As many of you know, I recently had the heartbreaking blessing of being with my father as he left this life.

There are many things about this experience that I am keeping close and pondering in my heart. One of the many things my dad taught me was that in the life of the soul and psyche and the heart there are times when some things need to kept in a crucible to complete the process of change, before you open that crucible to the wider world. And it’s important to take care in discerning that, and discerning with whom and how you share the precious things that are forged in the depths of the soul.

At the same time, I want to model a comfort with the discomfort of loss and grief and death, and to normalize the feelings and reflections that can come up around the realities of death and loss.

So, at this point, for me, there is one thing that I do feel is a gift I received that would be good to share with you all. It can be a jumping off point for a wider reflection that I pray is helpful to you, wherever you are on life’s journey.

As I sat with dad in what turned out to be his last hours of his life, at a certain point I was overcome with a realization:

“Oh! Dad, you’re joining the ancestors.”

I had this overwhelming sense of the presence, along with my father in the room with me, of his father and mother, and the moments of their deaths and births, and along with them, their parents before them, and the moments of their deaths and births, and their parents before them, and their deaths and births … the generations of my father’s ancestors, my ancestors, millennia of lineage, present, in an astonishing, mysterious sense.

He was joining them.

I felt their presence in a way that was like, well, have you ever hiked in mountains when it’s misty or foggy? It’s very different than walking in the fog through a field in Iowa, with open space all around you filled with fog. In the mountains, in the mist, you know the mountains are there, at some level, you sense their presence, their tremendous bulk and scope, even if you only get fleeting glimpses of rocks and slopes through the fog. You don’t really know many details of what’s all around you and on the horizon, but you know you are in the presence of greater things. This is how it felt to me to feel the presence of the ancestors in that hospital room, as I witnessed my dad slowly go farther and farther from me into the mist, to join their embrace.

I was not expecting this.

I’ve had the blessing of being at the bedside of many, many people in their final journeys towards death. I can tell you with certainly that there is much more going on than meets the eye when it comes to the transition from life into death. The reasons I’m religious are not just forms of wishful thinking.

But I had never experienced this. I did not see coming.

“Dad, you’re joining the ancestors.”

The ancestors.

I don’t usually think this way. I don’t usually think about the ancestors or consider how they may be present.

Many cultures do. For many people, in many times and places, now and through history, the ancestors have a quite active role in the lives of the living. 

There are countless rituals and practices in countless culture for honoring the ancestors, or for interacting with them in various ways.

Among Christians this is perhaps less so, at least less explicit – though I want to be careful about just how diverse the forms and expressions of Christianity are through the world.

In the Christian faith it’s important that the object of our devotion is the one transcendent and holy God, which for us includes the divine incarnation of Christ and the intervening power of the Holy Spirit. Very often for Christians, religious practices involving the ancestors are seen as pagan idolatry and rejected.

But this doesn’t mean that the ancestors are not present for many Christians in meaningful ways.

We have All Souls Day, and All Saints Day.

And it’s very, very common for folks from a Christian background to feel the presence of their dearly departed from heaven, in various ways.

“Ah, that was grandma looking out for me from heaven.” Right? I’m sure you’ve heard people say that, or said it yourselves.

What’s also very common – I’ve had countless people in churches share with me experiences they’ve had at a time of grief and heartbreak, where a bird came to them in such a way where they felt the presence of their loved one and received a message they needed to hear.

You all may have other kinds of experiences you could share around this.

So, I think it is important that we honor and explore the ways that our ancestors and dearly departed are present in our lives, and our living relationship with that reality. They are precious and important.

What is our relationship with this? What is our relationship with the ways our ancestors are present? Not only in a spiritual sense, but also through everything that we inherit from our ancestors? We may not be – we probably are not – fully aware of what all we inherit from those who come before us, and what of it we accept or reject, forget or deny, heal or leave behind or carry forward.

The Biblical testimonies, which we inherit from our ancestors in the faith, contain a strong theme about honoring the wisdom and faith and sacred experience we can receive from those who came before us. At the same time, biblical writers urge their listeners to learn from the mistakes, blind-spots, and hubris of their ancestors.

We all know that what we inherit from those who came before us is not all positive. It can be very fraught. The idea of the presence of the ancestors can feel haunting as much as it can feel comforting.

I’m introducing a big topic here. There is a lot to explore here. I propose to explore this through more than one sermon in the weeks to come, especially around the question of healing from what we inherit.

For now, I want to emphasize what can be life-giving in this, in knowing that at a certain level those who came before us are still present, even as this now is our time to live and to use whatever life-force and freedom we have to fulfill our possibilities for fullness and goodness of life.

For the sake of focusing on what’s positive about this, how we understand “the ancestors” can mean many things. It can mean our literal genetic ancestry. It can also mean our spiritual ancestry, the host of kindred spirits who form the lineages of your spiritual belonging, and your community belonging, the lineages of whatever other communities you feel at home in. It can mean the lineages of your trade or practice or craft. Who were your teachers and mentors, and who were their teachers and mentors, and their teachers and mentors, and so on. It could mean all those who built the towns and cities where we live, the houses of worship where we pray – we inherit this sanctuary and building from our ancestors in this church – the schools and libraries where we study, the factories and offices and shops where we work, the music halls where we dance, the cemeteries where we are buried, and on and on.

However it is life-giving for you to feel the presences of such ancestors, please know that you belong to a great cloud of witnesses who support you and encourage your flourishing in this life.

I give thanks for each of your lives and for those who have helped support your flourishing.

For all this I give thanks to God.

Thanks be to God.

You can view video of this sermon here.

Delivered Sunday, July 7, 2024, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.

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