Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King - November 24, 2024
Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.
St. Columba's Episcopal Church
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 + Psalm 93 + Revelation 1:4b-8 + John 18:33-37
Grace to you, and peace, from Christ who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Alpha and the Omega. + My sisters and brothers, I speak to you in the Name of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen!
Happy Feast of Christ the King on this last Sunday of the liturgical year. Christ whom we crown today with many crowns as the One who is, who was, and who is to come: the prince of peace, Lord of Love, and the King of Kings.
It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the television series, “Six Feet Under” premiered on June 3, 2001. Spanning 63 episodes over four years, the modern-day drama depicts the lives of the Fisher family, who run a funeral home in Los Angeles. The series is a staggeringly beautiful portrayal of life told of a family whose business is death. A series which could have easily turned macabre and morose, perched, as it is, on a razor’s edge between life and death.
But precisely because death is never far off…precisely because it refuses to let go of the specter of hopelessness and despair, the series unfolds as a poignant celebration of hope. As a profound reflection on life: in all of its beauty, fragility, and brevity.
In the opening scene of the first episode the father of the family, Nathaniel Fisher, is sporting a brand-new, luxury-line hearse they had recently purchased, as he weaves his way through LA traffic enroute not to a morgue, but to pick up his adult son at LAX who is flying in for the Christmas holidays.
His doting wife queries from the other end of a cell phone about whether he remembered to take his blood-pressure pills even as she nags him incessantly about his smoking habit while he attempts, but in vain, to sneak yet another drag on his cigarette – one after another. He throws the butt out the window promising her he will, at long last, kick the habit. They hang up.
And then in a moment of distraction as he attempts to light up his next cigarette in his shiny new hearse, he is T-boned by a bus at an LA intersection where he is instantly killed. This sets the stage for a major shift in the family dynamics, the origins of much of the series’ drama as the Fishers struggle to keep their family business alive.
As the seasons unfold, each new episode will begin with yet another death, always played by a cameo actor. Sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, sometimes absurd or unexpected, and sometimes downright cringe-worthy. Yet each death ends with a “fade to white” as the name of the deceased, accompanied by the dates of their birth and death flash across the screen for all of us to see and ponder.
With each episode the corpse and the grieving family with them will somehow play into the lives of the Fisher family mortuary, all the while as they go about living their own lives and struggles and family dramas.
Seeing as we are now out a quarter century from the series, I am hereby declaring a full amnesty on all spoiler alert safeguards. If you haven’t seen Six Feet Under yet, the fact is, you’ve have had 25 years to do so…the world needs to move on.
And with that disclaimer, the last 10 minutes of the final episode offers what is arguably the best season finale of any series I have ever seen. The daughter of the family, Claire Fisher, whom we saw mature throughout her tumultuous years in high school is now a young woman and aspiring photographer. As the last episode comes to a close, she leaves their family home in LA to strike out on her career as photographer in New York City, she and her family exchange tearful goodbyes on the front porch of their funeral home. And her mother, still neurotic, yet expressing an unexpected inner strength we had come to discover in her, embraces Claire, offering a mother’s blessing: “May you thrive as long as you possibly can.”
The arial views of Claire making her way Eastbound in her new prius through LA traffic is reminiscent of the opening scenes of her father’s last moments. But in short order we see long stretches of desert highway open out before her as the film begins to accelerate, inviting the viewer into a time lapse of the future.
A montage of scenes begins to flash across the screen, as we catch glimpses of life unfolding for all of the main characters. Family visits for birthdays and holidays, the celebration of weddings. Now, for a moment, back to the young Claire making her way across the open roads of the Midwest, then a flash forward yet again to future children we had never met, now born and beginning to mature, as the beloved characters we have come to know so well, slowly betray signs of their own aging amid family visits and clips of a day-in-the-life of a funeral home as a new generation begins to learn the family business. This, until one by one, you realize with an irrepressible catch in your breath, that we are beginning to witness the demise of each of them. After each one passes, their dates of birth and their death flash across the screen. Fade to white.
Middle aged children now gathered around their mother on her death bead as she takes her final breath; the brother who collapses from an embolism at a family picnic; his lover who is shot dead while delivering packages for UPS.
And so it is with each of our beloved characters as time marches on: relentless, bountiful, yet unforgiving, until at last, Claire herself, now 101 years old falls asleep peacefully, as a young hospice nurse sits nearby. She is very much alone in her swanky NY apartment, surrounded by a life-time of photographs attesting to a long and successful career. Indeed, her mother’s prayer was answered. And one can hardly help but to cheer her on, even as we mourn her passing.
To its very last moment, the series will not allow us to disentangle life from death, beaty from tragedy, joy from grief. It will not permit us the fantasy that only “other people” die – those in the cameos of the series itself, any more than those who play cameos in our own lives: whose stories we will never know, whose struggles we will never share, and because of which, whose deaths we will never mourn.
There is no “happily ever after” even, and most poignantly, for the characters that we have come to know and love: those we will grieve. We are reminded with brutal honesty that all of us must sooner or later, and with candid admission, face with tenderness and the horror, the absurdity, the beauty, and the inevitability of death.
In the days following that final episode, which I saw close to fifteen years ago, I was literally transported to another state. Something about its telescopic time-lapse forward, grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I found myself weepy, tender, somewhat disturbed and distracted as I went about my daily life. Notably very clingy to Fernando. Something deep within me was demanding that I pay attention, that I give space to what the series wanted me to look at within myself.
So, on one particular afternoon, I decided to take a solitary walk around Bon Tempe Lake in San Anselmo. As I strolled the trail, pensive in the late afternoon sun, I paused at a site that had stolen my attention from across the lake where the edge of the forest met the water. There was a grove of dead California Oak Trees that stood out in sharp relief from among the otherwise deep green bays and pines that encircled it: white and gnarly, weathered sage-colored moss draped over their still magnificently twisted branches. I paused and stood there for a long while, intuiting that this landscape, indeed, had something to say to me. No words would come, nor was I trying to conjure any. I was just watching and waiting. Or maybe not even waiting. Just being present to whatever it was, feeling perhaps those trees were speaking to me on a pre-cognitive level. Rearranging and settling in new ways whatever had been stirred up in my psyche.
After some time – I can’t quite recall how long – I was surprised, though not startled to notice a woman was standing next to me, closer than might have otherwise seemed comfortable for two strangers who had never met. I was so lost in thought I hadn’t heard her approach. Unruffled, we stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a shared silence. Elderly but spry, her hair as silvery white as the luminous skin of the oaks that stood like sentinels across the lake.
Uncharacteristically, I never felt an impulse to greet her. Nor did she greet me, as if she intuited something about my seriousness. In hindsight I realize she had a gentle way of accompanying me in that moment without disrupting it. As if she were fluent in some unspoken spiritual etiquette I wish now I could go back and thank her for. But then as if she could read my thoughts even before I could think them, she said suddenly in a quiet voice: “Death in Life: Beautiful isn’t it?”
The question mark that punctuated the end of her sentence sounded more like an exclamation point. A rhetorical question that was more of a pronouncement, an affirmation, a revelation which could only conjure a resounding “yes” from deep within my heart. She too had read the trees. She too was seeing precisely the stunning contrast that had captured my attention. And from the primordial soup that had been stirring in me, her pronouncement, proclamation, and question all at once brought Order. Sense. Meaning.
I was stunned at the simplicity and eloquence with which she captured the elusive feeling of “beauty twinged with sadness” that had been haunting me for days. Stunned more deeply into a silence I was already holding. A few moments later, I could see from the corner of my eye, that she had turned and continued along her way, quickly disappearing from my peripheral view.
The path stretched on for some distance before curving along a hillside out of view. I must have stood there, still gazing at the oaks, longer than I realized, for as I turned to face her direction for the first time since she arrived, to my surprise I did not see her. I launched into a quick jog to make my way to the curve in the path around which she had clearly just turned. But when I turned the corner, there was still no sign of her. Bemused, I smiled to myself, only half-jokingly wondering if that is what it felt like to be visited by an angel. A trick of the eye, no doubt.
Surely if I quickened my pace, I would find her around the next curve, or the next…or the next. I would be able to thank her for whatever it was she had just done for me. Whatever seed she had planted that brought stillness to my soul. Whatever gentle sword she had drawn to pierce my heart. But I never did see her again. And I realized only later – much later – that I had never actually spoken to her. Not one word.
There is something in the delicacy of her presence, in the stealth, unobtrusive manner in which she was suddenly right there at my side…until she wasn’t. something in her subtlety that evokes the gentle presence of the High King to whom we give our praise today. For all the pageantry and grandeur we trot out from the pages of scripture no less than the expansive repertoire of our time-honored hymnals on this triumphal Feast of Christ the King.
From the Prophet Daniel, who peers beyond the veil to reveal the Ancient One, with hair as white as snow mounting his throne of fire and ten thousand times ten thousand attendants wait upon him amidst the clouds of heaven, in praise of his endless dominion and glory and power; From the psalms which sing of the splendor of his regalia, whose throne is established since before the world began, who is mightier than the eternal pounding of waves upon the endless shores; Whom we honor, in the Book of Revelation as the Alpha and the Omega.
Our language, our song, our exultations, all but trip over themselves, faltering under the inadequacy of even the most resplendent language we can conjure for our monarchs, all in our effort to proclaim the unique and exalted status of this, the one true King, to whom all others must bow…whose everlasting Kingdom is not of this world, as Christ tells us in the gospel today, extending before and after and in all directions beyond our fleeting world that will come and go upon the cosmic stage like a flash in the pan.
Indeed, for all our exalted pageantry, for all our theological prolixity, for all our language that flairs forth and fails to name, indeed proclaim what it means to call this crucified messiah, “King,” we do well to remember the dissonance, the vast chasm that rises up between this one King and all others. The chasm of humility, obscurity, and simplicity; Indeed, the quiet reverence by which this King will make his presence known. God is subtle like that.
Coming to us stealthily, like a thief in the night, like a sudden insight, like an unexpected word that unlocks a treasure-trove of truths you did not know you possessed. Like an elderly woman who is there beside you with piercing insight, until she is not. Like the brilliant white trunk of a dead oak tree against in the verdant green leaves of a Laurel Bay. Like the beauty and agony and bewilderment of death in life: Whether a death that comes suddenly, as it did for Daniel Fisher in his shiny new hearse at a random street corner in LA, no less than it did for my father at whose bedside I kept vigil five years ago today, watching his chest gently rise and fall…until it didn’t.
Yet this is our King, the Alpha and the Omega, as gentle as our first breath…and our last. And as present, as subtle, indeed as unnoticed as every breath in between. It is this King who comes to us not only in life, but as life. Not only in death, but as death. The two, like the extended parable of “Six Feet Under…” like the white oaks against the verdant bays, betray a beauty we can only begin to see when we come to realize this King, our King, is inseparable from it all.
And when the final episode in the series of our own lives arrives at last – as inevitably it does for all our beloveds, may it be that the quiet praise of this one Eternal King, be the last breath we give to him, with all our fealty, our faith, and our loves that our fleeting lives can muster.
Fade to white.
+ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.