Easter 4-C -- April 29, 2007

Twenty years ago on Maundy Thursday afternoon I had to perform an unannounced, unnoticed, and an uneventful burial. My kind neighbor and parishioner at Trinity Church in Parkersburg, Chet Waterman, acted as funeral director. We buried Miss Shelly Pugliese. No one in Parkersburg had ever met Shelly. No one in my family had ever met her. The first time I ever met Shelly she was already dead, caught it the fence in my backyard. Chet and I laid her to rest next to the azalea bush.

Miss Shelly Pugliese was a rabbit whom my dog – she was my dog when she did something bad – whom my dog, Angel, chased around the backyard. Shelly, in her fright, tried to squeeze through our chain fence. She made it half way. She died of fright. After the burial service, Tracy, who was six at the time, placed a sign over her grave. It read: "In memory of Miss Shelly Pugliese. We all loved her. The people who loved her were Bill, Jessica, Aimee, Conie, Autumn, Lorie, T.J., Tracy, Christy and Arlena. This is where she is berried. Love Everyone." On the side she wrote, "The one who killed her is Angel." Half the people whom Tracy said loved Shelly never even saw her. As I said, when I met her, she was dead. But we loved her anyway. We still have that grave marker in Tracy’s scrapbook.

It's a cute story. I tell it not just because it is cute, but because I think that it really pertains to today's Epistle and Gospel readings. In the Epistle reading we have the writer of the Book of Revelation trying to give us a picture of what heaven is like. He sees many, many people dressed in white robes standing around. He doesn't recognize any of them. He wants to ask "Who are these people anyway?" But one of the elders asks him that question. His response is, "You’re asking me? You’re the one who knows that answer." So the elder tells him who they are. They are the people who, in their lives, did what God asked them to do. And now they are being rewarded. Maybe no one else knew who they were, but God did.

I never met Shelly while she was alive. And those who did, only knew her briefly – while she was running for her life from Angel. But in the words of the writer of Revelation, God knew her. And that is what is important.

One of the enjoyable parts of my ministry over the years is visiting the shut- ins. It is enjoyable. But it is sad, too. So many of them over the years have told me over and over again that they feel lost. They read the newsletter and they hardly recognize any names. Most of the people they knew when they were active in the parish have died or moved away. They want to be a part of our parish life; but it is so hard not only because they can't get out but because they just don't know anyone and feel no one knows them.

What I have always tried to do is reassure them that even though so many of you don't know them, maybe don't even know their names, or only know their names because we remember them every Sunday in our prayers, that all of them are loved by all of us here. You see, like Tracy and her rabbit, as Christians we do not have to know others by name or even know the person behind the name to love that person.

It's like that vision of heaven in the Epistle. When you and I get to heaven, there will be millions of people we will not know, have never even heard of, let alone have met. We will no doubt ask them, "Who are you?" like the writer of Revelation. But it really won't matter who they are. What will matter is that they and we are loved by God, have been forgiven by God and have been rewarded with eternal life. That is what will matter, what will be important.

As with today's Epistle, so with the story of Shelly the Rabbit: we do not need to know personally or by name or in any other way to love someone else. All we need know is that that person is loved by God. That's enough. Tracy's fertile young mind understood that we should all love Shelly because God loved Shelly. It is enough that someone loves another enough to ask us to pray for that person. Our response is not, "Who is that person?" or "Who are those people we are praying for?" Or "What's wrong with them?" Yes, it might be good, better, if we knew. But it really does not matter. God loves them. Someone else loves them and cares about them. So should we. And that is why we pray for them.

The other part of the Shelly the Rabbit story has to do with today's Gospel reading. There may be many, many Angels in our lives: people chasing us, pursuing us, trying to get us into trouble. Sometimes either in our running away from them or our running with them, we get caught in a fence. Or, like lost sheep, we succumb to temptations to wander off somewhere, and we do. But we will not be lost forever and we will not be, in Jesus' words, snatched from God's hands. The only way we can be lost from God is if we willingly choose to lose ourselves. That is the only way. No one can chase us away from God. We have to run away on our own.

No matter what the temptations, no matter how strong the force: we can have literally a pack of hounds, a dozen Angels nipping at our heels, but in the end God will always protect us if we let God. Again, that doesn't mean that we might not get nipped or might not get caught in a fence or two. But the wounds will heal and we will get through as long as we let God be in charge.

And even the Angels of this world have their redeeming qualities. They may be hard to discover sometimes, but they are there. The people we will meet and greet in heaven, the people we pray for, were not, are not saints. But they have been and will be forgiven for chasing after false gods, just as we will be. When Angel saw that rabbit, she saw food. But if Angel could have reasoned, she would have known that she would starve to death if she had had to find enough food to feed herself. She should have left rabbits alone and stuck to her dog food.

The Angels of this world sometimes do not leave well enough alone. When they don't, they cause harm to others and sometimes to themselves. But as long as they realize, as long as you and I realize, that even when we do not leave well enough alone, that we can't go it alone in this life, that it is God who is in charge and that we need one another – as long as we realize all this, we'll be okay.

When I arrived home to perform the burial that Thursday, the killer was upstairs under our bed hiding. Somehow she knew she did something wrong. At that moment what was important for Angel was that somehow those of us who loved Shelly Pugliese, a rabbit we never knew, show Angel, an animal we did know, that we still loved her, even though we didn't like what she did.

We do that for dogs all the time. God does that for us all the time. Can we ever do anything less for one another? Tracy hit it right on the head in her grave marker. Would that every tombstone have after the person's name these words: "we all loved her" or "we all loved him".

The message of today's liturgy is that just as God knows and protects and loves and forgives each of us by name, we must do the same for one another even when we don't know the others' names, even when they pass into and out of our lives as quickly as a rabbit running from a dog, even when they are those dogs nipping at our heels.