We began our holy time, our sacred celebrations this morning at the Lychgate. This is highly significant. The gate is an example of theological architecture, the embodiment of sacred and theological principles in wood and stone and mortar. It shows us, points to, incarnates for us the divine and how the divine unfolds in life and creation.
During the Middle Ages, Lychgates were traditionally known as ‘Corpse-Gates’. The bodies of the beloved dead were taken, placed under the pent-house roof of the gate, protected from the elements, rain and wind and sun, to await burial in the days ahead. The beloved dead’s body was often watched over by their family or the poor of the parish, paid for the task. The funeral service would then begin at the Lychgate, before processing to the church, just as we began there and processed here today.
Lychgates were also part of traditional wedding customs, and were the spot the newlywed couple would leave the church grounds after the ceremony. The gates, however, were tied together and the couple’s first public act as a wife and husband was to untie the knots together, before leaving the church to the road beyond and their ‘new normal’ of life together as one.
The Gate then functions as an in-between place, a boundary marker, a liminal space, between the church, consecrated ground, and the outside, unconsecrated ground, between the living and the dead. It is neither one, consecrated, nor the other, unconsecrated, but a transition space between the two.
Starting our Holy commemorations, plural, today at this space of sacred liminality, is very appropriate. Because today, although we started singing joyfully and deeply these acclamations of Christ:
The company of angels
are praising you on high,
while we and all creation
exultant make reply
We quickly hear the words:
“but they kept shouting, “Crucify, crucify him!”
Our sacred story changes, darkens, becomes ominous and takes the utmost turn for the worse. This is the point in the movie that the music changes to the most sombre tones.
Today, as we celebrate with fronds and sing, we also hear and remember the passion, the death and suffering of our saviour. And so, we are caught between the two poles of Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday, between proclamation and despair, between acceptance of the incarnate God and rejection by the utmost cruelty imaginable.
We then, we ourselves, we as people, we as the Body of Christ, we as the church have become, and are right now, the liminal space. We are the transition, the not-this, not-that, the uncertain no-thing between what should be, God on earth, and what is, God rejected.
And of course, we all know these strange, disturbing, unsettling times of the in-between in our personal lives. Times when we ourselves are in-between, perhaps caught between, the old and the new, times of maturation, when we are neither child nor adult, neither student nor expert, neither in a failing relationship, nor outside it.
This is a human, universal experience.
And so, we turn to, we look for what it is that can get us through, what it is that will both hold us as the in-between, hold us in that mysterious liminal space when we are neither one nor the other, and also unfold us unto the new.
For Christians, and for others of some other faiths, this “what” is a “who” – a person, a person who is fully human like we are, but is also fully divine, fully God.
As our passion story tells us that this person, Jesus, dies. But he dies as God.
He dies willingly. He dies in power, having chosen to be powerless.
He dies consciously to know the unconsciousness of death.
He dies in the fullness of himself, God and human, mortal and immortal, to know the emptiness of the grave.
And so, through his death Jesus is the one who spans both sides of the liminal divide, both aspects of the transition space: life and death, light and dark, seen and unseen, here and gone. He is both the start and the finish, the beginning and the end, and he is also the path between. He is the Way.
He is the way for all liminal journeys, he is the archetype, the template, the secret hidden knowledge within each of us that we find at our darkness moments, that which gets us through, that which holds us and moves us and unfolds us from one space, our former life, our past self, to our new life, our future self.
He is the way, he is our way, because he has traversed the greatest of ways, death – and has returned.
And being the way, having traversed the way, Jesus changes the world forever, backward and forward in time, the entire universe blessed and being blessed. We hear:
“It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed and the curtain of the temple was torn in two”.
This was the heavy, solid curtain that veiled and guarded the holy of holies in the temple, the centre of all, the place where the presence of God was, the place where the people, people like you and I, could not enter. And now by the way of Jesus this barrier is torn forever asunder, the walls between the divine and the human, the sacred and the mundane, are gone.
And what this means is that we, and the entire world, are now caught between the two poles of earth and heaven, creation and uncreation, the life temporal and the life everlasting. We are now, as followers of the Way of Christ, constantly in the liminal space, constantly unfolding, forever becoming, eternally moving towards God. She has called us into existence, into being, from non-being. She has given us this in-between life and shows us the way to Life Eternal in Christ our saviour.
This is the way of Holy Week, where we accompany Christ to Jerusalem and all that entails; acclamation, feasting, betrayal, arrest and death before his glorious resurrection. This is the way we, as his Body, imitate Christ, bridging the barriers between heaven and earth through our service and love, making, like Him, the invisible God present to this visible and struggling world.
So, may we, this Holy Week and Easter, by following Christ on the Way, through prayer and practice, by meditation and compassion, know ourselves more and more as the Lychgate, the space between heaven and earth, to serve both heaven and earth. In the Name of Christ. Amen.