The homily from the Memorial Eucharist for Mark Allen McIntosh: November 20,2021,St. Luke’s Episcopal Church,Evanston,IL

READINGS: Isaiah 61:1–3; Romans 8:14–19, 34–35, 37–39; John 14:1–6

Mark and I go back a long way, to 1986 when I was Bishop Coadjutor of the Diocese of Chicago, and he was a newly ordained deacon assigned to the Cathedral. Our paths would cross not only in the halls of 65 East Huron, the building shared by the Diocese and the Cathedral, where, when I presided, Mark was usually at my side. His liturgical sensibilities were very much my own, and I soon discovered that there was much more we shared that went well beyond rites and ceremonies. Later, that year, I ordained Mark to the priesthood. By then, we had become friends.

Some years later, when I became the Presiding Bishop, and Mark, a distinguished theologian and author, I asked him to serve as a chaplain to the House of Bishops and also as my Canon Theologian. I wanted the bishops of the Episcopal Church to experience a theologian as a pastor and person of prayer. And I needed someone deeply grounded—whom I greatly respected and trusted—to help me, and the Church, approach, with a discerning spirit, some of the passionately debated issues of the day.

Mark’s gift to the church has not gone without recognition, and I am mindful, standing here this morning, that many of us were here in this Church on January 6, 2019, the Feast of the Epiphany, when Mark was presented with the Dean’s Cross by the Virginia Theological Seminary. The citation that accompanied the presentation reads in part,

“If you are a theologian you truly pray. If you truly pray you are a theologian.” These words of Evagrius Ponticus which come from the 4th century, very much apply to Mark Allen McIntosh, a distinguished theologian of our own day . . . Virginia Theological Seminary honors him for the embodied theology of his own life, and for showing us that theology and spirituality are indeed integrally related.

Mark was at heart a priest, and as such maintained an active pastoral and liturgical relationship across the years with a number of congregations in this diocese, and latterly he served as Priest Associate here at St. Luke’s. This was true as well while he was serving as Van Mildert Canon Professor of Divinity in the University of Durham, a prestigious appointment in the Church of England. Mark’s great joy was his ministry as Canon Residentiary of Durham Cathedral.

Since Mark’s death, so many have reached out to say how very special Mark had been in their lives: things he had said, sermons he had preached, lectures he had given, books and essays he had written, his acuity of insight in spiritual direction, his sensitivity as a confessor, and the list could go on. Echoing the words of Isaiah in our first reading, “The Spirit of the Lord,” as Mark lived among us, was very much “upon him.”

Mark spoke from time to time of things being “luminous”: that is, revealing something beyond and deeper than what appears to the outward eye. Such luminosity has to do with the Spirit of the Son who, “with sighs too deep for words,” “bears witness” with our spirits and unfolds within us the mystery of communion with the One whom Jesus calls “Abba, Father.” This is the life of the Trinity into which we are drawn by the Spirit, and this is where Mark so deeply lived and moved and had his being, and continues to live and move and have his being since, when we die life is changed, not ended as Paul declares and the Liturgy affirms. And again, as the apostle affirms in his Letter to the Church in Rome, “nothing in all creation, not even death, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In spite of the unrelenting progress of the disease which allowed no respite, the time after Mark was diagnosed with ALS was amazingly productive. Earlier this year, The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology was published. It begins with a dedication page that reads “For Anne, Liza and Nate with all my love and gratitude.” God’s generosity and self-gift, what we call, God’s love, were not only the foundation of Mark’s theology, but the daily reality of the life he lived as husband, father, brother, colleague, teacher, mentor, priest, and friend.

As his ALS advanced, one of Mark’s concerns was the pain he perceived his condition caused others, especially those closest to him. “I feel I am such a burden,” he would say. “It’s all about love—and love suffers,” I reminded him.

Mark had no fear of death, only sadness that he would miss so much in the unfolding lives of those he left behind. I think he found consolation, however, in the communion of saints understood as a fellowship of love and prayer that surrounds and supports us in a further dimension of life—one that transcends yet the impinges upon life as we know it in this world. Perhaps those in that fellowship of love and prayer are more present to us that we realize inasmuch as Scripture tells us, “Love is stronger than death” (Song of Solomon 8:6).

Before The Divine Ideas Tradition was in its final stages, Mark sensed he had not finished his work. He wanted to leave behind a more personal distillation of his theological vision, especially for clergy and those engaged in ministry. He wanted them to know the Trinity, as he did, as more than doctrine—as the source of life itself, and the revelation of God’s infinite and boundless goodness, self-gift, and love. He asked me to join him in his effort and the result is not one book but two: Seeds of Faith: Theology and Spirituality at the heart of Christian Belief, and Harvest of Hope: A Contemplative Approach to Holy Scripture. Both are listed on Amazon for release next year at the end in May. ¹

One of the chapters Mark asked me to take on dealt with death and the life to come. As I began, I felt that I was writing it, less for a future audience and more for my friend. What could I say to Mark while writing for others, that might companion him as the disease continued its unrelenting course. What came to mind was a prayer from the Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu:

After having perceived you [O God] as he who is “a greater myself” grant, when my hour comes, that I may recognize you under the species of each alien or hostile force that seems bent upon destroying or uprooting me. When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful fact that I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only that my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.

In one of our conversations, Mark told me when he could no longer speak or communicate, he just wanted to “slip away.” Mercifully, before that moment came, while sitting in his chair and reading a book, he was borne away and slipped through the narrow door of death into the force field of Eternity. There, we who in this world, know only in part, will know fully as we have been known—known with the death-defying love of the One who declares “I am resurrection and I am Life” (John 11:25)—a love that exceeds all that we can ask or imagine.

With the strong belief in a life that awaits us beyond this life, the early church spoke of one’s death day as one’s Dies Natalis, one’s birthday into eternity, signaling a new stage of being and becoming. Life when we die is not taken away: it is changed, transfigured by God’s all-embracing love, the same love that drew Jesus through death into resurrection. What we know of life—the gathering up of all that we have lived from the day of our birth—is then fitted into a larger frame called eternity, which is not a place, but an ever-present dimension of reality that surrounds us. So, we don’t so much die out of life as we die into life—life yet to be revealed beyond all imagining, of which love is the source—“For the steadfast love of the Lord,” we are told, “never ceases” (Lamentations 3:22).

Being born into eternity, rather than signifying “rest in peace,” for which we pray will be afforded to the departed, inaugurates, we are told, a new dimension of life. If it is a season of peace, then it is a peace “which passes all understanding” because it is of a totally new order. St. John of the Cross speaks of the experience of God as finding ourselves on “strange Islands” where we have never before been. Such, I imagine, is the experience that awaits us when we die. It is impossible, however, to imagine what it will be like, since we are limited to our experience of time and space. Eternity is beyond our concepts of time and duration, just as God is beyond any concepts or images we may have of God. “God does not offer himself to our finite beings as a thing all complete and ready to be embraced. For us, God is eternal discovery and eternal growth.” ² These are again the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, for whom evolution was a sign of God’s active presence in the cosmos.

And here, I am put in mind of Mark’s own words, in a passage for the one of the books completed some months before his death:

What would it be like to pray for the gift of such loving trust in God that we would rejoice to be “transferred” into the realm of inexhaustible life and love? The early followers of Jesus clearly understood their sharing in Jesus’s death and resurrection as something like this, as the confidence that Jesus had opened the way through the power of darkness that we now experience as death. For, as we read in Colossians 1:13, in Christ God has “rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.” Paul believes that this can happen for us because in our baptism we are united to Christ’s death, and this means that our old self—with all the fearful limitations of our mortal life and the sins that have deformed us and others—is undone in Christ’s death. And that makes it possible for us to begin living into the truth of us as God knows and loves us: for God’s knowing and loving of us is our resurrection, the true life into which we are drawn by sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection.

In a passage we have just heard from the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disconsolate disciples that he is soon to leave them and that his hour of glorification has arrived. By way of encouragement, he tells them not to let their hearts be troubled: “Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:1–2)? Jesus is, of course, speaking metaphorically about what awaits his followers after they have died and been taken by him to the Father’s house. What is interesting to note is that the word for “dwelling places” can be used to describe “resting places” such as a traveler might find in the course of a journey. This possible meaning did not escape commentators who saw such resting places as stages in an ongoing journey of spiritual growth and discovery that continues in the world to come. From this perspective, “growing up in all ways into Christ” continues beyond this life. And Christ’s risen body, of which we are declared members through baptism, continues “building itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:16).

A prayer for the departed in the Book of Common Prayer asks that the person who has died, “increasing in knowledge and love of thee . . . may go from strength to strength in the life of prefect service in thy heavenly kingdom.” Moving more deeply into the deathless life and love of the Trinity, which is to move more deeply into the mystery of who I am and am called to be, involves knowledge and love, and here we encounter judgment: what do we bring with us into this new dimension of life; what needs to be forgiven or healed or let go in order for us to go from strength to strength? “In the evening of life we will be judged on love alone,” declares John of the Cross.

When life as we know it ends, I believe everything within in it will be gathered up and fitted into eternity along with all other lives. Here is where all spatial and temporal categories fail. Eternity is totally other, yet completely real in a way that is beyond all comprehension. When we try to imagine what it will be like, we are reduced to using metaphors—a celestial banquet with fine wines, a large house with many rooms. Perhaps the best we can do is accept our unknowing and find consolation in God’s words to Isaiah, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your way my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9). Eternity is finding our true home beyond death within the eternal mystery of love and goodness we name as the Trinity.

Therefore, as we join together with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven—the living and the dead—to celebrate the Eucharist, the foretaste of the heavenly banquet, let us give thanks for Mark, his life and his witness, and all that he has been in our lives—and as he continues to grow and discover, to know as he is known, within that vast fellowship of love and prayer we call the communion of saints, let us pray for him and ask him to pray for us as we journey on toward our own birthday into eternity.

Mark, having died in Christ, now lives in Christ. Amen. Alleluia.