Do you walk around in grave clothes?

4th May 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Jerome LeDoux
The Louisiana Weekly Contributing Columnist

Among the thousands uprooted from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Horace Charles Bynum Sr. settled in Haltom City, a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas. He and his devoted daughter-in-law Rose quickly found their way to Our Mother of Mercy Church where they discovered a spiritual home with an embracing extended family.

For all his security stemming from two pharmacies that he and his sons operated over six decades in New Orleans, he was always a simple, unassuming man, content in his new town and happy to have found a Faith Community that loved and appreciated him.

“He did not walk around in his grave clothes,” Sister Jane Nes­mith, S.B.S. would have said of him. She would have been satisfied that he had done what she repeatedly admonished us to do in her weekend revival talk, “Get rid of your grave clothes!”

Our meditation was based on the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. After waiting for Lazarus to die and be entombed for four days, Jesus approached the cave tomb where a grieving crowd had no doubt that their friend had died several days ago.

When Jesus said, “Take away the stone!” Lazarus’ sister Martha cautioned Jesus to beware of the stench of a putrefied body that had lain in the tomb four days.

John 11:44 recounts that, at the loud command of Jesus, “the dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth.”

Jesus’ further command to untie him and let him go summarized what Sister Jane characterized as “getting rid of your grave clothes.” In other words, Lazarus had been restored to life by Jesus, but he was in no condition to resume his life among the living.

First, with the aid of astounded bystanders, he had to be loosed from the tight wrapping of burial bands that held him almost immobile.

Those bonds were as strongly symbolic as they were physically real and debilitating. Certainly, Lazarus could not step forth in public without frightening to death anyone he encountered along his way.

By the same token, the mummy-like figure was a stark symbol of negative attitudes and all the things that burden our steps and movements, that sap our strength as we exert ourselves, that impede our progress toward our daily and ultimate goals, and that almost nullify our efforts to live our lives to the full as Jesus pledged to us in John 10:10.

This is the point in Lent that draws a stark line in the sand between those who profess a vague belief in resurrection/afterlife and others who stake their present life and their eternal future on the transcendent power of the Man from Galilee. The Man who walked on water is the same Man who stilled the winds and waters of an angry lake.

He is the same Man about whom John 9:32 speaks through the man born blind, “It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind.”

When this Man from Galilee raised the widow of Nain’s son from the dead, Luke 7:16 reports, “The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, exclaiming, ‘A great prophet has arisen in our midst,’ and ‘God has visited his people.’”

At this juncture in our Lenten meditation, the most mind-bending miracles of Jesus are running toge­ther in a solemn symphonic stream toward the Sacred Triduum of Holy Week. Unaccustomed to the heavy metaphysical realities of the raising of a body that has already experienced the ravages of putrefaction, our minds grapple with resurrection.

On the one hand, our struggling with the most difficult concept in the universe is a throbbing mystery for us. On the other, it is the one reality that answers the ultimate question all of us have. What will happen to me when I die? What will happen to my mother, my father, my siblings, my children, aunts, uncles, relatives and friends?

What will happen to all the good people around the world who have done the best they could to live as they understood their Maker wanted them to live? If indeed there is to be a resurrection from the dead, where will we go and with whom will we spend eternity?

People like Dr. Horace Bynum Sr. are living witnesses to the compelling peace and productivity of a life lived without the impediment of grave clothes. Despite his outer layer of comfortable prosperity, Dr. Bynum in particular gave an ongoing testimonial to the higher life to which we are called by God and to which we all aspire as believers.

This was evident when Ethel Frinkle caught his eye, then his heart early on and became the apple of his eye for the rest of his life. Large photos in his home in New Orleans portray the two as a stunning, eye-catching young couple who lived out their youthful years in elegance, then grew old together with class and esteem.

Horace and Ethel lived in such a stylish and compelling way that their life caused one to think, “That is how people should live, rear a family and grow old together.”

A patriarch in his own right at 93 years and five months, Horace enjoyed the esteem of his brother Alvin, of his children Adolph, Horace, Jr. and Lauren, of his seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, of Rose, his loving daughter-in-law, who was as close as a daughter, of his community in New Orleans and later in Haltom City and Fort Worth.

We here at Our Mother of Mercy Church sorely missed him when he left Haltom City to return to New Orleans for medical reasons. I personally regretted missing his Mass of Resurrection because I could get a plane to New Orleans but could not find one to get me back to Garland (near Dallas) for the first day of a revival at St. Michael the Archangel.

As we age, even we Easter people find each glance at a mirror a summit conference on the length of our days. But 2 Corinthians 5:1-8 cheers us, “We know that if our earthly dwelling, a tent, should be destroyed, we have a building from God, a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in heaven…Yet we are…courageous…we walk by faith, not by sight.”

This story originally published in the April 25, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.