Tombs Are Funny That Way

24 December 2025  II Samuel 7:1-5, 8-12, 14, 16

The Last Wednesday in Advent – Christmas Eve

“I will appoint a place for my people Israel…” II Samuel 7:10

St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City is one of the most beautiful buildings on earth. It is home to Michelangelo’s Pietá, Bernini’s baldacchino and colonnade, and dozens of other exquisite pieces. There is, quite literally, no place where your eye can rest in that entire immense basilica that is not trying to call your attention to the beauty of holiness. The art and architecture are so fine that if anything ever happened to them no one would be able to fix them. Those skills have disappeared.

The laughter of heaven blows away the narcotic haze created by tombs and death-dealing narratives so that we can say with confidence and excellent good cheer that we have a better story than the world is telling.

Yet the day is coming when not one stone will be left upon another at St. Peter’s.

The Bible is rather ambivalent about the whole matter of temples. Samson pulled one down on the Philistines (Judges 16:23-30). God wouldn’t let David build him a Temple (II Samuel 7:1-16), and even when he did let Solomon build one, and let Herod expand it, it was destroyed – twice, and never rebuilt. This ambivalence may be because Temples tend to get cluttered with tombs, and the Bible is even more ambivalent about tombs. The giants of the Old Testament, and the giant of the New have no tombs. Nobody knows where Moses was buried (Deuteronomy 34:5-6), and Elijah was assumed bodily into heaven in a chariot of fire (II Kings 2:11). Jesus’ tomb was only borrowed, and was only in use for about 36 hours. Tombs have a disobliging tendency to become shrines where death and vengeance are turned into virtues and sacred obligations. It should be more troubling than it is that both Union and Confederate tombs have become shrines, even pilgrimage sites. People still go to Springfield, Illinois, and Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, and tip their hats to Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.  The irony is seldom deep enough to make many say, “Hey, wait a minute….”

Tombs are funny that way.

Maybe that is why the only tomb we celebrate is an empty one, where life, not death, is a sacred obligation, and vengeance is none of our business. Maybe the irony we’re supposed to appreciate most of all (remember, irony is a form of humor) is how a crucified man has saved us all, and how the joke is really on the devil who thought the cross meant hell had won. Maybe we should be remembering that one of the biggest hoots in the Bible is how the Savior appeared at tax time, how shepherds – the gangbangers and petty criminals of their time – had an audience with the heavenly host, and attended the first church service in the New Testament, in a cave with the livestock. The laughter of heaven blows away the narcotic haze created by tombs and death-dealing narratives so that we can say with confidence and excellent good cheer that we have a better story than the world is telling.

St. Peter’s Basilica is indeed one of the most beautiful buildings on earth. It is also built on top of a cemetery, and the ruins of a racetrack where Nero could race chariots with his lowlife pals. Only a Deity with a serious sense of humor and a deep appreciation of irony could come up with something like that. C.S. Lewis once said that joy is the serious business of heaven. Maybe that’s because laughter clears the air, and makes it possible to hear.

So smile.

And hear.