Before reading further you must listen to this mp3. I referred to this 9-25-11 on St. Michael and All Angels and rightly pointed out the error of this song in saying “we shall stand guard though the angels sleep.” Angels don’t sleep, men do. But without further ado please listen.
If you’ve known anyone broken by battle, or you yourself are, you can’t help but be moved by this. My cousin, six years older than, enlisted in the Marine Corps and served as sniper in Vietnam from 1969-1971. I remember him telling me at my mother’s or dad’s funeral, “Everyone thinks Vietnam **** me up, but I was **** up before I went over there.” I didn’t think so as a kid he was either. But his wife wrote in his obituary, “My husband, my Marine, you didn’t die in combat but Vietnam ultimately killed you. Semper Fi.” She was his high school sweetheart and knew him before and after, so she would know better.
Based as my 12 years as an Army Reserve chaplain, I do think that if one’s war experience doesn’t ultimately kill them it does a kill a piece or pieces of them. And many lie on rocky, thorny, painful beds each night made of memories and thoughts and regrets and sighs, so, O Lord do Thou bring them peace.
That’s what this “hymn” promises apart from Christ to all fallen, broken brothers who are brought to the Mansions of the Lord by their fellow soldiers. But guess what? No can do. The mansions of the Father are only available through His Son. There is no key, let alone entry to those mansions apart from the Man Jesus and His suffering and dying for your sins.
No amount of a fallen soldier’s blood can pay for even one of his own sins let alone anyone else’s. No “prayers pleading through the night” no matter how gut-wrenching or tear-retching are heard apart from the God-Man’s prayers in Gethsemane pleading for the Father’s will to be done which was that no sinner drink the cup of God’s wrath he so richly deserves.
We right RIP, Rest In Peace, on virtually everyone’s tombstone. And it is a crime and very disconcerting when you find a grave has been disturbed. The Bible says a proper burial is part of a prosperous life. Ecclesiastes 6:3 (NASB77): “If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, however many they be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things, and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, ‘Better the miscarriage than he,'” (N.B. it doesn’t say everyone should get a Christian funeral but the act of being buried).
But resting in undisturbed grave is not enough. Gibb’s, in the Concordia Commentary Series’ volume on Matthew 21:1-28:20 doesn’t think RIP is enough to put on Christian’s gravestone. That implies, “We’re all done here.” This is it. Not even “The Mansions of the Lord” is satisfied with that RIP. They expect something more but to no avail apart from Christ.
There is, however, more than RIP for Christians, says Gibbs: “I learned from others than one can put this on a Christian’s grave: ‘Rest in Peace; Rise in glory” (1364, fn. 74). There you confess Easter. There you confess that when Christians plant a Christian in the ground we do so looking “for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”
So, even though the dead in Christ’s body may be resting in peace here, even though their souls have been carried by the angels to the mansions of the Lord, that still isn’t good enough. And even though all through the ages they are safely kept in the mansions of the Lord by God’s grace in Christ, apart from our standing guard, that’s not the message of Easter. Christ didn’t suffer, die, and be buried, just so the dead could rest in peace bodily in dirt with souls eternally in heaven, but so that we might also rise one day, body and soul, in glory.
By all means, RIP but also RIG!
