You may not notice much the bells.
Relics of a quieter world, not all churches have them anymore. We are blessed to have some, to hear them, even though some of our neighbors find them irritating; I will not silence them. Christians have had their bells, churches have rung them, for millennia. Ours is indeed noisy world, but I’ll keep the bells, thank you very much. Because they mean something. Because they’re a better noise.
In ages past bells were essential. They marked time, the beginning of the business day, the end of it too. Not just to call the faithful to worship, the bells of a village church shaped and set in rhythm the whole of the community, even elements profane.[1] Before mass production, when each village’s bell was cast locally, each village’s bell possessed a unique sound. Villagers knew they were home hearing their own parish’s bells, like a parent can tell his own child’s voice. And this created community, an auditory community; to hear the bells, to be in earshot of the bells, was to belong. It was to be part of the community.[2] In our noisy world, in our loud today, this is something we’ve lost. I don’t know, it’s just that’s why I like the bells, why I won’t silence them; because I long for that quieter, closer, more communal world.
But, of course, all this is merely sociology. There is also something sacred about bells. At the elevation of the Host, the “sacring,” as it used to be called, they’re rung.[3] Bells have long signaled the inbreaking of the divine into the earthly, the apocalypse and the theophanic—like when bread becomes Body; wine, Blood. Rung at weddings; rung at funerals; at funerals, they reminded the living to pray for the dead, reminded the living to remember their mortality. “[S]end not to know/ For whom the bell tolls/ It tolls for thee,” Donne wrote.[4] The bells, it was thought, alerted St. Michael to defend and protect the departed soul as it made its way from the grave to purgatory and to heaven.[5] Bells sounded out the other world, the world beyond death. Ringing, they reminded faithful souls of God and heaven, that God still comes us and that we still go to him—upon the altar and from our graves.
Anyway, the bells stopped ringing on Thursday; they don’t sound, we don’t ring them, at the betrayal and at the death. It’s just the sound of wood that’s worth Good Friday, the sounds of bones and iron and tears. You may have not noticed it, that the bells were silenced the other day. Until tonight—for the resurrection of Christ, for you. Because now there’s something divine about you, about us. “O happy fault…O truly blessed night, when things of heaven are wed to those of earth, and divine to the human.”[6] The bells ring again because there’s something new about you, not merely earthly but heavenly. You’ve become saints.
It’s a miracle. “God’s saints come from two different schools,” the poet, Charles Péguy, wrote. “The school of the righteous and the school of the sinner.” “Fortunately,” Péguy said, “in both cases God is the schoolmaster.”[7] Most of us come from the school of the sinner; at least, that’s my alma mater. But that’s what’s so strange about what God does, that “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.”[8] “What strange arithmetic,” Péguy wrote, “And yet this, my child, is how the books are kept with God.”[9]
And this is why we ring the bells again—for you, for the miracle of your salvation, for the miracle that is the entirely new you; when probably no one thought a new you possible at all; maybe you didn’t think it possible. But now a new you will always be possible, no matter how many times you fall, no matter how badly you fall. Christians, of course, aren’t perfect; baptism and confirmation doesn’t magically make you perfect all at once. Rather, what tonight does is it gives you someone to walk with through the valley of the shadow death, someone through whom you can fear no evil.[10] And it kills despair; now, with Christ, you need never despair, for now mercy for you is divine. For you now the bells will always ring out, because you belong, because your life is hid with Christ in God.[11]
And again, just think about the miraculous nature of it all, the unlikeliness of it, that sinners like us are here. Again, I think of Péguy’s words; he captures so often what I’m trying to say. “So God, for each soul that is saved, rings the eternal Easter bells./ And he says: I told you so./ Strange reversal, strange overturning, it’s the world upside-down.”[12] It’s beautiful tonight to be with such sinners as yourself, a sinner like me. Beautiful that God loves us both so much that he’s willing to ring the bells again, because Christ died for us, because God has risen within us, giving us all the chance to be someone new. Which is the point of all this Easter stuff anyway, the meaning of the bells—hope for something new. Amen.
[1] Sophia Menache, The Vox Dei: Communication in the Middle Ages, 30
[2] Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, 97
[3] Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 126
[4] John Donne, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1624)
[5] Richard Morris, Evensong: People, Discoveries and Reflections on the Church in England, 120-121
[6] The Easter Proclamation
[7] Charles Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope
[8] Luke 15:7
[9] The Portal of the Mystery of Hope
[10] Psalm 23:4
[11] Colossians 3:3
[12] The Portal of the Mystery of Hope
© 2023 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
