Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 50

“And the heavens proclaim his righteousness, 

for God himself is judge.” Psalm 50:1

 My uncle told me about it. I’m not at all sure my father even knew. He said that he’d once heard that his own grandparents, the immigrant Dutch Calvinist folk who came to this country in the late 1860s, were buried in the cemetery in Orange City, Iowa, just a hop, skip, and jump from where I’d just taken a job. “You ought to look once,” he said.

I don’t remember what finally tugged me out to that graveyard. At the time, I knew no one else who’d been buried there; but finally I went, dutifully determined to find that headstone. I scouted the oldest parts of that cemetery, where the ancient headstones stand like marbled tongue depressors, leaning in various degrees of sleepy repose. No Schaaps—or at least not C. C. and his wife Neeltje. Maybe my uncle, the family historian, was wrong, I thought. I kept looking.

I found it in the neighborhood of newer graves, a barrel-like, granite monument clearly carved with the family names, relevant dates, and a scripture verse, in Dutch, on each side, for each grandparent.

It’s difficult to describe what I felt right then, and likely impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced such a palpable sense of rooted-ness. Even though I’d never stepped a foot in that cemetery before, I felt, strangely enough, as if I were home. Does that make sense? There was an unmistakable sense of life in the grave at my feet.

It’s 110 years now, since C. C. Schaap died, 102 since Neeltje passed away; but once I found the spot, I felt as if I’d been somehow summoned, and those great-grandparents, who died long before my father was born, were looking me over—Grandpa nodding, Grandma turning up my collar against the cold prairie wind.

Just three days ago I went back to that cemetery, took a nephew out to visit. When we found that barrel-like monument back, there they were, smiling, as grandparents do.
I think of that this morning, as I consider this line from Psalm 50—how heavenly spectators stand there in awe before the Judge. I can’t help but imagine what that Orange City cemetery might look like, the ancient ones standing atop their monuments, a most astounding crowd of faithful.

One of the dreams of the Ghost Dancers in the late 1890s was that “the old ones” would return from the dust, would walk silently into camp and take their places around the campfires. It was a beatific and celestial Lakota vision.

And it’s here in Psalm 50. “The heavens declare the glory of God” is the central line of Psalm 19, a psalm that reverences the heavenly preaching God does each day in sermons the wide open skies proclaim. But here there’s a homily with a different blessing, a new twist, a cloud of witnesses, a ton of great-grandparents, waiting for the word of the Lord.

If I could choose a place to be when such a court is assembled, I think I might choose a cemetery, just to be there when all those ancient tongue depressors fall on cue and the righteous emerge.

Wouldn’t that be fun? There’d be lots to talk about, lots of songs, lots of stories, lots of smiles.