REBURIAL

High atop the mountain called Susita, at about 6 a.m. on July 18, we buried them — again.

Sunrise tinged the excavation and the Sea of Galilee loomed below in its incomparable splendor.

With the delicacy of a careful supermarket produce manager, Mark Schuler emptied two cardboard boxes of human bone into a great sarcophagus a meter and a half down.

Archaeologists often want to restore sites to some semblance of the way they used to look. So does Mark.

But the Lutheran pastor also wants to restore his site spiritually and theologically. So there was no question in his mind that these dead he had exhumed would be reburied with respect and in the right liturgical context.

And where better than the place where they lay to begin with?

We found the first hint of these saints in 2003, troweling across the altar of this small, 12-meter-square church. I happened to hit an upright flat stone — barely a speed bump for a mouse. But something was down there.


TOMB RAIDER!

The next season, we opened the sarcophagus and carefully took our saints out bone by bone. Glenn Borchers, a retired soil scientist from Fargo, N.D., did most of the work. “Tomb raider!” I called him in a screaming Web headline for 1,000 schoolchildren who were following us in 2004.

These dead had been treated with great reverence. Their final place of rest was sacred — beneath the altar of this little church in the ancient city of Hippos.

Now, after three years in a laboratory and careful analysis by a good physical anthropologist, they rest again beneath the same altar.

We have both sexes. Two individuals were quite tall. Another was an infant.

Early Christians often buried their dead this way, adding bodies to the same tomb over a period of years.

So there they lie — bits and pieces awaiting the bodily resurrection of Christian belief.



RING OF ANGELS

Mark, who teaches theology at Concordia University in St. Paul, has excavated at Hippos since 2001 and has led the church dig since 2002. His wife Rhoda, a liturgy specialist, prepared a ceremony from Greek Orthodox sources.

At sunrise, in the little church, we sang and prayed and read from the Gospel of John.

A few of our Israeli friends looked on, perhaps musing about Christian mysteries — or perhaps pondering their own. Dig director Arthur Segal attended, as did Micahel Eisenberg, assistant director.

The Polish team came over from the bigger church they are excavating 100 meters away. They stood above the sarcophagus on the half-circle of our apse wall — just where angels would have floated at the earlier funerals.

I was an usher, handing out programs. Linda Miller, a California church worker and like me a repeat volunteer, briskly tried to separate the sheep from the goats — worship participants from worship observers.

There was no point. We’re all participants. We all face the same end. Glenn, who had spent so much time with these dead, left the day before. His mother-in-law had passed away. Was she among the Polish angels?



PINK BLOSSOMS

Down in the hole, Mark put the stone slabs back over the poor old bones. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” he recited, pouring soil in the sign of the cross. “Dust you are and unto dust you shall return.”

I stepped up with a few others and dumped in a ritual bucket of earth. After Eden, Adam would serve the dirt, says Genesis. And here we were — fulfilling the prophecy.

As I emptied my bucket, Yolanta Mlynarczyk gently dropped a few plumeria blossoms atop the basalt slabs of the sarcophagus lid. Their exquisite deep pink mingled with the earth. Then they were gone in the poured soil.

Life is beautiful and delicate — and it is dust. Death always startles us. Yet we know it will come. Today the Holy Land rooted death and interment in centuries of context.


SECULAR AND SACRED

My mother asks again and again why I come here. Finally, looking at the picture over her bed, I tell her it’s because this is where Jesus was.

That keeps her quiet for a while. But the questions always start again.

And I have the same questions. Why do I come?

Last year Linda found a coin and proudly held it up for a photo. “Good shot,” I said, peering into my digital camera. Then: “Uh-oh. I can see Darryl’s butt.”

Darryl, a plainspoken retired cop, gave me a look.

“Not that you don’t have a nice butt,” I said apologetically.

His look altered. “If you think I have a nice butt,” he intoned carefully, “you’ve been on this mountain waaaaay too long.”

Maybe so. But that’s why I return. For such moments — the secular and especially the sacred.