rich’s blog

Introduction:

Well, it’s been a time hasn’t it friends, both since I’ve seen you and since I’ve preached–and Jerry, thank you for sharing with us the past couple of weeks, and serving all of us in that way. 

 

But since it had been a while, I figured I’d jump in with something cheery and easy to talk about today.  

 

That was a joke–but we are talking about death today.  Talking about what the world thinks of it, what our society considers when they consider death.  And we’re talking about what Christianity has to say about death–turns out quite a bit, really.  And I don’t know if I will say anything you haven’t heard before.  I’m just being honest; but I hope that we can hear it anyway, because it’s important stuff. 

 

The Best Policy: 

But I do need to be honest about a couple of things.  

 

First, today’s message is short; shorter than most of the messages I give, and I don’t mean, then, that it’s only a 40 minutes long instead of 45.  I mean it’s short, like Kaitlyn or Jamey short.  Little.  So set your expectations. 

 

Second: I am tired this morning.  Tired of thinking about death, and just tired generally.  So.  Be gracious with me, if you can.  Especially when we get to the middle of this message. 

 

Jogging:  

So this morning, this short, tiny morning, I want to remind us that this message is part of a whole series of messages about what Christianity has to say to the world, to our society in particularly, about a bunch of different things that pretty much everybody cares about.  Remember that?  This is jogging our memories time–it’s the only jogging I’ll be doing all week, so, I’d like to make the most of it. 

 

And we’re exploring this stuff, trying to figure out what our faith has to say about stuff like sex and information and spirituality, and all sorts of things in the hope that if we can just articulate what we have to say about these things, we’ll be a little better positioned to choose between the the world’s perspective and our faiths.  

 

It’s the hope (“the hope!” My hope! Geeze.) that we’ll be better positioned to live out the ethical call of our Christian life, which is to become like Jesus as we depend on each other, and Scripture, and the Spirit, living our lives as Jesus lived his own. 

 

So.  Jogging.  I’m tired, done working out.  I hope we remember why we are here; but let’s do something else. 

 

Let’s do something else.  Let’s talk about something.

 

What the World says about death: 

Let’s talk about what the world has to say about death.  Oh–one thing, though: 

 

A Quick Note:

And as I speak, let’s not fool ourselves.  Death is a touchy thing; it’s always personal, if not to us, to someone else, somewhere else.  The opinions we have about it are close to our hearts–we’d be surprised how close, really, how personal and basic our thoughts on death are.  And already this morning, some of us are distracted–and will remain distracted all morning–by loss–recent and further away.  And I will fail you: I will not be as reverent as some of our sensibilities say I should be, or as funny as some of our anxieties & fears would like me to be. And though I pray that at the end of this morning God draws our hearts together into his own, and we are safe there, and at peace, I can’t ensure that.  Sensitive, personal things today.  Because, of course, when we talk about death we aren’t talking about things at all, but people & ourselves.  

 

With that said, let’s talk about the world. 

 

The World & Death:

If you weren’t aware of it, the world around us, our society, is obsessed with death & dying.  Fascinated, confused, worried about it.  The world is obsessed with death & dying.  That sounds a bit inflated, I bet, but it’s not.  People don’t talk about death much, they don’t chat about it over coffee, or tell strangers that they were thinking about death the other day.  You know what we do–and I include us in this room in this–you know what we do with death, with the things we think about it, with the common anxieties, and common daydreams about it?  We stick it in stories. 

 

Stories:

Death is the one thing present in every genre, every folk tale, a thousand little Grimm bed-time stories that are read to children.  It’s in hundreds of novels, personified or there.  I read, you know, and like flipping pages of a book my memory can flip through novels and scenes and passages and chapters where people fought or cheated or grieved death, where their lives were changed forever for good or bad because of death and the ending of lives around them.  

 

I can see scenes of so many movies–it’s like flipping through tv stations–about death and dying and people’s lives changing, we meet them right after someone died, right before, right during, and so many movies that are just long stories of people dealing with life after death–not their own, but even that sometimes.  The world around us may not be chatting about death, but don’t open a magazine or a book or a short story, don’t turn on a movie or tv show, and not expect to be confronted with it.  Stories are our sort of collective human journal, a dear diary, where we stick all the questions we have about death, explore the emotions that come of it, thoughts and feelings we that we don’t know how to talk about over breakfast with a friend.  

 

The world is thinking about death.  And when it does speak, it has all sorts of things to say, has all sorts of responses.  And we ourselves–for all our Christianity, or because of it, in certain cases–have the same sort of responses.  I’ll just quickly make some broad-sweeping generalities and name a few, alright?  We’ll come back to each of them soon. 

 

Natural:

The world will say almost positive, soothing things like “Death is part of the cycle of life; it’s natural–organic–actually, that’s a federally regulated term, I don’t have the right to use it.”  

 

Irrelevant & Inevitable: 

The world will say, “Look, death is far away.  It’s irrelevant.  Let’s not worry about it, let’s take life easy.” Let’s eat some more, drink some more, buy some more, because it’s a waste of time to think about death; everybody dies, so we should just really live well until it happens, whenever that is.  

 

Impermanent & Positive: 

I find more and more often–and probably was just blind to this for most of my life–that much of the world seems to be pretty sure that this life isn’t all there is, that something else is there on the other side of death–and frankly, the world tends to think that something is good, or at least better than the being alive now.  The world hopes for death, sometimes, because life is hard, and death seems like a good escape into something better.  

 

Meaningless:

Sometimes the world–and I’m making enormous generalities here, right, but what can you do–the world, society, will straight up call death out, and say it is meaningless, death is without reason and terrible.  This can sometimes make Christians feel smug, because they tend to agree, but it should break our hearts, because this sort of perspective usually comes out of a broken heart. 

 

Necessary:

And we could keep going, right? But I just want to add one more; which is just that the world will often say that death is simply necessary-not “cycle of life” necessary, but murder necessary-and while a person may not want to administer death, they’ll really think that someone else should. 

 

These are generalities, and they are few, but they are fair, I think, fair samples of what the world we’re immersed in thinks regarding death, and dying. Most of the people we’ll meet today or tomorrow have these responses to death, think these things about it–and we ourselves often carry the same opinions. 

But before we talk about what we have to say into all this, I guess I should mention why it matters that we do have something to say. 

 

Pause: 

So.  I was working on this, with the Lord, I think.  And two things happened; one, the time kept getting later and later, or earlier and earlier, really.  And I also found myself sort of writing this involved, complicated treatise on death and life and the resurrection, and easter, and trying to fit all these things together into some beautiful thing. 

 

And I just felt like I should stop.  Who needs a treatise on death? And so I just stopped. And I was praying, pacing, wondering what I should say, really? What should I say, I who have only known death from a distance, really, separated from it by degrees.  

 

Death is a confusing thing for me; there are days when I wonder if I would cry if anyone close to me were to die.  I am used to loss, and used to moving on.   I moved so much growing up, I am so not close to my family, I tried to kill myself a decade ago–and I’m just generally a melancholy fella. I haven’t known death in any large big way, but I often feel sometimes as though I have walked right along its edge, that death has been behind all the loss I have ever felt in my life, all the wounds that have scarred over and are open in me. The death of places, of intimacies, of dreams and expectations and seasons that I thought would last for much longer than they did–and real deaths, too–the deaths of people who left behind hurt people that I have loved, hurt friends and hurt family. 

 

Reset: 

Here’s what I know, if you want it.  Jesus is alive.  Christ is risen.  All I know is the resurrection; the hope it, the longing for it, the way we groan, Paul says in today’s passage “groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling.”  The thing he calls “that which is unseen” our resurrection bodies, bodies that creation itself, Paul says in Romans, groans to see.  He writes, there in Romans 9:22-23: “We know that the whole of creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, and not only he creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”  

 

Paul links creation’s redemption with our own; and why wouldn’t creation groan?  Tired of death like we’re tired of death.  In Isaiah 11, Isaiah tells us what creation has been looking forward to since death first happened.  He writes: 

 

“The wolf will live with the lamb,he leopard will lie down with the goat,he calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.

The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together,nd the lion will eat straw like the ox.

Infants will play near the hole of the cobra; young children will put their hands into the viper’s nest.

They will neither harm nor destroyn all my holy mountain,or the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORDs the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9)

 

Creation knows what the world tries to kid itself about, which is that death is an intruder.  It is an enemy.  It steals and destroys and tears down, it keeps a thousand new things from happening that should wonderfully happen, a hundred memories from being formed, and hopes being realized.  

 

Sure, death is part of the life-cycle; but the life-cycle itself was broken near its very beginning, and I do think we’re called to care for creation, to steward it, to turn it toward this ideal; but I am not going to simply bless and rejoice in the world as it now stands: because as it now stands, death has to happen so that life can happen.  Things have to die so that other things can live.  And that is unnatural, and wrong, and wasn’t the way God hoped things would be. No wonder creation groans, right?  It wants freed from the cycle of death as much as we do.  It wants to see, as Paul puts it, the “redemption of our bodies” because it’s us, our bodies, humanity, that messed up creation in the first place by breaking faith with God.  Creation looks to what is not yet revealed.   

 

Paul says that he doesn’t even look at himself anymore, doesn’t even think about his own body anymore–he calls this, in 2 Cor 4:18 “what is seen,” knows that this life is temporary, but instead his life is motivated by what is unseen, what is eternal–his body renewed, resurrected as Jesus was.  The ultimate becoming like him.  

 

Have you heard about the resurrection? Anyone?  Without it, we’re wasting our time.  We–as Paul says, as you’ve heard–are fools if there was no bodily resurrection of Jesus, if we don’t have our own to look forward to.  It’s not a metaphor, it’s not a neat idea, it’s not for Jesus only, it’s for us. 

 

The fact that we look forward to a bodily resurrection–these bodies, these ones, renewed, without disease or pain or illness or all the things sin has marked them with–living in a resurrected world that groans for this all to happen.  We Christians, who are trying to become like Jesus, with God’s Spirit living in us, have this promise to look forward too. 

 

But I have found, that by and large we don’t think about it, and we don’t care all that much, and we don’t try to figure out what the fact that we’ll be resurrected means with regard to how we live our lives right now, today, this minute.  It just doesn’t seem all that important; we tack it on to the end of Jesus dying on a cross to free us from death & sin, but we forget that if there’s no resurrection, then what have we been freed into?  Floating around on little clouds with harps, disembodied? I don’t want to be disembodied; I like my body, I like food and I like to smell things and taste them, and I look forward to the big huge party meal Jesus says he’s going to eat with us on the other side of the resurrection.  I look forward to a back that doesn’t pinch up when I lift light things.  

 

And I look forward to seeing people again, and hugging them again, and touching their faces, and telling them hello.  The passage from Thesselonians, where Paul reminds us that we do not grieve like those who have no hope, isn’t talking about people who are hopeless–it’s talking about people who don’t have the hope of the resurrection.  

 

This is what Paul means when he says in 2 Cor 5:7 that “we walk by faith not by sight.”  We don’t live our lives looking forward to what is seen–this body, as it is, or something less than it–but to what is unseen, expected only through faith, the hope of resurrected bodies in a resurrected world.  And right now those we have lost in the Lord are in the hands of God, they are well; they know peace, they know joy, they know so many great things.  But they also wait and hope for the resurrection too, because they want to hold us again, and not just float around on clouds with us. 

 

Christians–ideally–grieve differently from non-Christians, because we look forward to something different.  The hope of our bodies back, and our world renewed, re-made, and life together as it was supposed to be, a day when the power of death is finally and completely broken.  We look forward to a day when we don’t have to stop forming memories together with those we love, because death won’t cut them short.  It doesn’t belong in a resurrected world, and no one will miss it. 

 

Easter:

So do you care about Easter?  It’s why we meet on a Sunday, you know?  On “the Lord’s day” instead of on Saturday.  Every Sunday we remember the first Easter Sunday, when death’s powers in this world–fear, anxiety, unending grief–were broken, and Jesus came back to life, not to die again.  It’s why we celebrate communion–to remind ourselves that Jesus is coming back, and what we see, what is temporary, will give way to what is unseen, eternal, and of faith.  It is only because of Jesus’ resurrection and the one we look forward to that we have ever gathered together for anything.

 

The Space Between Seen and Unseen: 

In the meantime, we have to live differently.  We have to live as though we have already died.  We should own Paul’s words, that “while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.” “I have been crucified to the world, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”  We need to own Jesus’ words that whoever follows him, should take up their cross.  We need to live knowing that death has no claws and blunt teeth, and no matter how much it spits and hisses at us, it can’t hurt us anymore, not if we grieve with the hope of the resurrection inside us.  Not of we live immersed in the care of one another, in the power of the Spirit, in the guidance of Scripture.  And we must be people who are not agents of death, but agents of life, drawing people toward the resurrection instead of killing. 

 

Grieve:

And you know, If you need to grieve, then grieve. Sob, be a wreck, but allow the one who wrecked death’s grasp on us to heal you.  Some of us have new cracks in our souls because of loss, because of Glenn, because of others.  Some of us have old, old cracks that we must take to the mender of broken things.  We are not alive in a society of repairers–when things break in America we don’t fix them, we replace them and toss the “old” out into holes we fill with other used up broken things.  You were not meant for that, no person was, but especially no new person, no new creation.  You were meant to be repaired, fixed and put together until the final day when you will never grieve again, you will never hurt again, you will never know death except as a memory of an old thing, a memory that can no longer hurt you.  

 

A Eulogy:

Today is a eulogy, but not because someone has died; but because with every death our innocence, our ability to ignore that life is hard, that life is troublesome and wearying, becomes harder to ignore.   Every time we gather together and remember Jesus, who is alive, remember the resurrection of Jesus, and the resurrection that is coming, we remind each other of death’s death. We give death a eulogy, and with it, our own selves. 

 

Remember Paul’s cry “Death oh where is your sting?  Where is your power?”  Remember the renewal of this world, where we’ll see what our world looks like without death in it.  Hold onto all these things, remind one another of them, no matter what this life brings.  Don’t hide death in stories; but bring it out into the open, and carry Jesus’ death with you, the death that ended death’s ability to destroy us, so that you might live for the world and Christ and one another, might grieve with hope, might become like Jesus.  If we can do these things, we’ll have no problem engaging the world around us, and it’s fascinations, dismissals, concerns, and anxieties about death.