FACING DEATH IN LIFE

(Preached on Sunday, November 14, 2004)

By your endurance you will gain your souls.

          -Luke 21:19

 

There is a forbidden zone marked on the map of twenty-first-century American culture — a place every citizen knows but fears to enter.

It is a place whose borders are open but never willingly trespassed, a place guarded by dread but surrounded by fascination.

It is the zone of death, the modern American Hades.

All of us know, intellectually, that we must die.

But we fear that reality and we live our lives in a way that totally denies that truth.

 

Part of that conspiracy of denial is the way our culture is permeated by images and accounts of death, but they are only fictions, works of imagination, counterfeits.

The real thing is carefully hidden.

Photographs are cropped; news footage is edited.

 

How else do we explain the lack of outrage over the human cost of the war in Iraq?

There have now been over 1,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq and, no one seems to know for sure, but Johns Hopkins University has conducted research that seems to indicate more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, most of them women and children, have died as a result of the Iraq war.

Plus, ever week there are more people taken hostage by terrorist groups and usually beheaded.

Yet most all of us go about our business as though nothing happened.

Of course, we don’t see most of this violence (thank goodness) and we don’t see flag draped coffins on the evening news, either.

 

The other way we conspire to deny the reality of death is by seeking permanence in our culture.

We are not alone in this, nor are we the first to try this.

Jesus, look at these stones!

That’s what the disciples said when they saw the massive temple in Jerusalem.

Herod’s temple is how it was known, not Yahweh’s, but Herod’s.

Herod was the king who was expanding the temple which had been rebuilt when the Jews returned to Jerusalem following exile in Babylon.

They had discovered their city in ruins, including Solomon’s great temple.

They had returned with barely any resources and so the temple they had rebuilt was disappointing, almost shameful.

But Herod was determined to fix it.

He went on a massive public building spree during his tenure as King of Israel, building monuments to his greatness.

 

He was determined to leave his print on Israel, by building massive edifices that would stand for ever.

Jesus, look at these massive stones!  Stones as big as these, a building so great as this, will last forever!

St. Peter’s basilica in Rome is a contemporary version of Herod’s temple.  It is massive — two football fields long.

Everything in it, the statues, the tabernacles and altars, the pictures, are done on massive scale so the building doesn’t appear so cavernous.

The Roman Catholic church built it to convey permanence and grandeur and power.

But walk less than a mile to the south, and you come to the site of the massive buildings of the ancient Romans.

The ruins of the Coliseum, the Forum, and the Palatine Hill, where the palaces of several of the emperors are located.

All of these ruins hint at massive structures that are no longer — built for permanence, only ghostly outlines and skeletal remains of solitary pillars and partial arches remain.

 

Jesus was right when he said to his impressed disciples, “I tell you this whole great building will come down, not one stone will be left on top of another.”  All of this is passing away.  It is not permanent.

If you go to Jerusalem today, you will not find the great temple that Herod built.

You will find nothing but a collection of stones, all in a jumble, making up the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem.

That wall is not even part of the temple, but the wall supporting the raised area on which the temple was built.

In fact, the Roman legions were so thorough in their destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. that archeologists and scholars are not even sure just where it was located.

The massive temple, that seemed so permanent, has been obliterated.

 

Nothing is permanent in the world.

The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the ruins of the Empire in Rome, the ruins of the great temples in Luxor, Egypt, the crumbling and looted pyramids at Giza, the Acropolis at Athens, the Mayan temples and cities in Central America reclaimed by the jungles, the twin towers in New York, it really doesn’t seem that much withstands the ravages of time, the tremors of history.

Nor are our institutions, our governments, our organizations, our cultures or societies immortal.

Where are the Babylonians and Persians and Egyptians?

Where are the Incas and Mayans and Aztecs?

Where are the Romans?

The truth is, nothing is permanent, immortal, everything dies.  We don’t like to hear that or think about it.

It feels too frightening.

If history teaches us anything, it is that all things eventually become history.

That means, as great a nation as the United States of America is, someday, it will no longer exist.

Someday, our denominations will no longer exist.

Someday, Christ Congregational Church, will no longer exist.

 

So, where, then, is our hope?

As always, Jesus is pushing the boundaries of our comfort zones radically in order to call us to faith; to call us to radical trust in God.

For that is our hope; not in massive buildings; not in institutions or governments or cultures or societies or churches; but in God.

The future has a name, a face; that name, that face is Jesus.

Because of his life, death and resurrection; because of the power of his witness that love is stronger than death; that God can be trusted to be good and that God truly loves us and is the one waiting for us at the end of history, we can have hope and faith.

 

The irony is that Jesus’ followers — then and now — may miss the real point of his teachings about the end.

We hear him talking about the end, and we focus our attention on that end.

His real point in this passage, as in others, however, is not the end per se, but life in the meantime.

The coach does not point to the time remaining one the game clock to get his players thinking about what they’ll do after the game.

He points to the time remaining as a way of getting their heads more into the game itself.

So it is with Jesus’ teachings about the end.

 

Jesus calls us to be engaged in both heaven and earth.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus taught that in the face of life’s tragedies and tumult we should “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

That is a fatalistic attitude that many people hold today.

It looks only to the present moment on earth, and has not vision for the future.

On the other hand, Martin Luther, before traveling to Worms to go on trial for his life, was asked, “Where will you be, Brother Martin, when church, state, princes, and people turn against you?  Where will you be then?”

Luther answered, “Why, then as now, in the hands of Almighty God.”

 

That is the faith in the permanence of God that will see us through the impermanence of life.

How do we cultivate that faith?

By facing death squarely in life.

That is what Jesus called us to do, and what many spiritual teachers from all religious traditions recommend.

St. Benedict tells us to keep death daily before our eyes.

Medieval philosophers kept a skull on their desks to remind them of the impermanence of life.

The truth is, instead of being morbid and depressing, death actually brings meaning to life.

 

Those who work with the dying daily, hospice workers, bear witness to the greater awareness and intensity with which they embrace and live life.

They are more aware of their joys and sorrows, even the little, daily automatic things — like breathing or walking.

They also become more attentive to the people around them, aware that they will not always have them at their side.

So they long to explore them and to contribute as much as they can to what they are becoming and what they are called to become.

 

This is especially hard for Americans to think in this way, because our culture is almost as phobic about death as that of ancient Egypt.

But the more we can begin to accept death as part of life, stop hiding it, denying it, treating it as a plague, the more we can actually begin to embrace life.

The more we can stop putting all our energy into building that which has no permanence, and instead place our energy into what does have permanence: our relationships with God and with other people.

 

There is a medieval Christian mystery play in which the lead character asks who will come with him into the grave to support him at his last judgment.

Not I, said his friends.