May 27, 2001
Rev. Eugene Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
Romans
8:31-36
(The sermon began with the
playing of a country song - “O Death”.)
“O death, won’t you
spare me over ‘til another year.” As so many country songs are, these words
sung by Ralph Stanley are brutally honest about the human condition. A man
bargains with death - tries to put off the inevitable. But he knows it is
coming. And finally, all his bargaining, all his arguing, will not stop it. I
think of words of the old Arab proverb, “Death is the black camel that kneels at
every man’s gate.” None of us gets out of this alive.
But who wants to
have to have to deal with such grim news? Robert Louis Stevenson, himself
haunted by ill health for much of his life, once wrote an essay about a village
in South America perched on the side of a volcanic mountain. They lived in the
region of death, he observed, and never thought about it. He was talking about
more than simply some South American villagers. Words of that noted theologian,
Woody Allen, come to mind, “I do not want to achieve immortality through my
work,’ he said, “I want to achieve it through not dying!” Then there is that
time when Charlie Brown and Linus are contemplating a young tree. “It’s a
beautiful little tree, isn’t it?” says Charlie Brown. “It’s a shame that we
won’t be around to see it when it’s fully grown.” To which Linus responds,
“Why? Where are we going?” Not many of us really want to spend much time
thinking about where we are going. “O death, won’t you spare me over ‘til
another year.”
I have a friend in
ministry, one of my best friends, who when he turned 50, went into a deep
depression. It surprised him and all who knew him. He is a very strong, self
assured, able minister, a wonderful preacher. But he found himself sinking
down into this depression and could not stop it. He decided to seek therapy.
It was discovered that the root of his depression was anxiety about his own
death. He was in good health, no physical problems, but at age 50, somewhere
deep inside the realization had taken hold that he was now a lot closer to death
than birth, that his life was probably well half over. And the result was an
increasingly debilitating depression for this minister, this man of faith.
He’s not the only
one. Over the years I’ve seen so many people, good people of faith, really
struggle with this issue. Denying the reality of death - not someone else’s
death but our own - can be easier than finally facing up to it and all the
questions it brings. “They lived in a region of death, and never thought about
it.”
Ah the mystery, the
deep mystery of death. On this Memorial Day weekend, our hearts are drawn
together around this great mystery of the human spirit - this one great and
inescapable experience which eventually finds us all. How can we deal with it?
What can be said about it?
The first thing I want
to say about death is this . . . the inevitability of death means that there is
a boundary set around our life. If we are to live and love at all, we must do
so within that boundary. We don’t have forever.
I’ve told you before
about the funeral attended by a colleague and his wife in a small, hot, crowded
independent Baptist church in rural Georgia. The coffin was wheeled in and that
Baptist preacher began to preach. He shouted, he fumed, he flailed his arms.
“It’s too late for Joe,” he screamed. “He might have wanted to do this or that
in life, but it’s too late for him now. He’s dead. It’s all over for him. He
might have wanted to straighten his life out, but he can’t now. It’s over. But
it ain’t too late for you. People drop dead every day, so why wait? Now is the
day for decision. Now is the time to make your life count for something. Now
is the time to give your life to Jesus!”
My colleague was
furious. On the way home he shared his frustration with his wife. “Can you
imagine a preacher doing that kind of thing to a grieving family? I’ve never
heard anything so manipulative, cheap and inappropriate. I would never preach a
funeral sermon like that!” His wife agreed that it was tacky, manipulative,
callous. Then she added, “Of course, the worst part of all is that it’s true.”
To put off life, to
live as if there will always be a tomorrow, is to live like a fool. There are
places to go, sights to see, things to do. There are people to care for, causes
to champion, a community and world to be made better. But for each of us there
is also a limit beyond which opportunity for these things ceases.
Frederick Buechner
says it like this: “I have never had an ache or pain that wasn’t fatal or an
illness that wasn’t terminal. One of the occupational hazards of being a writer
of fiction is to have an imagination as overdeveloped as a blacksmith’s right
arm. Again and again I have watched the doctor pause for a way to break the
tragic news to me. I have lain in a hospital room receiving the final visits of
friends. I have said goodbye to my wife and children for the last time. I have
attended my own funeral.”
He continues, “There
is something to be said for such nonsense. For one thing, to have a doctor tell
you that it is not lung cancer after all but just a touch of the flu is in a way
to be born again…to be given back not just your old life, but your old life with
a new sense of its pricelessness. At least for a time old grievances,
disappointments, irritations, failures, that had cast a shadow over your days
suddenly cease to matter much. You are alive. That’s all that matters, and the
sheer wonder and grace of it are staggering . . . of each moment too, even the
most humdrum. The taste of fresh bread. The trip to pick up the laundry. The
walk with a friend. They were nearly taken away for good. Someday they will be
taken away for good. But in the meantime they are yours. Treasure them for
what, except for God’s grace, they might never have been at all.” The harsh
reality of death, but also the wisdom of death, is that for each of us there
will be a day when there is no tomorrow. This time - this life - is so fleeting
and so precious. Love it, embrace it, allow yourselves to be overwhelmed by
it. We are standing on holy ground.
But what of death
itself, the end of me, what John Updike calls the “ceasing of your own brand of
magic which took a whole life to develop.” In the novel, The Book of Bebb,
a man is visiting the grave of his sister, Miriam, when a painful realization
hits him: “At that instant I knew that I didn’t just have a body, I was
a body, and that the body I was was some fine day going to be as dead as
Miriam. I’d known it before, but here I banged right into it - not a lesson
this time but a collision. You might say that there at my sister’s grave I
finally lost my innocence, saw the unveiling of middle-age’s last and most
intimate secret.” How to confront death - to look it in the face - and not just
any death, but my death?
Woody Allen, again,
pretty much gets to the heart of our anxieties when he says, “If it turns out
there is a God, I don’t think he is evil. I think that the worst thing you can
say about God is that he is an underachiever.”
But in response, we
have these words: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor
depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
For all my worries
and anxieties, for all the ghosts of deferments and of paths not taken, of
unhealed guilts and regrets which continue to haunt me, still I love my life and
intend to cling to it for as long as I can. And quite honestly, contemplating
the end of my life, of me, is discomforting, at times terrifying. “O Death,
won’t you spare me . . .” And I realize that there are no magic words that will
answer all my questions, relieve all of my doubts. But I do find myself
returning again and again to the words of Paul in Romans 8; I find myself
reflecting on his bold affirmation that nothing, nothing in life and nothing in
death, can separate us from the love of God. For right here is where my anxiety
about death is tempered by hope; here is where I find a measure of peace, a
place of faith.
Reflecting on his own
death, Rod Romney, a Baptist pastor in Seattle, wrote, “And now as I lie here .
. . I feel only gratitude for the song that was mine and know that in a
mysterious way, just as my beginning had no beginning, even so my end will have
no end. For this is the secret of life, that somewhere, somehow, a divine
spirit found its voice in me, took wing and came alive, for today and for all
time.”
My beginning did not
depend on me; what happens in the end will not depend on me. I find that very
hopeful. A divine spirit found its voice in me, called me to life, sustained me
in my living, and in the end, will sing to me still. The song goes on. Nothing
can separate us from God. There’s the key. There’s my faith. Ultimately, our
hope is not grounded in us, but in the character of God.
And so Paul and the
early Christians spoke, not of immortality, a kind of unchanging timelessness,
but of resurrection. For this is what they had seen and experienced in Jesus -
not life just going on endlessly, but God renewing life; out of nothing,
something; out of the end, a new beginning. Resurrection. In the words of one
of my mentors, Dr. Culver Nelson, “And why do I believe this? Not because there
is something in my nature that does not die; but because there is in God’s
nature that which will not let even death separate us from him. God cares too
much for that. God is vulnerable, as we are vulnerable, to the pain and beauty
of human loving. That is what Jesus was all about, what Jesus revealed - a
wonderfully human image of God as one who cares, who can be trusted, and who
will not stop loving us.”
G.K. Chesterton said
of Robert Louis Stevenson , “He died with a thousand stories in his heart.”
What a great way to die; what a great way to live. And somehow, if God is to be
trusted, in Chesterton’s words, “Those stories will be written still.” Only
sentiment, you say, just Nelson whistling past the graveyard again. Perhaps.
But I don’t think so. Rather, I think the poet gets to the heart of the matter
and of my faith with these words:
Ah, great it is to believe the dream
As we stand in youth by the starry
stream,
But a greater thing is to fight life
through
And say at the end, “The dream is true.”