Life and Death
a sermon by John W. Wimberly, Jr.
Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
May 25, 2008

Text: Matthew 6:24-34

When I was in seminary, I had a shocking realization.  At age 25, I had never been to a funeral.  Now surely people were dying around me.  My grandparents died before I was born and, gratefully, I didn’t have any other family members die.  But friends of my family and church members were surely dying during that period.  For some reason, I never went to the funerals.  I have many questions for my parents when we meet in heaven.  One is: “Why didn’t I ever go to a funeral?”

Of course, as with most questions we ask our parents, I think I know their answer.  My parents must have felt they were protecting me from the trauma of death.  For in this country, too many of us feel death is something from which we must be shielded. 

However, there are real problems that flow from shielding ourselves and others from death.  Most important, we push death into a dark corner in our minds.  There it becomes much more worrisome and fear-inducing than it need be.

In response to my lack of exposure to death, I went to work at a funeral home for a month.  In so doing, I went from one extreme to another (a consistent trend in my youth).  In a month, I attended about 25 funerals.  I also read everything I could get my hands on regarding death and dying. 

I observed Jewish funerals and Irish wakes, totally secular burials and Protestant memorial services.  I saw people stand stoically at the casket of their loved one, never shedding a tear or allowing a lip to quiver.  I saw others throw themselves sobbing on caskets.  My own self-designed cram course in death was one of the best things I ever did personally or professionally.

Death is a pervasive part of ministry because it is an inescapable part of life.  Sometimes the specter of death is raised by a serious illness.  Other times, death appears in a sudden, surprising way, one of death’s traits that makes it so feared.  But whether death moves toward us slowly and surely or appears out of the blue, death is a reality that shapes our days on earth.

A friend of mine from Ghana says his father used to say, “If you don’t want to die, don’t be born.” Indeed, there is no dodging death.  But in this country, we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to dodge it. 

Several years after my month in the funeral home, I visited Mexico for the first time.  I discovered that one of the big holidays in Mexico is called El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead).  This amazing day goes back to the ancient Olmec, Aztec and Mayan cultures.  When the conquistadores arrived with their priests, they co-opted the tradition, merging it with All Saints Day on November 1st.  But despite the church’s efforts, Day of the Dead still very much feels like a pre-Christian, non-European occasion. 

On El Dia de los Muertos, families visit the graves of loved ones.  They have large dinners in which they sit around and recall the lives of their dead family members.  Public and private altars are prepared with special offerings of corn and small crafts.  There are parades through the streets. And it is not a one day event.  People spend the entire year making, buying and collecting things to be used on the Day of the Dead.

When I first learned of the holiday, I thought, “What a contrast to our culture in the U.S.!” Here we do our best to bury not only the dead but the specter of death itself.  In Mexico, they put death in the center of their living rooms.  Here we think of death only when it is forced upon us, there they ritualize thinking about it.

Back in the 70’s, in addition to going from one extreme to another, I was impossibly addicted to black-and-white opinions.  So I became convinced that Mexico’s approach to death was far superior to our approach.  I’m sure I wrote a few sermons declaring their approach to death correct and our approach wrong. 

But I have since changed my view about what is right and wrong when it comes to death. In fact, I no longer think there is a right or wrong.  I don’t believe the emotional person is necessarily processing her or his emotions about death better than the stoic person.  They are just processing them differently.  In like manner, Mexico has a different way of processing grief than many of us do here in the U.S.

The issue isn’t what is the best style of grieving and acknowledging death.  The issue is, “Are we grieving and acknowledging death?  Do we deal with rather than deny death?” If we are dealing with it, I don’t much care how we do it.

I was talking to someone recently who was concerned about his father who was mourning his wife’s death.  I asked him to say a few more words.  He said, “Well, Dad seems pretty unemotional, given the great loss we have all experienced.” I asked what he was like normally.  “Pretty unemotional,” came the response.  I advised, “Well, if your Dad processes most things in an unemotional way, I’d actually be more concerned if he suddenly dissolved into a pool of tears.  He is handling things the way he handles things.”

It seems to me that healthy grief is likely to resemble the rest of our lives.  Since I am very emotional about just about everything, I get very emotional when someone dies.  In my case, if I got stoic, it would be a cause for concern.  But what is right for me is not right for others.  For others, a less visibly emotional response is perfectly fine, if that is the way they typically process grief.

Moreover, the way we appear is not necessarily the way we are.  Body language and other external behaviors can be incredibly deceptive.  The fact that we don’t appear emotional on the surface doesn’t mean we aren’t very emotional deep inside.  For a whole host of reasons, we may choose not to release all of that emotion in ways that are visible to the world.

Grief needs to fit into the continuum of our lives.  It needs to mirror who we are.  When it does, death becomes a normal part of life and grief is the way we process it.

In the Gospel lesson this morning, Jesus talks about anxiety.  Reflecting on this passage in the first half of the 19th century, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard laid the groundwork for the modern existential movement.  In his Journals, Kierkegaard wrote, “Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God....”

I think Kierkegaard nails not only the roots of anxiety but why we fear death.  We fear death will cause us to end up alone, cut off from loved ones, forgotten by God.  It is a spiritual, existential nightmare, the scariest vision of hell I can imagine.

To such very, very normal and human fears, fears of abandonment, Jesus responds, “Be not anxious.  Does not God take care of the lilies of the field and birds of the air?  If God takes care of them, won’t God take care of you and me?” Of course God will!

The Bible really doesn’t give us any details about the afterlife upon which we can hang our hats, does it?  It doesn’t lay out our post-death itinerary clearly and precisely the way a good travel agent does.  The lack of clarity about the afterlife is why artists have had a field day creating their own images of it. 

But there is one image about death that is repeated over and over and over again in Scripture.  It is an image of people finding their way home to God.  Even if somehow we get lost on earth, veer onto some bizarre detour, God finds us and brings us home.  Far from being abandoned, far from being alone, forgotten or cut off from God and those we love, after we have finished with the joys and sorrows of life, we go home to God.

Jesus looked death in the eye, more than once.  As you know, I have never accepted the theology in which Jesus supposedly welcomed death, in which it was part of his mission to die for our sins.  Jesus died because sinful human beings killed him.  He died at the hands of an unjust political system.

Furthermore, it is very clear that Jesus didn’t relish the thought of dying.  Indeed, as death neared, he asked God to “take this cup (of death)” from him.  In that scene, his profound anxiety is palpable.

But nowhere does Jesus become more anxious than on the cross.  His anxiety was not rooted in the physical pain of dying or even the fact that his friends and followers had abandoned him.  His anxiety flowed from the phenomenon Kierkegaard described.  For all of history to hear, Jesus shouted it out, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” Even Jesus, who was one with God, even Jesus was shaken by “the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God....”

Some of us are fortunate enough to die surrounded by people we love, people who love us.  It is amazing to observe such a scene when it takes place.  But many more people die the way Jesus died—alone, wondering if the world and God have forgotten us.  It is, in my opinion, this prospect of aloneness and abandonment that lies at the root of our anxiety and fears about death. 

It isn’t that we won’t be able to go to work or see the sun set or play with our grandchildren.  Rather, we fear that we will be cut off from everything we know and love.  It is making me nervous just describing it!

Such a soul-jarring possibility is why we need to put death in the continuum of all that we experience in life—not push it into a dark corner.  If we think of the way God relates to us across the entire span of our lives, day in and day out, we will understand that the chances of God abandoning us in and after death is somewhere between zero and none.

We baptized a baby this morning.  Think about the way God brought little William into the world.  God surrounded this child with a loving family.  He will grow up surrounded by the same love and add to it as he meets friends who develop a love for him.  At some point, he will realize that all of nature is loving and nurturing him—providing him with air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, beauty to see.  One day, he may have children of his own who will love him.  Someday a child may even call out to him, “Grandpa Will.”

This is God’s plan for us in life—to be surrounded, nurtured and loved, not abandoned and forsaken.  If someone is abandoned and forsaken as we are currently seeing in Burma, God’s will has not been done.  It is antithetical to everything God wants for us.

When we put death in the larger context of God’s plan for us, the context in which we live, move and have our being, how can any of us live in fear of death?  We may not like the thought of dying.  I sure don’t.  I love my life.  I love life itself.  I hate the thought of dying.  But I don’t fear it.  The only thing I really fear in this world is the possibility that I’m not getting the most out of my limited days on earth. 

So on this weekend when we baptize a baby and remember those who died protecting our freedom, let us remember that God takes care of the lilies of the field.  God takes care of the birds of the air.  And God will take care of you and me.  There are no truer or more important words in this sacred book we call the Bible.  May we allow them to illuminate every part of our being, casting out fear, replacing it with confidence.

Let us pray: Gracious God, the world can be a scary place.  We see people dying and suffering needlessly.  We see people die in the prime of life.  As we watch, we worry.  Our worry morphs into anxiety.  Help us to allow your non-anxious Spirit to penetrate and soothe our spirits, lifting us to a place where we know that no matter what happens to us, we will find our way home to you.  All will be well.  We pray this in the name of the One who leads us to you, Jesus the Christ. Amen.