life and death, 2.24.13

Psalm 46:1-11

¹God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. ²Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; ³though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

⁴There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. ⁵God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved; God will help it when the morning dawns.

⁶The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts.

⁷The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. ⁸Come, behold the works of the Lord; see what desolations he has brought on the earth. ⁹He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire.

¹⁰“Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth.” ¹¹The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.

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            Friday night we had a really nice movie night here. It was a good reminder for me of some of Laurelton’s strengths. It was relaxed and comfortable, like Laurelton. Our challenge is making sure we’re always actively reaching out to include new people in the intimacy and family feeling that makes this such a fun place to be.

            The reason I mention that now is that I want to bring that relaxed spirit to our time with scripture right now. Ritual and worship are important in the Christian life. Sermons help us learn and grow but they aren’t always the best way to engage with scripture. That’s why I like to spend some of our “sermon time” outside the box of traditional sermons.

             The church is a community shaped by love, trust and truth. Today we’re talking about death, about aging, about facing the end of life, both our life and the lives of those we care about. The end of life can be a scary topic. I suspect fear of death and questions about the afterlife are some of the most important reasons people come to church and run away from church.

            Because the topic is already surrounded by anxiety, I think it’s going to be more helpful for us to have a relaxed conversation about life and death than for me to just stand up here and preach a sermon. I’ve done some thinking and writing in preparation for this moment, but I want your questions and thoughts to guide us too. This is only going to work if we can trust each other. Different people have different beliefs about death and the afterlife. The point isn’t getting the right answer to intellectual questions about Christian teaching. We’re here to listen to each other and to bring our questions and fears to God’s word, trusting that God speaks through scripture and through us.

It’s OK if someone believes something that we don’t think is true: we are always learning and growing, so there’s no need to correct each other right now. And it’s OK if you don’t have the “right” answer. You can share your thoughts and fears here without worrying what someone else will think. So I want us to promise here and now that we will listen to each other without judgment, that we will share honestly and that we will respect each other. OK?

            Great. So let’s start with a question: What was your first experience with death? Not everyone has to share, but let’s hear from a few people.

            What emotion do you feel or think of when you think about death?

            That’s the warm up. Here’s the big question: What is your biggest fear about death? Think about that for a moment then get into groups of three or four and talk about it for a couple of minutes.

            Now I’d love for you to share your fear in a word or sentence.

            Hold onto that word while we listen to God’s word from Paul’s second letter to the Corinithians: 2 Corinthians 4:5-18; if you’re reading along, that’s page___.

⁵For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. ⁶For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. ⁷But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.

⁸We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; ⁹persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; ¹⁰always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. ¹¹For 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. ¹²So death is at work in us, but life in you.

¹³But just as we have the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with scripture—“I believed, and so I spoke” —we also believe, and so we speak, ¹⁴because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence. ¹⁵Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

¹⁶So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. ¹⁷For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, ¹⁸because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.

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            Are there any ideas or words that jump out at you from that passage?

            Any areas of the passage that spoke to the fears we talked about?

            Is there anything there that touches how you think about life and death?

            There’s a tension in Christian faith between life and death. This is certainly not the only place we see that dynamic at work, but it’s on full display here. Life and death are related, not opposites. And life and death are not all or nothing; there’s a continuum, which I think we know from our own lives, right?

            Part of aging is the power of physical life in us getting weaker. We get achier and our bodies are less able to do the things they used to be able to do. So in that process of getting older we see a side of death. That’s part of why we do things like dye our hair or buy anti-aging creams. Our culture worships youth and a superficial kind of beauty connected with youth. Along with that, we worship speed and wealth and other signs of outward power. In popular culture life is about success, about having it all together. When we don’t feel like we have it all together, when we don’t feel fast or successful or young we feel the threat of death creeping up on us. That can be as major as a cancer diagnosis or as minor as a cold that slows us down and keeps us from doing what we “have to do.”

            Paul sees it a different way. He looks at the story of Jesus, how the Lord Jesus Christ gave up the infinite power of divinity to become fragile and human and weak. He not only faced all the normal challenges of life, he faced the pain of torture and death to bring us closer to God. The life of God, true life itself, showed up most clearly in a man willing to die.

"Death to life" Easter, 2012

Luke 23:55-24:12

⁵⁵The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid. ⁵⁶Then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments. On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment. But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. ²They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, ³but when they went in, they did not find the body.

⁴While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. ⁵The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. ⁶Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, ⁷that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” ⁸Then they remembered his words, ⁹and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.

¹⁰Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. ¹¹But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. ¹²But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

Romans 6:1-11

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? ²By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? ³Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

⁴Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. ⁵For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

⁶We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. ⁷For whoever has died is freed from sin. ⁸But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ⁹We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. ¹⁰The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. ¹¹So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

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            Jesus had been traveling for three years. He had healed and taught, welcomed outcasts and called sinners to repentance. Often huge crowds followed him to hear his comforting and challenging words.

Besides the crowds, Jesus had a core group of followers who went everywhere with him. Twelve leaders, called apostles were the most famous, but there were also others Jesus sent out in his name to teach and heal. Other disciples supported and cared for Jesus in his ministry, especially many women.

            Jesus and his followers started to make their way to Jerusalem, the capital of Jewish life and worship. Along the way, Jesus told his disciples that he would be killed in Jerusalem, but that he would rise again. The disciples knew enough to be sad about that prediction, but they didn’t really understand, even though Jesus repeated it three times.

            When they got to Jerusalem, a huge crowd welcomed them with shouts of praise and songs to crown a king. Israel hadn’t really had a king in 600 years, but the people’s hope for someone to trust and follow hadn’t died. A welcome like that must have been a high point for the disciples. All Jesus’ talk about the kingdom of God seemed to be coming true. On top of that, the excitement of the big city at festival time thrilled these small-town fishermen.

            Then things went horribly wrong. The religious leaders had never liked Jesus. They worried about his teachings and were downright terrified of the attention he might bring from the Roman rulers. They also worried that Jesus’ teachings could weaken their power. As Jesus’ ministry continued, the conflict with the religious leaders got more and more intense, until they finally decided to kill him.

            At the Passover supper, Jesus told his closest friends that one of them would betray him and the rest would run away. Despite their passionate denials, that’s exactly what happened on Thursday night when officers from the Temple came to arrest Jesus.

            A whirlwind of interrogation, trial and torture followed, and by Friday evening Jesus had died on a Roman cross and been buried. True to his prediction, the disciples ran away. A few women and a man named Joseph made sure Jesus was buried decently before sunset, and the women made plans to go back to the tomb on Sunday morning after the Sabbath was over.

            That morning, Jesus proved once again that he wasn’t interested in playing by the rules. He’d been surprising people since birth, and death wasn’t going to limit Jesus any more than tradition had. The women came expecting to find their teacher’s body, expecting to anoint him with spices as a sign of their love for him, a last expression of care. Instead, they found the rock door rolled away from the front of the tomb and no body to be found. 

            It’s a great story, but all that happened almost two thousand years ago, so what difference does it make for us today? That answer will be a bit different for everyone since faith is a bit different for each of us, but Paul’s words to the church in Rome ring true today: faith is about deep questions, life and death importance.

            Christian faith is about following Jesus. Like the first disciples, we never do it perfectly. We misunderstand and fall short of our calling. A lot has changed over the two thousand years since the women and Peter found Jesus’ tomb empty. The early church was surrounded by threats from religious leaders and the Roman Empire. Following Jesus was very obviously a matter of life and death.

In the US in the 21^st century, we face different threats. We’re free to worship or not, and we’re free to believe whatever we want to. I thank God for our freedom, but I worry that the Christian majority in this country makes it easy to follow Jesus halfway and easy to forget that following Jesus is still a matter of life and death.

When we choose to follow Jesus we aren’t picking a club or a team or a style. We are choosing to join Jesus in his death. We are choosing to leave our sin and selfishness behind, to die to the world and begin a new life with Jesus. We are choosing to put Jesus first, to make him the center of our existence.

Faith can seem complicated and confusing. There are so many churches, so many opinions, so many points of view. Christians think different things about the Bible, politics, organization, money, family and everything else.

At the same time, faith in Jesus is simple because it means choosing to trust and follow Jesus. All the complications are second, and very distantly second. The point is following Jesus; everything else falls into place when we put Jesus first.