“The Ministry of
Death”
Luke 23:33-43
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
November 21,
2010
Christ the
King Sunday
Meditation
before Holy Communion
Maybe
it is because the years are starting to pile up, but I find myself thinking
about death more these days than I used to.
Not in any morbid way, I don’t mean that. Not
in fear of it. I don’t mean that.
But death is to me at this point in my life a greater reality.
This fall as I have taken my early morning runs (or walks, depending on
the day) and before the return to Standard Time robbed me of the dawning light,
I’d look at the trees in their frenzied riot of colors and wonder how many
more lovely autumns remain in my life.
It occurs to me that I am beginning to live my life more and more from the end. By that I mean I seem to be moving my death from sometime in the future into the present. When we are young, most of us do not give death much thought. Most of us have a feeling of invincibility or, if not that exactly, death seems so distant as not to merit much consideration. But when we bring it front and center, when death for us begins by reason of our age or circumstance to enter our field of vision and the realms not only of possibility but inevitability, it tests our lives:
Am
I living the life I want to be living?
What
in my life needs mending or amending?
What
are the emerging interests or activities in my life to which I want to pay more
attention?
What has been a part of my life that I want now to lay down, to set
aside,
to
move past?
What
unfinished business do I have that holds me back or down?
What
is the form or focus for the remaining years of my life of the freedom for which
Christ
has set me free?
With
whom do I need to be reconciled or from what relationship do I need to resign or
renew?
How
do I want to live the years that are left to me?
What is important to me?
Evoking
questions like these, death has a ministry with the living that can be profound.
In her well-received book of a few years ago entitled My
Grandfather’s Blessings; Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging,
Rachel Remen tells of a woman in her
thirties who discovered that Remen worked with the dying.
So she confronted Remen at a party one night and told her bitterly that
she resented the idea that there is anything good or meaningful about death.
Then she told with considerable vitriol about the horrible death suffered
by her husband a few years earlier. He
has been diagnosed with cancer and, as therapy after therapy failed, he became
bitter, lashing out at everyone, rebuffing anyone who tried to comfort or
console him. He died angry and
withdrawn and the woman said to Remen, “I do not want to die that way.”
Remen
replied to her, “So, then, how do you need
to live?” The woman looked
puzzled, so Remen asked her again. “How
do you need to live to be sure that you do not die in the way your husband
did?” This time the woman got it.
Remen remembers, “She looked past me for a moment, making eye contact
with something intensely personal in her mind.
Then she reached out and touched my hand and slipped away into the crowd
of guests. Some months later, Remen
received in the mail a note from this woman.
She realized that she had not been living as authentically and fully as
she had wanted. There were things
yet undone in her life, roads not yet taken that she wanted to travel.
She began to revise her living in light of her dying.
Thinking about the reality of her eventual death, the woman began a
process that led her to rearrange her life and her priorities in the present.
It
is not a stretch, I don’t think, to say that a sense of impending death helped
Jesus to frame and to focus his life. Because
he trusted God, he never seemed to be cowed by the specter of death.
He surely did not run from it, even inviting it by his frequent dust-ups
with civil and religious authorities, by refusing to pull back on his
provocative teachings, by living with such integrity to God’s call on his
life.
To
what have you felt, to what do you feel called in your life?
Is your life, like it was for Jesus, a long obedience in the direction of
your call – and, for us Christians, though it may take many different forms
during the course of our lives, is not our one call to glorify God by the manner
of our living - or are you distracted from your call, waylaid by other easier
paths or seductions? Are you bound
and shackled in your life by so many self or socially-imposed “shoulds” and
“oughts” that you are rendered impotent to follow the kismet of God’s
Spirit?
Scientists
tell us that the universe still is expanding, still heaving outward from the
point and moment of that big beginning bang, but our lives on earth are moving
the other way. Our lives are
contracting. Death is coming
to meet us late or soon and so the question is not “when?” for that is
unknowable save for the “inner knowing” that some people experience when
death is near. The question is how,
in light of the reality that we each of us are some day going to die, how are we
now going to live?
I
hear regret in the voice of one of the criminals being crucified beside Jesus.
Death is imminent and he is remorseful for misspending his life.
Responding to the other criminal who had taunted Jesus for neither saving
himself nor them and so demonstrating that he completely misunderstands this
Messiah, the first criminal chastises the second, saying, “Do
you not even now, about to die, have a shred of humility or reverence or
comprehension? You and I have been
condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man
has done nothing wrong.” Then,
to the One in the middle, he said as we sang earlier, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
To which Jesus replied, “Truly,
I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
That
tells me that the final word, like the first word, in the kingdom of this
Christ, our Christ, is grace. But
grace is not for the purpose of excusing our lives but ennobling them.
Kathryn Tanner is an ascendant star in contemporary theological skies
about whose work I have written in the December issue of our church newsletter.
She is a theologian of the Incarnation who sees in the Word of God
becoming flesh in Jesus the infusion of ennobling and enabling grace into our
lives. She writes, “In union with God (made possible in the incarnation), all the trials
and sorrows of life – suffering, loss, moral failing, the oppressive stunting
of opportunities and vitality, grief, worry, tribulation, and strife – are
purified, remedied, and reworked through the gifts of God’s grace.
In short, God, who already is abundant fullness, freely wishes to
replicate to every degree possible this fullness of life, light, and love
outward in what is not God.”
We are not God. But we are
God’s (possessive) and God wants us to know, to experience, to delight, and to
live in and into the paradise that is the kingdom of which Christ is king so
that, even today, we may be with him in paradise.
Thus would change not only our own lives but the world as well.
The kingdoms of this world would become the kingdoms of our God and of
his Christ not only in the poetry of songs but in spirit and in truth and
indeed!
I know it does not feel so when death comes to one we love, to one who has loved us. But death can be our friend if, in consideration of our finite journey in this world, we wake before we die, giving thanks for all the good gifts we are given of God, for galvanizing grace that impels us to use them in the service of the world portrayed in Christ’s gospel, and for the assurance that it is those who dare to spend their lives on love’s account who find true Life.
That
is our faith that is dying to be lived! I
invite you so to do!
Amen.
Copyright
© 2010 First Presbyterian Church