My
friend Beth posted this on FB on Monday evening: “I just got a call -- My brother... has less than 24 hours of
life on this earth. He is in the hospital … with a severe infection after
battling cancer for over 3 years. Please keep him and my family in your prayers….
I just hope to get there before he dies.”
I am sure she got on a plane as fast as she could. Nothing
else mattered except being at the side of her big brother. She made it. She was
there to tell him that she loved him and to tell him good bye. We don’t always
get that chance. Yesterday they had a memorial service to give thanks to celebrate
his life.
His 5 sons, his wife, my friend/his sister and others will now
walk through what we call grief – that sort of fog that surrounds us when
someone we love is ripped from life on earth and moves to the unknown we call
heaven, or eternity with God. For Christians, we trust that it is a good thing.
At least we try to believe that the afterlife is a good place. We believe that
death is not the end. Rather: death in this world is our transition to
life in the next world.
But when someone dies, we don’t always act as if we believe
this. I often hear people say how tragic it is when someone dies, or how it is
unexpected. We know that every one of us is going to die one day. I wonder how we
can say that every death is unexpected.
Yes, of course, when a
child dies, or a young adult, a parent who still has children at home, with their
whole life ahead of them, it is painful. It feels like it would be so much easier
for us to deal with death if everyone would live to the age of 95 and die in
their sleep. That would be so much
easier. But here is the thing. We believe as Christians that when our
physical bodies die, then we are resurrected and have eternal life with God. But we are still afraid of death. I wonder, why, then, are we so afraid of death?
And why do we have so much difficulty letting go of our loved ones when they
die?
Of course, there is a natural grieving process. We must allow
ourselves to grieve. There is a big empty space in our lives where someone once
lived. We need to cry and acknowledge our loss. We need to go some rituals, to
talk about the person and remember them. But let’s be clear: the loss is ours.
That person – they are fine. They are alive, fully alive with God. Death in this world is our transition
to life in the next world. Life goes on.
Life is eternal.
Most of us don’t have many good opportunities to talk about
death and the transition life in this world to life in the next. It just smacks
us in the face sometimes. People avoid talking about death. I know
people who avoid going to visit people in the hospital who are dying. We avoid
going to funeral homes and funerals. They say: “I just can’t handle funeral
homes. It’s too hard.” That is because in our culture we have not learned to
have healthy conversations about death. One organization help us with this:
hospice. They do a great job with death. And people love hospice because they
have learned to help families prepare for death, when we have to face it.
Well, today’s scripture (Luke 20:27-38 from The Message Bible
for those following along on the web), Jesus is having a conversation about
death with a group of religious people called the Sadducees. This is an
important conversation because the Sadducees were a group of religious people
who did not believe in the resurrection.
They didn’t believe in life after death with
God. They were very concrete in their
thinking and so they came to Jesus to question him about resurrection. They
created this somewhat absurd scenario: “Teacher, Moses wrote us that if a man
dies and leaves a wife but no child, his brother is obligated to take the widow
to wife and get her with child. Well, there once were seven brothers. The first
took a wife. He died childless. The second married her and died, then the
third, and eventually all seven had their turn, but no child. After all that,
the wife died. That wife, now—in the resurrection whose wife is she? All seven
married her.”
They were thinking about the after-life
with the same sort of time and space that we have here on earth in this world.
Jesus told them their thinking was too narrow. They were too preoccupied with
things of this world: systems and institutions, human relationships such as
marriage that simply will not be necessary in the resurrection. Jesus said: “[those in the resurrection] will have
better things to think about, if you can believe it. All ecstasies and
intimacies then will be with God. Even Moses exclaimed about resurrection at
the burning bush, saying, ‘God: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob!’
God isn’t the God of dead [people], but of the living. To [God] all are alive.”
God isn’t the God of dead men – but of
the living – all are alive. Death in this
world is our transition to life in the next world. You see, there are no
dead people. There are people alive here and there, in this world and the next.
Physical death is just a transition to the next life.
Our resurrected life is not going to be
like our physical life here on earth. So, for example, if we have had a spouse
die and we have remarried, and had another spouse, we don’t have to worry about
some convoluted question of who will be our spouse in heaven. Jesus says that
the things we worry about here we won’t worry about there. (That’s a relief!) Jesus
says our connection will be with God. I think that means that our spiritual
selves will be deepened. We will be one with God in ways we can only dream
about now.
Honestly, we have no clue what heaven
will be like, except to know that we will be alive, more fully alive than we
can imagine. It will be good, and we will be with God.
So, then, how shall we live now, in
order to prepare for such a resurrected life? I want to tell you a story about
a family I once knew. The mother found out that she was dying of cancer. She
was an older woman, with grown children. She was a woman who knew God well. She
had given her life to serving God. When I went to see her in the hospital right
after she found out that her illness was terminal she told me, “I’m not afraid
to die. I have had a good life. Sure I would like to live longer, but we all
have to die sometime and I am not afraid.” That woman died with grace and
dignity. On her last day, she got up out of bed, something she had not done for
a week or so. She ate breakfast, laid down, and just died. Her family was there
in the house with her because they knew that she was near death. Her husband, a
gentle old soul, who was also quite a saint himself went into the room and saw
that she had died, he quietly said his good-bye and went into the living room
to be alone and begin to grieve in his own way.
She had a grown daughter who had been
staying there. She had come from out of state. The daughter went into the room
and laid down on the bed and cried. She was grief stricken. The hospice nurse
came and called the doctor. I came too. We told the daughter that we needed to
call the funeral home to come and pick up her mother’s body. The daughter asked
if we could just wait a little while longer so she could lay there with her
mom. She laid there for a good 2 or 3 hours until we had to tell her that we
could not wait any longer. The daughter just could not let go, she couldn’t get
up, she couldn’t leave her mother’s side.
You see, I think the husband was able
to walk into the living room, and start his grieving because he knew that the
lifeless body was not his wife. He knew that she was not dead. He knew that she
had already made her transition from this world to life into the next. Of
course he would go through days and weeks of grief. He would miss his wife. But
he had a deep faith. He had a theology of death. I believe he knew that his
wife was alive with God.
The daughter, well, I am not so sure. I
think she was having a more difficult time. I think for her, the mother was
still there, in that lifeless body on the bed. I fear that the daughter may
have been stuck in her grief for a long time. I fear she may have been stuck
for a long time, believing that her mother’s life truly ended when her heart
stopped beating that day. The daughter did not want to leave her mother’s side
because she did not want her mother’s life to be over.
I want to live my life like that
husband. I want to live my life trusting in God, so that when I have to face
death, I can put my trust in God. When I get the phone call like my friend Beth
got this week, saying that her brother had 24 hours to live, I want to be ready
to say good-bye to my loved one. Death in this world is our transition to
life in the next world. Jesus said
it: “God isn’t the God of dead people, but of the living. To God all are
alive.”
So let us live, believing that we have
eternal life. Amen.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment