A Few Good Words About Death

by Dave Wilkinson

Romans 8:33, 1 Corinthians 3:18-23

September 20, 1998

This morning's sermon is about death.

Paul assures us in Romans 8:38 that even death cannot separate us from Jesus Christ. But it is still something we would choose to avoid if we could. And yet, death is a part of life -- our lives and the lives of those we love.

I first met Connie Christiansen in 1961 when her husband, Dr. Robert Christiansen, came to be the pastor of my home church in Concord. Since I was in Junior High school at the time, and was still somewhat in awe of ministers and their wives, I did not get to know Connie very well before leaving to attend college..

Nine years later, however, I returned to the church in Concord as assistant pastor -- not nearly as awed by ministers and their wives as I had once been. That change of perspective was helpful to me -- partly because it prevented me from having an inflated view of me and partly because it allowed me to get to know Connie not as an image or position but as a truly exceptional Christian woman. I came to know her as a warm friend, an unfailing hostess, a superb Bible teacher, a lover of the small children she taught so faithfully -- in all things a fitting partner in ministry with her husband -- as Carol is with me.

Three years later, in 1978, Dr. Christiansen was diagnosed by doctors at Stanford with Parkinson’s disease. It rapidly became clear that he would soon have to retire from ministry since the ministry involves a degree of stress which is incompatible with Parkinson’s disease. During this time of deep, personal struggle, Connie drew upon her great reserves of faith and helped carry her husband through some dark days.

Then, I was at the Christiansen's for a staff luncheon. Connie did not join us at the table explaining that she was having some mild pains in her stomach and was going to see the doctor later that afternoon.

The mild pains turned out to be a virulent form of cancer. Surgery was performed which, backed by therapy and the prayers of many people, gave considerable hope of a total recovery.

We praised God for this good news and got on with our living -- continuing our prayers for Connie. Then, it was discovered that the cancer had reappeared in an inoperable form. After her condition was stabilized, therapy was halted and Connie went home to wait for death.

Through these events, I experienced anger at God. I was partly angry because it didn't seem fair for Dr. Christiansen to serve the Lord faithfully his entire life only to lose his health and his partner in marriage just as it came time for him to retire and enjoy life.

But beyond this, I was angry because Connie's illness reminded me of my own mortality and the mortality of my loved ones -- that no matter how wonderfully devoted and loving a person is, death is an ever present possibility.

In the later stages of Connie's illness -- after we knew of her impending death -- I visited another woman from the congregation in Concord who had also been diagnosed with cancer -- cancer of the bone marrow. Before we prayed, she said; "I spent all of my time crying for Connie. I guess I should have saved some of my tears for myself."

And in the midst of all this pain, we have the words of the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 3 which flesh out what he says in Romans 8:38: "God has already given you everything you need. He has given you Paul and Apollos and Peter as your helpers. He has given you the whole world to use and life and even death belong to you."

Death ours? Death our servant? What a contradiction of so many things we know of death. Death is something horrible. Even the Lord shrank back from the approach of death in the Garden of Gesthamane.

Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in a marvelous bit of understatement, writes in her book, On Death and Dying: "When we look back in time and study old cultures and peoples; we are impressed that death has always been distasteful to man and probably always will be."

I suspect that many of us would choose a stronger word than "distasteful" to describe our feeling about death. But why is this so?

One reason that we may find death to be, to say the least, distasteful, is that we perceive death as involving pain -- often a great deal of it. And, with rare exceptions, we are not a species with too great a regard for pain. If you are anything like me, you would greatly prefer to die peacefully in your sleep after a very short and rather pleasant illness and at a ripe old age.

Another reason we fear death is that death makes us feel powerless. In the movie, "Little Big Man," old Chief Lodgeskins of the Cheyenne tribe recognizes that it is time for him to die. He climbs to the top of a mountain and there, dressed in his war clothes and armed with his lance, he challenges death to come out and fight.

But death won't come out and fight. It sneaks up when we don't expect it and there is nothing we can do. A husband stands by the bed of a wife or a child he promised to love and protect and knows that there is no protection he can give. A doctor knows that no matter how many times he or she defers death by some medical marvel, and some medicine is marvelous, death will finally come. At best we win stays of execution -- never pardons.

We may fear death because death involves separation. We have all experienced times in our lives when a person we love says, "goodbye." In a way, such a time is a small death for those we love are a part of us. Death is like that but compounded many times for when we die we seem to say "goodbye" to everything and everyone we love in this world.

Many people, especially those who have a hard time accepting the saving love of God in Jesus Christ, fear death because they fear the possibility of punishment. They are aware of their sinful lives and as they come face to face with death, they realize in their hearts that there must be a reckoning -- for each person has within his or her heart an innate awareness of the justness of God's moral law.

Francois Voltaire, the famous French writer, philosopher, and agnostic declared while he was still healthy that Christianity was a good thing for chambermaids and tailors to believe in, but not for people of wisdom. On his death bed, however, he cried out to his doctor: "I am abandoned by God and man! I will give you half of what I am worth if you will give me six months life. Then I shall go to hell, and you shall go with me!"

Voltaire had spent his life at war with God and now he knew that he had to answer for his life. That knowledge led him to fear the approach of death. In the words of evangelist Billy Sunday, If you live wrong, you can’t die right."

Of course the reason many people who do not trust in the love of God fear death is that they are afraid -- not of punishment per se but of annihilation -- that which the existentialist calls "non-being" and other writers call "the void."

The fear of annihilation reads like this: you can do wonderful things all your life and live by the right values, but you still die. You disappear. Your body rots. The people you did wonderful things for also die, and in a few years it makes very little difference whether you lived a good life or a bad life.

For example, none of us here has any idea how long Moorpark Presbyterian Church will continue. It may well be that this church will still be around two hundred or five hundred years from now. People then will look at pictures of us and think, "I wonder who those people were. They sure dressed funny."

How can life have any real meaning if that is all the future holds? Why should one way of acting be any better than any other? So Hearses don’t pull U-hauls. sooner or later say these nonbelievers we all die, and this universe just keeps whirling along.

To a lot of people that thought is not big deal. They tend to live on a very pragmatic, day to day level. But to someone who things and feels deeply, it's a shattering thought. The idea that this body of mine, these thoughts that I think and these feeling that I feel are ultimately nothing more than a bunch of molecules arranged in a particular way, and that someday they will return to nothing but dirt -- that's devastating. To this belief, the person you love the most is finally no more significant than the hunk of mud you kick off your boots, death, to those who don't believe in life after death, proves it. You live a while and then you're gone -- annihilated.

Theologian Allen Konigsberg, who is better known to us as Woody Allen, declared in this regard: "all political, social activities, religious and artistic thought is in some way a response to the innate knowledge that we are going to die. Some artists feel that their works bring immortality, but I think it gives you a fake sense of immortality -- I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."

Allen is a self-proclaimed agnostic. Certainly he could use a much better moral compass. But in the face of annihilation, all he can do is hedge his bets -- even in his humor. "I don't believe in an after life," he declares, "but I am going to bring a change of underwear."

For the person of the world who does not know the power of God, there is ample reason to fear death. Death brings pain, guilt, loss, fear of punishment, and fear of annihilation. Even for the Christian, death is in many ways hateful.

But there is also hope in death -- hope for the world and hope for our own lives. There are ways in which death does become our servant.

Consider the question: "where would the world be without death?" Such a world would not be a paradise, as many think, but a kind of hell.

Romans 5:12 declares that death is a result of sin: "Through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, and death spread to all men, because all sinned."

What this verse is saying is that sin makes death a necessity. But why is this so?

Imagine, a sinful world where there is not death. Such a world would be sunk in evil with no hope of breaking free apart from the direct intervention of God. If a Hitler, a Stalin, a Nero came to complete power there would be no way to get them out. We would be caught forever in their grip.

With death there is always the possibility of world renewal for death is the sure cure -- not for evil itself -- but for individual evil people. If a conqueror comes, he lasts for a while but then he too is swallowed up in the pages of history. As one epitaph on Alexander the Great declared: "A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient."

But beyond this general preservation of the world which comes through death, death also benefits our own lives.

In many ways, death teaches us the value of life. With the knowledge of death comes the knowledge that we only have a limited amount of time in which to do what we want to do with our lives. And this awareness forces us to choose and makes us acutely conscious that we must work "while it is yet day." In this way, death becomes the great motivator to creative action. We all waste enough time as it is. Imagine the waste if we did not know time to be precious and irreplaceable. In the words of Rollo May, "a river without banks is a swamp." We must have limits in order to have forward motion.

Death also teaches us to keep short accounts.

The 22-year-old son of William Sloan Coffin, pastor of the large Riverside Church in New York, was killed in an automobile accident. A few days later, Coffin preached to his congregation about Alex's death. He said this: "there is much by way of consolation, because there are no rankling unanswered questions. How often when death comes suddenly, there are rankling, unanswered questions. Did this person know how he or she stood with me? And because Alex and I simply adored each other, the wound for me is deep but clean."

Death reminds us that we don't walk through life always postponing the expression of the things that matter most in our relationships. We need to keep our lives and relationships current so that if the unpredictable happens, our wounds may also be "deep but clean."

But it is in our relationship to God that we most discover the meaning of death as servant -- that death is not a wall but a door -- the door to the fulfillment of all we have looked for.

It is here that, as Christians, death most becomes our servant. For death becomes the door to a far richer and fuller life. As we have known Christ in this life, we will know him that much more fully in the next. If we have sought God in this life, we have the promise that in the life to come we will know God even as he has known us.

I'm going to become a bit personal here, but in hope that you might think along with me, out of your own experience.

I have found Christ to be absolutely reliable. I have put him to the test, here on the earthly scene. And having found him so reliable and trustworthy here and now, why shouldn't I trust him into the unseen? He speaks with utter assurance when he says "I go to prepare a place for you." He has never lied to me. I am very sure that he brings us authentic word about what lies beyond. That takes away a great part of the fear of death.

Also, as Paul said, "for me to live is Christ and to die is gain." Very few of us would feel at ease making such a staggering claim. "For me to live is Christ." We're too much aware of all the other baser ambitions and mixed motives that operate within us. Yet if to any extent at all we are incorporated into Christ, a new life has come into being within us. To die is gain because death means that the best part in me will win out — and besides that, I will get to be with Jesus. For even death cannot separate me from His love.

Sometimes we wonder if this new life is going to survive in the rough and tumble of things -- but new life is there. And there are times when that new life attains great intensity -- often in the hour of crisis. Then we know -- I know -- that this new life in Christ has the touch of eternity upon it. It is not interrupted or destroyed by death. It goes on. Then I begin to understand, however hesitantly, what the Apostle meant when he said, "to die is gain."

In 1 John 3:2 we have this promise: "Beloved, we are children of God and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when he appears we will be like him because we will see him as he is."

It was hard to say goodbye to Connie -- even though I know that I will see her again. It is hard for her family and the others she has left behind to carry their grief. But for Connie, as for all the others who have died in Christ, death is gain. God has wiped away every tear from her eyes and has given her total and permanent healing. The Lord she served so well in life she now sees face to face. It is here that death is our servant for death is not an end but a beginning -- like our birth -- a little darkness, a little pain, and a whole new world outside.

There's only one way to close a sermon on this awesome subject, and that is to pray.

O God, as we face the solemn wonder and mystery of death, which sooner or later comes to all of us, open our eyes to see it as part of your wise and gracious ordering of our lives. Our departure is in your hands, even as our birth was. Take away our fear of it. Help us to accept it when it comes, knowing that in it and behind it, is your goodness and your greatness. And that no matter what happens, we rest in your care. We ask this in the name of Jesus, our Lord. Amen.