Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 5, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I really don’t want to be morbid about it, but I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently. I experienced one of those confluences of events that happens from time to time that all point to something in a way you can’t ignore. This time it was death. First, there was the death not quite two weeks ago of our beloved sister in Christ Joyce Smith. Then there was the fifth anniversary of the death of my first wife Francie last Tuesday. Then there were the readings from the lectionary for today from Ecclesiastes and Luke. Finally, last Wednesday, there was the bridge collapse in Minneapolis that abruptly ended the lives of several people and that could have killed a whole lot more than it actually did. All of these things told me that I needed to preach this morning about death and our relationship to death. It’s not an upbeat, cheery subject I grant you, but maybe that in itself is a good reason for us to spend some time thinking about it. You see, my reflections on it this past week have convinced me that a healthy relationship with our mortality is an essential part of the wholeness of life that God desires for all of us and that most of the time we have a very unhealthy relationship to our mortality. Or maybe I should say only that I have such an unhealthy relationship to my own mortality and that I think that if I do perhaps some of you do too.

An unhealthy relationship to mortality comes in two basic forms, and we see both of them in our readings this morning. One extreme unhealthy reaction to mortality is despair. That’s what we see in the words of the speaker in Ecclesiastes, in our reading called the Teacher but more traditionally called the Preacher. We first hear his famous cry of vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Now, he doesn’t mean that all is excessive concern for one’s appearance, which is what we usually mean by vanity. Vanity here means “in vain,” that everything is in vain, useless, worthless, of no value. I’ve long thought that the author of Ecclesiastes needed a good strong course of Prozac; but apart from chronic clinical depression, just what is it that has him so upset? It is his awareness of his own mortality. His knowledge that one day he will die has convinced that nothing he does has any value. He says that he hates all the work he has done, supposedly as the king of Israel although who he was we don’t actually know, “seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me.” Eccl. 2:18 NRSV He himself names the state of his soul that this obsession with death has created. He says: “I turned and gave my heart up to despair….” Eccl. 2:20a NRSV Because he like the rest of us is mortal he knows he won’t be able to enjoy the fruits of his labor forever, and he just can’t deal with it. For him human mortality renders everything worthless, and despair is his only response. He will meet his death fully expecting it but never having truly lived.

We see the second type of unhealthy relationship to mortality in our reading from Luke. The rich fool in that little parable shows an opposite but equally unhealthy relationship to death. So far from falling into despair over his mortality, the rich fool doesn’t even recognize it as part of his human reality. His problem with mortality isn’t despair, it’s denial. He goes about amassing as much wealth as he can, being concerned only with his earthly security. He gives no thought to the state of his soul. He fails to consider that his mortality means that perhaps there are matters other than material wealth he should be concerned with. Death will come as a complete surprise to him, and he will be totally unprepared for it.

Our Bible readings this morning then present us with two extreme, opposite relationships with death, both of them thoroughly unhealthy. Paradoxically, it turns out that what makes them both unhealthy is, despite their differences, the same thing. Both approaches lead to a selfishness that prevents us from achieving that wholeness of life for which God created us and to which God calls us. That despair prevents wholeness of life is perhaps obvious. The Teacher of Ecclesiastes sees the life for which God created him as a useless waste of time. That attitude amounts to a denial of God’s goodness and of the goodness of God’s creation. Life is a gift God gives us, and God intends for us to enjoy it, to celebrate it, to live it fully and wholly. The Teacher can’t see life as God’s good gift because he knows it doesn’t last forever. He is not satisfied to be the mortal creature God created him to be, and so he squanders the life that he has in despair because it is a mortal human life and not the life of an immortal god. He becomes totally self-obsessed. All he can do is bewail his own mortality, an attitude that is entirely inner directed, that is in other words, entirely one-sided and entirely selfish.

The life of the rich fool of Luke’s parable is one-sided and selfish too. It lacks wholeness because it denies one of the fundamental existential truth about human life, namely, that it inevitably comes to an end. Our knowledge of our mortality is part of wholeness of life because when we face our mortality honestly and openly, it changes how we think about life itself. It changes our values. The rich fool values only wealth, which he must one day leave behind and for which no one will remember him. No one will think of him. Worse, no one will mourn his passing. And when he faces death he will have no way to understand it, no way to cope with it, no way to accept it with courage and grace as a natural part of life. Because he denies death, he is selfish and concerned only for himself. He doesn’t share his abundance with others. He hoards it in ever bigger barns. Wholeness of life means living out of our nature as centered selves with and for others. The rich fool will never know that wholeness because his denial of death makes him think only of himself.

Both despair over death and denial of death therefore lead to the same one-sidedness of life. They both lead to selfishness, and the whole, complete life is an unselfish life. The life of wholeness is one that accepts the reality of death but isn’t overwhelmed by it. The life of wholeness is enriched by its mortality, because knowing that it is finite it turns to the things that are infinite for meaning. It turns to God and God’s values of love, peace, justice, and compassion. Precisely because we know we won’t live forever we seek our meaning outside our mortal selves and thereby attain the abundant, eternal life that God desires for us.

And when that day comes when we face our death not as some future abstraction but as a present reality we can face the end of life with courage and peace. We can perhaps even welcome it as the next stage of life and as an end to earthly suffering. We can face our death as part of God’s intended wholeness for us. But we can do that, I am convinced, only if we have had a healthy relationship with mortality during our lives. We can die well if we have lived well, neither denying death nor being consumed by it.

And I am also convinced that there is only one way we can to that. We can do it only with the firm conviction of God’s grace. We can acknowledge our mortality without being consumed by it if we can see and truly trust that whether anything lies ahead for us beyond this life or not we are safe, and all is well, because all is as God intends it, all is as God has ordained it. God created us as creatures not as gods, and that means that God created these mortal bodies of ours for death. Perhaps not ultimately for death, but certainly for death of the flesh, death in and to this world. That means that we can trust God in our deaths as we have trusted God in our lives, trusted that God’s love never fails us, trusted with St. Paul that whether we live or whether we die we belong to God and that nothing, not even death, will ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.