Revelation 21:1-4
Most of our lives are spent
tiptoeing around death, sometimes pretending like it isn’t there, sometimes
putting other things in its way, and sometimes intentionally minimizing it, as
if any of those options put death to death. This is true of our own mortality
but even more-so when it comes to those we love. Parents, brothers and sisters,
friends, even our children. We tiptoe around it because we’re scared of it,
because we absorb messages in our lives that tell us life is always good, death
is always bad, so best to flee from it however much you can. When J.K. Rowling
was crafting her primary villain for the Harry Potter series she could think of
no better name to give him than “Vol-de-mort” which, in French, means “flees
from death.”
So, it is at first jarring, sometimes uncomfortable, but
ultimately a tremendous blessing to have people—nurses and social workers and
retired people, as well as people who have vocations that don’t seem to have a
thing to do with end of life care—who nonetheless give of themselves, their
time and energy, to those whose life is ending, who do not flee from death out
of fear but who stand alongside the dying, because that is what human beings
are called to do. These people are the hands and feet of Jesus, it is most
certainly true.
Last month I was eating with a friend whose son had
recently died unexpectedly—not a hospice situation, more of the tragic accident
type—and during the course of the conversation we were talking about the ways
that we face our mortality or flee from it. We talked about how Ironman
triathlons are overrun with people in their 40s and 50s, trying desperately, it
seems, to remain young forever. Perhaps if they do just a little more and just
a little more they will never get old. We talked about regrets and living with
grief, figuring out how to truly live when the imagined future is gone and we
are confronted with a real-present that isn’t what we imagined. We talked
purpose and what the good-life looks like. We talked about love, without using
the word.
Love is astonishing and surprising because of how
particular it is. You can say that you love everybody, but until you have
walked alongside a person in the mountains and the valleys that love is not
fully realized. Dying has a way of showing us this. It shows us all the ways we
have failed and it reminds us, sometimes even more painfully, of our successes.
We relive what was; we wonder what might have been. Even in the longest, most
full life, we suffer alongside, because we are not as distinct of human beings
as we imagine. Crafted in the same image, members of the body of Christ, when
one suffers we all suffer, but with one whom we have lived beside, loved, or
even hated (since we cannot hate without love, after all) that loss is all the
more poignant because it is hard-earned. We occupy a part of one another and
never is that more evident than in our grief. It’s like the nurse who offers
those reassuring words that “there is nothing happening to our loved one that
doesn’t happen to everybody.” To which we respond, “I’m not everybody’s wife…
or husband… or daughter… or son.”[1]
Love changes things.
Wendell Berry talks about it like this. He says, “In the
world of love, things separated by efficiency and specialization strive to come
back together. And yet love must confront death, and accept it, and learn from
it. Only in confronting death can earthly love learn its true extent, its
immortality. Any definition of health that is not silly must include death. The
world of love includes death, suffers it, and triumphs over it. The world of
efficiency is defeated by death; at death, all its instruments and procedures
stop. The world of love continues, and of this grief is the proof.”[2]
The immortality of love—this movement of our hearts that
continues on after our loved ones have died—is one of the deepest, most
mysterious ways that God meets us. As Christians, we believe in a God in Jesus
Christ whose primary obligation to our world was entering into death. His telos, which is to say his ultimate
destination and purpose, was not to say wise words for motivational posters; instead it was and is the cross. And this is so precisely because of all the fear we have
surrounding death, and all the avoidance and minimization we use to try to
mollify it. We can’t and we know it. But our grief bears witness to something
different—that not only do we live on through the love of those who knew us
best, but we are loved just as specifically and even more strongly by the God
of the universe, who entered into death on our behalf, so that we can truly say
that nothing and nowhere can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
We are loved because we are fully known, and that includes
those moments of particular weakness so many of which happen around death. But
weakness is not as weak as we were led to believe. This is why all of you are
here, whether you realize it or not, because whether you are one who has walked
the long road of losing someone you loved, or whether you are one who serves a
person you never had the privilege of knowing well in life but in whose
transition from life to death you became intimately connected, either way you
are embodying love in the midst of particular weakness. And either way you are
changed by it. And either way you are not necessarily better for it—no, better
is the wrong word; death is never better—but your love is completed in it, your
service is made right in it. You don’t get anything out of it but the
understanding that you did what must be done, and that, right there, is exactly
what living is all about. It’s only in death that we discover how it is we
should be living all along.
Those of us here today stand on one side of this
equation, remembering those who have died and memorializing their passing, and
it’s easy to believe that it’s on us to make right things that can no longer be
fixed. It’s not our job and we can’t do it. Instead, we need to die to our need
to be perfect; we need to put to death the part of ourselves that feels the
need to love perfectly, to honor and remember perfectly. We can’t. We won’t.
That’s why we have a God who does. Death should teach us that: We are limited.
We are temporary. We aren’t going to solve things. And yet we have a God who is
unlimited, eternal, and saves us in spite of ourselves.
It is this God who frees us to live on, carrying forward
the love for those who have gone that we sometimes expressed well and sometimes
failed at expressing. It does not matter if you were the best or the worst of
loved ones, the strongest or the weakest, because love is perfected in weakness
and God’s love is obsessed not with past injustices or future regrets but only
with the right-now because it is in the right-now that God holds our loved ones
and, indeed, holds us too, separated by less—much less!—than we imagine. Life
and death are bridged by love by the grace of the God who chooses us, redeems
us, saves us, and rewards all of us with the opportunity to love and be loved
in return. See it. This love that God has for the world from John 3:16, but for
more than the world, the cosmos, and also, astoundingly, for you and for me and
for all the ones who have left us but not left us. Thanks be to God.
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