This is a macabre time of year. The
turning of the calendar from October into November brings with it Halloween,
scary movies, the passing of the seasons, and in the midst of all those
reminders of death we have a Sunday dedicated to the saints, especially those
who have died in the last year.
Well, isn’t that just a depressing way to start
a sermon?
But if we’re honest about our
cultural traditions around death we don’t actually talk much about it. As much
as parents are sometimes concerned about the message of Halloween, most of it
has much more to do with candy and dressing up than it has anything to do with demons
or anything like that. The same can be said about our scary movies. They have
plenty of blood and gore, but most of it is so sensationalized that it is
actually a detriment to approaching real-life death. In fact, we are so
saturated images of death that we’re desensitized to the entire concept.
Society spends an inordinate amount
of time evading questions of mortality. The more Zombieland or Saw that you
watch, the more you will be convinced that you have seen death. The same can be
said for the more realistic killing in video games. All of this makes real
death in real life actually kind of awkward, because society has prepared us
for the graphic nature of bodies being beaten, shot and otherwise abused but
they have done nothing to prepare us for the ramifications of loss. Now, I
don’t want to make this a message about the evil of graphic movies and video
games; it’s enough to say that our younger generation is handicapped in talking
about death, strangely, because they are saturated by it.
Death should cause a rift; it should
not be normal; it should smack us in the face.
In today’s lesson we have a prophet
named Elijah who stopped the rain from falling in all the land of Israel
because the king had turned from worshiping the true God and had started to worship
the god of fertility, Ba’al. And what happens when there is no longer any rain?
Death. The land starts to die. First the wadis—or stream beds—then the rivers,
then the wells, and then the animals and the people with them. No water—then,
as now—means death. Elijah’s control over the rain is meant to demonstrate who
it is that truly has power over the rain; not Ba’al but the one true God of
Israel.
But Elijah too needs water and so we
have this odd scene where he is sent to a widow in the town Zarephath who God
commands to feed him. When Elijah visits the widow the abstract concept of
death that he helped cause becomes specific and real. She and her son are
dying; they are without water and without hope. They are the most vulnerable in
society: a widow with a child. Weirder still, God sends Elijah not just
to see her suffering or, better still, to fix it; instead, God sends Elijah to
the widow so that she might feed him.
It’s a strange turn. The widow wants nothing more than to be left alone. She has
given up and truly expects that both she and her son will die. And in precisely
that moment Elijah arrives not to offer a hand but to do exactly the opposite:
he asks her to give up just about everything she has left. He casually acts
like he’s ordering a sandwich from Subway when in fact he’s asking for the last
little nuggets of food this woman has—bread that would have been her final
meal.
Remarkably, the woman gives it away, but the moral of the story isn't simply about her blind faith; the scene continues on without missing a beat. Suddenly, the son of the widow falls ill, probably from malnutrition,
and dying. The widow loses the last thing that is hers—the life of her only
child. She is left with nothing. Only then is she in a place to discover the
true God; so when Elijah stretches out over her son and he is raised from the
dead she finally exclaims, “Now I know that you are a
man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.” The false
god is crushed by resurrection. Death does not have the last word.
Death and resurrection are probably
the most critical themes in the Christian faith. They represent our human limitations crashing into God’s unlimitedness. Death and
resurrection are why we worship god incarnate in Jesus Christ, but in today’s
world—especially in today’s church—we have just two little problems with death
and resurrection. One little problem we have is with the resurrection part… and the other problem is with the whole death thing. It is a fascinating trait in human beings that we hide from the very things that give us life. We are truly all Adam and Eve,
hoping that God will not see us in our nakedness.
Resurrection doesn’t make sense.
It’s kind of an absurd and extravagant promise. So, in some sense, I get why we
have issues honestly believing it to be true. We are suspect of stories like
Elijah and the widow’s son—maybe Elijah was just doing some kind of CPR on the
boy; maybe it wasn’t really a resurrection. We do the same things with Jesus. Even
if we believe he was resurrected, we make our life's journey about getting to heaven to be
with Jesus rather than the more incredible promise we have of resurrection.
But the death part is even stranger.
We hide from death by trying to make it something laughable and commonplace. How
many horror/comedy genre mash-ups are there these days? They tap into something
people want: to minimize the impact of death; and in-so-doing they attract a
wide audience. All of this tries to make death less powerful, but in fact it
makes real death, actual death, something strange and more powerful. It makes
us unable to process real death because we are stuck behind images of comic
and horrific death that do not allow us to confront the reality of loss.
On this All Saints Day we celebrate
the lives of all those who have completed their journey on earth. We celebrate
the promise we have of their resurrection, but we can’t do that unless we also
remember and comprehend their deaths and deal with the fact that they are no
longer with us. Today, we proclaim that death is real but also that death is
central to new life. Never is that more evident than in baptism. Our
church’s understanding of baptism is that in these waters you are drowned—not washed;
we’re not cleaning you of sin—no, in the waters of baptism you are drowned and
put to death. This is the big death. This is why it should really say on my
gravestone: Francis Bradley Johnson. Born March 26, 1986; Died (in baptism) December
2, 1987; Finished him off: such and such a date 20-something.
Baptism is the big death because it
is in these waters that God raises you as a new creation. It’s not just a sign;
it is quite literally a death. This is why the South American priest, Juan Carlos Ortiz, baptizes with the words: “I kill you in
the name of the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit.” That doesn’t go so well on
a Hallmark card, but it’s true. If death is the last word then what we
are doing today is horrific. Without resurrection, baptism is nothing more than
a horror movie kind of escapism.
That’s why resurrection is so
important. We see the widow’s son, risen from the dead; Lazarus, so dead he’s
smelly, and all other little resurrections in our life as pointing to the one
who was, and is, and is to come; Jesus Christ—crucified, died and RISEN.
This All Saints Day we celebrate death because
it is the only precursor we know to resurrection. We celebrate those who have
gone before and those who will follow—all God’s saints, those who have been
drowned in the waters of baptism, finished off at the end of their earthly
lives, and finally raised with Christ as a new creation.
We shall not run from death; we shall not become desensitized to it. Death brings new life, new life requires death; there is no
way to wrap our heads around the reality of resurrection without honoring and
respecting the reality of death. Today, we celebrate it; we live it; because
this world will end, our lives will end—whether we want to acknowledge it or
not—and the only reality that matters then is the empty tomb, Christ risen from
the dead, and our resurrection in the world to come.
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