Really Most Sincerely Dead

“As Coroner I must aver,
I thoroughly examined her,
and she’s not only merely dead,
she’s really most sincerely dead.”

In the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the coroner confirms the passing of wicked witch of the east with a sweet tonality and no regret.

Death, life’s ultimate mystery, is rarely celebrated unless it involves wicked witches or Osama Bin Laden. The lawyer Clarence Darrow spoke for many of us when he said, “I have never killed a man but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

Apart from moments like this, most of us avoid thinking about death. This is easy enough when we have our health and can deceive ourselves that all will be well, that our loved ones and friends will always be at our side, that our annual lab tests will always be fine, that we will always cross busy streets without mishap.

But, as Paul Newman said in the 1963 movie Hud, “Nobody gets out of life alive.” And some days death is uncomfortably close.

Death is the topic of two scripture passages highlighted for this week by the Revised Common Lectionary. 

In I Kings 17:17-24, Elijah successfully intervenes with God to restore the life of a young man. In Luke 7:11-17, Jesus raises a widow’s only son from the dead.

There are, indeed, several scripture professions of God’s power to rescue people from death. Apart from the resurrection of Jesus, the most famous is the raising of Lazarus (John 12:38-44), Jesus’ raising of a little girl (Mark 5:41), and Peter’s raising of Tabitha (Acts 9:37-41).

My favorite story is the raising of a young man named Eutychus who dozed during one of Paul’s interminable sermons and fell out a third-story window. The young man, according to Acts 20:9-12, was “picked up dead.” This was not the intended result of Paul’s sermon, and he rushed downstairs to restore the young man to life. It was the least he could do.

I confess I listen to these hopeful stories of resurrection with cynicism and sadness.

These biblical references to folks being raised from the dead are encouraging, but they are also hard to believe.

And I confess I have been thinking about death lately, not a lot, but more than usual. In April I was deeply affected by the sudden death of Bob Edgar, my friend and boss at the National Council of Churches. Bob, who was president and CEO of Common Cause when he died, was a man of vitality, energy, compassion, and humor, the very essence of what we mean by the life force. The fact that his essence could be so suddenly extinguished – he had a massive heart attack on his treadmill one Tuesday morning – was a reminder of the fragility of life. I wept as soon as I heard the news and I couldn’t stop weeping. Martha, ever la pastora, reminded me that Bob’s death forced me to confront my own inevitable mortality. When the bells tolled for Bob, they tolled for me - for all of us.

More recently I was affected by a death that took place more than four years ago but became known to me only this week. This time it was the passing of someone younger than me, a girl I had known in the Air Force, the daughter of a pilot. She was a member of the Protestant Youth of the Chapel group that I supervised and I remember her exuberance and mirth, her zest for life.

I came across her name in her father’s obituary and was surprised to see that she had predeceased him in 2008.I could find no additional information about her on the internet.

In my mind, her image persists as a bright-eyed, laughing child. I’m not sure why the passing of someone I have not seen for 46 years had such an impact, except that the past seems a safe place where people never grow old, where my parents are a lovely young couple, where grandparents still smile dotingly, where JFK is still president, where death never happens.

But on some days death's harsh reality rears its empty cowl, and we are forced to remember death means the end.

My mother pointed that out to me in 1962, when her brother died after a long battle with cancer. Mom sat at Uncle Maurice’s bedside in his final hours. “I could tell the moment he died,” she said. “He was no longer there. He was gone.”

Millions have observed this. As a newspaper reporter in the early nineties, I witnessed some grisly scenes – auto wrecks, small plane crashes, parachute accidents – and I could see the stark difference between the quick and the dead.

Death is usually obvious long before the coroner arrives to confirm it. Death deprives us of the twinkling in our eyes, our smiles, our laughter, our warmth, our love, our need to be loved, our essence. It’s one thing for the priest to mutter, “Remember, thou art dust” when ashes are smeared on our forehead, and quite another to remember the intermediary stage when our bodies are desiccated, unrecognizable shells.

Usually I avoid thinking  about death. I grant it is inevitable, and unless I live to be 132, I must acknowledge that my life is way passed half over.

But I would prefer to live in denial. Like William Saroyan, I know everyone dies but I want to assume an exception will be made for me.

Yet there is no way out of biological death, no reprieve, no Elijah pleading with God to breathe air into your limp lungs, no Paul to take you in his arms to revive you when you fall to your death out a three-story window.

For those who have seen it, biological death seems banal and ordinary, hackneyed and prosaic. In death we are a dead raccoon on the side of the road, unpleasant to behold but beneath our notice. There is nothing unique about it, nothing mysterious. One moment we are, the next we are not.

But that in itself is mysterious.

And the mystery lies in the obvious question: If death means we are gone, where do we go?

It’s easy to answer that question with clichéd images of angels on clouds, or pearly gates, or tunnels of light where Jesus and loved ones await, or the far, far side of Jordan.

But who really knows?

I am indebted to my friend Randy Creath for uncovering a quote from Bob Edgar I had never seen.

“I admit that I do not give much thought to the afterlife personally, if only because I am keeping plenty busy here on Earth and I trust God to sort out eternity,” said Bob, a United Methodist minister. “The promise of heaven and the threat of hell were simply not central themes in the faith tradition I was taught. But all people of faith can agree that there is work to do in this world, no matter what we believe awaits us on the other side. There is too much that is broken in our world to rest our souls on a theology of waiting.”

Amen, Bob.

The universality and routine of death may make us wonder what, if anything, awaits us beyond the grave. Certainly there are more mysteries than certainties about it.

But God does give us occasional insights.

In A Man Called Peter, her 1951 biography of her husband, Catherine Marshall reports one of those insights:

On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Peter Marshall preached to the regiment of midshipmen in the Naval Academy at Annapolis. A strange feeling which he couldn’t shake off led him to change his announced topic to an entirely different homiletical theme based on James 4:14: For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away. In the chapel before him was the December graduating class, young men who in a few days would receive their commissions and go on active duty. In that sermon titled Go Down Death, Peter Marshall used this illustration.
In a home of which I know, a little boy—the only son—was ill with an incurable disease. Month after month the mother had tenderly nursed him, read to him, and played with him, hoping to keep him from realizing the dreadful finality of the doctor’s diagnosis. But as the weeks went on and he grew no better, the little fellow gradually began to understand that he would never be like the other boys he saw playing outside his window and, small as he was, he began to understand the meaning of the term death, and he, too, knew that he was to die.
One day his mother had been reading to him the stirring tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table: of Lancelot and Guinevere and Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat, and of that last glorious battle in which so many fair knights met their death.
As she closed the book, the boy sat silent for an instant as though deeply stirred with the trumpet call of the old English tale, and then asked the question that had been weighing on his childish heart: “Mother, what is it like to die? Mother, does it hurt?” Quick tears sprang to her eyes and she fled to the kitchen supposedly to tend to something on the stove. She knew it was a question with deep significance. She knew it must be answered satisfactorily. So she leaned for an instant against the kitchen cabinet, her knuckles pressed white against the smooth surface, and breathed a hurried prayer that the Lord would keep her from breaking down before the boy and would tell her how to answer him.
And the Lord did tell her. Immediately she knew how to explain it to him.
“Kenneth,” she said as she returned to the next room, “you remember when you were a tiny boy how you used to play so hard all day that when night came you would be too tired even to undress, and you would tumble into mother’s bed and fall asleep? That was not your bed…it was not where you belonged. And you stayed there only a little while. In the morning, much to your surprise, you would wake up and find yourself in your own bed in your own room. You were there because someone had loved you and taken care of you. Your father had come—with big strong arms—and carried you away. Kenneth, death is just like that. We just wake up some morning to find ourselves in the other room—our own room where we belong—because the Lord Jesus loved us.”
The lad’s shining, trusting face looking up into hers told her that the point had gone home and that there would be no more fear … only love and trust in his little heart as he went to meet the Father in Heaven.
After Peter Marshall had finished the service at Annapolis and as he and his wife Catherine were driving back to Washington that afternoon, suddenly the program on the car radio was interrupted. The announcer’s voice was grave: “Ladies and Gentlemen. Stand by for an important announcement. This morning the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor was bombed…..”
Within a month many of the boys to whom Peter Marshall had just preached would go down to hero’s graves in strange waters. Soon all of them would be exposed to the risks and dangers of war, and Peter Marshall, under God’s direction, that very morning had offered them the defining metaphor about the reality of eternal life.

How did Peter Marshall know to change his sermon at the last minute?

That is impossible to say, but such premonitions are not unusual. When I was in high school, I followed the presidential campaign of 1960 with interest, yearning for the election of my boyhood idol, John Kennedy.

My enthusiasm was only slightly dimmed by separate pronouncements, emanating that fall from the tables of my mother’s monthly bridge club. Both my mother and my 7th grade math teacher, Mrs. Dorrance, had the same conviction: “There will be a Democrat elected president,” both said. “And he will be assassinated in his first term.”

How did they know?

That is impossible to say, and no one can deny both Peter Marshall and the eerie pronouncement of the Morrisville Ladies’ Bridge Club may be entirely coincidental.

But there remains a sufficient mystery around death that it cannot be dismissed as the end of everything.

Elijah, Jesus, Peter, Paul – all demonstrated that God alone has the power to free us from death.

Henri J.M. Nouwen put it this way:

“Hope and faith will both come to an end when we die.  But love will remain.  Love is eternal.  Love comes from God and returns to God.  When we die, we will lose everything that life gave us except love.  The love with which we lived our lives is the life of God within us.  It is the divine, indestructible core of our being.  This love not only will remain but will also bear fruit from generation to generation.”

Just what it will be like, as Bob Edgar said, cannot be known. And there is far too much to be done on this earth to spend all our time wondering and waiting.

But we do know this: Our bodies will one day be dust, but the love of God that is within us is indestructible.

And Saroyan would have been comforted to know that everyone dies. But thanks to the love of God as expressed by Jesus and sustained by the Holy Spirit, an exception will be made for each of us.

See a similar treatment of this topic at http://bit.ly/HlePDx