“How Will We Die?”

A Sermon by

Dr. James Henery

June 22, 2008

Bill and Bob are rather old guys and they have been baseball fanatics all their lives. They’ve played on every kind of team including old-timers baseball and they agreed that whoever would die first will then try to communicate with the other and try to let them know that there is baseball in heaven.  Bill dies, a few nights later Bob hears what he thinks is Bill’s voice.  He said, “Bill, is that you?”  Bill said, “Yep.”  “So tell me,” Bob asks, “is there baseball in heaven?”  Bill says, “I have good news and bad.  The good news is there’s great baseball here.  The bad news is that you’re pitching tomorrow night.” 

This morning’s scripture is about death.  Not so much the end of life and the mortality of it but what we do with the life that we have before it ends.  Any biblical student of Greek who delves into this particular Corinthians text will be awarded with a plethora of great words that have oozed their way into our daily vocabulary.  Words like necrosis, meaning basically one who is dying.  Zoa, one’s life.  Even the word Zao meaning to live and the other word thanatos meaning death.  Two words dominate this text, zoa and thanatos.  And so these words of Paul, beginning in the 8^th verse, “we are afflicted in every way but not crushed.  Perplexed but not driven to despair.  Persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.  For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh, so death is at work in us but life in you.

How will we die?  We experienced this past week a kind of national funeral and mourning over the death of Tim Russert.  The media management, courtesy of NBC and MSNBC, have all the details.  When a personality, be it news, politics, entertainment or sports, dies our consciousness seems to be pricked and we are alerted to the possibility of our own mortality, at least momentarily.  One NBC commentator remarked earlier this week, “that all of America was in mourning.”  I don’t think so.  Aware of people who lost their homes and farms in Iowa and Missouri were much too busy with survival to pay attention, even if they could turn on a television.  People were also concerned in this country this week with their own health problems, their own concerns.  Dying that went on in various places including perhaps the 6,700 who died that particular day.  But still a death of nationally prominent and gifted people, as Tim Russert was, does tend to grab our attention.  Although we are sometimes uncertain what to do about it.  A few weeks ago I was watching, as perhaps you have seen, The Last Lecture by Randy Posh, a Carnegie-Mellon professor who is dying of pancreatic cancer, who has a book out now, titled the same, The Last Lecture and just a few weeks ago he returned briefly to Carnegie-Mellon to speak to the graduating classes.  He began his talk with them with this, “You aren’t going to escape the reaper, what you can do is live better before the reaper comes.”  There was a pause for that.  Perhaps even the sermon title this morning tends to turn you off.  “How will we die?”  But I must tell you it’s not meant to be morbid or macabre but to put the question before us the reality of our demise.  I want to look at and reflect on death as Christians, as people of faith, who for centuries have approached the end of life with an attitude of affirming that God is present in our lives, in death, in life and death and beyond death wherever that may take us.  So how will we die?

 In the early 1970’s I was fortunate to be studying in Chicago and to have heard Elizabeth Kubler Ross.  I studied her rather at that time, somewhat disliked and questionable book, Death and Dying.   But her work with terminal patients provided the well-known and now established rubric of various stages:  anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  In almost 40 years, those lectures and years afterward have molded much of my perception and practice as I have ministered and worked with families and friends, that death and dying are not taboo subjects and honesty about it is much preferred over denial. 

Besides cells and skin, we die just a little bit every day, do we not?   Our dreams, our goals, our relationships, sometimes our happiness, our love and when spirits die, people tend to give up and give in.  People tend to live slow deaths of various dimensions.  I’ve know teenagers who at 14 or 15 experience the death of self-esteem and they did not become what they wanted to be.  I have known adults who never lived, who never really knew themselves, they never really found their inner happiness, they just existed.  Beyond genetic testing and medical evaluations, how will we die?  Not when, but how? 

One answer is when we lose touch with the core of our spiritual being, what we believe is a fundamental connection with our God in Christ.  When the soul no longer claims joy or purpose or celebration.  It is as Leo Buscaglia would write in a number of his books, “We must have a quest to become fully functioning people.  To know rapture in an orange and ecstasy in blade of grass, to be fully functioning is to reach out with total trust and to touch God in all things and in all people.”  How will we die?

When we fill our lives with regrets and remorse, when we hold on to everything too tightly that there is no room for breath or flexibility or openness or freedom.  How will we die?  When we suffocate the spirit, when we deny our mortality and we become so weary of life because it’s too overwhelming because we made it that way.  How will we die?  When fear overcomes love, when doubt exceeds faith.  When everyday encounters deny and resist beauty and wonder, when tomorrow and next week and next month become more important that living today with  passion, with certainty, with fulfillment.  How will we die?  When we extinguish any chance for the holy to shine forth in our daily drabness—but I believe in the Christian faith it shouldn’t happen.  Without a fight for substance and purpose that each day demands a struggle beyond what and whom we take for granted.  We have a chance to celebrate life as it is when love cracks open all sorts of sealed vaults we are fully alive when love transports us beyond our own self-imposed boundaries until we can glimpse a fuller life and perhaps see beyond it as well.  How will we die?

According to Paul, when we stop affirming the life of Jesus Christ in us, while still alive we are being surrendered to the hands of death so that the life of Jesus will be revealed in our bodies.  When zoa (life) overcomes thanatos (death).  How will we die?  The question really isn’t important nor is it a dark choice.  It’s not if we choose or when to die, what is important to us, as believers, as Christians, is that we choose to envision and stretch our lives and spiritual roots of our existence to the most complete parameters of living and living spiritually and living now and continuing in our faith the essence of believing that challenges us to see more than our everyday shallow, sometimes bitter, almost always selfish endings.  We must seek the courage to face the death of our thousand yearly endings and all the loose ends and in our Christ-centered existence, to say yes to life.  What Paul is suggesting, in this rather Greek enigmatic statement, is that death happens much earlier, not physical, not bios, but the death of the soul, the death of our faith, thus in my life, in my zoa, when I can no longer allow Christ to live and breath and to be part of my cosmos, I start to diminish and I start to die.  Wherever we go, Paul writes, we carry death with us.  The same death that Jesus died but also in the same body it also reveals life, the kind of life that Jesus lived.  Death is at work in us and life in you.

Now in contemporary language, if we refer to the words of Bob Dylan, he said the same thing.  “He who isn’t busy being born, is busy dying.”  How will we die?  Many of you, perhaps, by this time, have either heard, read or watched some form of Tuesdays with Morrie—Mitch  Album’s visits with Morrie as he was dying.  One of the last Tuesday lessons that Morrie speaks is this—Morrie says, “Let’s begin with this idea.  Everybody knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it.  Let’s do what the Buddhists do.  Each day have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, is today the day?  Am I ready?  Am I doing all I need to do?  Am I being the person I want to be?”  We do have a choice in how we die.  It is to be discovered in how we live.  Amen.