Sermon preached by the Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
The 4th Sunday after Pentecost
There was a warm-hearted, but over-anxious secretary whose boss died suddenly one day, leaving on his desk a number of letters that he had been preparing to sign and send out. The helpful secretary put the boss’s rubber stamp signature on them, and then, after a moment’s thought, added the following postscript to each letter: “Since writing the above letter, I have died.”
A funeral happened to be passing by as an armored truck from a bank pulled up to an intersection. Since he couldn’t get through the procession, the driver joined it. An onlooker, impressed by the spectacle of the funeral cortege, remarked to a friend: “What do you know? You can take it with you.”
I’m going to be morbid for a few minutes, and I mean that literally. The word morbid comes from the Latin word mors, which means death. I’m going to talk about death. Do you ever think about death? I suspect that most of us who are middle-aged or older think about death fairly regularly, not dwelling on it, mind you, but having it come to mind. And I imagine that even younger people from time to time think about it. Michael Jackson’s and Farrah Fawcett’s untimely deaths just a couple of days ago certainly brought all of us face to face with our own mortality.
We surely do a lot to stave it off. We try to have healthy lifestyles, take vitamins, get our physicals, take medications to keep our blood pressures from being too high or too low, to keep our cholesterol down, and so on. Why do we do these things if not to keep away from death’s door for as long as possible? These are all good things. God gave us life. He intends for us to enjoy our lives, to live them to the fullest, to love life.
But death is something that will happen to each of us. We know that and we think about it. I am reminded of an anthem that may be said at the service of burial: “In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succor, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?”
Here death is linked with sin, which should remind us of the third chapter of Genesis, where we are told that death entered the world through the sin of Adam and Eve. But does that refer to a spiritual death, because their relationship with God was severed and they could no longer walk with him in the garden, or to physical death?
Our life of faith is very much related to death, for it begins with death—death to self. When we are baptized, we are baptized into death and raised to new life in Christ. The whole point is that this is the most significant death we can experience and when physical death does come it will be a transition into the nearer presence of God. Of course, the life of faith is one of learning what it means to die to self that the risen Christ may live in us. What does it mean to die to self with respect to my spouse, my employees, my boss, my friends? Would that argument I had with my wife gone any differently if I had remembered to die to self? Would I spend my money and my time differently if I really had a lifestyle of dying to self?
H. King Oehmig tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl by the name of Hope Stout who, in 2003, “was fighting bone cancer (osteosarcoma). Officials from the Make-a-Wish Foundation came to ask her, amid family, flowers, and cards, to make a last wish to take her mind off her terminal illness. Would she perhaps like to attend a teen fashion show? Have lunch with a movie idol? Visit a resort?
“She asked, ‘How many children are waiting for wishes to be granted?’ On learning that the agency was aware of 155 in her part of North Carolina, she declared, ‘Then my wish is to raise money to grant all of their wishes.’
“Hope herself never made it to the extravaganza that was organized to raise the money, because she died a few days beforehand. But in an interview taped before her death, she explained, ‘I just saw that God had given me a whole lot, and I had already been to Disneyworld and stuff. But I figured a lot of other kids hadn’t.’”
Hope Stout, at an early age, had learned something of what it means to die to self, even as she was anticipating her physical death. Perhaps the very immanence of her own death made her more open than most of us to thinking about those things in this life that have eternal significance. If I had been in Hope’s position I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have been so selfless. In fact, I most likely would have asked to go up on the space shuttle!
The raising of Jairus’s daughter, another twelve-year-old girl that we heard about in today’s Gospel, led me to reflect on life and death, on the two kinds of life and death, spiritual and physical, and on their relationship to faith and salvation. It may be a stretch, but I believe Mark intended for his readers to contemplate these things when he recounted this story of the raising of Jairus’s daughter.
So let me ask you another question. What is the mission of the Church? Would you agree that the mission of the Church is the salvation of souls? Our catechism puts it differently: “The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” In other words, our mission is reconciliation, the reconciliation between God and his people, and among his people. That reconciliation is salvation, the saving of souls.
What does this have to do with life and death? “In the midst of life we are in death,” for without being reconciled with God we are spiritually dead, and that spiritual death causes us to be isolated not only from God, but also from one another. The Church, that is, you and I, is called to be a sign to the world of this salvation, this new life in our Lord Jesus Christ. We have died in our baptism. We are a resurrected people living in a community of resurrected people, the Church. We are called to live out this reality in community.
And so we gather, week after week, on the day of resurrection, the Lord’s Day, to remind ourselves of our calling, to hear scripture, to pray for one another, to confess the ways we have failed to live into our calling, to be renewed through the Body and Blood of our risen Lord, and to support and encourage one another in our calling. It’s a high calling, brothers and sisters in Christ, but it is the path to life, everlasting life.
When you come up to this Altar to receive Christ, think about what you’re doing. Don’t think about who you’re passing on your way up to the Altar, or the fact that the mass is almost over, or what you’re going to be doing later on. Think about renewing your covenant with God and the fact that you are about to receive him anew into your life. Be thankful that God has brought you out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life. While we do think about death, we no longer should see it from a morbid perspective, for we are people of the resurrection.