The Practice of Dying

"...."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....But
the serpent said to the woman, 'You will not die.'"

You will not die. They are the four words so many in this sanctuary have longed to hear from a doctor after days of anxious prayer. You will not die. They are words we tell ourselves in the middle of the night, when life has closed in, when the darkness threatens to overtake us and the morning refuses to dawn: "If I should die before I wake." You will not die. They are words we project upon our children or attach to our achievements, our works of art, our generous bequests in hopes that, though we be buried, in memory or monument we nevertheless will be. You will not die.

As to the ridiculous, they are words subliminally spoken in every advertising campaign ever launched, wherein beauty and health and success and happiness and love are promised in a product. You will not die. As to the sublime, they are words spoken from the pulpits of packed churches, proclaiming the resurrection as though it were not preceded by the cross. You will not die.

We are, of course, suckers for the message and, according to the Book of Genesis, have been suckers for the message from the beginning. Who doesn't want to live as long and as happily and as healthfully as humanly possible. But there's the rub: as humanly possible. What is humanly possible is possible within limits. The the fact is, sooner or later, the serpent's strong assurance is obviated by the onset of our infirmities--of our illnesses, our failures, our sorrows, our sins--wherein we hear the stronger words of the Lord God, spoken in the garden in the cool of the day saying, "You are dust and to dust you shall return."

"It is evident," said Karl Barth to a gathering of preachers concerning congregants in general, "that they do not need us to help them live, but seem rather to need us to help them die." To help them die. To help you die. How could that be so for a healthy young family who have returned to the church for the sake of a baby's baptism...or a student with his whole life ahead of him and wanting a little spiritual direction...or an up and coming executive in need of a positive word to carry her through the week ahead...or a senior high still growing up rather than growing old?

Yet Barth made no distinctions of age or station in life: "...they do not need us to help them live," he said, "but seem rather to need us to help them die." His point was not morbidity but mortality. Even in life's prime, we cannot escape the fact that human life is life given within limits. Hence we are ever those in need of help to die.

More specifically, says Barth again, "The reason that they come to us, strange as it may seem, for wisdom, is because they know the whole network of their life is hung upon a thread like gossamer." You are dust. "They suddenly awake to a realization that they are walking upon a ridge between time and eternity that is narrower than a knife-edge...at the boundary of mortality." And to dust you shall return.

What mother has held a newborn in her arms or father bid good night to a toddler at the bedroom door and not been undone by the incredible vulnerability of that little life? What couple has not trembled in the saying of wedding vows, and so been humbled before the prospect of loving well and being loved, until death does them part? What young person has not awaited the first day of college life with fear of the mind's failure or the heart's rejection and so of a future foreclosed? Or who among us has not slept fitfully the night before a new job begins or wakened to the first day of retirement without a little question as to our worth?

Not just in the face of tragedy or disease or divorce or failure--though there for sure--but in life's highest moments and most exciting adventures, we are those who awake walking upon a ridge between time and eternity that is narrower than a knife-edge, living in this terrible and tender knowledge that we are dust and to dust we shall return, earthen vessels, clay jars one and all, and we need help. We need someone to help us make sense of our humanity, of our mortality, of our deaths, so that we may live.

The help we here have to offer, of course, comes not from ourselves...comes not from stories about near death experiences and long white corridors...comes not from biological research into the endorphines set loose at time of accident or aneurysm which surely soften death's blow...comes not from psychological and sociological studies of the dying who have normalized denial and bargaining and anger and acceptance...nor from anecdotal evidence of voices from the "other side." This is the world's way of offering serpentine assurance: You will not die. Tempting, perhaps, but ultimately of no help for those who know themselves hanging on a thread like gossamer, for those who live on the boundary of mortality.

No, the help we here have to offer comes from Jesus Christ, and from these pages which bear witness to Him as God's Word to us. To be sure, he has come that we might have life and have it abundantly. But before he has come to help us live, my friends, he has come to help us die. Unfortunately, given the way the biblical witness is being used in these latter days, we have taken the pages of this book as a blueprint for how we are to live...as a book containing clear and unambiguous rules of conduct, from the theological right, or a book containing mandates for social action, from the theological left...we have taken the Bible to be a book about how to live, when the help it has to offer, the help Christ came to give, is help for us to die.

In fact, perhaps the first help the biblical witness has to give is the relentless insistence on the fact of human frailty and brokenness and death. We have been given story after story of a stubborn people, an unfaithful people, a corrupt people...followed by the antics of twelve utterly human beings, falling all over their failure to understand and trust and obey. In short, we have a story about ourselves. And if we would cease trying to make it all into such a pious, moral tale of people going to heaven, and rather hear it as a most honest account of our humanity, our frailty, our finitude, then perhaps we might be given precisely the help God knows we need! For through these painfully recognizable characters, and in the presence of a God who, in the flesh, nevertheless, loves them, we may cease denying the limits ingredient to our days and rather know ourselves as freed to be simply and honestly human. This is the beginning of the practice of dying.

But more, for in the second place, if we were left with just our humanity on our hands, we would simply be those who were consigned to watch the slow erosion of our personal existence ...resigned to a life of diminished returns: bodies which slow down and break and give up, loves that quit too soon, careers that fade and fail to sustain us, children who grow up and away. Death would seem to have dominion. But the incredible claim of the Bible is that we have this human existence within limits, we have this treasure in earthen vessels, in clay jars for a purpose: the clue to our living is in the fact of our dying! "Lord, make me to know my end, and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is...My hope is in you," cries one psalmist; while another prays, "Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." The question, says Glenn Tinder, "is whether one can live within time, receiving each moment as a possible disclosure of...the end for which one was born and for which one might even give up one's life. If so," he says, "one practices dying...."

A mundane example, perhaps, but Will Campbell, a crusty, Southern preacher, begins his memoirs with the story of his utter failure in the ministry: "'It's a mighty poor God,' teased a friend, after Campbell had lost his third ministerial position in a row, 'who'll call a man and then not qualify him.' He wondered," wrote Campbell of himself, "if God the jester might have done that. From the beginning he had known that God was not bound by Aristotelian logic, that God had His own ways of doing things. It might be that God occasionally calls one to a life of failure, thus delivering the called one from the sin of pride....Maybe the call was authentic all right, but the qualifying had been neglected for reasons he had no right to understand."

One practices, again and again, coming up against the limits of human existence and, in those very limits, being given intimations of the purpose for which one was born. "To practice dying," says this philosopher in so many words, is to make a habit of looking toward God in every moment [no matter how threatening] until, in death, one comes face to face. Or, as Paul put it more plainly, "We have this treasure in earthen vessels, in clay jars, so that it may be made clear (moment by moment) that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us."

The help we need to die, my friends, comes from this God who made us thus and remembers. God does not abandon us to our limited humanity, but comes to us, reveals his purposes to us, precisely there, at the limits. Time and time again, Jesus came to those whose lives were hung upon a thread like gossamer--the woman at the well, the man by the pool of Siloam, Zaccheus, Peter, the Marys one and all--taking their utter humanity as the occasion for the revelation of God's tender mercy, using their broken pieces for the greater purposes of God. Earthen vessels, clay jars, limited, broken, bumbling, besieged by doubts, hounded by failures who are, by Christ, given to trust our poor lives into the purposeful hand of a great and gracious God: "afflicted in every way but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down but not destroyed...."

So it was that those early Christians knew what we are so tempted to deny: namely and in the third place, that the practice of dying is a public practice long before it is the private experience wherein we come to breath our last...and that the help we are given is given us only by way of a cross. For those who have been brought face to face with the limits of their existence and in those limits have become habituated to look for the greater purposes of God, there comes an incredible freedom--and almost a compunction--to live at those limits physically, emotionally, spiritually, politically. There is nothing too hard or too fearful or too risky to dare because, if at the limits, God in Christ is there to meet us and uphold us and sustain us, then there is no where else to be.

Such is the case for some in this place today...some who must fight the good fight with the physical limits of their existence and who sooner rather than later have been called upon to give account for the hope that is in them...some who have been pushed to the limit by the institution they serve and who enter the near future not knowing what may befall them, but trusting God alone will not forsake them...some who have come up against the limits of their spirit and who are holding on by a gossamer thread made strong and sure by the steady hand of a God who will not let them go. The public practice of dying is the way of the cross, the way of risking all for the sake of another, the way of losing life that it might be at last found, the way that does not fear death but looks it daily in the face and, nevertheless, lives.

"The course of faithfulness," wrote Paul Lehmann, "is not the course of safety through conformity but of the risk of obedience in faith and hope and love. When, embarked upon such a course, faith is met by infidelity, hope by disillusionment, love by loneliness, and the risk of obedience by the haunting sense of disobedience, the point of renewal is discovered again to be where it has been from the beginning. It is the point of encounter with him who reigns in forgiveness and renewal over every human failure and defeat."

In the end, you see, the help we have been given by God in Christ to die, is none other than the help we have needed all along to live. "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 moral flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you." Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory.

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