Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.

This week we lost another CrossWalker, Roger Langley. He and his wife Andrea have been faithful members for many years.  We walk with Andrea now as she grieves our loss. The previous week we lost Larry McCart, a long-term member who remained active in serving through CrossWalk his entire journey.  His wife, Wanda, remains with us, and we walk with her through this valley.  A few months ago we lost Dot Hoover, a spit-fire of a lady who was a dedicated Jesus follower pretty much her entire life, was active in service, and was committed to lifelong learning (even from a heretic like me!).  We walk with her husband, Perry, as he mourns our loss. Bill Swanson passed away in March.  He was newer to CrossWalk and loved the church deeply for its truly proclaiming God’s love for everyone, and for our work in Kenya. All of them are and will be missed. All of them great people.

            Anytime someone dies we are faced with the question of our own mortality. As we continue to trudge forward through the COVID-19 global pandemic, we are reminded of death and dying every (damn) day.  All day.  The headlines will not let us forget that the virus is a real, lasting threat.  COVID has touched my family personally.  My wife’s elderly uncle got infected in a nursing home and died a few days later.  My brother’s family members living in the Kansas City area all got infected.  My brother’s wife had this in March, and now has it again.  It was a tough, eight-week battle for her a few months ago, and the battle is equally severe this go around.  This is personal to me.

            Studies have been done indicating that Americans are particularly in denial about death.  Google it. How about you?  How have you chosen to relate to the subject of our shared mortality?  How does it make you feel?  Are you at peace with the fact?  How at peace can we be?

            As a pastor, I deal with death regularly as part of my role.  It is a great honor to walk with people through the dark valley of grief.  Holy moments for sure.  When I preside over funeral and memorial services, I often refer to Jesus’ comments to his disciples near the end of his life:

 

“Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. And you know the way to where I am going.”

     “No, we don’t know, Lord,” Thomas said. “We have no idea where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

     Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you had really known me, you would know who my Father is. From now on, you do know him and have seen him!” – John 14:1-14 (NLT)

 

Jesus flat-out told his disciples that there was something hopeful waiting for them after death, and that he would personally guarantee it.  This certainly carried a lot of weight.  

Not long after he shared these words he was arrested, tortured, falsely convicted, and killed.  Living in an era of heavily-practiced atonement theology, when it was believed that God’s vengeance needed to be appeased with blood sacrifice, early Christians began to identify his death as a substitution for all humanity – a final sacrifice that would satisfy God’s ledger so that we would know we are forgiven by God.  That carried a lot of weight.

Three days after Jesus died, he was experienced as alive again (though in different forms – he didn’t look the same and natural laws didn’t seem to apply).  According to the Gospels remembering Jesus’ life and ministry, hundreds of people had this experience and came to believe.  Even long after his death, the Apostle Paul had an encounter with Christ as a blinding light that forever changed him.  After-death experiences carried a lot of weight.

How much weight do these three things carry with you?  Are they equally meaningful, or does one carry more weight than another for you?  There’s no wrong answer, here.

I’ll never forget an exchange I had with Frank Daniel.  He came into CrossWalk later in life, a retired Fire Department Captain.  He was also a veteran who served in one of the worst battles of the Korean War.  Before that, he was a legitimate cowboy who left home as a young teen and made a life for himself.  He was a truly tough, self-made man. One Sunday I was teaching about love and grace as key characteristics of God’s nature.  I told stories from Jesus’ life that made it clear that we are forgiven even before we know we need to be, and even before we ask.  He came up immediately after the service ended, looked me in the eye, and asked me if what I said was true for him.  He had been a participant in horrors most people will never know because of his wartime military service.  When I told him that he was fully forgiven by God, Frank, one of the toughest guys I have ever known, wept. I bring this story to your attention because some people feel unforgivable.  Guess what?  God’s grace is bigger than your mistakes.  You are already forgiven.  Why not embrace this truth and live in freedom?  The asking for forgiveness is something we do to welcome grace, not to get God to grant it.  It is a gift from God that we won’t enjoy unless we choose to accept and unwrap it.

Because all of the above was and is so powerful, the hope for “heaven” has dominated the message that many hear from the Church.  I hope that you receive hope from it as so many have before us.  And yet, there is more to the Christian story than simply getting to heaven.  In fact, the much more is really important, because if all you are building your hope on is an intellectual head trip, you will find yourself waning regarding hope.  The good news is that faith is much more than a head trip.  If you have a moment, please watch Rob Bell’s short Nooma video, Rhythm, where he does an excellent job talking about how faith is so much more than an head trip.

The Apostle Paul certainly knew this.  He didn’t turn his life around because of an intellectual awakening.  He responded to a completely different paradigm for life, which generated a life experience filled with the presence of God.  He was so captivated by the living presence of God in his life that he wrote about it to early Jesus followers:

     For I fully expect and hope that I will never be ashamed, but that I will continue to be bold for Christ, as I have been in the past. And I trust that my life will bring honor to Christ, whether I live or die. For to me, living means living for Christ, and dying is even better. But if I live, I can do more fruitful work for Christ. So I really don’t know which is better. I’m torn between two desires: I long to go and be with Christ, which would be far better for me. But for your sakes, it is better that I continue to live.  – Philippians 1:20-24 (NLT)

     Do you see the paradigm shift?  There is a life that is filled with Christ – God in our midst – that is actually the True Life that our deepest selves desire.  Thomas Merton distinguished between our False Selves and our True Selves. He believed that our True Selves represent the greatest manifestation of who we really are when fully and completely alive, free of beliefs and behaviors that are not rooted in life, in God.  Paul, to a different audience, has something to teach about that:

 

     It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don't use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that's how freedom grows. For everything we know about God's Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That's an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

     My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?

     It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

     This isn't the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God's kingdom.

     But what happens when we live God's way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

     Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified.

     Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original. – Galatians 5:13-26 (The Message)

 

As Rob Bell noted in his video, we are being invited into a beautiful, compelling song that is founded in the heart of God, which is the very source of all that is.  Being deeply rooted in God doesn’t mean we will be totally free from fear and anxiety about death and dying.  We are human beings and this is part of the human experience.  Feel your feelings as they are.  When we are rooted in the depths of God, however, I have found that I am less prone to feeling despair and being overwhelmed because I know whose I am, I know who holds me, and I know that will never change.  It gives me peace that passes understanding, and invites me to live in step, in rhythm, with this eternal song.  I hope it does for you, too.

Over the past few months I have been meditating using the Lord’s Prayer as a framework.  Spend time on each phrase and allow it to shape your eyes into the Way, Truth, and Life which is God.

 

 

Questions.

How have you come to grips with the reality of mortality? What is your level of comfort with this?  What questions does the subject of death bring to your awareness?  What do you wonder about?  What are you worried about?

 

What aspect of the Christian story gives you hope for some experience of life after death?  In other words, why does the Christian story give you hope?

 

How has your level of hope regarding something “more” changed throughout your life?  When have you felt most hopeful?  What were the surrounding circumstances of your most hopeful seasons?  When have you experienced a hope deficit?  What were the circumstances revolving around that season?

 

What can we do now to maintain our level of hope?  What’s involved?  What’s at stake?