Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's March 14, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.  If you would like to read sermons from previous services, please click HERE.

The latest sermon will be posted here as soon as it is received – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday following the Sunday that it was presented.

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From the 12^th century comes the nighttime prayer for children of all ages: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray, Thee, Lord, my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.” Next to the “Our Father” or “Hail, Mary” the “Now I lay me down to sleep” might very well be the most prayed prayer in all of Christendom. It reminds us that every time we fall asleep, we experience a little death, a losing of consciousness, a rehearsal for the real thing.

But aside from the sing-song rhythm of this favorite child’s prayer, dying is not something most of us think about everyday. And if someone should begin to obsess over his or her dying and talk about it too much, we would likely call for some form of psychotherapeutic or pharmaceutical intervention. And, indeed, that might be the right thing to do.

It does remain, however, something of an anomaly, when viewed over the sweep of the history of western culture, an anomaly that in our age, this age of Prozac and so-called “shrinks,” this age of decoding DNA and transplanting organs, that we for the most part distance ourselves from any thoughts about our own dying: we often isolate the old and the dying in various convalescent care settings; we permit the funeral home industry to control the meaning of the dead body; we have memorial services in order to celebrate life instead of being forced to dwell on the hard facts of death; we talk of grief, not as a form of spiritual suffering, but rather as psychological stages we pass through on our way to recovery.

If we are healthy and of sound mind, any concentrated effort we might spend meditating on our mortality or what we think the end will be like is an effort generally frowned upon by our death-denying larger culture.

Now, let it be heard that I am not saying that we should become a culture of death, either here inside the church or outside of it. Although one could argue that we have already become a culture which glorifies death based on what we watch on TV or at the movies. But, is our culture’s current obsession over the dieting, physically fit, consuming, youthful, and sexualized body all that healthy when it comes, finally, to facing the reality of death and embracing the truth of Christian hope?

I know that it is a rather cruel oxymoron to speak of a “good death” or of a “dying well.” When I use these phrases, I am not thinking of the makeshift roadside shrines I see almost everyday along the interstate, a homemade cross with flowers staked to the ground to commemorate, I am sure, the tragic nightmare of another fatal traffic accident. Nor do I mean any other number of other kinds of deaths that we read about everyday in the newspaper that are not good in any sense of that word.

But, it remains true that it has only been in the last 200 years or so that a deep, everyday awareness of our certain, even our imminent dying, has become something that has slipped out of Christian devotional practices and pastoral discourse. Here’s a little verse from the New England Primer used as a school book text to teach school children from the 18^th century that would have been typical:

I in the Burying Place may see
Graves shorter there than I;
From death’s arrest no age is free,
Young children too may die;
My God, may such an awful sight,
Awakening be to me!
Oh! That by early grace I might
For death prepared be.

So, how do we today, as Christians, go about preparing for death? Or, maybe the prior question is, do we think that a “good death” or a “dying well” is even something we should anticipate or ponder? Or is the entertainment of such thoughts just too morbid, too fraught with negative implications for us?

There are three approaches to dying that I want to speak with you about today. The first is an old image that describes death as “the king of terror.” It is an image of the certainty of our mortality as a source of horror and fear, often imagined as the devil stalking its next victim, But mostly it is a way of pondering dying and death as a punishment for sin. It is the most ancient way of thinking about dying.

In the I Corinthians 10 passage that I read, Paul recalls various moments in the history of Israel when God struck down complainers who rebelled during the 40 years of wilderness wanderings, or, another time, the 23,000 who committed acts of immorality and were struck down dead in a single day.

Why does sickness come? Why do people die suddenly? Well, the ancient view has always been that God’s anger gets kindled against sinful behavior. Especially sudden or premature dying is a sign of divine wrath and judgment. Of course, in the Christian tradition, the classic explanation for why we die has been rooted in the Fall of Adam and Eve and the ensuing curse upon all humankind because of that original sin.

And really, until the 16^th century reformations in the Catholic Church, it was very hard to die well unless the church intervened with the last rites of anointing with oil and administering the eucharist so that one’s sins could be absolved and the harshness of God’s judgment appeased. The deathbed became a kind of miniature playing out of the cosmic battle between God and Satan for the soul of the dying person. If you were going to die well, you had to see your deathbed as a time to repent of sin, to be reconciled with family and neighbors who used to be brought in for final instructions, and to attest to your loyalty to the church. The deathbed was the stage for great social drama of death with the dying person as the lead actor.

Of course, the fact that you were dying wasn’t as ambiguous for them as it is for us today. With the plague running rampant through cities, few surgical options, and no antibiotics, it was all too easy to determine when death was imminent.

And even after the Protestant Reformers of the 16^th century did away with the Catholic church’s notions of sacramental salvation and the necessity of priestly intervention before one could be forgiven or achieve assurance of salvation, still the deathbed was seen as a time to prepare to meet one’s maker and a time to try to convert those who came to visit in the sick chamber.

But a critical change began to occur in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries. Death came to be seen as a natural phenomenon, and less as something that came directly from the hand of God. Science offered explanations for the origins of disease; sanitation efforts and medical advances reduced the percentage rate of early mortality; anesthesia made certain medical procedures possible; mass inoculations for small pox, polio, and other diseases reduced the fear of death for many parents and others. The list of ways that have improved one’s health and life expectancy goes on and on.

That leads me to the second view of death that predominates today: that is, dying understood as a biological process and death seen, finally, as the failure of medicine to find a cure for disease or old age. Instead of death as punishment for sin, death becomes a part of the natural order of things and, eventually, human beings who are mastering nature can supposedly master death, too . . . or at least delay death longer than ever before.

I know that sounds a bit odd, but I think it is true. The medical community enjoys the virtually unrivaled authority and knowledge to determine if the dying should be allowed to let nature take its course or whether various heroic measures should be introduced to try and extend life, even if any quality of life seems to be seriously lacking.

I have done ministry with families, and I know how hard it is when medicine is the preeminent value, how hard to create a context today in which a loved one, usually an elderly parent or other relative, can have a good death. Regardless of whatever “advanced directives” have been put in place, it still can be quite difficult to work through all of the levels of ethical decision-making. A big part of the problem is that it is so hard to tell if the person is dying or whether some measure, even if the percentage chance is quite low, might produce a “miracle,” a word more often paired with the word “medical,” as in “medical miracle” than it is asked to stand alone.

The medical ethicist Daniel Callahan in his book The Troubled Dream of Life argues that we in western culture have really backed ourselves into a corner on this matter of how we live towards the certainty of our death. We have bought into the illusions of the medical mastery of death and the belief that self-determination is a virtue that will allow us to have control at the end.

He describes the problem this way: “longer lives and worse health . . . longer illnesses and slower deaths . . . longer aging and increased dementia”(p.47) Now I know that his generalizations don’t always hold true, but all one has to do to understand the problem he describes is to walk through any nursing home and you will see evidence of how hard it is to die well in our society. As medical advances push us ever further in an effort to save and extend life, the reality of a new terror creeps in, the technological terror of death, the fear of an extended critical illness in which various forms of life support translate into something other than a good death.

I am just as happy and thankful as you are for medical advances that cure cancer, transplant organs, and repair hearts. But, at what point do we as a society have to say, “enough” so that a loved one can die gracefully under the mercy of God?

Our very first task, as Callahan puts it, is “to recapture our mortality, to give it once again a meaningful relation to our lives. Death must be brought to the surface, given its rightful place, brought back inside of life.” (p.123) He calls for our vision of death to become that of a peaceful dying, death “marked by self-possession, by a sense that one is ending one’s days awake, alert, and physically independent, not as a machine-sustained body or a body that has long ago lost its mind and self-awareness. It should be a death in public, by which I mean a time when friends and family draw near, when leave can be taken, when the props and devices of medicine can be put aside save for those meant to palliate and assuage” (p.54)

Which leads me to a third view of dying, one which allows me to circle back to the text from I Corinthians 10 and the idea of “testing.” “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and God will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing God will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”

Perhaps the greatest test any of us ever faces is the challenge of what we do with the suffering and disappointment that come our way. And the ultimate test is if we can find the spiritual resources that will enable us to die well and to experience a good death. Dying well doesn’t just happen – it happens in as much as there has been a life well lived, it happens to the extent that gratitude and reverence have characterized our living, it happens when the spiritual practices of the faith community surrounds us as we pass across the boundary of our mortality.

We must recognize that death is an inevitable part of life, an unnatural interruption to the way God has intended creation to be. We must recognize that there are certain Christian spiritual practices that should accompany us and our loved ones at the end: practices like scripture reading, hymn singing, prayer, communion, anointing with oil. These are the ways Christians have always experienced the passage from life into death, but these communal practices vie for time and space with medicine as answers to the problem of suffering.

“In modern western society,” writes Amy Plantinga Pauw of Louisville Seminary, “the two institutions that have had the most influence on how people face death – hospitals and funeral homes – have altered the communal practices that once surrounded this life passage. As a result, contemporary people are especially in need of the wisdom and care that the Christian practice of dying well can offer” (Practicing our Faith, “Dying Well,” p. 165)

Instead of merely seeing our mortality as a medical or biological reality, we need to see dying as a religious and moral process, a spiritual practice which can enable a final forgiveness and reconciliation with God and with others.

I believe that one way to die well is to learn how to practice both hope and lamentation, to embrace both the transcendence and the despair that the Christian view of death brings. We despair and utter lamentation because death is part of the natural order of things, a horrible breech in our intended relationship with God; we hope because the new Adam, Jesus, has healed this breech and gives us comfort as we make our passage.

Yes, dying is a time of accountability for how we have lived our lives, evidence of our fallen natures and self-centered living; and so, yes, there is an important element of judgment. But the dominant theological theme of our dying has to be that of divine mercy, the deep awareness that love and forgiveness will sustain us and others at the end.

Dying well rests on the promise that there is a divine ground beneath us in all the passages of our lives. If we manage to live well or die well, it is because we are not our own, either as individuals or as a human race. This recognition humbles us; but it also gives us hope that in our failures as well as in our successes, we belong to God. With the assurance that not even death will separate us from God’s love, we can dare to nurture the Christian practices that will help each of us to embody God’s mercy to one another while we live and then, when it is time, to die well. (Paw, 177)

Our own inevitable dying is one of the hardest topics to talk about in our culture. Yet, every year, as we begin the season of Lent, the church on Ash Wednesday says, “you are dust, and to the dust you shall return.” I can’t think of any more offensive, counter cultural phrase in our day, than those words, “you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Yet these are some of the most honest words we can say and hear.

Last Wednesday morning at the Lenten study, the topic of today’s sermon came up and someone wondered what hymns would be appropriate to sing for a sermon with a subject like “dying well.” I should have responded, if only I had thought of it, that, of course, each and every hymn in the hymnal is appropriate because they all speak to the fullness of what it means to live and die well as individuals and as a community who trust in God’s final mercy.

But I think the words of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” have a power all their own to describe what dying well really means. Tommy Dorsey wrote the words in 1932. He had just left his young pregnant wife behind in Chicago and was in St. Louis as a featured soloist at a large revival meeting. At the end of the meeting, a messenger boy ran up to Dorsey with a Western Union telegram. He ripped open the envelop. It read: YOUR WIFE JUST DIED.

“When I got back home, I learned that Nettie had given birth to a boy. I swung between grief and joy. Yet that night, the baby died. I buried Nettie and our little boy together in the same casket. Then I fell apart. For days I closeted myself. I felt that God had done me an injustice. I didn’t want to serve God anymore or write gospel songs. I just wanted to get back to that Jazz world I once knew so well. . .. But everyone was kind to me, especially a friend, Professor Fry, who seemed to know what I needed. ON the following Saturday evening, he took me up to Malone’s Poro College, a neighborhood music school. It was quiet; the late evening sun crept through the curtained windows. I sat down at the piano and my hands began to browse over the keys.

Something happened to me then. I felt as though I could reach out and touch God. I found myself playing a melody, one just came into my head -- they just seemed to fall into place.

“Precious Lord, take my hand, lead on on! Let me stand; I am tired, I am weak; I am worn; through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light; take my hand precious Lord, lead me home.”

As the Lord gave me those words and melody, God healed my spirit. I learned that when we are in our deepest grief, when we feel farthest from God, this is when God is closest, and when we are most open to God’s restoring power. And so I go on living for God willingly and joyfully, until that day comes when God will take me, and gently lead me home.

And so may it be for us, too. That we can overcome whatever testing comes to us, especially at the end, so that we will know the peace and joy of gently passing into the eternal presence of God. amen.

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Prayers of the People

In life and death, we belong to you, O God. You are the God who is sovereign over all our knowledge, all our strivings, and finally, over all our dying. May these days of Lenten preparation be for us a time of spiritual self-examination as we seek to hear your call to meditate on our mortality. Help us, then, not to be a people who live as if we have no hope, but fill us with your peace which does surpass understanding even as we stare into the mystery of the unknown.

Be a refuge and strength for all who face dying, or those whose illness leaves them wondering about the meaning of their suffering or pain. Help us to find ways to be a communal presence to heal and restore, especially with those who find themselves trapped in the margins of life – and not just the sick and dying, but those who experience life, whether in prison, nursing home, or other setting as hopeless and filled with despair. Be with those who now live with the memory of the dying of a loved one and for whom grief remains a burden difficult to bear. In the darkness, cast the slant of your light so that we can face the truth of our mortal natures.

Hear our prayers today for Ted Walton,

Hear our prayers for those who experience death suddenly and tragically. The people of killed and maimed in faraway Madrid and the deputy killed much closer to home. Bring peace amid all the terror, we pray, a peace that endures and affirms your love for all the children and people of this world. Forgive our love of guns and the way they become accessible to young people and to others whose intentions are neither yours nor ours. Help us to find better ways to educate, to love, to care so that insensible and horrific deaths would no longer fill the media and cause us to be perplexed about your place in our world.

Be with your people, here and everywhere, as we travel forward under your mercy. Help us to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with you as we seek to apply the principles and love of Christ to our political, social, and economic order and our daily relationships

Eternal God, you create us by your power and redeem us by your love. Guide and strengthen us by your spirit, that we may give ourselves in love and service to one another and to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord who has taught us to pray together.