Death and Dying
2 Corinthians 5
1For instance, we know that when these bodies of ours are taken down like tents and folded away, they will be replaced by resurrection bodies in heaven--God-made, not handmade 2-4-and we'll never have to relocate our "tents" again. Sometimes we can hardly wait to move--and so we cry out in frustration. Compared to what's coming, living conditions around here seem like a stopover in an old, cold and rundown flat, and we're tired of it! We've been given a glimpse of the real thing, our true home, our resurrection bodies! 5The Spirit of God whets our appetite by giving us a taste of what's ahead. He puts a little of heaven in our hearts so that we'll never settle for less.
We are all at different places with our thoughts on death. We can…
- See it on TV and become impervious to it
- never had anyone die, unreal… but this will help prepare
- you hate and fear death; rightly so it's a bummer
- you've had a parent/grandparent die or other close relative and friend… maybe not processed it
- abortions, but no grief counseling, didn't tell you about PAS
- Death brings up all sorts of fears about it cos it's unknown, sadness, pain and awkwardness.
As I raise it tonight be care-full of those around you. I'm probably going to unsettle you. I've unsettled myself. Feel free to ask questions. I will also try and answer some next week. Listen to the hope of the Christian message.
Wherever we are at the statistics on death are quite impressive: One out of one people die.
It is the most democratic of all experiences and the most certain fact about living.
But most people don't like to think about it, let alone talk about it and usually only face it when it happens to someone close. We are marvelously unprepared and maybe we can never be.
When you hear that we are going to talk about death, what feelings, thoughts does it bring up?
Do you think we should talk about it?
What feelings does walking in a cemetery evoke?
How was death treated in your family of origin, how does that influence you now?
The Next 5 Minutes
I'm living the next 5 minutes
Like these are my last 5 minutes
'cause I know the next 5 minutes
May be all I have
Every moment God is giving is precious
Every heartbeat every breath I take
Not everybody believes this or lives like this:
Limited
I AM riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
answers: "Omaha."
By Carl Sandburg
Don't be like the man who says he is going to Omaha, but is limited in his awareness of his true destination, death. Most people don't want to think about it and so exclude it from their awareness and limit their consciousness.
But death doesn't go away and so we try to figure out how to live with it, get on with it.
For the atheist: it's a nothingness. That's how they deal with this tension
You just cease to be. Simple, no responsibility, no accountability.
Life's but a walking shadow, laments Shakespeare's Macbeth.
It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
My opinion is that it is something we should talk about and confront and make our peace with.
My personal reflections on death:
Unreality, not talked about. A lot of people live in quite a fantasy world.
This can never happen to me.
My mother's death, my father's words, my vision of her.
The need to say goodbye and when you don't go to the funeral
The need to grieve well.
Feelings of guilt, unforgiveness, not forgiving myself, regrets
Not knowing how to grieve, or anyone to help
Not knowing how to finish it off and move on.
People still haven't moved on 10-20 years later, eg death of a baby, miscarriage
Children need to grieve as much
Grief over divorce too
The most painful stage of being is remembering the future, especially the one you can never have. Kierkegaard The life you imagined
There are lots of little deaths in life: leaving, loss of limb, abilities, sicknesses, relationships.
We need to grieve, to process, ritualize it and attend to it, but not get stuck in it.
There are 5-10 stages of grief
Importance of Rituals
When someone close suffers death: Don't avoid it. Don't stay away even if they look like they're coping
Say you are really sorry Help them to talk about the loved one Let them cry. Acknowledge the pain as best you can but don't be silent and don't say there there.
But for the Christian there's a completely different take on it.
Resurrection 1 Corinthians 15 from The Message Bible
1Friends, let me go over the Message with you one final time--this Message that I proclaimed and that you made your own; this Message on which you took your stand 2and by which your life has been saved. 3The first thing I did was place before you what was placed so emphatically before me: that the Messiah died for our sins, exactly as Scripture tells it; 4that he was buried; that he was raised from death on the third day, again exactly as Scripture says; 5that he presented himself alive to Peter, then to his closest followers, 6and later to more than five hundred of his followers all at the same time,
12Now, let me ask you something profound yet troubling. If you became believers because you trusted the proclamation that Christ is alive, risen from the dead, how can you let people say that there is no such thing as a resurrection? 13If there's no resurrection, there's no living Christ. 14And face it--if there's no resurrection for Christ, everything we've told you is smoke and mirrors, and everything you've staked your life on is smoke and mirrors. 15Not only that, but we would be guilty of telling a string of barefaced lies about God, all these affidavits we passed on to you verifying that God raised up Christ--sheer fabrications, if there's no resurrection.
16If corpses can't be raised, then Christ wasn't, because he was indeed dead. 17And if Christ wasn't raised, then all you're doing is wandering about in the dark, as lost as ever. 18It's even worse for those who died hoping in Christ and resurrection, because they're already in their graves. 19If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we're a pretty sorry lot. 20But the truth is that Christ has been raised up, the first in a long legacy of those who are going to leave the cemeteries.
21There is a nice symmetry in this: Death initially came by a man, and resurrection from death came by a man. 22Everybody dies in Adam; everybody comes alive in Christ. 23But we have to wait our turn: Christ is first, then those with him at his Coming, 24the grand consummation when, after crushing the opposition, he hands over his kingdom to God the Father. 25He won't let up until the last enemy is down-- 26and the very last enemy is death! 27As the psalmist said, "He laid them low, one and all; he walked all over them." When Scripture says that "he walked all over them," it's obvious that he couldn't at the same time be walked on. 28When everything and everyone is finally under God's rule, the Son will step down, taking his place with everyone else, showing that God's rule is absolutely comprehensive--a perfect ending!
29Why do you think people offer themselves to be baptized for those already in the grave? If there's no chance of resurrection for a corpse, if God's power stops at the cemetery gates, why do we keep doing things that suggest he's going to clean the place out someday, pulling everyone up on their feet alive?
30And why do you think I keep risking my neck in this dangerous work? 31I look death in the face practically every day I live. Do you think I'd do this if I wasn't convinced of your resurrection and mine as guaranteed by the resurrected Messiah Jesus? 32Do you think I was just trying to act heroic when I fought the wild beasts at Ephesus, hoping it wouldn't be the end of me? Not on your life! It's resurrection, resurrection, always resurrection, that undergirds what I do and say, the way I live. If there's no resurrection, "We eat, we drink, the next day we die," and that's all there is to it.
35Some skeptic is sure to ask, "Show me how resurrection works. Give me a diagram; draw me a picture. What does this resurrection body' look like?" 36If you look at this question closely, you realize how absurd it is. There are no diagrams for this kind of thing. 37We do have a parallel experience in gardening. You plant a "dead" seed; soon there is a flourishing plant. There is no visual likeness between seed and plant. 38You could never guess what a tomato would look like by looking at a tomato seed. What we plant in the soil and what grows out of it don't look anything alike. The dead body that we bury in the ground and the resurrection body that comes from it will be dramatically different.
42This image of planting a dead seed and raising a live plant is a mere sketch at best, but perhaps it will help in approaching the mystery of the resurrection body--but only if you keep in mind that when we're raised, we're raised for good, alive forever! 43The corpse that's planted is no beauty, but when it's raised, it's glorious. Put in the ground weak, it comes up powerful. 44The seed sown is natural; the seed grown is supernatural--same seed, same body, but what a difference from when it goes down in physical mortality to when it is raised up in spiritual immortality!
45We follow this sequence in Scripture: The First Adam received life, the Last Adam is a life-giving Spirit. 46Physical life comes first, then spiritual-- 47a firm base shaped from the earth, a final completion coming out of heaven. 48The First Man was made out of earth, and people since then are earthy; the Second Man was made out of heaven, and people now can be heavenly. 49In the same way that we've worked from our earthy origins, let's embrace our heavenly ends.
50I need to emphasize, friends, that our natural, earthy lives don't in themselves lead us by their very nature into the kingdom of God. Their very "nature" is to die, so how could they "naturally" end up in the Life kingdom?
51But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I'll probably never fully understand. We're not all going to die--but we are all going to be changed. 52You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes--it's over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we'll all be changed. 53In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelves and replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal. 54Then the saying will come true:
Death swallowed by triumphant Life!
55Who got the last word, oh, Death?
Oh, Death, who's afraid of you now?
56It was sin that made death so frightening and law-code guilt that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. 57But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three--sin, guilt, death--are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God!
58With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground. And don't hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for him is a waste of time or effort.
Discussion:
What is the Christian hope?
Is there anything positive about death?
Should we fear death or make friends with it and how might we do that?
Throughout the whole of life, one must continue to learn how to live, and what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn how to die. Seneca
Scott Peck: death is a magnificent lover. Death is not a taker-away but rather a giver of meaning.
This life may change but it can never be destroyed, and though the change from one form of existence into another is called Death, this never means that death finally ends life, or even that it adds to life, or takes away from it. It merely transfers the life from one form of existence to another. A thing that disappears from our sight has not thereby ceased to exist. It reappears, but in another form and state.
(The Visions of Sadhu Sundar Singh )
E kore au e mate
Ka mate ko te mate
Ka ora tonu aau
I shall not die
When death itself is dead
I shall still be alive
Maori writing in the Gardens Cemetery
Vita mutatur non tollitur - Life changes but it is not taken away. Preface to Catholic Requiem Mass.
Time involves limits. This means that even in the paradise creation of Genesis there was death and decay as a natural part of life. Otherwise there would be no successive generations or cycles. The first creation is not perfect or immortal, it is temporal.
Physical death is built into being human. It is the frailty and vulnerability of our existence. We have no control over it, and we live with an awareness of it.
It was this awareness and vulnerability which the serpent exploited in Genesis 3. It exploited this by raising the possibility of being able to control one's life and existence. It played on our fear of this vulnerability, offering a way out, of not dying, but of being like God and in charge of our destiny. And we took the bait for we do not want to be what we are, but to be like God, rich, healthy, invulnerable and immortal.
Thus one definition of sin is: our attempt at our own provision against our mortality.
So in the first instance, death is physical and common to all. One out of one people die. In the second instance and Biblically, death is spiritual death. For the wages or end result of sin, choosing to be without God, is absence from his presence and thus spiritual death on top of the decay I will naturally experience.
Sin disseminates spiritual death quickly. This type of dying is to become numb and insensible to spiritual reality and to each other.
Gen 3 sin excludes Adam and Eve from the presence of God in the Garden
Gen 4 sin generates the first murder in Cain's fratricide
Gen 6:11-12 sin here is described as violence and total corruption of all flesh.
'The frailty of the first, temporal and imperfect creation is like a detonator for the sin of wanting to be equal with God and overcome this frailty'. The Coming of God by Jurgen Moltmann, p91
We do not die physically because of our sin as punishment. Everything born dies at some point. But sin has made this all the more rotten.
Death is the power of separation, both because we are transient and time gets to us, and from this issues the disintegration of our body and our living configuration or Gestalt and it also separates