Facing Death

Psalm 22, John 12:1-8

March 21, 2010

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

A week from today, Palm Sunday, we begin our annual six day journey into death, specifically Jesus’ death on Good Friday. It’s not an easy journey, and many good Christians simply cannot face it, hence a big attendance on Easter and a small attendance at services on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday when we stare suffering and death right in the face. In those services, we tell the stories leading up to and including Jesus’ death, but we don’t really talk about death in general.

Today’s scriptures, however, are full of the subject. In the gospel, we are at the home of Lazarus, who was raised from death by Jesus and walked out of a tomb in his burial cloths. Lazarus’ sister, Mary, now anoints Jesus in preparation for his death and burial. For Christians, Psalm 22 is forever linked with Jesus’ death, for he began to pray this Psalm while hanging, dying, on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” So as we enter this season of death – and resurrection – I want to take some time today to speak with you about death and our faith response to it.

In an essay I read this week, the author said that for the Christian, “dying well embraces both lament and hope.” That is precisely the movement of Psalm 22, and it expresses a theology embraced by Jesus, Paul, and the Christian tradition over the centuries.

First, lament. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In the midst of deep suffering, in the valley of the shadow of your own death or that of someone you love, in the midst of tragic, untimely or painful deaths, that cry lamenting what seems to be God’s absence bursts out of the hearts of many, many people. We want God to do something about the pain, the emptiness, the loss, and in the midst of weariness and deep grief, sometimes we cannot see or feel God’s presence. And for some faithful people that I have known over the years, they have great guilt about this. They think if they are really good Christians, then they will calmly accept death (either their own death or a loved one’s) with the promise of eternal life, and if they do otherwise, it must mean their faith is weak, or they are selfish, and they feel guilty.

The Psalmists carried no such burdens, nor did Jesus. They cried out their laments to God, and not just in this Psalm. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O God! God hear my voice!” “Are you sleeping, God? Wake up!” “Why do I cry and you do not answer?” Weeping and lament, anger and sadness are not the signs of a weak faith; they are expressions of the deepest emotions we carry. At St. Thomas Church in New York City, there is a rugged crucifix near the pulpit, and under it a quote from Queen Elizabeth, spoken after 9/11, “Grief is the price we pay for love.” Even if we believe with all our heart that we or a loved one lives with God after death, nevertheless the life we have known here is gone, in all its suffering but also all its beauty and joy, and it cannot be wrong to mourn the loss of that, the severing of relationships which had been a gift to us from God.

So the singer in Psalm 22 dances back and forth between lament and hope. “O God, I cry day and night but you do not answer!” “Yet, you are holy; our ancestors trusted you and you delivered them.” The beloved here does not give up on the Holy Lover; suffering and sadness and trust and hope are entwined. As another writer puts it, “We live our lives in the shadow of the cross, but we also live in the presence of the risen Christ.” (Stephen Shoemaker, Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 2). Jesus was very clear, as the church has been ever since, that death is not the end, as it was not for Jesus. We are not resurrected on earth in a physical body as he was, but we are promised eternal life in the presence of God. No one is clear on exactly what that looks like; most of the New Testament descriptions of heaven include singing and feasting, but all the questions we all have: Will I see my loved ones there? What will it look like? Will we have to face punishment for our misdeeds on earth? The answers to these and so many others are not clear to us, any more than they were to the Psalmist. The singers of the Psalms know only one answer: God has proven trustworthy in the past, and so we trust in God for the future as well. We know in Jesus a God who is full of forgiveness, who desires abundant life and joy for us, who loves us beyond our capacity to understand love, and who never leaves us alone at any time in our lives, even when we cannot perceive God’s presence in our midst. There is no such thing as being truly “God-forsaken” as the Psalmist discovers, even when we feel that way. As William Sloane Coffin wrote about the death of his son, Alex, when death happens, God is the first to cry because God knows that all death causes pain. And even as God weeps for those who feel the pain of the loss of a loved one, God also welcomes the one who has died into waiting arms, for God loved them first and has always loved them best.

This is what the church teaches us, what many of us truly believe. The challenge for us, then, is how to translate what we say we believe about death into concrete acts while we are alive. For guidance in that, today we are given Mary of Bethany. Very simply, what Mary teaches us is the power of being fully present. After her brother, Lazarus’ death, Mary lamented deeply, but trusted in Jesus when he arrived. On this day, she acknowledged what Jesus’ disciples kept denying: the reality and inevitability of Jesus’ death. On this last occasion when he would be with her, she was fully present to him, caring for him as best she could. In a few days she would be with other women at the foot of the cross, again present with him. She couldn’t do anything to keep him alive, but she could be there with and for him. She was saddened by death and suffering, but she was not so afraid of it that she avoided it or ran away as did the others.

We live in a youth-obsessed, Botox culture, a death-denying and death-fearing culture. We don’t want pictures of dead soldiers in body bags on our news screens and we often ask our doctors to put our loved ones through great pain and suffering because we feel we cannot let them die. In the midst of this, Mary of Bethany calls us to perhaps the most difficult faith practice many of us will ever be called upon to do, the ministry of presence, of complete love and attention to another human being in the face of death, and complete trust in God in the face of our own deaths.

Very few times in my ministry have I been privileged to be present at the exact moment someone died. Each time it has felt to me like an enormous privilege, the same kind of privilege as being present at a birth. One of those times involved a baby born too soon, a child who lived for two hours. At first, the mother and father were too full of pain to hold their very tiny and delicate child whom they knew would die soon, but finally the young father reached out and took his son from my arms. He rocked him and spoke to him, and never have I seen such complete attention and love flow from parent to child. His courage gave the mother courage, and she too became fully present to her son. In the two hours that boy lived, he was surrounded by such love, more love than some people know in their entire lives. All three of us lost our fear and found the dance of lament and trust that freed us to love their son into eternal life. Like Mary of Bethany, those young parents taught me something about faith and death, about being fully present for one who is dying and trusting completely in God’s love.

The good news is this, as the UC Canada Creed puts it: In life and death, in life beyond death, God is with us, we are not alone. Thanks be to God. Amen.