20 I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body,whether by life or by death. 21 For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain....
2 Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.
5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in very nature[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
I had a rather
upsetting experience recently.
My
son and daughter in law and my wife and I went out to eat at a Chinese
restaurant. I know this sounds corny,
but you know what I really love about Chinese restaurants?
The
fortune cookie. I’m not superstitious –
I just like to see what the message says.
Besides, I’ve never met a dessert I didn’t enjoy!
My
son opened his and he read it aloud.
“You will have a happy surprise.”
My
daughter in law opened hers and read it aloud:
“Make the most of every opportunity.”
My
wife’s fortune cookie said, “Look to the future.”
I
opened mine, and it said “Resolve all unfinished business immediately.”
My
son thought that was funny. He suggested
that this might simply be nothing more than a way for the restaurant to say
we’d been sitting at the table too long and we needed to pay the check and get
out of there.
Then
my wife suggested that perhaps the waitress knew something about the chicken
that I didn’t know.
Well,
I smiled, but inside I found it rather unsettling.
“Resolve
all unfinished business immediately.”
The
phrase had the ring of death to it.
The
simple fortune cookie had allowed death to enter our lives and to sit with us
at the table of our meal. I didn’t like
that. I don’t like the possibility of
death to be allowed into my everyday life.
And in that regard, I am a child of my culture, and so are you.
We
live in a culture that does not know how to deal with death.
Woody Allen put it
this way: “I’m not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it
happens to me.”
What
it takes for most of us in this world to accept the reality of death is a
shock. Face to face with a doctor,
we hear the words, “I’m sorry, I’ve looked at your tests, Maynard, and I think
you should resolve all unfinished business immediately.”
Now
there was a time when the church saw it as one of its main missions to help
people to think about death. Not
death in general, but their death. This
was not a morbid sort of activity. It
was considered to be very helpful. In
fact, a main focus of devotional material centuries ago was built on the belief
that by learning how to die, we will learn how to live.
There
was an entire collection of this devotional material called the Ars Mo ri en di,
the “art of dying well.”
John
Cheever has written a short story called, “The Death of Justina.” It is about a man with the very symbolic
name, Moses. He lives in a little town
called Proxmire Manner. One day Moses
comes home from work in Proximire Manner, and when he enters the house he finds
there on the couch is his wife’s elderly cousin Justina. Dead as a doornail.
Now
when you find your cousin dead as a doornail in your home, you have two
tasks. Get the body out of the house and
get her a proper burial. But Moses finds
that in Proxmire Mannor, this is no easy thing to do. He discovers you can’t take the body out of
the house without a death certificate, and you can’t get a death certificate in
Proxmire Manner because the County Council in a fit of community spirit and in
the effort of keeping a funeral home from building a location in Proxmire
Manner made it illegal to die in Proxmire Manner.
So
Justina is not only dead, she is criminal.
Moses
contacts the head of the County Council and asks if an exception can be made in
this case since she is already dead.
“No,
it would set a bad example” says the head of the council. “People don’t want to live in a place where
things like this happen.”
Finally
he was able to succeed at getting the cousin out of the house and buried in a
cemetery. In the final lines of the
story, are in the voice of Moses. Here
is what he says. “How can people who
cannot deal with death ever deal with life?”
That
is, in fact, what the ancient Christian leaders were trying to say in their
devotional material of the Ars Mo-ri-en-de.
In order to know how to die well, you must first know how to live
well. And in order to live well, you
must be prepared to die well.
About
30 years ago, one of the hot books about death was Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross’
Death and Dying. If you know that book,
you will recall that she presented a wonderful presentation of how people deal
with the process of their own death. She
said that people move through a very specific set of stages.
According
to her, people start out with denial – “I’m not going to die.” But then people would realize they were
indeed going to die, so they became angry.
Then they moved into bargaining.
They would bargain with the doctor, with the family with God
Almighty. When that didn’t work, they
would move into depression. And once
they worked through that stage, people would arrive at the peaceful state of
acceptance.
Now
as helpful as that book was in many ways, it has also been criticized more and
more over the years, and rightfully so.
Because people do not move through these stages in an orderly
progression. Most people meander from
one stage to another and sometimes circle back into a previous stage they had
left behind. And sometimes they even get
stuck along the way.
As a matter of
fact, many have observed that most people do not move through stages at all at
the end of life.
The
fact of the matter is that people die the way they live. And the living and anticipation of our
mortality is a dress rehearsal for how we will die.
If
we are a bargainer in life, we will be a bargainer in death.
If
we are angry in life, we are angry in death.
If
we are trusting in life, we are trusting in our death.
The
early church saw itself as a source of alternative thinking. The world may teach one thing about how to
think about death, but the church calls on its members to think boldly,
courageously and creatively about death.
So Paul wrote in his New Testament letter to the Philippians, “For me to
live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
And to the Thessalonians,
Paul would write “I don’t want you to grieve as those who have no hope.”
He is not
suggesting that we do not grieve. He is
suggesting that grief should be shaped by the hope we have in the
resurrection. And when that happens,
grief becomes a different kind of dynamic, a different kind of emotion. [1]
The ancient
writers of the devotional works about how to die well focused on different
virtues for life as a way to prepare for death.
Embrace and exercise these virtues in daily living, and you will be
better prepared for your death, or the death of your loved ones.
Our New
Testament lesson is a wonderful letter written by St. Paul
In this letter
he wrestles with death. In the opening
verses of the letter he toys with how he might face death, and then he boldly
says, “I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will
have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my
body, whether by life or by death. For
to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”
Paul had
learned how to face death, by learning how to face life.
And likewise we
will learn how to die well, by learning how to live well.
Or as Paul
would say in his letter to the Philippians, “Whatever happens, conduct
yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” (Philippians 1:27)
That is an
interesting phrase, because Paul began using it a lot shortly before his
death. It shows up over and over in the
letters he wrote late in his life. “Live
a life worthy of the gospel of Christ.”
“Live a life worthy of your calling.”
“Live a life that is worthy…”[2] Colossians.
First Thessalonians. Second
Thessalonians. Philippians.
One of the
places where Paul uses that phrase, “Live a life worthy of Christ” is in his
letter to the Colossians. And in that
letter, he sets forth a plain statement on what it means to live a life worthy
of Christ.
Paul says, “As God's chosen people, holy and dearly
loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and
patience. Bear with each other and
forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the
Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love...”
You
can take each of those virtues and spend a lifetime looking at each one, but
let’s look at just a couple.
Patience.
One
of the things that makes it difficult for us in our culture to deal with death
is our impatience.
Paul
said in Romans 12:12 that we need to learn to be “patient in our
afflictions.” But the greater the
affliction, the less patient we become.
We
are impatient for suffering to end, so when we see others suffering, we walk
away as quickly as we can.
We
are impatient for suffering to end, and when we are the ones suffering, we
might pour alcohol into our systems, take drugs to deaden the pain or long for
a society where euthanasia is legal.
I’m
fascinated by the way Rembrandt’s artwork changed during the course of his
lifetime.
As
a young man, Rembrandt painted that wonderful but disturbing Old Testament
story of Abraham and his son Isaac.
Abraham is about to sacrifice his only son to God, when thankfully an
angel appears and stops the father from taking the life of his child.
What young Rembrandt saw was Isaac on the
altar and Abraham is pulling his head back and Isaac’s neck is exposed and the
father has the knife and is about to thrust it into the flesh and blood of his
child. Abraham has covered the mouth of
the child so Isaac cannot speak and argue for his defense. The angel has to wrestle the knife from the
young Abraham. Abraham is staring into
the eyes of the angel as if angry that he is being interrupted, and the angel
has one hand on Abraham’s right hand, wrestling the knife from him, while the
angel’s other hand is raised as if ready to fight Abraham.
Rembrandt
sees in Abraham a determination, and zeal and even an impatience to “get it
over with.”
But
as an old man, Rembrandt revisited this biblical story with an etching. With the patience learned through suffering
and wisdom, the artist saw everything differently. Isaac is no longer on the altar, but is
lovingly and gently held by his father who has pulled him to himself in a
loving embrace. Abraham does not cover
the child’s mouth, but he does cover his eyes so he cannot see the suffering
that is to come.
The knife is held reluctantly. It’s even pointed away from the child.
The knife is held reluctantly. It’s even pointed away from the child.
There
is in aging Rembrandt an understanding that we should not rush the timetable of
death, but we should be hesitant and patient.
A
key factor in whether a person will “die well” is found in how well that person
can embrace the virtue of patience in dealing with grief, suffering and
sadness.[3]
Forgiveness is another element
of Paul’s list of virtues in Colossians, and like the other virtues it is
important to embrace so that one may live well, and die well.
One
of my Methodist colleagues was taking his wife out to eat one night, and they
were walking on the streets of the city where they lived. They saw a man collapse nearby. While his wife called 911, the Methodist
minister leaned over the man to comfort him.
“Don’t
worry,” he said. “We’ve called for help
and they will be here any moment. Just
hang on.”
Suddenly
the stranger reached up and grabbed the minister by the coat and pulled him
close to him so they were eye to eye – “Charlie,” the stranger said.
“I’m
not Charlie,” said the minister. “But
don’t worry. I’m with you and we’ve
called for help. Just hang on.”
The
stranger ignored him.
“Charlie,
forgive me.”
“I’m
not Charlie. Charlie isn’t here. But we’ve called for help.”
“Charlie,
listen to me, forgive me!”
“I’m
not Charlie.”
“Charlie,
listen to me. Forgive me.”
And
seeing the desperation in his eyes, the Methodist minister said, “I forgive
you.”
And
those were the last words the stranger would ever hear before his death.
The
minister later thought about how arrogant he had been to offer
forgiveness. “Who am I,” he would later
ask, “to speak for this Charlie and to offer a word of forgiveness.”
But
then he realized as a minister he did that every Sunday in worship, and ever
day of his life.
We
are called to forgive. God means for us
to be forgiving to others and to receive and enjoy forgiveness.
At
death, people often desperately seek forgiveness from others, or they
desperately seek to extend a word of forgiveness before it is too late.
But
to die well, or to live well, means that we walk in forgiveness throughout all
of our lives.
In
New Testament, Paul wrote to the Colossian
Church
All
of this keeps bring us to the same truth – if you want to die well, you must
live well. You learn to prepare for
death by learning how to live.
If
you are angry in life, then you will be angry at death.
If
you are bitter in life, then you will be bitter at death.
If
you are forgiving and compassionate and patient in life, that is how you will
face death.
Copyright 2014, The Rev. Dr. Maynard Pittendreigh
All rights
reserved.
[1] Patience, compassion, hope and the
Christian art of dying well
Christopher Paul Vogt, Boston College 2002
Christopher Paul Vogt, Boston College 2002
[2]
Examples: Colossians 1:10, I
Thessalonians 2:12, II Thessalonians 1:11
[3]
Ira Byock, Dying Well: Peace and
Possibilities at the End of Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997), page 60.
