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The Wilderness: Death

Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
April 1, 2007--Palm Sunday
Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 22:14-23:56

Is. 50:4                The Lord GOD has given me
                        the tongue of a teacher,
            that I may know how to sustain
                        the weary with a word.
            Morning by morning he wakens--
                        wakens my ear
                        to listen as those who are taught.
5             The Lord GOD has opened my ear,
                        and I was not rebellious,
                        I did not turn backward.
6             I gave my back to those who struck me,
                        and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
            I did not hide my face
                        from insult and spitting.
7                The Lord GOD helps me;
                        therefore I have not been disgraced;
            therefore I have set my face like flint,
                        and I know that I shall not be put to shame;
8             he who vindicates me is near.
              Who will contend with me?
                        Let us stand up together.
              Who are my adversaries?
                        Let them confront me.
9             It is the Lord GOD who helps me;
                        who will declare me guilty?
            All of them will wear out like a garment;
                        the moth will eat them up.

Phil. 2:5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
6             who, though he was in the form of God,
                        did not regard equality with God
                        as something to be exploited,
7             but emptied himself,
                        taking the form of a slave,
                        being born in human likeness.
            And being found in human form,
8                         he humbled himself
                        and became obedient to the point of death--
                        even death on a cross.
9                Therefore God also highly exalted him
                        and gave him the name
                        that is above every name,
10             so that at the name of Jesus
                        every knee should bend,
                        in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11             and every tongue should confess
                        that Jesus Christ is Lord,
                        to the glory of God the Father.

I. BEGINNING--Death

Death is a strange thing.   It is, quite literally, beyond our experience.   While scientifically possible, the possibility is remote that anyone in this sanctuary has ever been dead.   Really dead.

A.  Encountering death

My own first encounter with death was that of a classmate of mine in eighth grade.   I had known Lisa since kindergarten.   We went to the same church.   Sat in the junior choir together.   She was my childhood sweetheart.   We were each other's first kiss.   She got sick one night with flu like symptoms, slipped into a coma, was rushed to the hospital, and died three days later.

I remember the wake.   How she looked like she was sleeping.   It seemed like you ought to be able to reach over and nudge her awake.   Death, whatever it was, seemed so unreal .

My freshman year of college my grandfather died two days before Thanksgiving.   We had been planning on heading out to Buffalo the next day for the holiday, now we were headed out for a funeral.   I remember the wake, and thinking, 'Grampa was old and had had a couple of heart attacks .   Death happens to old men.'

My year of grad school following college , a 21 year old student named Susan fell ill very suddenly and died the next morning from meningitis.   For some reason, that one hit like a ton of bricks.   Lisa's death, my grandfather's death had not gotten to me for whatever reason-- this young woman whom I didn't even know--it was her death that shook me the most .

Perhaps because she was my age.   Perhaps it was because it was so sudden, so unexpected.   I remember thinking about it for a long time after that and reflecting on it for a long time.  

B.  Death in America

It probably should not have affected me so profoundly.   I probably should have come to an understanding of death long before that.   But perhaps that's something that we as a culture need to work on .

We're not very comfortable with death in this country.   We like killing--but we're not really comfortable with death.   We don't even like to talk about it.   We say that people have "departed" or "passed away" or even just "passed."   The latter of which almost sounds like a good thing.   "Joe, how'd you do on your test?" "I passed."   "Why doesn't Bob come around any more?" "He passed."   A colleague of mine lamented that an administrative board spoke of a dead member as having been "lost".   She wondered, shouldn't we be looking for him?

It almost seems like we do everything to avoid actually having to say 'so-and-so died .'

Perhaps this is understandable .   In former days, people died at home.   The family cleaned and prepared the body for burial.   Today, the monitors stop beeping and the doctor quietly ushers the family out of the room. The next time they see their loved one, he or she has been cleaned by staff, embalmed and prepared by a funeral director.

It's really no surprise then that for so many of us death should be a wilderness experience .   It is a place that very few of us are familiar with, in our daily living, even in our conceptualizing .

II. THE DISCIPLES' WILDERNESS

Imagine the wilderness experience that Jesus' death was for the disciples.

Here they had given their lives to this ministry , left everything behind and followed Jesus.   They enter Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to crowds waving palm branches and shouting "hosanna"--that must have been great.   It had all been worth it.   This was going to be a great week.   Then there's that little "incident" at the Temple that seemed to have gotten some people concerned.   But, okay, things are going well.   Passover's coming soon.   And Passover --we all know what that's about--it's about the Exodus.   About liberation.   About God coming and saving the people.   It's gonna be big this year because Jesus is right in the middle of it.   Passover dinner that first night...

And then suddenly ...

Jesus is arrested .   He is taken to the priests.   They send him to the Romans and the following morning he is crucified.   And dies that afternoon.   He is dead.   Jesus is dead .

The disciples experience that wilderness of doubt .   Had everything they believed been wrong?   Was Jesus not who he said he was?   Was God really not going to save the people?   Would the people be subject to tyranny and violence and oppression forever?

They also experience the wilderness of failure .   They had failed.   It all looked so promising just a few days ago.   The crowd seemed to be with them.   But they lost the crowd somehow.   What had gone wrong?   How had this movement failed?   Just when it looked like they were on the verge of their biggest success .

And finally, and not the least, they experienced the wilderness of death .   Jesus was dead .   Their leader.   Their shepherd.   Their rabbi and teacher.   Their friend .   He was dead.   Dead by the oppressive hand of the Roman state, hanged upon a cross the way subject peoples like the Jews were crucified.   And then taken, buried in a tomb outside Jerusalem.   Not even home back in Galilee.  

What a miserable experience that must have been for them.  

III. THE DEATH IN GOD

But what about the wilderness of death that Christ himself experienced upon the cross?   What was the wilderness that Christ traverses on Calvary?

In 1944, an eighteen year old German youth named Jürgen Moltmann was drafted into the German army.   Six months later in Belgium, he surrendered to the first British soldier he saw and spent the next three years in a prisoner of war camp.   In that prisoner of war camp he was given a book of the New Testament and Psalms by an American Army chaplain and he began to read it.   At first, out of boredom--he was not a particularly religious person.   But in the pages of that Bible, he began to encounter a God who understood devastation and suffering. He understood that God is someone who really understands.   God really understands that grief--the grief of all the living who grieve from the dead of all living .

He would focus on the words found in Mark's gospel, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"   In those words he would come to discover the deep mystery of the heart of God .

Moltmann would go on to become one of the great Protestant theologians of the 20 th Century, his book The Crucified God becoming a landmark theological treatise.   For many people, the existence of God and the existence of suffering are, if not contradictory, at least problematic.   If God is good and all powerful, why is there suffering?

For Moltmann, "God and suffering are no longer contradictions," but "God's being is in suffering and the suffering is in God's being itself, because God is love." (TCG 227).  

The cross of Christ does not represent the death of the human Jesus alone, but also the death of the Divine Son of God .   In order for this death to be meaningful, it had to be real.   When Jesus dies on the cross, the Trinity itself experiences a death within itself.   The cross is not a death of God, but a death in God .   The Father and the Spirit suffer the death of the Son within God's innermost being.   It is a serious blow to God--God is not left untouched by the death.   As Moltmann writes: "What happens on Golgotha, reaches into the very depths of the Godhead and puts its imprints on the very depths of God in eternity."

William Sloane Coffin , the great peace activist, Christian leader, and pastor at Riverside Church in New York, tells a story about the drowning death of his son after an automobile accident.   He recalls that a woman came in carrying some food and said as she headed toward the kitchen "I just don't understand the will of God." He lept up after her and said, "I'll say you don't, lady!" He continues:

  "The one thing that should never be said when someone dies, is 'It is the will of God.'  Never do we know enough to say that.  My own consolation lies in knowing that it was NOT the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break."

IV. THE SOLIDARITY OF THE CRUCIFIX

Tonight we have a crucifix in our worship .   We don't usually have a crucifix here.   One of the benefits of working in an interfaith chapel is having a bunch of really cool Catholic stuff back in the sacristy that we can borrow for occasions such as this.   Protestants don't like crucifixes.   They're so depressing. And they're a little graphic.   I mean, Jesus us up there nailed to that cross.   You'll often hear Protestants say things like "Our crosses are empty because we like to remember Jesus being off the cross."   That's all well and good.   But our understandings of the Hosannas of Palm Sunday and the Alleluias of Easter are lost without the Cross.   Between palms and lilies are the wood and the nails of the cross.

For the Cross of Christ shows us that God has taken death into God's own self .   The death within the Godhead that Moltmann talks about, the death that the Father and the Spirit grieve, takes into it all deaths. All deaths .

No death happens apart from the cross. In the death of the Son, all of the deaths of the living are swallowed up.   God is omnipresent such that even the dead are present with the Father for Christ's sake.

V.  END

What this means for us is that even death itself is not beyond the presence of God .   Even in the wilderness of death, we can encounter God, because God is in death and death is in God.  

St. Paul wrote in the Book of Romans that not even death " will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."   The Psalmist writes "If I ascend to heaven, you are there ; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there." The cross testifies that even in the abject wilderness of death, God is there.  

Our hope as Christians comes from the Empty Tomb we celebrate at Easter.   But the nature of our home comes from and understanding of the Cross that we come to before that glorious day.   For we have hope that if God is with us even in death, then there is no wilderness, no alienation, no injustice, no suffering, no injury, no sorrow that takes place apart from God.

Some here may be mourning the death of a loved one.   Others may be mourning the countless deaths caused by war, famine, poverty, violence.   Others may be worried about their own mortality.   Our message of hope is this:   in all those places, God is there.   In the grief over a loved one, God is there.   In the grief over an injustice, God is there.   In the grief over one's own mortality, God is there. In all the wilderness places of our lives--even on that lonely road between palms and lilies--God is there.

As Christians we understand that God is faithful with us in our suffering.   And because God has demonstrated solidarity with us, through the Cross, we are freed to demonstrate solidarity with others who suffer.   We are freed to open ourselves to suffering and to love for the sake of one another. We can take upon ourselves the suffering of those who mourn, of those who grieve, of those who suffer injustice--we can declare solidarity with them, because God first declared that solidarity with us.

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Copyright © 2007. Mark A. Schaefer.

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