4/10/66

Scripture: Read Matthew 28: 1-10; 16-20; Revelation 14: 12, 13.

During this past week, we have thought some of death. We meditated upon it as we recalled Jesus’ facing toward it on Thursday night --- his own last Thursday before the crucifixion. We thought of it on Friday, as we recalled his words on the cross. Then, after the meditation of the afternoon in a union service, we gathered here for an evening of worship in beautiful music. And again we thought of death in the “Requiem;” the plea for eternal rest.

There are times when circumstance forces us to think of death, whether we wish to do so or not. Someone you have loved very much -- a child in the neighborhood, a parent (father or mother), or the partner of a lifetime, dies. And there is no escape from the thought of death because it has happened so close to you that it is a part of you.

Further, we think of death when there is a known, recognized possibility that we --- you or I --- may die, and we know it. We are, still further, reminded of death at the passing of someone we have not known personally, but who has lived so significantly in the world as to be widely recognized. When someone, who represents something important in the life of the world, dies, it leaves, for a time, a vast emptiness. The one who has gone may be an old person like Sir Winston Churchill or Dr. Albert Schweitzer who, after a long and triumphant life, dies in the natural course of events. Or it may be a younger person like John Kennedy [or Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr.] who died unnaturally in the full flush of life’s promise. It may be someone still younger, like Jonathan Daniels, who was shot when he went South to help prepare Negro people for voter registration.

We may think of death at other times, but at these particular times we are bound to think of it; we are shocked into thinking about it. You and I know that the person who has died is not coming back to us. We know what King David knew when his child died: “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.” No one denies this kind of solemn finality; nothing that we think about it can alter the fact; though how we accept the fact makes a great difference to us.

As we think about it, one wonders whether death is the end of the person -- whether there is anything beyond it for him, whether he is extinct or whether he still has being. You accept the finality of death as fact, but you still keep wondering about the future.

Some people can accept an easily obvious sort of answer. That answer is simply that death is the end of a person, just as birth was the beginning of him. A person is like a flower, so they reason. It has begun perhaps as a tiny seed beneath the surface of the ground; it pushed its way to the light; grew, budded, bloomed, faded and died. Of course other flowers take its place, but that one seems gone forever.

But still you wonder, don’t you? There is an ageless potential that brought the seed to growing; that brought the child to birth. And there is that in nature and in history which perpetuates what has existed. And a person seems different from a flower, or from even a tree with its more impressive dimensions. So you still wonder; still think about the future.

My father died more than nineteen [25] years ago, in January of 1947. I know where his body was laid. I expect it to stay there. I do not expect to see it again. And I doubt that it could longer have been a fit habitat for his life. But there is that of my father which still lives. Of course he lives in my memory. But it seems to me that his integrity continues. There is that about his straightforward manner with people, his honor in business, his awareness of God, his expectation about others, and me, that lives. He still stirs my imagination and disturbs my conscience. I think I know when he would have been pleased and when he would be stern. I am not willing to shut the door of my mind and blot him out with the word “finis.” He came into the world out of the Creator’s purpose and potential. He lived vividly and vitally here for more than eighty years. And I do not believe that death can erase him.

Haven’t you known people whose life made such impress upon you that you wonder about the continuation of life after death?

We celebrate that kind of wonder each Easter day. For the resurrection story is that of a life that followed the same pattern our lives take. Jesus was born in the flesh. He may have been part of Creation’s potential from time without beginning, but he was born a babe in Bethlehem. He was raised in a Nazareth home; did the things that other boys did at play and at work and at study. He learned a trade; he became a teacher and leader of those who wanted his leading. He had enemies who came to hate him and who secured his condemnation. And he died a slow, agonizingly painful death. His mother knew he was dead. His friends, the disciples, knew he was dead. Roman soldiers knew he was dead -- they had followed orders to make sure that he was dead. Caiaphas, the high priest, knew that he was dead --- he had been a leader in the plan to get rid of Jesus. He knew that Jesus was dead, and he wanted everybody else to know it, too! Jesus’ death was fact! --- and all the more bleak since he was only 33 years of age, or thereabouts. For all of a black Saturday, the disciples knew that their leader was dead, and life was divested of all hope.

But it did not stay hopeless. By Sunday morning, things began to change. You may have questions about what happened. You may wonder if people who got around to writing about it, decades after it happened, really remembered the details accurately. You may wonder if those who have, in the years since, translated the written accounts into languages that we now understand were able to do so without distortion. There is a great deal about the story that intrigues a thoughtful mind.

But the central reality of the account is simply this: those disciples realized that their Christ is not dead! He is alive! And he has been vitally alive for 19 centuries of history since they found it out!

Now I know, and you know, that this is not a matter for laboratory demonstration. We can not prove, and do not expect to prove, that Christ lives by mathematical formulae; by the perception of physical contact; by photographic evidence; by the discoveries of astronauts; or by any such device or measure. It is not that kind of knowledge.

It is a matter of belief. Perhaps we can see a little of the light of understanding on this word “belief” if it is simply illustrated. I know that this church building now stands on a lot at the corner of Second Street South and Birch Street in Wisconsin Rapids. I know that it houses the ministry of the word, of music, of meditation, of sacrament, to the people who are here. I believe that this church will continue to offer a ministry of some sort to people at this place for several generations to come. I do not know that. The building might be destroyed by earthquake, fire, tornado, or bombing. The church’s people might move away, or they might mostly decide that skiing, or politics, or some other pursuit is so much more important than worship that they might as well just shut down the place. But I do not expect it. I believe that there will continue to be a church, living and at work in this place. Since I accept that belief as a real possibility, I shall act accordingly and go about my work and my planning as if the church is to be here for a long time or forever.

It may be something like this when we Christian people say “I believe” in life everlasting. We have had no measurable or demonstrable grounds for saying “I know” that death is not the end of a person. None of us here has ever been to death and back again, to report the certainty of experience. But many of us do say, “I believe” that death leads on to further life and probably larger living. And we are sufficiently convinced of it to live by that belief; to think in the light of it, to hope in the direction of it. In the words of one of the great creeds of the church, “I look for -- the life of the world to come.”

Perhaps it should be pointed out that, under normal circumstances, what the community of people says and thinks has an enormous influence on people brought up in that community. If, for instance, you believe that every individual has certain “inalienable rights,” it is largely because you have been brought up in a community that believes it. You might have believed it if you had grown up under ruthless dictatorship, but the chances are that you now believe it because you grew up in a community ruled by the will of many citizens. And this is one of the mainsprings of our kind of community --- the rights of the individual.

There has been a time when the same was true about what church people believe -- not necessarily the so-called pillars of the church alone, but people who were born into the church environment, who listened with fair regularity to what was taught there, and more or less believed the teaching, as they understood it, from childhood. Those people believed that death is not the end of a person because they lived in a community that believed it. They did not always try to reason it out; they did not try to defend it. They believed it because it was believed in the church; it was like the air that they breathed.

This may not always be true today. Many a younger person rejects most of what older people think or say. Of course young folk want to think for themselves --- and it is right that they do want to think for themselves. Sometimes they make sore mistakes; and sometimes they make great discoveries. If they can not square what they think the church says about death and eternal life, they may want to explore, in their minds, what they think will square with truth. They may not know that they are not alone in this. People long since matured in age and experience have raised their own questions. They may be more reticent about voicing their questions, but there is a simmering below the surface until some shock brings the questioning to a boil. If simple affirmations are not enough in our day, then what more can be said, in communication with questioners, old and young, of our time?

Probably no one of us wants to speak “ex cathedra” as if to lay down the church’s line that must be followed. But I want to say one or two things that may be useful as starters to thinkers who have an inquiring and exploring turn of mind. One is this: (1) what one thinks about life after death depends partly on what one thinks about life before death. If you think that life is a mean and meaningless affair; a promise never kept; a horror, pinched and cruel; unjust, unfair, absurd; --- if you think that about life, you may not think that there is anything beyond death. Life here is bad enough, and the thought of its prolongation appears intolerable. But if you think that life is a grand and glorious experience; full of opportunities to grow; to accept, to enlarge, expand; to endure and to surmount suffering; to bear burdens with others; to find new horizons, and to make discoveries beyond your present sight; it will be natural for you to think of death as leading on to something more.

(2) Also, we can say that what you think will happen to people after death will partly depend on what you think of people before death. If you think only of the petty, miserable, heartless people you have known --- and there are such --- then you will think it just as well for the story to come to an end. But if you think of the people who are alive and alert, responsible and responsive --- and there are many of them --- incomplete, weak and outrageous at times, but admitting their shortcomings and living with magnificent courage, lovable despite the limitations that life puts upon them --- if you think about people like that (some of them right here with you in this church), you will find it almost impossible to think of them as extinguishable.

(3) You may also think of still others whose lives strike you as unfinished, dependent on a just creation for a chance to go on farther toward completion.

In the last analysis, it depends upon what you think about God. Here again, we enter the realm of belief, and each one may have his own. For myself, I can only testify my belief that God is not dead; that even to speak of the death of God is a contradiction in terms. There have been a great many ideas which people have held about God which have died or been changed. But God is Being itself; the Everlasting First; the Reality that has no beginning nor end, whatever may be the fate of His worlds; complete Goodness and Truth; that which brought you and me and all others into being and into life here and now.

This life has not all been easy, by any means. I have not always had what I wanted, nor done what I’d like to do. But I’ve had many a glimpse of glory and goodness; and there have been times when I was aware of something other than this world of time and space. God has often supplied the strength to take the next step when I seemed not to have the courage or strength to take it alone. If God has brought me into this world when I was born, and kept me in it as long as I have lived, I trust Him to take me on when I die. I do not believe He brought me out of nothing, nor that He will put me back into nothing. More likely; more surely; He brought me out of the eternal and will continue me in the eternal. How it is to be, I do not know from any discernible measurement or experience. But I believe this to be so for all of His created people. And I am content to leave it in His hands.

Jesus left it in God’s hands. It seemed so real to him that he addressed his soul, his prayers, to God as Father. Into the hands of the Father he commended his spirit in life and in death.

It seems to me that the most poignant message of Easter is the urge to be right, to “wake up and live!” Don’t wait for a post-mortal paradise. I want to urge on your thinking that the chief significance of Easter today is the importance of life here and now. The future, beyond death, is in the hands of God. The present is what is given to us to use rightly!

Is not this the experience of his disciples at, and after, the first Easter dawn? Their listless, heart-broken, death-dealt despair was changed to a keen concern with life. E’er long they felt a holy spirit over their lives. They were in no ivory-palaced paradise. A lot of their life was to be pretty grim! But they went at it with zest and confidence. Rightness and beauty shone through their dangerous duties. They, in their turn, let rightness and beauty shine out to others.

We let a lot of time pass without really living in it. It is good for our souls that we use time to savor life’s goodness --- the promise of spring, the confidence of friends, the love of family, the hope of creating something of significance, the chance to bring light and hope to clouded lives, the freedom to challenge our future.

When Jesus saw Peter again, there was no reproach, nor review of the past. Peter did not need to have it said: “You see, I told you that you are the kind of fellow who would deny that you even knew me when it was dangerous to know me last Thursday night.” And Jesus did not say it, nor refer to it. Jesus directed Peter’s thought to life right then. “Peter, get on with the business. My sheep and my lambs, go feed them.” [John 21: 17]. He did not castigate any of his disciples for running and fading out of sight upon his arrest. When he saw them next, he said to them, “Go into all the world, and preach the gospel.--- And lo, I am with you always.” [Matthew 28: 19, 20]. These commands to new life now were given from the vantage point of resurrected, continued life. When we hear that kind of command, it is chiefly an encouragement to enjoy and use life here and now before death. It must be for those who have truly lived that the recorder of Revelation has said, “Blessed are those who die in the Lord. Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.”

Consider the comment in the gospel of John, that Jesus, on that night before he was betrayed, before his crucifixion and resurrection, while he vividly lived in the flesh, “knowing that he had come from God and was going to God --- girded himself with a towel -- and began washing his disciples’ feet” teaching them the satisfaction of living service. [John 13: 1-11.]

And so, to you, I say, “A joyous resurrection.” “Christ is risen unto you! He is risen indeed!”

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, April 10, 1966.

Also at Kalahikiola Church, April 6, 1969.

And at Waioli Hui’ia Church, April 2, 1972.