“On Immortality”
A sermon by Sid Burgess for Edgewood PC, Birmingham, AL
June 28, 2009 (Proper 8, 13th Sunday in Ordinary time)
Texts: 2nd Samuel 1:1,17-27, Psalm 130, Mark 5.21-43
Reading biography is one of my favorite pastimes. Over the years I’ve read biographies of a wide range of historical figures. From the Founding Fathers to Old Hickory and Honest Abe; from Robert E. Lee to U.S. Grant; from Teddy Roosevelt to Eleanor and Franklin; from Truman and Eisenhower to Kennedy and Johnson; and, from Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King. I have found these biographies of famous Americans all have one thing in common. Though the subjects differ in time and temperament, as well as in loyalties and values . . . . Though some were born with silver spoons and others with no spoon of their own . . . . Though some are Democrats and others, Republicans, these biographies share one common characteristic. In the end, the hero dies. Happens every single time! As King David observes upon news of King Saul’s demise and Jonathon’s death, “How the mighty have fallen!”
King Saul, Israel’s first king, helped the 12 Hebrew tribes unite, and begin “the difficult journey from a tribal confederation to a genuine nation-state.” Son Jonathon, Saul’s heir, gallantly steps aside to make way for his beloved friend David to succeed his father. Short biographies, to be sure, but, once again, the ending remains the same. And it is not just the mighty who fall. “All flesh is grass,” says the prophet Isaiah. “The grass withers, the flower fades . . . . All people are grass” (see Isaiah 40. 6,7 KJV).
Turns out, when our biographies are written, brief obituaries they may be, the ending will be no different. “Our years are soon gone,” writes the psalmist (90), “and we fly away”(v. 10). One of God’s gifts to us mortals is that we don’t have to live for ever.
Oh, but Mr. Preacher, I beg to differ! Aren’t you overlooking the sacred promise of the Christian faith? “Those who believe in me,” Jesus says, “even though they die, will live” (John 11.25). And there is more: “everyone who lives and believes in me will never die”(v.26).
The phrase “life everlasting” rolls so easily off Christian tongues that we rarely give it much serious thought. But others have pondered the meaning of this most basic Christian claim, including the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann. When I was on study leave at the seminary last spring the professors recommended Moltmann’s insightful little book, IN THE END--THE BEGINNING. Sub-title: “The Life of Hope.”
Moltmann’s own biography is fascinating. At the age of 17 he and his school buddies were drafted into Hitler’s German army. During the last week of July, 1943, they were manning an anti-aircraft gun in their hometown of Hamburg. Moltmann picks up the story:
Night after night, about a thousand Royal Air Force bombers appeared over the city, and with explosive and incendiary bombs kindled a storm of fire . . .which burnt everything living and reduced every home to rubble. During those nights and in that fire 40,000 people died. (Our battery) was completely wiped out in a hailstorm of bombs. But for some incomprehensible reason, the bomb which blew to pieces the school friend who stood beside me at the firing platform left me unscathed. I found myself in the water, clinging to a plank of wood, and was saved.1
Moltmann goes on to tell of his capture by the British army, and his three years spent in a Scottish prisoner of war camp. Early on an army chaplain gave him a Bible. Through these Holy Scriptures, God spoke to a lonely boy from a disgraced and broken nation. The gift of a Bible--and the kindness that Scottish miners and English neighbors showed German prisoners of war--changed his life. During his incarceration Moltmann became a Christian and decided to study theology. He would become the most influential Protestant theologian of the latter part of the 20th century.
Who better to ask the ultimate question of human existence? What happens when the mighty fall? What happens when the humble slip away? What happens when we die?
For a brief answer, Moltmann offers this insight: “Death is the limit of our lives but--remember, that is always the biggest word in faith . . . . “Death is the limit of our lives but it is not the limit of God’s relationship to us”(108).
That is the short answer, but German theologians are not known for short sentences or for short answers. And turns out Moltmann has about as many questions as we do. For example, on this issue of immortality, he wants to know, ‘Does that mean the immortality of the life I have lived thus far’--complete with all of my present-and-soon-to-come aches and pains, weaknesses and failures? If so, I should think one go ‘round in this old body is enough. Or, does the Christian claim mean the immortality of my unlived life. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” Jeremiah (1.5) hears God say. This concept is much like Greek philosophy’s immortality of the soul. Another German theologian, Dietrick Bonhoeffer, writes that for the soul, “death is the greatest feast day on the way to freedom!” This classical understanding separates body and soul, setting the spirit free at death to “fly away.”
Moltmann finds this answer unsatisfactory. Instead of ascribing immortality to some unknown substance, some “untouchable nucleus within us,” he contends that what is immortal--what will live forever-- is the relationship of the whole person to Holy God.
“It is not only we who experience God; God also ‘experiences’ us, and the ‘experience’ which God has with us remains existent in God, even when we die”(107).
Uh, oh! Does that mean God is going to remember all of my shortcomings and mistakes--forever and ever?
Not at all. “God’s memory is not a video of our lives, recorded in heaven and played through eternity. It is a compassionate, healing memory, which puts things right. “If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered.” Ps. 130.
So, the mighty and the meek will all someday fall. Our mortal existence will have an end but our relationship with God, begun in the here and now, continues for all eternity. Good news for the dearly departed. But what about us, the survivors? What about David, mourning the deaths of Saul and Jonathon? What about the father, Jairus, in our story from Mark, grieving the death of his daughter? What about the widows and the widowers among us? What about those grieving the loss of parents who died too young; and, those who are heartbroken because a child did not live to be old enough.
Motlmann quotes the poet Mascha Kale’ko, from her poem, “Momento.”
I am not afraid of my own death,
Only of the death of those near to me.
How can I live when they are no longer there?
Remember: with our own death we merely die,
but with the death of others we have to live. (109)
Sometimes this seems impossible. Our Presbyterian Church “Declaration of Faith” concedes, “Death often seems to prove that life is not worth living, that our best efforts and deepest affections go for nothing.”
Debbi Feagin, in her own insightful sermon on the story of David mourning the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, writes:
We may remember that our own Christian faith is based on a horrible tragedy, the gruesome crucifixion of the One who many thought would be king, the devastating loss of a hoped-for worldly victory. But God is always available to us in our grieving and is able to turn even the most hideous of losses into resurrection and new life. On this we can depend.
“O Israel, hope in the LORD! [sings the psalmist (130)] For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with God is great power to redeem.” We get a brief glimpse of this divine power in the Gospel story when Jesus heals the hemorrhaging woman and raises Jairus’ daughter. We can see the “wonder working” power of the Lord in this story, and in every hospital and clinic in this city, and around the world, in the miracles of modern medicine, all inspired by the Great Physician. Surely, the reign of God has come. But just as surely, when we see all of the suffering in the world, in our own communities, even in our own families, we know the reign of God is yet to come.
Our Presbyterian Church “Declaration of Faith” confidently proclaims the following:
We do not yet see the end of cruelty and suffering
in the world, the church, or our own lives.
But we see Jesus as Lord.
As he stands at the center of our history,
we are confident he will stand at its end.
He will judge all people and all nations.
Evil will be condemned
and rooted out of God’s good creation.
There will be no more tears or pain.
All things will be made new.
The fellowship of human beings with God and with each other
will be perfected.
Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honor
and power and might
be to our God forever and ever. Amen.
1 Moltmann, Jurgen, IN THE END--THE BEGINNING, The Life of Hope, translated by Margaret Kohl, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004.