TO CONQUER DEATH, YOU
ONLY HAVE TO DIE
November 2006
for the Collect, publication for St. Thomas Episcopal Church,
Medina, WA
Twenty years ago this month, in my family’s first year in a rural Michigan town, my dad officiated at no fewer than five funerals. Ever since then, I’ve felt like November is the month when people die. Maybe it’s the changing weather. Maybe it’s the lessening daylight.
As a teenager, I didn’t know much about All Saints Day, but I knew a lot about Halloween. Some Christians are scared of Halloween because of its emphasis on the dark side of things: the grisly and phantasmagorical. But the day after Halloween is All Saints Day, when Christians deal with death in a different way.
In fact, death is central to life as a Christian. Yes, Christianity is about the birth of Christ and the resurrection of Christ. But those two events wouldn’t mean much without the death of Christ. We celebrate Good Friday because we know Easter is coming, and this is why I feel it’s OK for Christians to celebrate Halloween, too.
By becoming human, God chose to die: to live a fully human life that embraced all aspects of humanity. God chose to become powerless over death, and in so doing, God conquered its hold on us. Death is not an enemy, but a God-designed, vital component of what makes life so precious. As Paul wrote to the church in Corinth: “O death, where is thy sting?/ O grave, where is thy victory?”
Now, I don’t believe that God decides when people will die. Some people are comforted by the notion that a premature death is God’s doing, but this doesn’t comfort me at all. Death causes pain for those who are left behind, especially when that death is sudden or violent. When disease takes a loved one, this is a function of a chaotic universe. When people kill each other, this is not God’s doing; it is human sin.
We saw this played out a month ago when a man entered an Amish school and killed several girls. The quickness of the Amish people to forgive received a lot of media attention. Some people probably thought, “I could never forgive someone for killing my child.” Well, you can bet the Amish parents are having a hard time with it, too. But they have chosen to make forgiveness a spiritual practice: to say, “I forgive you,” even when it doesn’t feel like it yet … and even if it never does.
I think that’s the proper way to deal with death. When it happens to someone we love, we just keep living. And when it happens to us, we just submit to it. We don’t have all the answers, but we have faith that God does. We hold in our minds a vision of life beyond death. And in the meantime, we live life abundantly, as Jesus wanted us to.
In the 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus sings, “To conquer death, you only have to die.” This is a perspective that doesn’t receive much attention in our faith. Death comes to all of us, but it only comes once. I imagine that when I die, I’ll be terrified. But in an instant, on the other side, I’ll say, “Oh, was that all? That wasn’t so bad.”
After that, or beyond that, or through that, God is doing a new thing. God is making all things new. God is working in your life and in mine. And God is even working in death.