Life Against Death

Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45

“What do you think really happened to Jesus in his tomb?  I mean (I know you don’t know but guess)what do you think?”

“Oh I don’t know,” he said.

I growled.  “That’s your first response.  What’s your second?”

So Joe and I sat across from the desk we share and got into a discussion about resurrection as I was beginning to compose my Easter sermon.  I had no idea back then in 2012 that it was going to change me.  For one thing, it was nothing new, my asking this question. I’d been posing it for no fewer than forty years, intrigued since at least seminary with the notion of what it means to live the resurrection.

In the course of our conversation I pulled off the shelf a book I’d had since 1970, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death.  Brown was a literary Freudian.  The final chapter in that book is entitled “The Resurrection of the Body.”  Here is a snippet of Brown’s argument that I shared:

The time has come to ask Christian theologians…what they mean by the resurrection of the body and by eternal life.  Is this a promise of immortality of life after death? In other words, is the psychological premise of [Christianity] the impossibility of reconciling life and death either in “this” world or the “next,” so that flight from death—with all its morbid consequences—is our eternal fate in “this world” and “the next”?  For…that perfect body, promised by Christian[s]… is a body reconciled with death.

In the last analysis [Christianity] must either accept death as part of life or abandon the body.[1]

So we talked on, Joe and I, about the acceptance of mortality, and about how Jesus embraced the body and the body’s inevitable fate, death.  We chewed on the notion of how resurrection is impossible outside the body, and thus of how the body is central to any discussion of resurrection, while it can easily be tossed aside if immortality of the soul, for example, supplants it.  That happened when Christianity exchanged its twin foundational doctrines of incarnation and resurrection for a pervasive suspicion of the human body and a campaign to classify anything material as inferior to anything “spiritual.”

I grabbed another book, one that I love.  It’s C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in his Chronicles of Narnia.  I flipped to that passage where Aslan, the great lion, willingly goes to the Great Stone Table to let himself be sacrificed in place of pitiful Edmund, who’s run afoul of the White Witch.  It’s much too long a passage to read to you, or even to sum up.  Suffice it to say that the little Pevensy girls stand in the shadows watching a jeering, mocking, cursing crowd of fiends and brutes cruelly shave, muzzle, and finally bind the great cat to his death on the cold stone slab. 

Lucy and Susan manage in the darkness to remove the muzzle from the dead lion, and sob and cry until at last they notice that little mice have appeared. The mice, perhaps hundreds, have come in the darkness just before the sun has risen and are gnawing through the ropes binding Aslan’s corpse.

A great crack then breaks the stone table in two from top to bottom.  The frightened girls, who could not bear to look any longer at the horrible scene, turn and, seeing no Aslan, imagine that something awful has happened to his body.  One asks a question and they hear a voice behind them.  “Yes!”  There shining in the sunrise is Aslan himself. No, not a ghost, but fully alive, even with his mane grown back.  He tells the girls to catch him if they can, and the three run, romp, laugh, and play until girls and lion lie panting in the sun, not the least tired or hungry or thirsty. [2]

I was in tears.  I put the book down.  “Joe,” I said in awhile, “I want to live like that.  I want the rest of my life to be nothing but resurrection.  I want to taste it, feel it, love it until—until I die.”

            I

We are at the beginning of Holy Week when we get to follow that dolorous way of the cross, watching another rabble mock and scourge and spit upon and string up the Son of Man.  So we’re not quite ready entirely to ponder the resurrection just yet, are we? Instead, let's look at two stories. One is a vision, Ezekiel’s celebrated vision of the valley of dry bones. 

"Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost..."

A voice says that they are the whole house of Israel, as good as dead, dismembered, bleached dry, useless.  But the vision of new life unwinds. Bones rattle together.  Muscle and sinew and skin cover them.  Then the ruah, the wind, the spirit enters them and becomes their breath.  It is a redoing of creation.  The spirit that moved over the face of the deep when there was nothing but a watery darkness now moves into the slain and brings them to life.  What does it mean? 

Then another story, even weirder than the vision because it purports to be factual.  Jesus gets word that Lazarus, a man whom he loves, is ill.  Instead of rushing straightway to Bethany, Jesus delays.  By the time he arrives, Lazarus has died and has been buried for four days.  Jesus is deeply moved, weeps even.  They take him to the tomb.  He prays.  He calls.  “Lazarus, come out!”  And the man whom he loves comes out not as a corpse, but alive, still wrapped in the grave-bonds.  “Unbind him,” commands Jesus. “Let him go.”  What does it mean?

Ezekiel tells us the meaning of his vision.  What happened in the valley of dry bones is what Yahweh will do to Israel.  They say that they are no better than bones, their hope clean gone, their future cut off completely.  Yahweh will breathe the Spirit into them, bring them home to their own soil.  And they will know who has recreated them.

And the meaning of the raising of Lazarus?  In John’s narrative it is the last straw for the authorities, the overwhelming impetus for putting Jesus to death.  In a larger sense, one cannot read the story without hearing overtones of the story which is yet to come, a story of a tomb sealed with the customary stone, a dead man inside covered in grave-clothes down to a napkin over his head, a voice shaking the world like thunder coming from heaven. 

Henry Ossawa Tanner, "Resurrection of Lazarus," 1896

What does it mean?  You get to figure it out.  But I think I can give you a hint.  There is only one thing deeper than death, and that is the power of pure love.  To put it in C. S. Lewis’s metaphor, it is the Deep Magic. Magic deeper than death decreed before the world began that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and death would start reversing itself.  As Jesus says before his own death, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” 

            II

So all of these stories, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the “Valley of Dry Bones,” the “Raising of Lazarus” are like so many sparks emanating from a single bonfire burning at the heart of human experience.  They all get at the truth differently, but the truth they get at is a truth about embracing mortality.  It is the  Truth himself who oddly says, “If you care about saving your life, you will lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake, you will find it.”   Every instinct in us wants to save our lives, beginning with our bodies and spreading out to everything material that props them up.  We love our things, our systems, our habits, our idols, our money, our pedigrees, all that stuff.  And, ironically, not always but often, much of that stuff comes between ourselves and our plain old bodies, our natural naked vulnerability.  We have a hard time even believing that we would ever be safe, let alone whole, if we once stopped worrying about it all.  We’ll make a thousand excuses to hold on to what we’ve got.  We’ll do our best to fend off change, mistaking change as life-threatening.  And the irony is that death is defanged the moment we begin to embrace the inevitability of death.  That’s not the moment when we know we are on our way out of this life, but the moment when we can behold our own bodies and love them the way God loves them.  St. Bernard of Clairvaux once said that the highest form of love was not the love of God for God’s sake, but the love of self for God’s sake.

That’s where new life is born.  And it does not stop where it starts. When we begin to love our bodies, our senses, without which the knowledge of God is impossible, we begin loving the things and people around us as we love ourselves.  Start practicing that kind of love and you’ll find that it’s a lot more fun than arguing, fussing, and fighting.  Begin loving profligately rather than measuring love out cautiously and you’ll find yourself laughing more than controlling.  Gradually shed your fixations and get playful and you’ll see how right Jesus was when he said that unless you become as a little child, you’ll just miss the boat to the kingdom.

III

Here’s the secret, and it is a pretty well kept one.  There is a difference between making a pact with death and embracing death.  On the one hand, making a pact with death is to resign oneself to the ways of death, most of which are pretty good at masking as life-sustaining, like that list of things we desperately want to cling to.  On the other hand, embracing death is facing into the wind, stepping out into space trusting that there’s a Love strong enough to hold us close and never let us go. 

You can’t be the Body of Christ without embracing death.  You can’t be the Body of Christ and opt out of facing the cross.  And that means more than persevering through suffering, though that might be in the cards.  It means affirming the physical, your own bodily life.  It means you let go of the fantasy that life is in the past.

What this troubled world needs is a community that doesn’t just recite a creed about the resurrection, but one willing to risk living the resurrection.  Show them by your life how to have a little more, or a lot more, Eros, and less strife. Form or reform communities where dreamers, mystics, poets, singers, artists, political idealists, social workers, healers, psychoanalysts, theologians, philosophers, writers say no to dead polemics and yes to reimagining a world living with its bodily senses wide open.[3]  Teach others how to live soulful lives the way you tend to your garden and the way you prepare and serve fabulous meals.  Look for opportunities to love and serve those hard to serve and harder to love.  And, in Norman Brown’s words, a little consciousness might help: “a little more self-knowledge, humility, humanity, and Eros.”[4]

And every time you stand on a gray day before some apparently dead end, listen carefully for a Voice that will shake your life like thunder.  It’s the old incantation fixed from all eternity by him whose Body is one with yours:  “I am resurrection.” 

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017

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[1] Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death:  The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History  (Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 1959), pp. 308-9. Alterations mine.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, vol. 2 in The Chronicles of Narnia (New York:  HarperCollins (Harper Trophy), 1950, 1978), pp. 150-164.

[3] Brown, p. 322.

[4] Ibid.

Facing Death

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 6, 2010

Text: Luke 7:11-17

Somebody asked me one time why the Church had nothing much to say about death. “I thought we did,” I answered.

“Only around Easter and at funerals. Did you ever hear a sermon about death any other time? And even then,” he went on, “all I hear is about resurrection taking the sting out of death. It surely hasn’t done that for me.” He, like most of us, had struggled through untimely deaths, difficult deaths.

“Well, I have preached about death at other times,” I said a tad defensively. And today is one of those other times.

But, I have to admit, preaching about death is itself a strange concept. What is the point? Certainly not to talk people out of death. We might assume that people are scared of dying, and to be sure some are. But many people of faith and some of no faith at all have long since determined that death is nothing to be afraid of, at least not our own death. We are afraid of other things surrounding death: long, difficult illnesses that drain our resources and leave us limp; not having enough money to afford a decent funeral; or going through the death of those we love the most. Ah! That is what scares us to death! Pondering the possibility—and sometimes staring in the face the reality—that there is nothing we can do to stop somebody we love and care about from dying. No matter how we deal with our own mortality, the truth is that saying goodbye, turning loose, letting go of someone else to die is the universal human dilemma.

The widow of Nain undoubtedly felt that, too. She had already gone through the death of a husband. When we meet her in Luke’s gospel, she is surrounded by a large crowd of mourners, weeping as she carries to the grave her only son and therefore her only means of support. Luke is silent on what kind of death he died—accident? illness? murder?—and leaves us to wonder what his mother might have gone through prior to his death. This incident in the life of Jesus closely parallels the one you heard earlier this morning from the life of Elijah (I Kings 17:10, 17-24). That widow, too, had a son who died. We do get more of a glimpse of her. Grief-stricken, she lashes out at Elijah, accusing the prophet of being out to get her, to bring to mind her sin, and to punish her by causing her son’s death. In one sentence we pick up the unmistakable scent of guilt, fear, and a God-blaming anger that death not infrequently kicks up. “What have I done wrong? What might I have done that I didn’t do which would have prevented this death? If God were any god worth salt, things like this wouldn’t happen. Maybe the widow of Nain felt some or all of those things. Surely she would not have been the only one. They are all a part of grief.

But neither the focus of the Elijah story nor that of the Jesus story is grief, or even the circumstances surrounding death. Both are stories told to proclaim the greatness of God. The first makes the point that the prophet Elijah is, in the woman’s words, “a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.” The second story not only makes the point that, as the people say, “A great prophet has arisen among us,” but that Jesus has the power not only to heal but also to resuscitate. Ultimately, of course, Luke’s proclamation will be that he has the power over death itself.

So certainly on one level, the point of preaching about death is to say something about how God is greater than death, and how in fact God holds death, like life, in God’s own hand. But before we get there, we need to deal with a couple of other things.

First, death, whether we like it or not, is simply built into the fabric of creation. We could not have life without it, literally. Stars die, plants die, animals die. And we are animals. We sometimes behave as if death is somehow wrong. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that most of the practice of modern medicine is about keeping death from happening, or at least keeping it at bay as long as possible. Nor is it hard to see that the motivating factor behind the vast industry having to do with diet and exercise is about lengthening life and keeping old age and death as far away as possible. I am not arguing that either effort is necessarily misplaced, but rather that our own built-in aversion to death can sweep us into an unconscious denial of its reality and certainly an ignorance of its goodness. What fuels our struggle to work out our neuroses is a failure fully to embrace our bodies, and thus to affirm our mortality, which means seeing death as a friend. Much of our art, a great deal of our literature, and an overwhelming amount of our religion sees death as nothing of the kind. Death—physical death—is seen to be, as the widow of Zarephath said, a punishment for ours or somebody’s sin, and thus the work of the great Death-dealer, the dark power in the universe who is God’s rival. But death is not God’s rival—not if you see God as the all-embracing Creator who knows best how to make a world and who has made it with a polarity of life and death running right through the middle of it.

But, somebody will argue, Christian religion explicitly calls death an enemy. St. Paul said it himself: “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Let’s put aside for a moment the question of whether in this instance Paul did a favor to us, to God, and to the gospel of Jesus by putting it that way. Let’s instead see what sense we can make of that. The “death” that is an enemy is not just the physical act of dying, but the possibility—the real possibility—of being closed to the renewing, life-giving power of God’s spirit. In other words, the death that is the enemy is more than—one might even say different from—physical death. It is critical to understand this. What seems like death is very often not death, and what seems like life is not truly life. Letting go, saying goodbye, turning loose of some old habit or soul-deforming behavior feels like death, or a surefire way to die. Instead, we discover (often after the fact) that it was what led to a new kind and quality, and sometime quantity, of life. Things that frequently feel good, such as winning, taking, achieving, acquiring, amassing, controlling, might as well wear the death mask, for death can be what lies behind them each and all.

Still, we have inherited an elaborate mythology that physical death exists in human experience only because something is radically wrong in creation—something that we call sin. In all honesty I have to say that such a notion is tragically wrong. We all must die, and, as Ecclesiastes says, there is a time to die. And it has nothing necessarily to do with how much or what we believe, or how good we are, or how faithful we are. We are simply mortal, and there is no getting around that. It is the other death, the metaphorical death, the death of the spirit that saps us of life and promise and vibrancy.

There is something else about death that we must get. All physical deaths are not equal. They are unequal in tragedy, unequal in effect, unequal in proportion. This week’s Washington Post carried photos of a young body killed in a shoot-out, mourned by scores of young people: a senseless death with little redeeming value. How different from the death of an aged person who, having finished a long course of this life, quietly passes from this world. Contrast the death of little Oscar from violence, whose funeral drew hundreds to this church last fall, with the death of civil rights activist Dorothy Height at the age of 98, whose funeral drew hundreds to Washington National Cathedral in April. We do not respond to these deaths with the same thoughts and the same emotional intensity.

There emerges from the story of the raising of the man in Nain a portrait of Jesus that informs the way we deal with death. We see him taking notice of the death that had occurred. We observe him moved with compassion for the widow-mother. We see him violating custom and ritual law by actually touching the coffin. We hear his utterance, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” We see the power of this simple command. The reason Luke gives us this picture is clear. It is to let his readers and hearers understand the unexcelled power of the Spirit at work in Jesus, to inspire faith in him as the risen and ascended Lord. But Luke’s purpose also is to move us to fashion our lives, our values, our behavior after the model of our Lord. Luke believed in the power of the Church to heal as Jesus healed. He also believed in the power of the Church to approach death with the same calm majesty that Jesus exhibited. In his second volume, the Book of Acts, Luke tells us a story in which Peter raises Tabitha (Acts 9:36-43), carrying on the work of Jesus. It is no secret that the Church has been slow to accept its healing ministry during most of its two millennia of life. And, though there have been exceptions here and there, the Church has shown little sign of a vocation to raise the dead. (Most of us have no thought of trying that.) But we can follow Jesus’ example of discerning the import of death, as he obviously did in Nain. And we can take our cue from him in stopping what we are doing and extending compassion to those who are grief-sick and sorrow-worn. And we can utter words of life, comfort, power in situations where death has been particularly cruel or gratuitous or tragic. We can, in our struggle for human dignity and freedom for all persons, bring the full weight of our witness to a culture that often condones official killing, that colludes with the forces of death often masquerading as forces of life but which in fact corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.

Ironically, we and our efforts are not of much use in dealing with death if we are busy denying it. Forty years ago, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross taught many of us that dying was nothing of which to be ashamed and that it was possible to do it with dignity and peace. If our faith teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:39) That is a faith which, far from sugaring over the complexity of death, places it squarely in the hands of God, whom not only do we have to thank for creating our bodies that die, but whom we have to praise for redeeming death so that, even at its worst and most threatening, it only tosses us closer to the Love that will not let us go.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2010