Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15, 23, 24, Mark 5.21-43
Queen Camel 'Together at Ten', Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 28 June 2015
‘God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living,’ wrote Solomon in the book of Wisdom. ‘For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them.’
This is one of the boldest and most radical passages in all scripture. And if it is true, we need to talk about it.
If God did not make death: we need to talk about it.
For over the centuries we have blamed God when people have tragically died; and we have involved God in our projects of death. We have enlisted God onto our side in wartime to justify the slaughter of enemies; and when our own people have been killed we have drawn on the language of sacrifice to sanctify their loss. If God did not make death: then why have we done these things? [2]
If God does not delight in the death of the living: we need to talk about it.
For we have grown accustomed to using the language of accusation to explain away people’s misfortunes. We have blamed homosexuality as a cause for everything from autism to tornadoes; we have used the language of judgement in which God is the force behind the disasters befalling the feckless and the wicked. If God does not delight in the death of the living: then why have we used God in this way? [3]
If the generative forces of the world are wholesome: we need to talk about it.
For we have separated ourselves from nature, our advanced industrial societies have regarded nature as something to be overcome and exploited to meet our needs, rather than to be worked with in partnership. We have come to see the forces of nature as something to be protected and insulated from and insured against. If the generative forces of the world are wholesome: then why have we made them our enemy? [4]
We need to talk about death - because we are a society of death-deniers. Our culture is death-phobic. Our instinct is to deny the reality of death, and to try to resist the inevitability of our mortality.
There is our consumer denial; there is our funeral denial; there is our nuclear denial; and there is our climate change denial.
We see our consumer denial in the rows and rows of supermarket shelves full of products designed to keep us fit and young: anti-wrinkle creams, scrubs and exfoliators, high-energy drinks, vitamin supplements - designed to counteract our sense of ageing and decay.
We see our funeral denial in the way we organise our funeral industry to distance us from the reality of the physical demise of our loved one, the way that dead bodies are treated almost as toxic and to be avoided, to be got rid of quickly so we do our mourning without them. Our culture unhealthily resists and denies our mortality. [5]
Since the end of the Cold War our fear of nuclear annihilation has been less spoken about - yet deep in our collective psyche the possibility of mutually assured destruction persists; disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima have kept the fear of radiation from nuclear power alive; yet we bury these fears in nuclear denial and persevere in developing programmes of nuclear power and weaponry. [6]
And despite the overwhelming scientific opinion on climate change, that the Earth's climate system is unequivocally warming, due to human activities like deforestation and burning fossil fuels, despite clear changes in weather patterns, and the increase of extreme weather events across the world, perhaps because of the challenge which climate change poses to our established ways of life, many persist in climate change denial. [7]
Yet if God did not make death, and does not delight in the death of the living; if God created all things so that they might exist; if the generative forces of the world truly are wholesome, with no destructive poison in them, and if the dominion of Hades is not on earth - then we must talk about these things.
We must return to those scriptures which we have misread or misrepresented or simply ignored, to refresh our understandings and remedy our denials.
We might go way back to the story of Abraham and Isaac to realise that God put an end to human sacrifice very early on in human history. This God who did not make death, and does not delight in the death of the living, stayed Abraham’s hand at the altar and saved his son from sacrifice. This God who created all things so that they might exist, said through the prophet Hosea, ‘For I desire mercy, not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings’. When you rail against the so-called 'sacrificial' loss of countless innocents in warfare and conflicts across the world, it is the anger of God, God’s passion for life, which is rising inside you. [8]
We might go to the gospel story of Lazarus and that unique picture of Jesus at the graveside - weeping at the loss of his friend, to confirm the view that God does not delight in the death of the living. For watching Jesus there in tears the onlookers said, ‘See how he loved him.’ When you weep at the loss of a loved one, Jesus weeps with you. When you stand before a stone memorial to remember the dead, Jesus stands there with you, for he understands your sadness. [9]
We might go to Genesis of course, and the innocent beauty of the Garden of Eden, to celebrate the truth that the generative forces of the world are wholesome; but acknowledging our place in a fallen world maybe we should also return to the narrative of the Book of Job, which is a long and serious discussion around the suffering of innocent people, a meditation on the possible powerlessness of God to alleviate the pain of the world; in which God, having listened to the laments of the righteous Job, describes the stars and heavens singing because of the order God has brought to creation, talks about creatures finding benefit in the natural cycles of life that God has established for them, suggests that God frees creatures and gives them a place on earth for them to value and enjoy. [10]
Now some thoughtful people say that religion is a form of death-denial; that its tendency to divide the fallen, physical world, from the eternally good spiritual world, is a defence mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, a survival mechanism in a deadly world. But Solomon turns this inside-out when he writes, ‘The dominion of Hades is not on earth’; suggesting that in God’s view the world is good, our fulfilment is to be found here, not - or not only - in some promised afterlife. [11]
But, you might be thinking, ‘hell on earth’ does well describe what life seems like for those who are suffering from a chronic illness or facing the death of a child, it describes what whole societies are going through in lands troubled by economic chaos and political unrest.
If there is no ‘hell on earth’, then why does it hurt so much that a loved one has died, and that there is so much suffering in the world? Solomon isn’t avoiding these questions, he’s addressing them head on. He’s inviting us to look at death in a whole new way. He is doing what other biblical writers do: revealing this astonishing truth - that death does not figure in the ways of God. [12]
The prophet Isaiah foretold it. ‘On this mountain’, he writes, 'God will destroy the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations.’ [13]
What is it that hangs like a heavy storm cloud over the peoples of the earth, which God will remove? It is death. ’He will swallow up death forever,’ Isaiah says. Death does not figure in the ways of God; he removes it from above us. We do not need to live under its oppressive weight, its threat, its curse. Our human spirit need not be defeated by the threat of doomsday destruction, the spectre of that exhausted, chaotic world we avoid by nuclear and climate change denial. With eyes wide open to all of this, we see that in God there is another way, a way of life.
In today’s gospel reading we saw Jesus saving Jairus’ daughter from dying; and saving the haemorrhaging woman from a kind of living death she had been enduring for twelve years: a death involving poverty, constant bleeding, a worsening condition. ‘Get up!’ he told the girl; ‘Go in peace, and be healed,’ he told the woman.
This is the same Jesus who, having drawn his dead friend Lazarus out from his reopened tomb, said: ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’ In Christ, no-one is bound by death. This is the same Jesus whose generative forces of life break forth from the empty tomb discovered by Mary Magdalene and the disciples. In Christ, the power of death is broken.
However astonishing it seems to us, the evidence of scripture is that in God, we learn not to deny death, but to face its reality, and see its limitations; in Jesus, we embrace the power to live unbound by death.
Learning to live unbound by death is a lifetime’s work. For we are so bound by a culture which is weighed down by death, the fear of death, the use of death as threat, the endless cycle of death through violent retaliation, it is hard to be unbound, and let go from such powerful forces.
Yet at that moment when Mary Magdalene discovered an empty tomb, our world began to learn to live unbound by death, and the influence of the resurrected Christ is now everywhere to see.
The German theologian Dorothee Sölle said that ‘Death is what takes place within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing or stimulus but as threat, danger, competition. It is not the final departure we think of when we speak of death; it is that purposeless, empty existence devoid of genuine human relationships and filled with silence, anxiety and loneliness.’ [14]
Learning to live unbound by death means being encouraged that in Christ, we can live purposeful lives, in a deep relationship of love with him which equips us to develop flourishing relationships with others; full, unbounded, lives. Lives in tangent with the natural cycles of nature in which we share.
As you know, Pope Francis last week published an encyclical [15] in which he reminds us of the words of Saint Francis of Assisi, that the earth, our common home, ’is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us…. [a] sister [who] now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.’
The Pope wrote: ‘For human beings… to destroy the biological diversity … by causing changes in its climate …; to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life – these are sins.’
He calls for a ‘global ecological conversion’, following the example of St Francis of Assisi ‘of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically. ... He shows us just how inseparable is the bond between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace’.
‘All is not lost,’ writes Pope Francis. ‘Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start, despite their mental and social conditioning. We are able to take an honest look at ourselves, to acknowledge our deep dissatisfaction, and to embark on new paths to authentic freedom. No system can completely suppress our openness to what is good, true and beautiful, or our God-given ability to respond to his grace at work deep in our hearts. I appeal to everyone throughout the world not to forget this dignity which is ours. No one has the right to take it from us.’
‘God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them.’
It is possible for us to live unbound by death. It may change our world around completely, to try. But that is our mission, and that is our joy.
Notes
[1] This sermon draws on from that preached as There is no death, in Christ, in Devon on All Saints’ Day 2012.
[2] See S. Mark Heim's Saved from Sacrifice, A Theology of the Cross, and my my review of the book here.
[3] Evan McMurry, 6 most absurd things the Christian right has blamed on gays, Salon, April 11, 2014.
[4] See Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, for a fierce critique and inspiring appraisal of what is possible in our relationship with the climate and the earth.
[5] Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematorium, is an eye-opening memoir of mortuary work and an impassioned argument against the way that ‘the public [are] being cheated out of [death] by the funeral industry… The realistic interaction with death and the chance to face our own mortality.’ (p.114). She has founded The Order of the Good Death, ’a group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality’... ‘The Order is about making death a part of your life,’ she says.
[6] David Ropeik, The Rise of Nuclear Fear - How We Learned to Fear the Radiation, Scientific American Guest Blog, June 15, 2012.
[7] See Klein, This Changes Everything, for extensive coverage of climate change denial, its perpetrators and its consequences.
[8] Genesis 22.2-8, Hosea 6.6.
[9] John 11.
[10] See my sermon from last week, On a Boat with Jesus - on the rocks with God, for more on this.
[11] See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize and widely regarded as one of the twentieth-century’s great works.
[12] I am grateful to Luis Rodriguez, Hanford Sermons, for his Pentecost 5 sermon, God Did Not Make Death, which influenced this section of my sermon.
[13] Isaiah 25.6-9.
[14] Dorothee Sölle, The Mystery of Death. Translated by Nancy Lukens-Rumscheidt and Martin Lukens-Rumscheidt, p. 121. Quoted in Virginia Sloyan, A Sourcebook about Christian Death, p.49.
[15] Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis. On Care for our Common Home.
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