Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15, 23, 24, Mark 5.21-43
Eldroth, Keasden, Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 1 July 2018
‘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, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.’
This is a bold and radical passage of scripture. And if it is true, we need to talk about it.
Now, I know that most of us don’t like to talk about death at all. We are a society of death-deniers. Our culture is death-phobic. Our instinct is to deny the reality of death, to resist our mortality.
Whether through our reliance on anti-wrinkle creams, high-energy drinks, vitamin supplements - designed to counteract our sense of ageing and decay;
Whether through our practice of quickly giving over our loved ones to funeral directors and doing all our mourning without their physical presence; [1]
Whether through suppressing our fear of nuclear annihilation in the face of disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima and the dangerous posturing of hawkish presidents; [2] and persisting in denying climate change despite the overwhelming scientific opinion that human activity is unequivocally warming the Earth's climate system: [3]
… our instinct is to deny the reality of death, to resist our mortality.
The certainty of death is real; we must face it. The threat of death is powerful, and we are all affected by it. So how important it is that we do grasp the need to talk about these things. And as Christians, to grapple with the significance of the wisdom of Solomon before us today.
For if God did not make death: we need to talk about it.
For it’s God we often blame when people have tragically died; and it’s God we always enlist onto our side in wartime - on the one hand to justify the slaughter of enemies; and - on the other - to use sacrifice to sanctify the loss of our own people. If God did not make death: then why have we done these things? [4]
For way back in time, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, we learn that God is opposed to human sacrifice. This God stayed Abraham’s hand at the altar to save his son from sacrifice, and later said through the prophet Hosea, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings’. If you lament the loss of countless innocents in warfare and conflicts across the world, if in remembering the First World War you deplore all that carnage justified as human sacrifice, then it is the emotion of God, God’s passion for life, which is rising inside you. [5]
If God does not delight in the death of the living: we need to talk about it.
For we have been in the habit of explaining the misfortunes of those we judge as feckless and wicked by accusing them of bringing God’s judgement on themselves. If God does not delight in the death of the living: then why have we used God in this way? [6]
For there at the heart of the gospels is that unique picture of Jesus - weeping at the at the graveside of his friend Lazarus, to confirm the view that God does not delight in the death of the living. 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 memorial stone, Jesus stands there with you. [7]
If the generative forces of the world are wholesome: we need to talk about it.
For we have separated ourselves from nature, regarded our fellow creatures as things to be exploited to meet our needs, or to be protected against and insulated from and insured against. If the generative forces of the world are wholesome: then why have we made them our enemy? [8]
We can go all the way back to the beauty of the Garden of Eden, to so many of our wonderful Psalms, to celebrate the wholesomeness of the natural world. And we have been gifted the Book of Job, a long and serious discussion around the suffering of innocent people, on what looks like God’s powerlessness to alleviate the pain of the world. ‘Job’ culminates in a passage describing the stars and heavens singing because of the order God has brought to creation, painting a picture of creatures at peace in the natural cycles of life that God has established for them, celebrating how God frees all creatures to value and enjoy their place on earth. [9]
Now, what about this line Solomon writes, ‘The dominion of Hades is not on earth’? That ‘hell’ does not have the upper hand on earth?
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 ‘hell’ does not have the upper hand on earth, then why does it hurt so much that a loved one has died, or 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 affirming this astonishing truth - that death is not dominant in God’s world. [10]
This goes so much further than that defective religious message that we should put up with this painful physical world, and look forward to the eternally good spiritual future world. Solomon’s wisdom is that in God’s view this world we live in is good, that we can find our fulfilment here and now, no need to wait for the promised afterlife. [11] Even when it’s hurting hard, in this life, hell need not overcome us, for God invites us to choose life.
The prophet Isaiah once wrote, ‘[God] will swallow up death forever.’ [12] God is not dominated by death; no - just the opposite - God lifts from us its oppressive weight, its threat, its curse. Our human spirit need not be crushed by a sense of our own mortality, or haunted by the spectre of doomsday destruction. With eyes wide open to all of this, we see that in God there is another way, a way of life which starts now and continues into eternity.
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, drawing his dead friend Lazarus out from his reopened tomb, said: ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’ In Christ, no-one is bound by death. In Christ, the power of death is broken. At that very moment when Mary Magdalene discovered his empty tomb, our world began to learn to live unbound by death, and the influence of the resurrected Christ is now everywhere to see.
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.
This is a lifetime’s work. For we are so bound by a culture which is weighed down by the fear of death, the use of death as threat, the endless cycle of death through violent retaliation, it is hard to unbind ourselves from such powerful forces. But the power of life in Christ is greater.
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.’ [13]
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. [14]
It is possible for us to live unbound by death. It may completely change our view of the world, to try. But that is what God invites to do.
Notes
This sermon is revised from If God did not make death, we need to talk about it, preached at Queen Camel in 2015, and draws on There is no death, in Christ, preached in Devon on All Saints’ Day 2012.
[1] 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 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.
[2] David Ropeik, The Rise of Nuclear Fear - How We Learned to Fear the Radiation, Scientific American Guest Blog, June 15, 2012.
[3] See Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, for extensive coverage of climate change denial, its perpetrators and its consequences.
[4] See S. Mark Heim's Saved from Sacrifice, A Theology of the Cross, and my my review of the book here.
[5] Genesis 22.2-8, Hosea 6.6.
[6] See, eg, Evan McMurry, 6 most absurd things the Christian right has blamed on gays, Salon, April 11, 2014.
[7] John 11.
[8] 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.
[9] See my sermon from last week, On a Boat with Jesus - on the rocks with God, for more on this.
[10] 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.
[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] Isaiah 25.6-9.
[13] 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.
[14] Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis. On Care for our Common Home.
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