On Living and Dying

Preached in Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge - 1st November 2009. Isaiah 25 v6-9, Revelation 21 v1-6a and John 11 v32-44

Yesterday was Halloween. As perhaps you all know. But for those of you who have been residing in a cave for the past few years, as the North American vigour for celebrating all things ghostly and ghoulish has infiltrated our psyche, Halloween involves dressing up as nightmarish creatures, carving images into large vegetables, and demanding sweets from strangers. Or so it seems.

Because beneath all the fun and frivolity lies a more serious side to this time of the year. In our clinical culture, so far removed from death and dying – to the extent that death can almost be seen as the last great taboo, Halloween gives us the opportunity to bring the idea of death, with its universal reach and finality, into the public domain. Albeit in a playful manner, Halloween gives us a chance to examine our feelings about death.

Seeing the body of someone who has died cannot help but have a profound effect on you. The first time I saw such a thing was in the clean, clinical conditions of the funeral directors, where the deceased are prepared, preserved and dressed before being placed in the coffin, often not to be seen by the family at all. While in some way maintaining the mystique of death and salvation, this whole process is western Christendom at its most paranoid. Associating and engaging with the death of a friend or loved one means exposing ourselves to our own mortality, whereas sheltering ourselves from the situation helps maintain that subconscious hope of immortality.

I never saw the body of my grandfather. I saw him in the hospital, raging, fighting against the decay of his elderly frame that was to overcome him. I saw him curse my father for not letting him go home, for leaving him in the hospital where they were ‘killing him’. I saw him slumped in resignation when the realisation that he was going to die kicked in. But I never saw him at peace. Reason tells me that he was; logic dictates that he did indeed die and his body was in the coffin that we sent off in the proper fashion, but the glory of God, evident at the funeral in all the talk of resurrection and new life, was veiled behind a confused outpouring of grief.

The second time I saw the body of someone who had died was in a very different context. The church where I worked in London had a very large African-Caribbean contingent, and when a young man from a family that hailed from Trinidad passed away, there was, as expected, a great outpouring of grief. In the days leading up to the funeral I paid a visit to the family. They were to be found, grieving, obviously, but carrying on with their lives with Dennis very much in the midst of them. His body was in an open casket in the living room, dressed in a sharp suit and smart, shiny shoes. His face was as I remembered him in life – gentle and passive, but he lacked that spark and twinkle that had been able to put even the most on-edge at ease. Dennis was most definitely dead. Dressing up the dead and bringing them home may sometimes be seen as personifying the body, a form of denial where we try to keep the dead alive by living our lives around them – but what I saw was the opposite of that.

Dennis’ family spent the days leading up the funeral living with a constant reminder of their mortality, a constant reminder of the fragility of life. Their little flat, on a housing estate in central London, became, for those few days, the tomb of Lazarus. His body may not have been decaying, as the preservation skills of the funeral directors saw to that, but Dennis’ family were waiting for the day of the funeral to arrive, and for them to hear the voice of Jesus cry out to his soul, ‘Dennis, come out’ – when, to the glory of God, he who was dead in their midst has been raised up to new life in Christ.

And so with that in mind, and celebrating Dennis’ renewal and rebirth among the saints and angels, the party after the service was something to behold. The family had gone to great lengths to prepare copious amounts of curried goat (really something to experience at some point), and rum was consumed late into the evening on the lawn of the vicarage garden. It did not feel wrong to be celebrating, or contrived, or disrespectful. In fact that day, Dennis’ family taught me something important.

It is in embracing death that we come to a greater understanding of what it is to be alive.

I touched on the story of Lazarus earlier, but it was in this passage that we heard today that we see an example of Jesus engaging with death. In fact, more than engaging with it, Jesus confronts death, giving us the sure hope that death is far from the end of the story. That command, “Lazarus, come out!” becomes one of the basic proclamations of the church. It speaks to things that are dead and calls forth life. The church – as the body of Christ – shouts for life from out of the tomb, and Jesus is there to unbind our grave clothes and release us into new life.

Our passage from Revelation spoke of the renewal of everything as we know it, bringing about an end to death, mourning, crying and pain. We pray for the coming of that kingdom, but in the meantime, following Christ in his commission to glorify God here on earth, we as Christians can echo Jesus in his call to humankind, to ‘come out’ from under the shadow of death and to really live. It is in taking our heads out of the sand, removing the scales from our eyes, opening our eyes… take your pick of the plethora of metaphors that are out there… and acknowledging death, that we can begin the often slow, and never easy journey out of death’s grip.

All Saints Day is not a time to look back on the dead and think kind thoughts about them. It is a time to see in those who have come before as signs and sources of life. It is a time for the mute stones to echo with the summons to life. For it is when we back off from death, treating it with fear and suspicion that we bind ourselves up in its grip, fuelling our own fears and masking the glory of God with our human emotions.

It is in embracing death that we come to a greater understanding of what it is to be alive.