Why is there suffering? Why is there death? These are age-old questions. I remember once as a young boy running to my mother and father’s bedside in the early morning, probably after a nightmare, and saying, “Mommy, I don’t want to die.” And my mother replied, “Don’t worry, you’re not going to die”. It was a comforting answer, but a mistaken one to a real fear.

 

Do we fear death? Or do we fear moreover, how we are going to die. Is death so terrible that we are better off not thinking or talking about it? Is death such an undesirable part of existence that we are better off acting as if it were not real? Is death such an absolute end of all our thoughts and actions that we have nothing to fear? Is it possible to prepare for our death with the same attentiveness that our parents had in preparing for our birth? Can we wait for our death as a friend who wants to welcome us home?

 

Death is more like birth; it happens to everyone. It has no favorites. In itself it is not evil. It may be attended by evil circumstances, like killing of innocent victims, or the painful death of starvation. But death itself is not evil. It is not tragic. It may, to be sure, be accompanied by tragic circumstances when it comes prematurely to one too young to die. We then feel the overwhelming tragedy of it, but it is not death that is tragic, but the circumstances of it. Nor is it sad when you think of it as a universal experience.   Some of you know all to well that it is often attended by sadness too deep for words when people who have loved each other for years are separated by death.

 

A near and friendly God may give you comfort and help when you need it, but the God of the cosmos and the universe is not like yourself, brief in time and years; not like you subject to sin and evil and mistake, but everlastingly good and eternal, gives you a home and the security that only a home can give. The very fact that God is so far from you means that He/She is able to surround you and your life, and that you, your birth, your life, your death, are cradled in the reality of God, whom no one can completely comprehend, but in whom we put our trust.

 

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me – Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me…Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

 

Yet even with that blessed assurance, the questions still come – why me?

Why do bad things happen to good people? My God, my God, Why hast thou forsaken me? Why the suffering? This is not only our plight; it is Jesus’ as well. It’s the plight of a person who has been left high and dry by God; a God whom he trusted and loved. The words Jesus was screaming from the cross are found in Psalm 22,(although Jesus was not quoting scripture on the cross. He was speaking Aramaic, his native tongue, not Hebrew in which the Psalm was written – in other words, it had become apart of him). It goes on to say “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not, and in the night season also I take no rest.”

 

When we begin to voice questions like that we sometimes wonder whether God has gone, that life has been stripped bare, that the mystery and wonder of life have gone. The sacred has been swallowed up in the secular.

 

But Jesus is speaking to us now; speaking out of the depth of his own experience, out of his own suffering, and he is saying something like this:

 

“You are not going through anything that I didn’t go through before you. At the time I hung on the cross, everything blacked out. There wasn’t a ray of sun, not a single star, nothing but darkness. One of my friends betrayed me, one of them denied me, all of them forsook me, ran out on me. In the courtroom I looked for a familiar face, I listened for one familiar voice. No one stood up; no one spoke up. I held my tongue. I kept my patience. I didn’t lose my temper. I looked at the soldiers and I pitied them. I almost loved them. I could pray for them. I went all out to the poor man on my right side; he was afraid and I spoke to him. I was p-leased that somebody recognized me. 

 

And then it came over me. It came like a blanket of fog! I had not left a single tracer of my life behind me, not one written word, not a friend left. It was all wiped out. I thought I had lived for God, but God did not live for me.”

 

I had to go through that. You’ve had to go through that. Everyone goes through that. We will never be sure of the presence of God until we have known His absence. We will never know the wonder of light if we have never been in the dark. We will never know what love can mean unless we have been left out.

 

We wouldn’t be where we are right now if He had really forsaken us. We are his legacy to the world. We stumble and fall sometimes. We think we won’t make it, but we will. It won’t be easy, it won’t come out the way we thought it might. It didn’t for me. The Kingdom hasn’t come yet. It is still coming, all the time. God will never forsake us, not even if we forsake him. Don’t ever forget that.

 

Some closing questions: Are we preparing ourselves for our death, or are we ignoring death by keeping busy? Are we helping each other, or do we simply assume we are going to always be there for each other? Will our death give new life, new hope, and new faith to our friends? Or will it be no more than another cause for sadness? The main question is not how much will we still be able to do during the years we have left to live, but rather, how can we prepare ourselves for our death in such a way that our dying will be a new way for us to send our and God’s spirit to those whom we have loved and who have loved us?

 

There was a news commentary on BBC recently, where a young man, Donnie, age 19 was in Israel as part of a peace effort. He was Jewish. Palestinian terrorists blew up his bus that he was traveling. His body was intact, but the doctors couldn’t do anything to save his life. His mother decided to donate his organs. The nest day, a news reporter called her and asked her how she felt that her son’s kidney was donated to a Palestinian girl. She choked, but composed herself and thought, “She’s a human being.” Several years later she went to see this child who was living with her son’s kidney. She embraced this lovely child whom she had seen in a picture as emaciated looking, but now was healthy, robust and lively. Life had blossomed out of man’s inhumanity to man. A new spirit had arisen out of a horrible death.

 

I had many people show me the way to death as a holy time when I was at Episcopal Homes. Ruth has planned her service since she turned 50. After all her parents died in their forties. She didn’t expect to live past 50, so she prepares herself. She wrote her service in great detail, even down to the costs. If it should cost more than what was allotted, then her family would sell the family silver. Ruth was now 90. The service had been through many revisions. She went over the order with me and gave me a copy to put in my files. She even directed the preacher to preach on a particular passage of scripture. He/she was to be brief. She asked for certain pieces of music to be sung, some which were out of print. It wasn’t that that she was prematurely expecting death. She wanted to be prepared. It reminded me of a certain intercessory prayer in that death not finds us suddenly unprepared. It’s an example of how to befriend death in order to help others how to befriend theirs.

 

A good death is a death in solidarity with others. To prepare ourselves for a good death, we must deepen this sense of solidarity. If we live toward death as toward an event that separates us from people, death cannot be other than a sad and sorrowful event. But if we grow in awareness that our mortality, more than anything else, will lead us into solidarity, than death can become a celebration of our unity with the human race.

 

One of the most celebrated deaths I have witnessed was Dr. Walter Russell Bowie, a homiletics professor at Virginia Seminary at the time I was there. He was to sign his autobiography, “Learning to Live” following the Eucharist at seminary when he suffered a stroke. He knew it was his time and though many nurses came in trying to feed him, he graciously refused and they respected his choice and he died within a week. He was a witness of strength and his faith conviction helped him to live out a holy death.

 

Saint Lydia, as we all had come to call her also lived at Episcopal Homes and was looking forward to meeting her Lord. “Do you think he’s ready for me?” she’d ask. We would all laugh. If the Lord wasn’t ready for Lydia, then we all were in trouble. Lydia knew her Lord better than most of us. She was so at peace with herself and her Lord that there was a constant radiance about her. Occasionally, she would not feel great and her countenance would fall, but her faith never wavered. She loved to be read the story of Lydia in the Book of Acts. It was well marked in her bible. She could quote it along with other passages. She was a humble person, a Christ presence to all who came in touch with her.

 

Much like the Benedictine Monks who surround their brothers when they are dying, dressed in white robes, holding candles and chanting psalms of joy, so we at the Episcopal Home would surround our people at time of death. We’d hold hands with family members as we circled the bed and pray the prayers of the vigil service. We would remember the person and the good and gracious influences of his/her life and we would sing Amazing Grace, concluding with “and grace will lead me home.” Then we kept a period of silence. This was a holy moment. Holy death. Holy dying.