Henrietta United Church of Christ

Rev. David Inglis July 13, 2008

Psalm 90:1-12

“Befriending Death”

Psalm 90 begins with a comforting thought.

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

But when the psalmist looks at himself, he doesn’t feel so comforted.

You turn us back to dust, and say, “Turn back, you mortals....”

You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning; in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.

For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed....

For all our days pass away under your wrath; our years come to an end like a sigh.

Whenever I get a chance to not think about this stuff, I take advantage of it, how about you? Death is our mortal enemy. Our life is like an elaborate sand castle that we’re pouring our time and energy into constructing. Death is like the wave that sweeps in and washes it all away. And when death does threaten us or someone we love, don’t we feel on some level something like the psalmist–like maybe God is angry at us for something. “Why is this happening to me?” we ask. “What did I do to deserve this? If only I hadn’t done this or had done that, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. In other words, it feels to us like something is wrong when serious illness or death encroaches on our life.

That feeling of the wrongness of death is portrayed in the very first story of humans in the Bible. According to this view, death came into the world because of Adam and Eve’s sin. Some biblical literalists refuse to believe that dinosaurs existed before humans, because how could they have died out before Adam and Eve, if Adam and Eve were the ones who brought death into the world?

But if I look for the truth that’s deeper than scientific facts in that story of the Garden of Eden, I hear an ancient memory about us humans making the transition from being natural creatures just acting out of instinct to human beings who were becoming conscious of themselves and their ability to choose between good and evil. With this self-awareness came feelings of guilt when they acted selfishly, feelings of shame about being naked and just “doing what came naturally,” and the fear of losing their separate identities when they die.

I think it’s these anxieties that come with self-awareness that make us feel like there’s “something wrong” with making mistakes and with death. But we know from our own experience with learning things, and from watching any child, and even from the process of evolution, that it’s not possible to develop without the process of trial and error and learning from our mistakes. I find the idea that God would kill His own creatures because they weren’t perfect all at once grotesque and nonsensical.

And is death a “bad thing?” We have learned from science that it’s not possible to have life without also having death. A healthy man’s body produces about 200 million sperm a day. What if they all lived to do their jobs, and their male offspring did the same? It would get pretty crowded around here pretty quickly, wouldn’t it?

When an egg is fertilized it creates a round zygote that quickly grows as its cell divide. As it grows into an embryo and then a fetus, the extra cells that don’t fit the shape of a human die. If that didn’t happen, we’d all look equally bad in a swimsuit.

There would be no food without plants and animals dying to sustain other organisms’ lives. Without soil made up of decomposed dead plants, there would be no strawberries, sweet corn or apple trees. Of course there’d also be no grass to mow…although there might be crabgrass – that just needs sidewalks to grow in. Life could never have evolved if old life forms hadn’t died to make room for improvement. In fact, over 99% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct. If that weren’t true, there wouldn’t have been room for humans to evolve. In nature, death isn’t a curse or punishment at all. Ironically death is a necessary condition for life.

There’s a Native American legend that the Great Spirit gave the ancient grandmothers the choice between having no death but no babies, or having babies and having death. It was a hard choice for them, but they went with the babies and death. There’s deep wisdom in that story, isn’t there? In human culture, without death and birth there would be no new generations and new visions and new life and energy to move the world forward.

In our own lives, life isn’t a static thing we can hold onto. Life is a process that’s always changing, always rising out of the death of the old to bring forth something new. If fact we can’t fully live the lives we have been given until we make peace with death and learn how to let things die and let them go.

One person who really had to learn that was Philip Simmons. Philip was a 35-year-old father of two young children when he contracted ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He knew that all his muscles would relentlessly deteriorate until his heart gave out and he died. Suddenly the waves were beating against the sand castle of Philip’s career, his role as a husband and father, and his hopes for the future. He kept a journal as the tide kept rolling in, which was published after his death as the book Learning to Fall, which is full of wisdom about living as the imperfect, mortal creatures that we are.

One of Philip’s journal entries is called “Mud Season.” He lived in rural New Hampshire, where many of the roads are still unpaved, and in March and April everything turns to mud. Mud season in New England has the highest suicide rate. Philip wrote, “Every mud season is a kind of death, with resurrection lying on the other side.” He said that any New Englander knows why the crowds threw palm branches and cloaks on the path for Jesus as he entered Jerusalem. It was Passover time—which would have been mud season in Palestine.

He wrote:

The example of Jesus, and the experience of mud season, also remind me of a harsher truth: to be reborn, we first must I die. The way to Jerusalem lies through mud. Dying, like mud, can take many forms, but every death, in the sense I mean, is a letting go. We let go of ambition, of pride, of ego. We let go of relationships, of perfect health, of loved ones who go before us to their own deaths. We let go of insisting that the world be a certain way. Letting go of any of these things can seem the failure of every design, the loss of every cherished hope. But in letting them go, we may also let go fear, let go our white-knuckled grip on a life that never seems to meet our expectations, let go our anguished hold on smaller selves our spirits have outgrown. We may feel at times that we have let go of life itself, only to find ourselves in a new one, freer, roomier, more joyful than we could have imagined.¹

Philip was tapping into a deep mystery: life isn’t really the forms that make up “our life”–the things we have, the things we achieve, the relationships we’re in. Life is something deeper than that.

Think about the things you have–your home, your furnishings, your electronic gadgets, your tools, your toys, your car. We invest so much of our life energy in earning money to acquire them, insure them, display them, and derive pleasure, satisfaction and self worth from them. But these tangible forms aren’t our life. Our life is in how we use them. Have you ever felt the satisfaction of sharing your home with someone by offering hospitality? Have you ever felt the expansion of your soul by providing something that someone else really needed? Have you ever found your heart growing as you opened your checkbook to people you didn’t even know—tsunami victims, people helped by the food cupboard or the CROP Walk, the family who will live in our Habitat house? Our life isn’t in our possessions or money themselves; our life is in what our soul does with them. We experience abundance, not by holding onto the these inert things, but by letting go of them enough for us to experience them moving out from ourselves to touch others. That’s why St. Francis said, “It’s in giving that we receive,” and Jesus said, “It’s more blessed to give than to receive.”

Some day, all the things that we own will be washed away. But if our soul has grown large from gratefully receiving and generously giving the gifts of this life, what will we really lose? We’ll be ready to go into the next life wide open with trust to share in the untold gifts God has in store for us.

Think about your relationships with the people you love. If you cling to them for fear of losing them, don’t you strangle the very life and love that are meant to flow through those relationships?

But have you ever found your soul growing as you stretched to understand and accept ways another person is different from you? Have you found your life expanding as your caring for someone drew you out of your self-centeredness? Have you found your soul deepening by opening yourself with compassion to another person’s pain? Have you felt your soul being strengthened by coming into integrity with someone you weren’t honest with? Have you felt the opening of the soul that comes from forgiving someone who has hurt you? Have you felt the even wider opening of your soul when you humbly asked someone you had hurt to forgive you?

The forms our relationships take or the particular people we’re in those relationships with aren’t really our life. Our life is in the quality of love we are learning to bring to those relationships. Even a loved one’s death can teach us that death doesn’t have to diminish the love at all, though our love takes a different form. In fact, pain and loss can actually expand our capacity for love and compassion.

For many of us, our lives seem to be defined by our schedules, activities, obligations, deadlines, and to-do lists. But what we do isn’t really our life. Our life is in how we do what we do. Have you ever found yourself fully in the present moment—appreciating being outdoors, or savoring just being with someone and enjoying their company? In those moments, regrets about the past and concern about the future and feeling rushed in the present give way to a feeling of great-fullness, openness, alignment with life as it unfolds. That’s where our life is—not in what we’re doing but the quality of our engagement with it. Or do you sometimes find yourself feeling centered and open enough to infuse what you’re doing with love, faith, hope, creativity, or good humor?

It’s not what we do that makes so much difference in the world. It’s the kind of energy our soul puts into it that makes a difference by rippling out into the world. When the clock finally stops and we face our final deadline, our readiness for death won’t depend on how many things did or didn’t get crossed off our to-do list, but how fully we lived each thing as we did it.

I know for myself how much easier it is for me to stand up here and tell you to live in the flow of life than it is for me to keep from clinging to the forms in my own life. I struggle with this stuff as much as much as any of you. But we all have a teacher that keeps nudging us to let go of the forms and stay in touch with the soul. That teacher is death—the persistent reminder that the forms that we keep wanting to cling to aren’t going to hold us. That’s why the psalmist concluded his Psalm by saying

The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, [or today, maybe even a hundred], if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away….

So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.

Living in the awareness that our days are numbered and the tide is coming in awakens us to the truth that the sandcastles we build aren’t really where our life is. Our soul is where our life is. In fact, our soul is our life. Our living, moving, changing, growing soul is a living creation of Source of all life, who has been “our dwelling place in all generations; who is from “everlasting to everlasting,” and who assures us that nothing in life or in death or all creation can separate us from His love.

Jesus said, “Those who seek to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life will find it.” I’ll close with a song by Peter Mayer called “God Is a River” that reminds me how to keep finding my life by letting go of it. [You can listen to a recording of the first part of this song by opening the third attachment to this e-mail.]

In the ever-shifting water of the river of this life

I was swimming, seeking comfort; I was wrestling waves to find

A boulder I could cling to, a stone to hold me fast

Where I might let the fretful water of this river 'round me pass

And so I found an anchor, a blessed resting place

A trusty rock I called my savior, for there I would be safe

From the river and its dangers, and I proclaimed my rock divine

And I prayed to it "protect me" and the rock replied

God is a river, not just a stone

God is a wild, raging rapids

And a slow, meandering flow

God is a deep and narrow passage

And a peaceful, sandy shoal

God is the river, swimmer

So let go

Still I clung to my rock tightly with conviction in my arms

Never looking at the stream, to keep my mind from thoughts of harm

But the river kept on coming, kept on tugging at my legs

Till at last my fingers faltered, and I was swept away

So I'm going with the flow now, these relentless twists and bends

Acclimating to the motion, and a sense of being led

And this river's like my body now, it carries me along