We Live We Die We Live Again
past Gwen Groff, Bethany congregation
Lent begins with the reminder, "…to grit you shall return." In this flavour we hear Jesus tell his followers, "I'm turning toward Jerusalem. I'm going to die in that location. Come up with me." It is a counter-cultural invitation. If much anxiety is rooted in our fear of death, we take to stop fugitive death. We are in the right season for this.
In the last sermon that I preached with a physically-nowadays congregation, I quoted Julian of Norwich, using the familiar words in our hymnal. "All will exist well, and all will exist well, all manner of things will be well."
At that time, I had no notion of the journey we were embarking on. I did not know we would not gather the post-obit Sunday. I did not know COVID-19 had already arrived in our small, spaciously populated state.
"All will be well" is not a glib platitude. Julian, born in 1342, lived through three rounds of the Black Plague, the Peasants' Revolt, and function of the Hundred Years' War. Before she heard God's revelation that "all will be well," she had been so severely ill that she was administered last rites. To say "all will be well" was not an optimistic claim that we will not experience suffering. It was a promise that in our suffering we are held within God's being.
Since that Sunday, Paul's assurance in Romans xiv:8 has been repeating internally, as I walk, cook, and sit in silence: "Whether we live or dice, we are the Lord's." That also is non a glib promise. It does not deny expiry or the pain of death. But it affirms that just as God holds united states of america now as nosotros alive fully and beloved life, God holds us as nosotros confront decease, equally nosotros move through death, and as we notice what follows after death.
Those words from Scripture first came alive for me when a friend described her midwest community's response to the Palm Lord's day tornadoes of 1965. She was a child in Indiana when 137 people died and 1200 people were injured on that ane Sunday. She experienced, upward shut, the reality that people y'all dearest die, people grieve difficult, and relationships with those people and with God continue.
I marveled at her attitude in the acceptance of death. She is a person in love with the globe, life, and people. Simply she has a real sense that decease is not the end, and that "Whether we live or dice, we are the Lord'southward."
I take at times thoughtlessly associated the acceptance of death with despair or purposelessness. A neighbor said to me final week, "If COVID-19 would accept happened the year after my hubby died, I'd have been out there trying to catch it. But non now. I love life again. I want to live."
Acceptance of the reality of death is not a death wish. And loving life doesn't create a fear of death. Nosotros may fear death nearly when we sense nosotros oasis't lived fully.
Another neighbor in the "high risk" category summed this upwardly: "I want to live to exist a hundred. But if I die now, male child—we've had a good run."
I take Paul's words in Romans to mean our life with God somehow continues through death and beyond. Tin can I hold that promise if my parents (in their 90s), quarantined in a nursing dwelling, autumn ill? Can I retrieve that promise if I am brusque of breath? And can I maintain that perspective if civilized society starts to atomize? How can we, equally the torso of Christ, conduct as if nosotros know that whether we alive or dice, we are the Lord's?
Source: https://mosaicmennonites.org/2020/04/02/whether-we-live-or-die-we-are-the-lords/
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