“The Secret to Living Life Fully”
Colossians 3: 1-15
February 7, 1999
Just before dawn on a cold winter morning, a group of Russian prisoners was led out to face a firing squad. One of them was a young man named Fyodor Dostoevsky. All of them were condemned revolutionaries.
The first three were handed white gowns and shapeless caps, and were ordered to put them on. Then they were tied to three posts. Drums rolling, the firing squad raised their guns, took aim, and then they lowered their rifles. For, at that moment, a horseman galloped into the scene announcing the prisoners had been reprieved.
Although the condemned men didn’t know it, all this had been staged to show the mercy of the Czar. As a result of this experience, one of the men, who had put on the gown and faced the firing squad, went mad. Another went on to become one of the world’s greatest writers.
Dostoevsky’s life was forever changed from this experience.
Facing the absolute certainty of death shattered all of the assumptions on which he had built his life. It brought him back to the faith of his childhood. He began to see people in a new way and was able to recognize and write about the holiness of God found in the most humble of relationships.
But what about yourselves? Have you faced your own death? Have you contemplated your own mortality? Last week, Bob Raines, in the conference on aging, had us all do an exercise that was most beneficial. He asked each of us to sit quietly and calculate how many years we had left on this earth. The doing of this exercise was a wake-up call for many of us. We were made aware that we had a limited time. The dock was ticking. We had a finite amount of time to perform acts of love and kindness and forgiveness. There were only so many opportunities to rectify injustices, to reach out to people, and to finish what we had started. This exercise of thinking about a termination point pushed me into unfamiliar paths. It got me off the treadmill. Thinking about death reminded me of “what a lovely, awesome, Godly thing it is to be alive and to be aware.” Aware that life was just not an endless round.
Thinking about death might also be an occasion to gather up some of the fragments of our faith. The Christian faith has always bid us to contemplate death so that we might leave behind a life that is a gift to those who survive us. As Christians, we must always surround ourselves with the reality of death. Jeremy Taylor, an Anglican divine of the 17th century, in his book, Holy Living and Holy Dying, wrote that the contemplation of death, of a holy death, changes the way we view our very existence. The task of the church, Taylor claimed, was to prepare us for a “good death.”
“Don’t be morbid, Douglas,” some of you are thinking. “On a beautiful day, lift our spirits, speak to us of pleasant things.” We’ve probably been saying to ourselves, “I came to learn to face life, not to talk about death.” But I would interrupt your musings and say, “If you want to understand life with all its complexities, you must first understand death, and then see yourselves in a collision course between death and life.”
St Paul in the Epistle this morning said, “You are dead.” This “you” you worry about. This “you” is anxious. This “you” is fearful about the future. “You are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God.” That is what baptism is all about. That is what the Christian faith is about. Not that everything will turn out all right, but that your life through baptism is hid with Christ in God. And because of that, you have been raised, incorporated into this Resurrection community. This community faces death squarely. This is the Gospel. This is the good news. You’ve already died and have been raised to newness of life, and therefore your task is to be aware of this new life, in others, as well as in yourselves.
Why is it that we seem to spend so much time and energy denying death? Why is it we keep trying to look younger? If you have already faced your death, do you have to cling to something so transitory as youth? If you are able to face your death, can you not look at life in a different way?
Dostoevsky found that after living through the utter certainty that his life was over, everything looked fresh and clear, and different. With his own anxious agenda off his hands, he could see the beauty of the people around him. He could sense his connections to the end of the earth and appreciate his aging process. Death was a great teacher. It taught him about living and living life to the fullest.
We have great funerals here. Some have said this is one of the best things we do. I’m not sure about that, but I am sure that funerals are great times to proclaim that death is not the enemy. Death teaches us about life. At every funeral homily, I try to say how we must celebrate life, and see death as an opportunity to appreciate what we have had, and where we are headed.
So accept that you’re going to die. And let it free you to live fully in the moment. And let the contemplation of death make you appreciate each person around you, and each day that you are given.
“What do you make of it all?” I asked a friend recently who was going through a battle with cancer. “Every day is a pure, unimaginable gift,” she said. “And you know, without the knowledge of cancer, I probably would not have appreciated all my friends. Each day, I see people in a different light. Each wonderful day, I see myself in a different way.”
So today, I would take the risk of asking you to think, “How long do you have until you are dead?” But don’t stop there. I want you to go beyond that and really begin to think about how precious each day is that we are given. And finally, go beyond even that and and about how important each relationship, each person is to you. Remember, remember, “You have died and your life is been with Christ.”
Mary Oliver has a poem I’ve used at some funerals. It’s really about life and what it could mean to us. It’s called When Death Comes. And it ends this way,
When it’s over I want to say
I have been a bride married to amazement
I have been a bridegroom taking the whole world in my arms
when it’s over I don’t want to wonder
If I have made of my life something particular and real
I don’t want to find myself
sighing and frightened and full of argument
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world
Nor do I. Nor do you. We do not want to simply visit this world. For it is a lovely, awesome, Godly thing to be alive and to be aware
Amen