I watched the national nightly news just a bit ago, and there was a story that broke my heart. I want to say it was in North Carolina, but a guy lost his father to the coronavirus. And I noticed he said it a couple of times, "My dad was…" I don't want to beat up on the guy too bad, because he just lost his dad. Yet it's wrong to say, "was". I want to acknowledge the reality of our separations from loved ones in death, without conceding some sort of ultimate reality to death. We can have all the space and time we need to grieve that separation, but I do not talk about my loved ones in the past tense, unless I'm telling a story that happened in the past. My dad is Richard Kettinger; he is a fan of the Dodgers. He is a son, a brother, a father, an uncle, and whatever else. Love in every form--even if imperfect--makes everything present.
A friend asked me how I felt some time ago on the anniversary of the death of another friend. I felt like a crazy person, but I said without a hint of hesitation, "It still seems like she is here." I won't tell closer friends and family what to feel about that, or about their own grief, but I know what I know. In my experience, to grieve with hope is to grieve in the knowing reality of the eternal present. As a result, my grief changes, because it takes the form of, "I sure wish we could have a conversation about this or that, like we did before." I grieve the ease of conversation, the relative ease of getting together, and that is the pain we feel when they are gone, because we take each other for granted. We forget that we die; we forget that life in this present form is fragile and not guaranteed. That said, it is not the end. It never was, and it never will be.
I find it interesting that so many people in this world take the truths of the Christian religion to be so otherworldly and strange, as if only lunatics and dreamers could believe it. I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense, depending upon where you sit. Yet to believe what is revealed is not to wrap ourselves in comforting fictions; it is to say that redemption in Christ and the resurrection of the body are realities that change this reality. They don't occupy some quasi-real myth space in our heads, while the real stuff is the job, the car, the family, and empirical science.
Indeed, the faithful Christian is the boldest person you will know, because he or she metaphorically stands in the town square and says, "Everything you think you know is actually wrong." If someone says that we possess souls that never die, then the death of our bodies is the anomaly, the fault that makes no sense. It is the error in the system; it is the graffiti that mars the park bench.
You know, the reason why we have such a presumptuous cultural tendency to put everyone who dies in Heaven is that a human life is so unique and unrepeatable that we have an instinct that such beauty and glory should not be forgotten. And that's right. At least we picked up from Sunday school or some early lessons that Heaven is the place where nothing and no one that is good is forgotten. I'll leave you to wrestle with the reality of judgment, of punishment and hell, but at least we understand the good things, and why they are the way they are.
My friends, don't concede anything to death, as if death is normal, and a part of life. It isn't. Death attempts to deny life, to cancel it. If indeed we have an instinct that death is wrong, and somehow a disruption to the life we know, let's not try to truncate life to make death make sense. Instead, let's enlarge our lives, so that when death comes, we will know that we have begun to overcome it. We will still hurt, but we will hurt as those who are alive. This is what it means when the Scripture says, "God is the God of the living, not the dead."
A friend asked me how I felt some time ago on the anniversary of the death of another friend. I felt like a crazy person, but I said without a hint of hesitation, "It still seems like she is here." I won't tell closer friends and family what to feel about that, or about their own grief, but I know what I know. In my experience, to grieve with hope is to grieve in the knowing reality of the eternal present. As a result, my grief changes, because it takes the form of, "I sure wish we could have a conversation about this or that, like we did before." I grieve the ease of conversation, the relative ease of getting together, and that is the pain we feel when they are gone, because we take each other for granted. We forget that we die; we forget that life in this present form is fragile and not guaranteed. That said, it is not the end. It never was, and it never will be.
I find it interesting that so many people in this world take the truths of the Christian religion to be so otherworldly and strange, as if only lunatics and dreamers could believe it. I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense, depending upon where you sit. Yet to believe what is revealed is not to wrap ourselves in comforting fictions; it is to say that redemption in Christ and the resurrection of the body are realities that change this reality. They don't occupy some quasi-real myth space in our heads, while the real stuff is the job, the car, the family, and empirical science.
Indeed, the faithful Christian is the boldest person you will know, because he or she metaphorically stands in the town square and says, "Everything you think you know is actually wrong." If someone says that we possess souls that never die, then the death of our bodies is the anomaly, the fault that makes no sense. It is the error in the system; it is the graffiti that mars the park bench.
You know, the reason why we have such a presumptuous cultural tendency to put everyone who dies in Heaven is that a human life is so unique and unrepeatable that we have an instinct that such beauty and glory should not be forgotten. And that's right. At least we picked up from Sunday school or some early lessons that Heaven is the place where nothing and no one that is good is forgotten. I'll leave you to wrestle with the reality of judgment, of punishment and hell, but at least we understand the good things, and why they are the way they are.
My friends, don't concede anything to death, as if death is normal, and a part of life. It isn't. Death attempts to deny life, to cancel it. If indeed we have an instinct that death is wrong, and somehow a disruption to the life we know, let's not try to truncate life to make death make sense. Instead, let's enlarge our lives, so that when death comes, we will know that we have begun to overcome it. We will still hurt, but we will hurt as those who are alive. This is what it means when the Scripture says, "God is the God of the living, not the dead."
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