Good morning on the Beginning of Holy Week,
It’s hard for us sometimes to talk about death, but it’s no secret. Death is no secret. There isn’t an adult reading this who hasn’t been touched in a painful way by death. Dr. Fred Craddock once said that death puts on soft slippers and walks in the nursing homes and snatches away the aunts and the uncles, the grandmothers, and the mother and the father. Death puts on old bloody boots and walks the center-lane of the highway, taking away our teenagers out of twisted steel and broken glass. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, death will slip into the nursery and hush a whimpering child. It’s no secret, this death.
“Will grandma stay dead long?” asked the four-year-old. “Will hamsters go to heaven, Momma?” The hamster died, you know. “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I learned that prayer as a child. “If I should die before I wake . . .”
In Salisbury, where I grew up, when someone died, they marked off a section of the street with these little signs which read, “Death in the family,” and there would be a wreath on the door. We were throwing the ball to each one other once, and it got away from me and rolled into such a yard. My friend said, “Go get the ball.” I said, “I’m not going to get the ball; you’re the one who threw it, you go get the ball!” And he said, “You’re the one who missed it, you go get the ball!” And we didn’t go get the ball — because it was in the yard, and there was something mysterious about death. We were children, and yet already thinking about this. It’s no secret.
As members of the Christian faith, we believe that God gives life to the dead. And the reason we know that is because of Jesus. Jesus faced death, and he decided not to run. He did not welcome it, but he did not run. When he knew that death was before him, he accepted it. And once he crossed over, he found that, on the other side of death, there was life. For Jesus now, and for all the saints of heaven, death is a past experience. They are free, and they are alive.
Over the years, I have stood with many of you by the casket in the cemetery or in the sanctuary as we have given our loved ones over to God’s eternal care and keeping. Through those experiences, the church has taught me something about death. Of course, we usually fear death, but we have come to know that “if the earthly tent in which we live is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in the heavens, not built by human hands” (2 Corinthians 5:1).
Death is never the end for those who believe in and place their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. I not only believe that, I am counting on it.
“Once he died, our souls to save; where’s thy victory, boasting grave?”
Bruce Jones, Pastor
Imagine Church
