Sermons

March 16, 2008

“Death In Context”

Palm / Passion Sunday

Rev. Phil Blackwell

It was a hoax, as it turned out, the death threat I received by e-mail last week. I was going through my messages that had accumulated during the afternoon, when I opened one that began, “”I am very sorry for you; it is a pity that this is how your life is going to end as soon as you don’t comply. . . . My duty as I am mailing you now is just to KILL you, and I have to do it as I have already been paid for that.”

Now, 65% of my brain said, “This is bogus. This is like all of those e-mails from Nigeria I get offering me millions of dollars if I just cooperate in a slightly illegal transfer of funds.”

And then there was this line in the threat, “Someone you call a friend wants you dead by all means, and the person has spent a lot of money on this.” Well, I do not have friends with a lot of money, so that is unlikely. Anyway, the whole premise of this e-mail is to scare me into sending the hit man money, and then he will tell me who my “friend” is.

“A clear hoax,” 65% of my brain said. But, 35% of my brain pondered, “A friend who wants to kill me – that could be a long list. Cherie has been treating me a bit strange lately, and Claude, and Cerna.” It is funny what your brain can do to you as the list grows longer. I felt a chill. “I don’t want to die! I’ve got more to do! I want to see my grandchildren grow up! I want to travel the world, see the Greek Islands, visit Ghana, get to the Philippines, and ride ‘It’s a Small World After All’ at Disney World again (I made that last one up).” But the e-mail, as improbable as it was, scared me.

I did not share it with anyone else except the security people in the lobby. I thought someone should “watch my back,” just in case. They took it to the Temple business office, and thankfully, someone there had seen a television news report about this very scam and sent me the link. I read it with instant relief. I was not in danger. But for the rest of evening I was unsettled by the obvious fact made so explicit earlier: one way or another, inevitably I am going to die some day.

And you are, too. As sure as we were born, so will we die. And if we can stand to face that fact, then every living moment takes on new urgency. Our American culture denies the fact that we will die. Our economy is built on eternal youthfulness – the cars we buy, what we lift of our bodies to defy gravity, the clothes we wear, the way we entertain ourselves – so much is a death-defying act of fooling ourselves.

The Christian faith is not fooling. Right here at the heart of the good news about Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is death. And not just death, but a horrible, state-sanctioned, publicly-gruesome execution. The reason we will read an extended version of the Passion Narrative today is because otherwise it is too easy for us to go from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the celebration of eternal life on Easter Sunday without ever passing through the Last Supper, the agony in the garden, the trial before a kangaroo court, the betrayal by his disciples, his torture at the hands of the military, and his suffocation on the cross.

Death has its place this week in the Christian story. But the gospel truth, the really good news, is that death is put in its place this week. Death is put into context. The context of death for Christians is in-between life on one side of it, and life on the other. Life here and now, and life beyond in a form we cannot imagine.

Death does not have the last word. Christianity is not a Shakespearean tragedy that ends with a corpse at center stage. It is a comedy, in the purest sense of the dramatic form. The gospel may not have a laugh-track, but clearly it moves toward life beyond death, hope beyond despair, and purpose beyond meaninglessness. Death is placed in the context of life, within the parentheses of life before and after.

My father died fourteen years ago tomorrow. It seems like yesterday. He was 86 years old. He lived a full life, and while I was sad when he died, I could make sense out of it. When children bury their parents, it is the normal order of things. Often there is the privilege of a child caring for her parent at the end of life with the same love that the parent cared for the child at the beginning of life. That is ideal. Death is not always an enemy, but even sometimes a friend.

But when a parent buries a child, the normal order of things is shattered. Last Tuesday at St. Sabina’s church I stood with Father Michael Pfleger, the mayor, the new police chief, the CEO of the public schools, and parents of slain children as we mourned the death of Ruben Ivy, the 18 year-old shot and killed by a 15 year-old outside of Crain High School a few days earlier. More than an e-mail hoax, the armed violence among our kids troubles the waters of our souls.

Death is not in the context of God’s intention for us when one kid shoots and kills another. And since Tuesday there have been two more murders of students in Chicago, a total of 19 this school year. It is not enough to put candles and teddy bears and balloons on the sidewalk, shake our heads in a “what are we going to do?” despair, and then go back to our daily lives.

If we are Christians who profess that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior and that he is the Lord of Life, then we must keep death in its proper context, in the natural order of things between life on earth and life with God. That very same faith will not allow us to accept death when it nullifies God’s gift to us and destroys our community.

Father Pfleger preached here the Wednesday before last at the Lenten service. In his sermon he promised that he would call us to congregate in front of the Sate of Illinois Building every time there is a gun murder of one of our kids in order to draw attention to the lack of commonsense gun laws in Illinois. Just think: if we have a dog, we need to get a license; if we sell guns out of the trunk of our car, we do not. It is insane. Collectively, we are out of our minds.

It is okay to manufacture and sell “junk guns” that have no purpose in life but to bring death to anybody who wants one. It is fine to manufacture and sell assault weapons for which there is no earthly use but to blow someone off the face of the earth. There is no tight screening; there is no sharing of mental records.

This has nothing to do with limiting hunting; hunters are safe. This has nothing to do with repealing the Second Amendment. We can debate that for another forty years, but in the meantime our children will keep killing each other.

A couple of simple steps would make an enormous difference, but there are people making too much money off the way things are to make changes. Legislators with blood on their hands, guys in the neighborhood with guns in their cars. As the mayor said on Tuesday, “We can ban smoking in restaurants, but we cannot ban guns in our schools. How bizarre is that?”

When Father Pfleger announced his commitment to keep this issue before the public and in the face of lawmakers, I said that after gathering at the Thompson Center we should march to the Temple, light a candle on the altar, and offer a prayer for the victims and their families. That was a week and a half ago. Since then we have lighted three candles – Ruben, Channon, and Marcellus.

Today in worship we move from Palm Sunday to Good Friday in order to see death in context. It lies within the parentheses of life, life on earth, and life eternal. Knowing that each one of us will die some day, e-mail or no e-mail, that fact ought to make this day, this living day, a real joy for us. “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

But when death is ripped out of its context and intrudes on life, when it nullifies the boundaries by a gun blast from one child to another, we must protest with our loudest shouts of offense. Killings of children by children are an offense to God, an abomination, a contradiction of God’s will. As Ruben Ivy lay bleeding on the sidewalk outside of Crane High School, God was the first to shed a tear – and for Channon and Marcellus.

Death in context makes sense. Death brutally imposed on life does not. In that way, the story of the Crucifixion that we hear today does not make sense, not until we hear the stunning conclusion next week. Let us listen carefully and ponder deeply so that ultimately we might become people of the Resurrection, affirming life in every way. Amen.

Philip L. Blackwell
The Chicago Temple
March 16, 2008