there's no denying death

Sigmund Freud once wrote that the only feeling that doesn't lie is anxiety.  This is a hard thing for us to hear, because few feelings terrify us more than anxiety.  Anxiety disrupts our carefully constructed and managed zones of comfort and serves to remind is that there’s a world beyond the edges of our noses.  In other words, anxiety is the way way we're affected by the reality we can't change, the things that just won't go away.  

That's why it's so hard to repress anxiety.  Sure, we medicate it, attempt to hide it.  But it's still there.  We can pretend it's not there.  That's one of the luxuries of modern life.  If we don't like seeing tragedy, just change the channel.  If we don't like hearing about all the deaths in the world, there's XM Radio.  If you don't like all that talk you hear in church about sin, repentance and following Jesus, you can always stay home and watch Joel Osteen and feel much better about yourself.  And that's not even to mention our contemporary panoply of narcotics -- from alcohol and prozac to retail therapy and comfort food. 

Thing is, deep down that anxiety doesn't go away.  It's always there, lurking just beneath the surface.  As Freud explained, anxiety is immutable because, ultimately, it is the chill of death's own inevitability.  So what happens when we try to do to death what we do to our other, more contingent sources of anxiety, and just "change the channel"?  How, in other words, do we try to forget our own mortality?

Simply deny it.  Whether through nursing homes or the funeral home industry.  It's our capitalist nirvana that has us simultaneously fearing and being mesmerized by death.  

My sister is dying.  It's 4:40 in the morning and I can't sleep for all the anxiety her death has brought to me.  And I'm struck, at this moment, in looking at her in her hospital bed, by just how much we do our best to deny her good death.

Christians use eternal life as now just unending life -- we've turned "the resurrection of the body" into resuscitation of a corpse at all costs.  The heights of Christian hope has been reduced to taking every measure to keep the person alive. 

My Christian living, no doubt, has been shaped more by the Prayer Book, than has the imaginations of other family.  In the words of the Great Litany, we pray to be delivered "from dying suddenly and unprepared".  Unprepared?  Unprepared for what?  Meeting our Maker, of course.  

But nowadays, we act around death as if there's no meeting.  Nothing beyond death.  So we do everything we can to push it away.  Deny it.  

The problem, of course, isn't what we’re believing.  It's what we're not believing.  The problem is that most of us are practical atheists when it comes to death.  Nowadays people don't talk about preparations before they die, but they might talk about arrangements after they die.  I've been struck this morning by how much my own language has shifted this direction.  The conversations I've had over the last 24 hours have not involved what will happen once my sister has died -- not what I'm doing to prepare for my own death.

That's a significant shift in language. 

And as I pray for her this morning, as I pray for her rest, other family are talking about what it takes to keep her alive.  They are worried about what would happen after she dies.  Me?  I'm more concerned that she die well. 

Dying well.  It even sounds strange to modern ears. 

We live in a culture of youth and beauty, with the chemicals and the cosmetic surgery to keep us artificially young and beautiful (actually, more like grotesque).  When you're young, you think you're immortal.  (That's called immaturity.)  But now, adults are people spare no expense pretending that they are Peter Pan right into manufactured old age, "living the dream".  And when reality finally, inexorable strikes, well, stick them in a nursing home until they "pass".  And then cart them off to be "done up well" for a death-denying send off. 

Thus the changing face of funerals.  Because it's all about me and mine, funerals are now becoming customized "celebrations", upbeat, nothing sad, no grief, no frank recognition of the grim reality of death -- this is what ministers are hearing more and more when we meet the families of the "deceased".  Coffins are as likely to be draped with photos, flags, or sports memorabilia as with Christian symbols.  One minute you're singing "Amazing Grace", and the next (never mind the inconsistency!) you're hearing a CD of Frank Sinatra belting out "I Did It My Way".  And poems are read that are not only -- let's face it -- mawkish and banal, but also completely untruthful:  "Do not stand at my grave and cry: / I am not there, / I did not die" -- but you did, you know.  There is mounting pressure on ministers to collude in this make-believe, to direct and choreograph it. 

The modern assumption is that the funeral is just psychology, not theology.  It's the tale of grief and loss.  It's the grand narrative of our anxieties toward life and death.  Not the grand drama of the Gospel.  

This is what makes me believe that the modern day attempts to deny death are so unhealthy.  It isn't simply about Sarah.  It's not simply about my loss.  Those are too myopic.  It's too small a story.  Because it leaves us with the bad news of anxiety, death and loss. 

Christians don't have funerals, we have services of death and resurrection, the death and resurrection of Christ as the basis of all we say and pray and sing, the death and resurrection of believers for sure, and the death and resurrection of non-believers in the trust that there are no limits to the grace and mercy of God.  We do not deny death.  We recognize that everyone is mortal, that death is natural, and we pray, with the Psalmist, that the good Lord will "teach us to count our days / that we may become wise" (Psalm 90.12).  On the other hand, the New Testament is quite clear that death is, finally, an alien and brutal force, not a friend but an enemy, indeed the "last enemy" (1 Corinthians 15.26), who steals our loved ones, breaks our hearts, and shatters our families and communities.  "Death is nothing at all"?  No one really believes that -- and Christians least of all.

That's why I find it so hard to deny death.  To deny her death.  

Instead, comfort and consolation.  But what kind?

Our services of death and resurrection are not about us, they are about this particular person who has been a part of our lives and, if a fellow Christian, a part of the life of the church.  Which is why of course the service of Christians should take place in the church, and why of course the body should be there.  Christians do not believe that the body it is just a "shell", a quite pagan idea, which is why Christians have always treated the dead not only with respect but with tenderness.  Have you ever loved a "soul"?  Of course not!  You have loved this embodied person.  In heaven, when we meet again, will it be as ectoplasm?  Of course not!  It will be as what St Paul calls a "spiritual body", which means that, while unimaginably transformed, we will still recognizably be the people we were.  Here in church the dead was baptized, indeed baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ.  Here in church the dead was made a member, and perhaps married.  Here to church the dead came to worship week by week, to celebrate Communion month by month, to hear the Easter message.

Mourn?  Yes.  But mourn as a people of hope -- as the Body of the Risen One.  Funerals may be for the living, but they are about the dead, and they are in and through the dead yet living Jesus Christ.  If we ever forget that Christian services of death and resurrection are about the management of our mourning only insofar as they are about the meaning of the message, then we of all people, in self-pity, are most to be pitied. 

The world is in denial and confusion about death, dying, and the afterlife.  The Christian Church should not be.  Our teaching is clear:  In the words of the Nicene Creed -- "We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come".  The church is not a public service industry.  We are not here to meet people's felt needs, to give their Jack or Jill a "good send-off".  We are here to proclaim the gospel that "Christ has died!  Christ is risen!  In Christ shall all be made alive!" -- to show the world the way out of its fear and muddle and into the truth.  The truth is often hard and always odd, but only the truth will set people free.  That truth is not a vague idea about life before or after death.  That truth is Jesus.  And in Jesus -- that's the only hope Sarah or I will ever have.