RISE UP!
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

June 28, 2009

2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27; 2 Corinthians 8:17-15; Mark 5:21-43

Two weeks ago at our Annual Meeting we were looking through our annual report and we had something happen last year that has never happened in my career: no church member in our congregation died.  There are a lot of churches that deal primarily with younger crowds that don't spend a lot of time in funeral homes except in cases of tragic illnesses and accidents.   But, we are so wonderfully a multi-generational church.  One of our oldest members, 95-year-old Harry Hollis, came up to me after the annual meeting and asked me if I was disappointed that no one had died.  I assured him that I was celebrating that no one had died.

I'm not superstitious.  I celebrate the life that all of us have had in the last year, but like you, I knew it was coming.  Death might take a break, but it never disappears.  Earlier this week saw the death of a woman named Edie Wetnight, a long-time member of this congregation, since about 1960.  She was a delightfully alive and vibrant person and she and her husband were vital aspects of this faith community and the city of Bloomington for their many years.  I offer my most sincere sympathy to her husband, Robert, Bob, who loved his wife dearly and cared for her sincerely and wonderfully. 

Edie suffered from Alzheimer's and remained just a delightful personality even as the disease took so much from her.  She was always such a joy to visit and Bob was such a great guy to talk with and watch his love his partner (of just one month shy of sixty-eight years).  Theirs is a tremendous love story. 

Where I want to begin today is with Edie's dying. We don't hear a lot of stories of normal people dying relatively easily in our culture.  Now this has been a unique week for the public spectacle of death, hasn't it?  Ed McMahon died after years of fame and fortune, dying as poor as a church mouse, it seems, in a home that went into foreclosure that Donald Trump bought so that Ed had a place to stay. 

Who would have guessed the celebrity world would have such a week?  Next came Farah Fawcett, who more than just a few us grew up with and had some fairly healthy lust and admiration for, I'm sure.  She died after a long bout with cancer. 

And then no sooner had she died on Thursday morning, then we received the news of Michael Jackson's death, which has dwarfed everything in the news media to the degree that politicians celebrate, especially those prone to trips to Argentina to visit women named Maria (which in the Roman Catholic world of South America is nearly 1 out of every 5 women).

Celebrity deaths don't really help us with our own or with the deaths of those we love, and celebrity deaths certainly hide the ugly reality of daily death that strikes the world's poorest and most vulnerable every day in huge numbers.   Perhaps we pay attention to celebrity deaths because we know they are not like us.  We are hungry, however for an awareness of how death happens.  So, we get daily death reports on the most bizarre deaths, as we get minute-by-minute horror stories on the news of the most ghastly deaths imaginable.  After the recent crash of the Air France plane as it traveled between Brazil and Paris , we now have a mental picture in our minds of what happens to bodies as they are suddenly impacted by the lack of cabin pressurization at 35,000 feet.  And such awareness of these horrific details often does nothing more than make us scared and produce phobic reactions.

Edie died of a cancer that, by the time it was apparent she had it, caused her death quickly over a few days, and she died in a coma, with no pain, surrounded by those who  loved her.  She was surrounded not only by her family, to whom she had fully given of herself through her long life, but she was surrounded by friends, this faith community that visited her regularly, and by a belief system that assured her that her soul was loved by God both in this life and in the eternity to follow. 

We live in a culture that is very death avoidant, to the extent that we don't pay much attention to normal death…, only death in the extremes.  In greater Chicagoland where I spent the last sixteen years before coming to Bloomington , we had what I called breathing box warehouses.  We had three huge multi-story facilities filled with people mainly unconscious on ventilators, breathing machines.  Many of the people warehoused in these facilities were there for long months on end, even years. It is probably not pushing the envelope to suggest that 96% of those people never left the facility in anything other than a body bag and their quality life by my estimation barely registered as anything other than mere physical survival.

There are at least two realities to be pondered about these folks.  First, the health care industry makes a ton of money keeping our bodies alive at the end.  The numbers, the amount of money spent keeping human beings in our culture alive for the final six months to a year is a staggering number that amounts to huge profits in the face of limited value to the person who is dying or their family.

I don't blame the health care folks.  I blame us and our lack of peace with dying, which is the second issue.  What was it last week that Jesus asked his disciples when the storm was brewing and they feared total catastrophe:  “Have you no faith?” 

We would do well to ponder what we believe about dying and death well before we get to needing to use the faith we have.   Most of the time, if carefully watched, our bodies have a way of dying with the least amount of discomfort.  Those of us who are around our partners, our parents, our friends as they die, rightly do not want to see the end come.  But, if we don't allow death to occur naturally when good opportunities present themselves, too often months if not years of suffering can too often be a result.

Are we confident in our faith that the death of the body is not the end of our existence?  Do we know that each of us must die and that the day of the death of our bodies is closer than it ever has been?  If we believe that eternity is going to be a very good experience, does it make any sense to drag out the last six months or so of this life, so often so very painfully for the sick family member as well as the family and friends?  I am not such a big supporter of the conservative Christian position that states, “Life at any cost!”  

First, they really only mean that about themselves.  They don't really mean that for folks who believe other than they do.   And, it seems that they don't mean life at any cost for prisoners who have killed someone.  The pro-life crowd often has an interesting antithesis in that they are as a group most often found to be pro-capital punishment.  I do not say this lightly.  I take with the gravest regard the reality that if someone has murdered another individual, that it is a most heinous crime.   But, I also believe in forgiveness not only for me, but that God forgives others, even those who have done something so horrible.  I remain willing to pay the cost of lifetime imprisonment for those who commit such horrible deeds.  But, I could scarcely live with myself, nor should society ever easily live with itself, for risking putting to death a wrongly convicted person or for not imagining that God and God's people cannot have the patience to extend the grace and the opportunity for a person who has committed wrong the opportunity to find forgiveness and to seek to make restitution for their wrongs, even within the walls of prison.  Capital punishment takes away a future that I still believe in and that I am confident God believes in.

Can we talk?  At my best moments I have a fair amount of faith in the eternal love of God for me personally and for life in general.  I do.  But, having faith does not keep me from being anxious in the face of that which I don't fully understand or have never experienced.  It makes sense to be anxious around pondering our deaths and even in the midst of dying.  Anxiousness is probably the most common issue to be treated with someone who is dying.   But, we live at a great time in history.  Hospice care, care for the actively acknowledged dying patient can provide the dying patient with not only personal care for our spirits, but medically they can calm us and help us move as comfortably toward our deaths as can possibly be.

I prefer to think of all of life as hospice care.  We need to be getting ready to die everyday.  But, the number of people who spend a week or less in hospice is alarmingly high and too often it is because of active denial that we are dying, mixed with a health care system too often wanting to maximize dollars gained from extending our lives.

My father was in and out of hospice care for two years before he died.  He was sort of like a very sick energizer bunny.  He was not a traditionally religious man, though he played along to keep his relatives happy and just in case they were right he allowed them to have him baptized a couple years before the end.  He was a pragmatic, fun person who knew better than not to play all the cards available to him, and a little water, he said, couldn't hurt and it might well help.

I hope to have the courage of my father when I die.  He and my mother and most of us kids were in agreement that the next time something happened and he had the chance to die we were not going to interfere.  We had made many interfering decisions through the last few years of his life.  And, it was because Dad was ambivalent.  The last couple of months of his life were good because he stopped trying to avoid death and let us know to let him die. 

He felt his last heart event coming and he told my mother and sister, who were present, not to call 911 until he was finished dying.  My dad finally died as he had lived, making good choices and choosing to die at peace with himself and the life that he had lived surrounded by the love of my mother and sister. 

As a pastor I would like to recommend that we start each day of our lives seeking to know to the fullest extent possible that today might well be our last and so therefore living as meaningfully and fully as possible.  People who live fully, in my experience, die the easiest, and with a smile.

I don't know if you caught the story reported earlier this week but buried by all the celebrity death, of the death of the medical doctor who had discovered some five years ago while part of a research team in Antarctica that she had breast cancer?  So remote was her research center that getting out for immediate treatment was not an option, and as she was the only medical doc, she performed her own breast biopsy and after a medicine drop in minus 59 degree temperatures she orchestrated her own chemotherapy until they could get her out of there.

She lived for a decade after her cancer self-diagnosis and treatment, and she wrote to her parents in an email saying, “More and more as I am here and see what life really is, I understand that it is not when or how you die but how and if you truly were ever alive.”

Remember Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane ?  It was just before his capture by the Roman authorities.  The story says that he was sweating drops of blood.  He prayed, so the story is told, that perhaps God might see fit for him not to end up dead at the hands of the Roman Empire after that night.  It doesn't seem that even Jesus was just excited beyond belief to end this life on earth.  I find great comfort in how much Jesus loved this life, valued it, enhanced it and also firmly believed that there was more after this life was over. 

In Mark's Gospel story this morning we find Jesus enhancing the lives of two women, one a small girl, the other an older woman who had been suffering not only physical problems with twelve years of bleeding, but being a social outcast as well; for both of these persons, just touching them or being touched by them made others unclean.  Jesus did both, and uncleanness was not the result either time.  Jesus superseded the normal expectations and gave new life, healing, and wholeness to two people.

Jesus filled life with renewed hope, with new vision, and offered peace and shalom at every turn, even when faced with an agonizing choice of whether to die for that for which he had lived.  He lived so fully that death could not contain him and he came back with a spiritual power and strength that superseded everything he had done.  Today, we live in the midst of his power, his strength, as we name him as our Christ and as we emulate his way of living, his reaching out to the ones who most need a helping hand that is ours to give.

On a very practical level, please note that it was to two women that today's gospel reading focuses.  Jesus—in the midst of a man's world where women were not even people, they were property—Jesus stepped out and said, “God disagrees.” Jesus said, “Young woman, Arise!”  We are part of a generation that has seen our part of the world only begin to excel in regard to legally and spiritually giving birth to women being experienced as fully blessed by God and endowed by God as secondary to none.  It remains our job the world over to say, “Young women, arise and be fully engaged in the world as God has dreamed for you to be and do.”  A lot has been accomplished, but the battle continues, glass ceilings continue to be a significant reality for many women, along with many closed doors and walled off opportunities.  It remains our job to see to it, to make it happen, that the long centuries of abuse of women is not echoed through our lives, our jokes, our lack of finishing the race toward true equality.

There are many ways to die in this world before our bodies breath their last.  Sadly, for over one-half of the world's population, death to women in their day-in-and-day-out lives is a common reality, as they continue to be denied opportunities by men and social and religious structures. Always remember Jesus saying, “Young woman arise,” and then he supported her in getting up. 

Now this is a strange sermon, from my perspective. But, I started with a woman named Edie, who, while I did not get to know her well, I was able to be around so many people whose lives were enhanced and lifted up by her life.  She was 88 years old and had well over a hundred people at her funeral.  I'm here to tell you this was unique.  It is because she never stopped reaching out and touching people, lifting them up and enhancing their lives.  She invested of herself always. Because of the way she lived the world was a better place.

Death is an ending and a new beginning.  The death of someone we love is to be grieved.  We miss those we love being with us.  But, death for us, personally, is a reality to be lived.  Spend time with people who are more actively dying.  Nine times out of ten they are amongst the most alive people we ever meet and it is such a wonderful discovery to learn from them how to live until we die.  The last days and weeks of a person's life who knows they are about to die are like a rich dessert, something to be totally enjoyed and taken in.

Let your children and grandchildren and great grandchildren know fully about death.  Don't hide dying and death from them.  Let it be as natural as the water that strives to reach the ocean. Teach them not only that God loves us and promises us a home in heaven. Teach them how to live graciously and fully. 

Teach them the greatest gift of all, that we have but a relatively short time and life goes by quickly.  So fill it by making good choices informed by what we believe to be most true, that God so loved the world that God gifted it with each of us.  God's gift of us is as diverse as the sands on the beach and God values each and every one.

Teach them that we make mistakes and oftentimes less than perfect choices.  And that God loves most people who confess their shortcomings and sins and does not hold our wrongs, rightly confessed, against us when we live to lift up others because of what we have learned the hard way.

There is divine judgment and I'm nearly sure that it going to be hardest for those of us who don't seek fully and conscientiously to make restitution for our wrongs. 

It is no harder today than it was when Jesus walked the dusty roads of Galilee .  Reach out and seek to touch the very essence of Jesus and you will discover that your faith in Jesus can still make you whole.

May it be so.

Amen.