Facing Fear

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 25:6-9, Revelation 21:1-6a and John 11:32-44.

It seems odd that while all lifeforms die, human beings have a big problem accepting it. Often this fact hits home when we are children and lose someone to death. We realize that our parents and grandparents and siblings and friends and even we shall die someday. It makes us sad or maybe angry and, when it comes to our own life, scared. Our fears tend to be based on two things: that death will be painful and the dread of non-existence.

As to the first fear, based on my 37 years as a nurse, I know that most of us will die peacefully. Globally the number 1 cause of death is ischemic heart disease, followed by stroke. Next comes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Only when we get down to number 8, road injury, do we get to violent death. And it is the only violent cause of death in the top 10 worldwide. That pretty much remains true even when you break the statistics down by income. And when you get to high income countries, road injuries drop out of the top ten causes of death. In fact, only when you get to wealthier countries do various cancers rise into the top ten causes of death. And sure enough, cancers are the number 2 cause of death in the US. However they are followed by accidents or unintentional injuries at number 3. And, sadly, suicide is the 10^th leading cause of death in our country. Still the number of deaths drop precipitously as we go from heart disease and cancers, number 1 and 2, down to accidents and other causes. If you die in a hospital doctors will do all they can to eliminate pain.

Even if our death is likely to be peaceful, the prospect of simply ceasing to exist is disquieting. Part of this is fear of missing out. Loved ones will get married, give birth, graduate, celebrate holidays with the family and at some point we will not be there to experience them. Personally, I hope to live long enough to perform my granddaughter's wedding and baptize my first great-grandchild. I also realize that those things are outside my control. But I remember how my grandmother died right after we found out that my wife was pregnant with our first child and I wish she could have at least known that.

Of course if you simply do cease to exist, you will not miss anything. You will not experience anything. That thought rarely comforts people, though. Some folks hold out hope that we will one day be able to upload our minds to computers. In view of the fact that the latest Windows update can inadvertently delete things from your computer's memory, I do not find the prospect of my consciousness being at the mercy of someone's IT department an encouraging one. And would not having a body be a pleasant state in which to exist? Anyway, such theoretical technological forms of immortality are at best far off.

All major religions believe in some form of afterlife, going all the way back to ancient Egypt. And most believe in some form of rewards and punishments. Even in Hinduism, where they believe in reincarnation, who or what you come back as is a matter of your karma. A bad person could come back as, say, a dung beetle and then have to live a long series of good lives into order to reach nirvana.

Justice is an inborn concept. Babies have it. But we also realize that this is not a just world. Bad things happen to good people, sometimes at the hand of bad people. And bad people sometimes get away with what they do and can have what looks like pleasant lives. If there is no justice in the afterlife, there is no justice in the universe. Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions and when the Russians were closing in on him, he evaded justice in this life by killing himself. Just a year earlier, in 1944, in a one day trial 14 year old African American George Stinney was convicted of the deaths of 2 white girls in South Carolina with no evidence other than verbal testimony by the police that he had confessed. Stinney's court appointed lawyer did not challenge the 2 different versions given of his confession. No written or recorded confession was ever produced. Nevertheless, the all white jury deliberated for just 10 minutes before convicting him. The court refused to hear his appeal. Less than 3 months after the murders, the 5 foot 1 inch, 90 pound boy was strapped with difficulty into the electric chair made for adults and electrocuted. In 2014 a judge vacated the conviction but if there is no afterlife, Stinney will never receive true justice.

If there is a just and loving God, there should be an afterlife. Life is after all the first gift, the primary one. Life is necessary to enjoy all the other gifts in this world. What is so awful about death is that along with life it takes all the other gifts from us as well. There will be no more new compositions by Bach, or Prince, or Lennon and McCartney. There will be no more new plays by Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill or Neil Simon. There will be no more breakfasts with my dad or discussions of current events with him. Death takes everything.

The readings for All Saints Sunday all concern God's defeat of death, the ultimate enemy of life. And that makes sense. God creates life and preserves life. God is anti-death. In Ezekiel it says, “For I take no delight in the death of anyone, declares the sovereign Lord. Repent and live!” Jesus called him the God of the living. And as God Incarnate Jesus healed people and restored them to life. Jesus said, “I have come so that they might have life, and may have it abundantly.” (John 10:10) But Jesus not only gives life; he is life. Just 7 verses before our gospel reading starts, Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even if he dies and the one who lives and believes in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)

Tears are also a major theme in our passages from Isaiah, Revelation and John. In the Old and New Testament readings God is depicted as wiping away our tears. In today's gospel, in response to the tears of Lazarus' sisters and friends, Jesus himself weeps. God is not impassive in the face of our grief but is capable of being moved by our sorrow. Indeed not only will death be no more in his new creation but mourning, crying and pain will also be things of the past. Not only will God get rid of death but also its effects. Strictly speaking, only the person dying experiences death. What the rest of us experience when a loved one dies are the aftereffects: the pain of loss, the emotional and psychological reverberations, the hole in our life and the death of our dreams for and with the person. How does God intend to erase those?

I don't think he does, not in the sense of making it like they never existed. The resurrected Jesus still bore his scars, but they did not pain him anymore. I still have mine from the accident and I can still remember how things hurt. But I don't literally re-experience the pain. I remember that every jostle of the gurney I was on caused me pain as I was wheeled to the helicopter but I only remember that as a fact. And I remember how I have described it felt at the time but I don't feel it anymore. In the same way I remember how distraught I was when I was home at last, starting outpatient therapy and then was told that my evaluation rated me as 70% disabled. But I don't re-experience the despair I felt then.

I think in the next life we will not lose our memories of pain and mourning and loss but we will not re-experience them. They will be part of our story but the sting will be gone. If cuts and insect bites didn't continue to sting, we would shrug them off. When the mental and emotional pain is healed, we will no longer be limited by even the worst episodes of this life.

And that's what death is: a limit. It is not only a limit on life but a limit on living. What I mean is that thinking about death, as Hamlet observed, makes “cowards of us all” and “enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.” Fear of death causes us to limit what we do. That's fine if what we planned to do was take selfies hanging off of skyscrapers. That's a healthy fear. But if we let it stop us from loving other people or standing up for justice or working for peace, then our fear allows hatred and injustice and violence to continue. Mussolini's blackshirts and Hitler's brownshirts killed their political opponents even before they became dictators. Fear of death at their hands kept people from effectively opposing them, which in turn led to the deaths of millions later on.

Fear bypasses the part of the brain where judgment takes place. It keeps people from thinking clearly. That's why certain kinds of leaders love to stoke up fear. “Let us do the thinking for you. We will keep you safe,” they say. And people shut off their minds and blindly follow, ignoring contradictions between what their leaders say and what they do. They give these men power to fight the threat that they fear and before long they fear the leader who said he would protect them. As Machiavelli observed, “It is much safer to be feared than loved because...fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.” Fear, like stress, is good short-term in appropriate circumstances, such as an immediate threat. It makes you jump out of the way of the speeding car or not make any threatening moves when you see a bear and her cubs. Long-term fear, like long-term stress, is destructive to the person and the group.

Remove the object of fear and you remove the limits on what you do. That's what Jesus' resurrection did for the church. When they saw the man they knew had died horribly, alive and solid and yet bearing the marks of the nails and spear, the disciples lost all fear of death. They went from a handful of men and women to a movement with a church in every major city in the Roman Empire in less than a century. One of the things that attracted pagans to the faith was the fact that in times of plague Christians stayed in the cities and took care of the sick at the risk of their own lives.

Jesus said, “...if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” (John 8:36) And as Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.” Death is the ultimate loss. Take it off the table and you have total freedom. Jesus came to give us eternal life. If we truly trust him and lose our fear of death, we gain the freedom to do great things for Jesus and for the people of the world. As Paul said, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21) If, in a video game, dying meant going to the next level, it would change how you played the game.

Because if we lose our fear of death, we can lose our other fears: fear of strangers, for instance; fear of those who don't look or speak or act as we do. If we have eternal life, how can they harm us? As it turns out, we have a great boon to share with them: the love of Jesus. Instead of seeing them as objects of fear, we can see them as people we can help. We can share with them the good news of God's grace and love, which we have experienced through his son, Jesus. We can show them how to live without fear of death. We can show them not only with our words, which people can doubt, but also with our deeds of love, which are more convincing. You think people merely believed Jesus because of his words? If so, why did he bother to heal people? When the crowd didn't believe he had the power to forgive sins, he showed them by having the paralyzed man get up and take his mat and walk. (Mark 2:1-12) Jesus understood that our words are validated by our works. Which is why he hated hypocrisy.

And for us to live in fear, when we say we trust in a risen Lord, is hypocrisy. Paul wrote to Timothy, “For God has not given us a Spirit of fear but of power and love and self-control.” (2 Timothy 1:7) Jesus calls us to be bold: to give to those who ask, to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies, to overcome evil with good. You can't do those things if you let fear limit how you live. Throw off fear, live in the light of the resurrection, and there is nothing you can't do!