Death - The Journey Of No Return Series

(Opens with song “O Death” from the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”.) If you have your Bibles with you today and you want to open them up, we will be looking at John 11:25-26. It is going to take us a while to get there, but we will eventually get there. If you have been here for a while, you know that we are going through a sermon series called “Do not conform but be transformed”. It is based on the book of Romans 12:1-2 that says “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The idea behind this series is that we would look at various patterns in the world, particularly negative patterns and how the world responds to different situations. What I am trying to do is open your eyes up. I know you can go through a series like this and really not get anything out of it in the long term. What I am trying to do is teach you to be editors of culture. To not just go through culture without opening your eyes. To open your eyes and be able to discern culture. To be able to discern truth from lies. What we are doing here is we are trying to look at the various patterns of the world and look at the consequences of following those worldly patterns and then coming up with a bridge to some sort of biblical solution, which I believe is there for every major problem in the world.

Today, we are going to look at a pattern that I see as basically how the world, the culture, deals with the issue of death. Before I continue, I want to make one thing very clear. I know that in a crowd this size there are a number of people that right now are in the midst of some form of grief. You have lost a loved one, a friend, a relative, whatever it is and you are currently in some sort of pain. Your heart may even be a little bit still tender right there. I say up front that my intention is not to cause any additional discomfort by preaching on this idea of death. Hopefully, if you stay with me, you will see that I will put a positive spin on it as much as I can. If you paid attention, if you were listening to the song, if you were watching the lyrics, some of you may have recognized that song. It comes from the soundtrack “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” It was a song that was composed by Ralph Stanley. These actually became the first words in my Master’s Thesis. I did my thesis actually on death within resurrection context. Although I know that image of death is not totally accurate, what I liked about it is it gives a very vivid imagery of the reality of death. Death is real for everyone. Think again about those words. You have this death personified up there. You have a picture of this impersonal, invisible thing called death that is hovering over a person’s deathbed. Hovering over the deathbed holding the keys to heaven or to hell. It says his icy cold hands are coming down and beginning to draw the remaining life out of the body’. All the while the person is pleading for just one more year. Can I have another year of life? Even long before the cold body makes it into the grave and the flesh begins to be stripped off of it, the soul has left the body for its final destiny, either heaven or hell. What we have here is we have a picture of the reality of death. Every person in the world has sometime experienced the reality of death. It is a very ever-present reality.

Today, I am not talking about the reality of death. What I wanted to talk about is the patterns of how the culture deals with death. When death occurs, as many of you know, there are all sorts of things that happen, especially at the emotional level. Some people cry. Some people get angry. Some people get fearful. Some people shut down. You have all these emotions that surround the death of a loved one. But again my aim is not to talk about how we deal within that immediate context. What I want to talk about is how, as a culture, we view this larger idea of death. As I thought about it in my quiet time this week, I realized there are a lot of different ways that culture deals with death. Generally speaking, those ways run along a spectrum between denial of death and exploitation of death. From totally ignoring it to knowing that there is a buck to be made around it. Somewhere in between, culture often responds somewhere on that continuum.