(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.
First thinking about the idea of denial of death. Realistically, no one can deny that death occurs. But denial is often evident by a person’s behavior. The way they behave when death is in the air. There are people that live in a constant denial by the mere fact that they do not let the idea of death into their conversation, or into their worldview. They do not allow that death to get on their radar whatsoever. In a sense, they are living in a denial of death. Evidence of that denial is all over culture. It is especially evident in the way that culture places such a high value on youth. On staying young. As much as the 40, 50+ crowd don’t like to admit it, we know how much some of the younger people tend to get on our nerves. But if I was a betting man I would bet there are many people out there that would be willing to pay a high price to be able to add back 5, 10, 15, 20 years to their lives. Especially given what they know now. There is an old phrase that says “Youth is wasted on the young.” This saying is based on the reality that many of today’s youth don’t have the life wisdom of the older crowd.
And many people (including myself) would like to add back those years and be able to live life differently, but we can’t. But many people still attempt to buy back those lost years. Again, the culture, the marketers, the advertisers, the businesses are sitting there ready and waiting to accommodate us. There is an entire industry around what is referred to as anti-aging products. The last I read, it is a $300 billion industry worldwide. If you are an investor and you are looking for what to invest in the future, go for the anti-aging products because you know who is driving that? The boomers. They are the ones that want to stay young and they are the ones that have all the disposable income. The anti-aging industry encompasses all types of products. Obviously, the cosmetics, the skin care creams, the herbs, the vitamins, the health clubs. Many of the advertisers target the older crowd with the promise that if you buy this stuff, you will look younger, and you will look younger longer. Again, I am not bashing these products. A lot of them are beneficial to a degree but most cannot deliver on the promise to make us look younger because the bottom line is we still age. You can’t stop the age clock from ticking. You can’t stop the death clock from ticking. These products only help us in our pursuit of denying death.
Then it is not only products. The next thing advertisers try to sell us is experiences. They try to sell us the idea that if you would just go out there and experience life to the fullest, especially now that you are retired, you can just live longer. I love this ad. It says “Life’s adventures are just beginning.” I got news for you, they are not. They are just about to end. But they are selling on the idea that if you buy this experience, you will have this whole new life. You are 0 years old again or whatever, so I can just start living. No, it’s wrong. But you can’t blame the marketers because they are just selling us what we want. We want to experience this. We want to go places. We want to travel. We want to do the thing we never could do. We want to take the cruises. We want to go to the Caribbean. We want to hike the Himalayas or whatever or eat exotic foods and all that kind of stuff. But, again, they don’t deliver. One reason we engage in these experiences is because it keeps us busy. If we are busy, we don’t slow down enough to realize that we are getting old. What they are trying to do is fill us up with experiences. Again, people buy into that, but for the most part the advertisers are not able to deliver. No matter how fancy those ads are, no matter how fancy those brochures are, they just cannot extend the death clock.
There is a professor of mine named Mark Sayers and he wrote a book about this. He has a great quote that to me kind of sums up the whole notion of us trying to get the good life or extend our life through products and experiences. He writes “Aging and death are the spotlights that illuminate the fraudulence of the culture’s promises to deliver us a good life. Culture has no answer for the ticking hands of time. All it can do is distract us from the fact that we age, we feel pain, and we are going to die.” It is very depressing, but it is very, very true. The products and experiences cannot deliver what they put out there. So, again, culture accommodates our denial or need to deny death by giving us products and experiences.
We also see denial of death in other ways. We see it in a very strange way when death shows up right at somebody’s door. I was reading statistics and I was trying to figure out how many people die on an average day in America. The statistic I found was like 7,000 people die every single day in America from all sorts of causes. From accidents, disease, cancer, crimes, etc. When you think about 7,000 people dying every day that means there are a good number of people that are also in grief, likely triple the amount of deaths. Grief is a very strange emotion if you have ever been through it, but it is also somewhat of a logical emotion. There is a woman, I think it is Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote a book called “The 12 Stages of Grief”. She basically tracked people going through grief and realized there are very clear stages that people go through. They might jump around back and forth but generally there are some stages that if they are going through them that is an indication that they are going through grief in a very healthy way. Unfortunately, there are people who are experiencing grief in unhealthy ways. What often happens when a loved one dies, is that a family member or friend of the deceased person can’t cope with it. They can’t cope with the fact that the loved one died so they become frozen in a state of grief. And if they are frozen in grief strange behavior often occurs. In some cases they will try to somehow immortalize the deceased. They will never change their room. Some people won’t even change the sheets on the bed. Some people won’t even use the loose change on the person’s dresser. Some people will never even empty out the clothes from the clothes closet. Some people will never take the ring off their finger for fear that that would bring dishonor to the deceased. As an aside all those things just mentioned are perfectly normal in the early stages of grief. Grief is a weird emotion and you do all sorts of strange things. Again, I have experienced it. But if a year or two years or three years out you are still doing those same things, you can’t get rid of the clothes, you can’t go in the room, you can’t take off the ring, and whatever it is, you probably should go out and seek some help. Seriously. If you know somebody that is in the midst of that, you should be trying to help them. Go to their house and say let’s go through the closet together and give it to the Treasure House non-profit, or give it to Goodwill or whatever organization could benefit from it. Let’s go out together and let me help you move past this stage of grief. Again, this is all part of the culture’s attempt to deny death.
On the other extreme what you have are the people that want to exploit death. They say hey there are some big bucks in this death business, especially with 7,000 people dying every day. How do I get in on this thing? What you have is people exploiting it. The most common way they exploit it and the most obvious is by television shows and movies that center on the macabre. The horror genre movies. The movies that are real popular now involve vampires and zombies and all sorts of those silly things. I guess some of the top movies out there are Twilight and World War Z and one of the top cable shows is called The Walking Dead and I guess it is about zombies or something like that. This stuff is popular now. Again, it is an exploitation of the whole idea of death. If you are not into these kinds of movies and you don’t happen to watch them, all you have to do is flip on the evening news at 6:30 and what are you going to see? You are going to be bombarded with image after image after image after image of death. It seems like the more sensational, the more extreme the thing that caused the death, the more it is going to stick around. Most recently, we saw the 19 men that were killed in the fires in Arizona and the crash of the Asian airliner in San Francisco. That is still big news. Of course you have the whole George Zimmerman trial with the death of Trayvon Martin and the tragic trial going on there. The question we have to ask is why these things? Trayvon is just one person. Three people died in the crash. There are people that die every single day that don’t make the news. You say why do they make the news? Because the bottom line is death sells. A few weeks ago I used the term sex sells and it does. But also in the media they use the term death sells. I was reading about it and somebody used the phrase “if it bleeds it leads.” In other words, it becomes a leading story out there. Why? Because the people are asking for it. The people want to hear it and so they watch it. These types of stories make the headlines where the story of the little old lady who died at 90 years old or whatever of natural causes in the local town is lucky if she gets a mention in the obituary on the back page. Again death is exploited.
It is not only exploited in the news. It is exploited through the funeral industry. As much as we like to think that funeral parlors are just nice people that want to take you under, be the undertaker. Take you on down. Take you on home. The bottom line is they are a business. Don’t get me wrong. There are some very good funeral directors that know how to work with a grieving family, but there are a lot of people that are out there just in it for the bucks. The funeral business is very, very big, big business. The average cost to bury someone today is between $7,000 and $10,000. That is the average cost to put somebody down under. To take someone into their grave from start to finish. Even with that, the funeral industry realizes there is always room for more profits. They are trying to think of a creative way to escalate the income from death. Now what is the most current trend? Themed funerals. We have all heard of theme weddings and theme parties. Themed funerals which means basically the whole funeral becomes really personalized. You set up a themed environment that you make sure you remember the interests of the deceased. Which means you could get really creative. There is a thing out there called themed caskets. Just because you don’t believe me, I thought I would throw up a few pictures there. Let’s say Uncle Billy is into hot rods. He decides I like the hot rod version up there on the top left. Or let’s say Uncle Billy is just one of those guys who just can’t keep their cellphone off in church. You need to get that customized iPhone so he can stay on the phone for all of eternity as long as he wants. These are true caskets by the way. Of course, if he is a baseball or football fan, get him a coffin that is customized according to his favorite baseball team such as the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The funeral business is big, big, big business so they are in it to make as much money and to sell you all the extras. They just want to sell you. What really annoys them is if you come in and sit down with them and they take you to their showroom of coffins and you say that you prefer to go the cremation route. You just see their mouth drop. Why? Because they know they are not going to make anything on you. They might make a couple hundred bucks, but they aren’t going to make the thousands of dollars that they would make if they sold you one of these items. They are trying to sell you once again the highest priced items. Also, the thing that is interesting is that someone has actually found a way to capitalize on the trend of cremation. There are actually companies out there that will allow you to take the deceased ashes and ascend them up into the heavens using a helium balloon. True ad. The name of the company is Eternal Ascent. Isn’t that a nice name? Anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 you can have Uncle Billy’s ashes put into a helium balloon and then throw a party or whatever you do. Just slowly let it go together and Uncle Billy is ascended up into heaven. The ad describes it so pleasantly, “Sending cremated remains to the heavens in a giant helium-filled balloon. It is a fitting farewell.” It is a fitting farewell unless Uncle Billy’s soul is headed straight down to hell and then that is not a very good representation is it. That was a joke too, sorry. The funeral business is trying to sell us stuff. It serves as a way to deny death. It serves as a way to not have to deal with the reality of death. The reality of death is something that the culture knows and it is something that the Christians know. It is real.
If you are a Christian, you know that you can open up the Bible and find all sorts of verses that deal with the reality of death. Old Testament and New. The first one that stands out comes from Hebrews 9:27. It says “Man is destined to die once and after that to face judgment.” This means forget about those thoughts of reincarnation. According to this verse you die once. Just once. You don’t get to die again. It goes on to say in Ecclesiastes 8:8 “No man has power over the wind to contain it so no one has power over the day of his death.” One that came to me this week in my reading that really just for some reason hung on to me this week comes out of the book of Job. It says “Only a few years will pass before I go on the journey of no return. My spirit is broken. My days are cut short. The grave awaits me.” Just focus on that first one. Only a few more years. Everybody in this room could hang on to that verse. Only a few more years if you are lucky before I go on the journey of no return. We have the reality of death in both the world and the Bible. The difference between Christians and non is that we hold the keys to the answer of the problem of death. As you should have figured out by now, that answer is found in one man, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.
Which finally brings me to today’s verse. A little bit of background on this verse John 11:25. If you read through John you know about Jesus and his friends, Martha, Mary, and their brother Lazarus. Apparently, Lazarus one day became very sick and very ill and ended up on a deathbed. Martha and Mary, in their distress, sent a message to Jesus because Jesus wasn’t there. He was ministering in some other part of the area. They asked him to come so that he might heal him. What did Jesus do? He took his time. He waited an extra two days before he came. What happened is Lazarus died in his deathbed. When Jesus is coming down the road, as the story goes, Martha goes running out and says Jesus if you had been here, my brother would have lived. Jesus says a couple words and then he goes on to say “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” These are phenomenal words. When I do a funeral, I probably use this scripture more than any other scripture in the Bible. To me, it encompasses hope. Contained within this passage is the answer key to the problem of death in the world. It is so easy to pass by this because Jesus says this in a weird way. He says he dies but then he says he will never die. What is he talking about there? Christians believe that the human basically experiences two deaths. A physical death and a spiritual death. Again, because we live in a fallen, broken, corrupt world, everyone, Christian or non, has to go through a physical death. Jesus did so why wouldn’t we. Everybody has to go through the physical death. Because of the sin in the world, we have also experienced a spiritual death. We have lost connection with God. Through a saving relationship with Jesus Christ through belief what happens is our spirit gets renewed, regenerated. Then we can have that life that really begins now and gets carried on through all eternity into the kingdom of God. In a nutshell, we refer to that as the born-again experience. That is the Christian term for it. It comes out of early in the book of John. The idea that when you are born again it is not that your physical body is born again. It is a spiritual rebirth that happens inside of you. It begins in many ways the first day of the rest of your life because it begins your walk into eternity.
This afternoon we are going to be having our church picnic. We are going to be over at Bellevue Memorial Park. We are going to do things like softball and do things like make hamburgers and obviously eat a lot of food and hang around and talk with people. But the thing I look forward to for the last couple years is that at 6:30 we are all going to go over to the pool and we are going to do some pool baptisms. I don’t know what it is, but there is something about pool baptisms that is really cool because you have a hundred people or so standing around the pool watching as we go through the baptisms. Right now, I think we have two or three people that are being baptized today. No matter what you think about baptism, I don’t want to get into the theology of it, at the very minimum it is the perfect picture of what is going on inside. It is the perfect picture of a spirit that is become reborn and renewed. When you come up out of that water that becomes a very clear place that you can mark in your journey that becomes the first step in the rest of your life into eternity. The first step, as Peter says, into an inheritance that is incorruptible, unfaded and just available right now again. In 1 Peter, speaking of God, he says “In his great mercy, he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade.” That is a right now thing. The minute you are saved it is right now. You have stepped into eternity. Physical death just becomes a crossing from this dimension to the heavenly. From this dimension to the full kingdom reality. That is what is going on there. There is barely a blip in your timeline. This is good news. If you are a Christian and you actually believe this like it says you should in the passage, then you should be different. You should be a living, walking model of the verse in John that says you believe it. Because you believe in him, even though you die, you will live. You have to believe that because that is good news.
In closing, I was trying to think of one example that would just kind of encapsulate what it looks like to fully embrace the passage in John 11. I thought and thought and I was looking for TV clips and pictures. You know the image that came to mind? It is the image of a guy named Nik Wallenda. Does anybody know who Nik Wallenda is? The Flying Wallendas. This family has been around I guess for a 100 years or so. Their main job is basically they are high-wire artists. They walk high wires for a living. Sometimes they die because of it. There have been at least three deaths of the Wallendas because of walking on the high wire. Nik Wallenda has come out of the blue lately because he had no plans of going into the high-wire act. In fact, he was going to pursue some other thing. Something got ahold of him and he felt like I have to keep this family tradition going because the family tradition was supposed to die out. He picked up the family tradition. Last year, some of you may have seen it, he crossed Niagara Falls without a net on a high wire and was one of the first people to actually cross over the falls very successfully obviously. What was it last month, June 23rd I think it was? What did he do? He got on another high wire. A wire that was over the Grand Canyon over the Colorado River. He walked across it without any net on a very windy day. How many of you saw that? I watched it. I was trying to get my kids to watch it but they wouldn’t listen to me. I said this is good stuff. This is history in the making. You need to watch this stuff. In case you didn’t see it, I have a two-minute clip that summarizes the whole event. Watch this and I will come up and tie it all together. (Clip shown here.)
Wasn’t that absolutely amazing? I watched that in awe. I was thinking this guy has to be incredibly brace or incredibly stupid or a combination of both. What is going on here? Debbie still can’t watch it. She couldn’t watch it. I watched it and I watched it kind of as a casual observer obviously.
If you were watching it in live time, you might have noticed at the very beginning who came and prayed for him. Joel Osteen. Joel Osteen came and said a prayer with him. I thought this is kind of a little bit hokey. Why bother with a prayer? You need a prayer, but again I have heard that you shouldn’t be tempting God and this was clearly tempting God. I thought this is just part of the stunt. When I was thinking about an illustration to wrap up the sermon it came to mind. I said I am going to do a little research so I went to his website. I went to Wikipedia or whatever and just tried to find out some basic background information about him. I found out that he is a born-again Christian. To me, Nik Wallenda is the real deal. That guy is an amazing guy with an amazing testimony. What he was doing was demonstrating that he embraced this gospel of John, specifically John 11:25. Because he believes in him, he would live even though he dies. Those who believe in him would never die. He embraced that. I was thinking about it again. Some people think of that as just kind of testing God. That is not his response. I saw he actually had a response to that. He said if I had not practiced that would be testing God just as if you didn’t practice any dangerous occupation and you just did it. You are just testing God. We are called to practice. That was his gift. He was able to do that. He was called to practice it. He saw this whole thing as an opportunity to glorify God. To use his gift in front of millions of people and to bring glory to God. As a quote from the article I was reading it says “Wallenda’s faith has been strengthened as his profile grew. He truly believes this because God has given him this platform for a reason, to glorify Him.” In other words Him as the Creator God. What a platform that guy has been given. Amazing. Did you hear how many times he said Jesus? Not in a cursing way like we sometimes use it. I originally looked at a video from TMZ who counted 63 times that he said Jesus across. Something tells me that even if Nik Wallenda was going to fall to his death all the way down, he would have been praising Jesus. There is no doubt in my mind. He would just be praising Jesus all the way down because he knows where he is going. Again, what we have here is a guy who is a picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is summed up again in the passage that we saw in John 11:25. This is what we are called to do. As a Christian, we are called to live as though we are not afraid of death. That we believe it. Not maybe to do something crazy like go on a high wire, but called to live out our faith in our specific calling. Whatever occupation God has called you into, whether it be the home life, school, work environment, hobbies, sports, whatever it is, you are called to live out your faith. There is no better way to die than when you know that you are in the midst of your calling. There is not a better way. I guarantee that when he goes, he wants to go doing his act because he knows that, no pun intended, that is what God wired him to do. It really is and he knows it. So he is going to use that platform that he has been given and everybody in this room has been given a platform. The question is again, as we get to the close, what are we doing with that platform? Do we believe this whole thing? The last line there says “Do you believe this?” Unfortunately, there are a bunch of Christians in the world and probably in this room that don’t believe that. They really don’t. You know how I know? They live the patterns of the culture of death denial or fear of death. They live the same patterns. They don’t live differently so what is going to attract people to the gospel of Jesus Christ if Christians do not live any differently. Again, I say that if you call yourself a believer, then believe and act on it. Live out your calling. Live out the gospel in the midst of your calling. Be an attraction to the gospel rather than a hindrance to it. If for some reason you are here today, and there always are people here that just haven’t quite got this for whatever reason. They don’t understand it. One thing they do understand is that culture does not give an answer. It can problem solve and problem solve but one thing it hasn’t been able to solve is the problem of death. The thing that Christianity provides is an answer to the problem. There is nobody besides Jesus Christ who ever claimed to be the resurrection and the life, who ever claimed to be the one who held the keys to life or to death.
As we go into this quiet time, as we go into this time of prayer, what better day than today to begin to take this passage. Take it in. Even if you don’t fully understand it but you might just know that you are not satisfied with the answers the world has given you. This whole thing about the answers that Christ gives you, you find it appealing. So much so that you are willing to take that first step in your heart and begin to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and follow it through with baptism and discipleship and just keep on going and don’t look back. Again, people, as the passage says “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” Let us pray.
