The Final Accounting

I just got back from the most marvelous conference. I almost didn’t go... I’d spent all my Continuing Ed allowance already, and the hotels in Baltimore are EXPENSIVE. But the organizer of the conference arranged for me to share a hotel room with one of the speakers, whose room was already being paid for by the conference, so I went. It was called The Consultation on The Church and Issues at the End of Life, and it wasn’t the usual sort of event where you sit in a large room with a couple of hundred folk you’ve never met before and listen to people talk at you. It was a planning conference for leaders of the Pro-Life movement from all the mainline churches - not just Presbyterians, but Methodists and Lutherans and Catholics and even a Syro-Chaldean from Israel. There weren’t more than thirty-five people there; half of them were speakers and all of us got to participate in the discussions that followed. We covered theology, medicine, law, ethics, pastoral care, and worship. I met big-name, cutting edge theologians like Gilbert Meilander, academic luminaries like James Edwards, political theorists like Jay Budziszewski, journalists like Ken Myers. One of the speakers was late for his presentation because his Senate hearings lasted longer than expected.

Wow. It was great. I still don’t know how I got lucky enough to be invited.

And, to be honest with you, after such an intense and intellectually demanding couple of days, I was not looking forward to switching gears and writing my sermon. One of the other pastors asked if I was going to preach on the issues we’d been discussing at the conference, and I said no, I was preaching on Malachi 3. But as I was driving home thinking about it all, I realized that no passage of Scripture has more to say about end-of-life issues than Malachi 3.

Because the third chapter of Malachi challenges us to consider whether we are ready to appear before God. "See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and YHWH whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight-- indeed, he is coming, says YHWH of hosts." [v.1]

Now, this was written four hundred and fifty years before the coming of Christ. And we usually preach this at the beginning of Advent, and point to John the Baptist, who prepared the people of Israel for the coming of Christ. But just as last week’s passage from Zechariah is as relevant now as it is for Palm Sunday, this warning from Malachi is also relevant today, and indeed every day, because God is still in the business of preparing his people for the coming of the Lord.

I’m not going to allegorize the second coming of Christ. The day will come when he returns as promised, and history will end. The dead will rise and we will all stand before God at his judgment seat. And those who are in Christ will receive the gift of eternal life. That is why we can say with the apostle John, even sinners as we still are, “Come, Lord Jesus.” [Rev 22:20b] But that is - no matter how often we say we believe in it - something far off and kind of fuzzy in its outline, and I’m afraid it doesn’t always have a great deal to do with how we make the decisions which impact our lives.

But there’s another reality which each one of us will have to face, and will have to face within our own timeline. And that is the fact of our own mortality. Each one of us has his or her own death to die. Each one of us will have our own personal one-on-one encounter with the living God. Whether he comes to us, or we come to him, we will not be able to escape it. "But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire." [v.2]

The question before us at the conference was, "Is the church doing its job of preparing its people for death?" Or, to put a slightly different twist on it another way, "How well is the church doing its job of preparing its people for death?"

And the answer was, I am afraid, “Not very well.” Our culture has infected the church enough so that death is now surrounded by the same kinds of taboos that surrounded sex in Victorian times. We turn our heads, we cover our eyes, we rush our children past reminders of our mortality as if we could put it off by denying its reality.

That is why the issues of assisted suicide and euthanasia have gotten such a hold on our culture, because both - believe it or not - are attempts to deny the reality of death. Woody Allen said that he “wasn’t afraid of death, he just didn’t want to be there when it happened.” We like to think that the worst thing about death is the act of dying, and if somehow we can avoid it, or get it under our control, or sleep through it, or at the very least make it quick and painless we have conquered it.