Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC July 27, 1986
The picture is indelibly etched on my memory, I'm sure because at the time the incident seemed so bizarre, so peculiar. The scene was an elementary school talent show; all of us had been groomed and polished and persuaded that we had some talent or another to display before our parents and our fellow students. Some children sang, others danced; one did a chalk drawing under ultraviolet light, a drawing which, when you held it one way, looked like George Washington, but if you turned it upside down, it looked like Abraham Lincoln. I never did figure that one out!
Some children dutifully plunked their way through the standard pieces every kid learning piano has to go through, pieces with inspired titles like Little Drummer Boy’s Song or Dance of the Little Flowers. As for me, would you guess it? I did a recitation. It was alleged that my talent was speaking. Is that or is that not a premonition? I did a recitation of a poem of sorts in which I had to do a very bad fake Italian accent and orate about something called "The Greata Game of Baseaball". Today I suspect it would be considered an ethnic slur, but in 1949 we hadn't learned about that yet.
All went well during the talent show until a precocious ten-year-old came out, dressed in a shortie choir robe, pushing a little portable organ ahead of him. I knew this kid, he and I went to the same church, and I knew that he was an extraordinary musical talent. So I and the others waited to see what Carl would perform on this miniature church organ. Now mind you, everything else up to this point had been upbeat, fun, full of laughter. Everything had been carefree and positive, and that's a part of the reason, I guess, we all got such a shock when this ten-year-old cherub in a choir robe announced, I will now play Johann Sebastian Bach's chorale prelude, “Come Sweet Death!”
“Come Sweet Death” How bizarre that seemed!. How utterly weird that anybody should speak of death as sweet, how utterly absurd that anyone should invite death to come. And how incomprehensible that a ten-year old could find any reason at all to select a piece with so morbid a title as his contribution to our evening of talent and fun and laughter. Well, as I remember, some laughed nervously, others just said, “What? What in the world does he mean by that?” And all went home pondering a phrase I suspect not one of them had ever included in his or her vocabulary before that night: “Come Sweet Death”
And, to some little extent at least, all went home pondering a theme that most of us try to avoid as long as we can, the theme of death. Most went home that night with a sober side amidst all the fun they had had, because the unwelcome enemy, the great destroyer, had been mentioned, and not only had it been mentioned, but the music had even suggested that someone might not fear death, but might embrace it, might call for it, might want it. Strange, strange indeed! Come, sweet death.
Today as the last of my series of messages on fear I want to think with you for a little while on the issue surrounding the fear of death. We've spent our other three Sundays this month working on fear as a theme of our everyday existence. We affirmed that fear is the enemy of the liberty, the freedom God wants to give us. And we said that our calling then was to have faith in a God who wants the best for us. Then we saw how fear leads us sometimes to break our integrity, how fear may lead us down the path of trying to save our skins at the expense of our integrity, and again we learned that we can trust God, we can trust God with the truth. Then last week we reflected through the life of Job on what it is to fear fear, we thought about the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that goes to work on us sometimes, and how Satan finds us vulnerable at that point at which we do not trust God with all that we are, good, bad, and indifferent. In all these messages there has been an underlying motif, and I hope you've caught it, I hope you heard it as I tried to underscore it again just now: trust God. Trust God. Exercise faith, believe and know that the living God who made you is able to keep you, is able to deliver you beyond all your fears. That has been in simplest terms the message I've tried to bring each week, and guess what, that's the message for today too.
If we fear death, what do we do about it? Trust God.
If we cannot imagine why anyone would in any measure be prepared to embrace death; if we would really rather not talk about death; if we would prefer to hide the reality of death by saying that someone "passed" instead of saying that he died; if we go around the issue by saying that I lost my father or my mother instead of saying that my father died, my mother died – if in any of these or a score of other ways we try to ignore the fact of death, then for us the message of the day will still be: trust God. Trust God in His goodness, trust God in His mercy, above all trust the God who in Jesus Christ tasted death, for us, tasted it and then overcame it. Trust God.
Now somewhere about the year we call 95 AD, some 60 or more years after the ministry of Jesus, there is an elderly man, so we think, a leader of the Christian movement, who has been banished to the Island of Patmos. Bad as banishment is, bad as it is to find yourself removed from family and friends and stuck away on a little island with no human companionship, it is not, surely, as bad as what this man's friends were facing. On long summer days as John would have paced to and fro, up and down, on that island, I can imagine him, slowly at first and then more continually, beginning to think about a subject that came to occupy much of his mind: death. Death.
Why death? Why is John preoccupied with the meaning of death? Two reasons, I suspect. First, he is no longer a young man himself. If, as some tradition has it, this is the same John who was the youngest of Jesus' twelve disciples, then by now he is quite advanced in years. You know, there is a kind of threshold that you cross, when the years begin to accumulate, and you just naturally begin to face certain biological realities. Some of us suspect that teenagers really think they are indestructible. But that illusion disappears as soon as you try to mow a lawn in 95 degree heat! John surely knew that he could not have much longer to live.
But there is another reason, a more important reason, why John would have been pondering the meaning of death. And that is that he is aware of the gathering storm that is costing the lives of his fellow Christians, here and there across the Roman Empire. As scraps of news find their way to him, maybe a letter from a friend, maybe a whispered rumor that travels to Patmos with an occasional fisherman – as scraps of news find their way to him, John is learning that the madman in Rome, Domitian, is exacting a terrible price from Christians. Christians are putting their loyalty to Christ ahead of everything, ahead of their social position, ahead of their financial stability, and most of all, ahead of their very lives. John is hearing that if you will not say Caesar is Lord, that if you insist on saying, “Christ is Lord,” then you will find yourself in the arena, or on the cross, or at the chopping block, just as Peter and Paul both had done some thirty years earlier. Death: John cannot help but reflect on death, for his fellow believers are not only tasting death, they are embracing death, they are courting death, they do not seem to be afraid of death. Come Sweet Death. How strange!
And so to John's mind and heart comes a vision; before the eyes of his spirit there comes the image of one who is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, one who was and who is and who come, the Almighty. Listen to what John sees in this unveiling of the risen Christ:
“From Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead: ‘Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one; I died, and behold, I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.’"
Fear not, I am the living one, I died and behold l am alive for evermore and I have the keys of death itself and of the place where the dead are. Fear not. Trust the living Christ and fear not.
What can this mean for you and me today? Where is the power in John's vision for folks like us, who are not challenged to lay down our very lives as a part of our Christian commitment, but who nonetheless must struggle with the harsh reality of death? Do we find here any resources to counteract our fear of death?
This morning I cannot hope to argue you out of any fear of death you may have. As I reflect on this Scripture I am struck with the fact that the Christ of John's magnificent vision makes no arguments, presents no cases, defends no theories. I am not able to argue you out of fearing death. I am not prepared, as one person put it, to describe the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell. I can give you no airtight theories, no proofs, no tightly woven logic. All I can do is ask you to get caught up in the glory and the scope of John's vision; all I can do is to evoke for you the grandeur and the breadth of John's glimpse of him who is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end of all things.
Consider him as one who began as we begin, struggling against the death that was coming. Consider him in the garden, crying out, “Father, let this cup pass from me.” But consider him also, in the beauty of submission, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done. “Consider him as one who experienced what I suspect we all fear most about death – that we shall be abandoned, utterly abandoned and left without hope, without companionship, without anything.
Consider his cry, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” But consider also the serenity of spirit that can reach out to forgive another, the peace of soul that can breath at last, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” All this lies behind John’s vision of Jesus Christ the faithful, the Alpha and the Omega.
Consider then one who knows how to look death squarely in the eye and to face it down even as it comes. Consider him in his triumph o'er the grave. Consider him who is the first-born from the dead -- how can I say all that needs to be said, how can I impress upon you what this means? It is not just that God raised Christ Jesus from death, it is not just that He broke the bonds of death for Himself. It is not just that this is a unique happening, never before and never again to happen. No; hear what John hears, see what John sees: he is the firstborn from the dead. And to him are given the keys of Death itself. He is in control. Consider him.
And consider him as not only Lord of your life and my life, not only as the one who makes such awesome guarantees to us, but consider him as the Lord of all human history. "Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, everyone who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth shall wail on account of him." Consider Christ; consider him as the one in whom all the nations find meaning, as the one in whom all men and women of all ages and all nations may find their futures written. Consider him as the pivot point of all creation. Does that sound fanatic to you? Does that sound too exalted, too much? Yet there it is: John's knowledge of his own death; John's awareness that Christians are dying – it gives way to no despair, it utters no words of torment, it allows no lasting room for fear. Consider the Christ, who is Alpha and Omega, beginning and ending, who was and who is and who is to come. And fear not. Fear not.
What have I really said today? What have I brought forward that you did not know already? Nothing really. Nothing much, nothing new. And yet everything, absolutely everything. Do we fear death? I think we do, in lots of ways. We keep it out of our language, we prettify bodies so that they look alive, sometimes better than alive, we make sick little jokes about death (Ride with me sometime in the undertaker's car and listen to the stories they tell.) We even create a motion picture genre that glorifies violence and death as long as it happens to the other person, as long as Rambo keeps it from happening to us. But all these things remind us that we do fear death.
But over against them all stands the figure of the crucified and risen Christ: I am the beginning and the ending, I hold the keys of death and hell, I am the first-born of the dead. Trust Christ even with this. Trust Christ even with your death as you do with your life. And fear not.
