June 29, 2010 by djackson.

(Note: Jordan Corona, a fine young man and sometime student of the South Texas School of Christian Studies, preached last Sunday night at my home congregation, Windsor Park Baptist Church. His message triggered some thoughts which I share here with deep gratitude for his inspiration.)

“Put out the light, and then put out the light.” - Othello, Act V/Scene 2

Othello says that just before he strangles Desdemona. He gasses on for a while afterward about how physical light - a candle, say, or a lamp - can be rekindled once extinguished, but a life once snuffed is gone for good. What interests me is Shakespeare’s metaphor of light for life. He seems to equate the two, as if all life gives off light.

Maybe so, but Jesus takes the image in a different direction. “YOU,” he tells the wretched refuse on that particular teeming shore (or hillside), “are the light of the world.” The Greek pronoun is plural and emphatic - nothing about divine sparks in each individual, nothing about humanity in general. These people, this straggling gaggle of the upstarts, the downcast, the outcasts and the inbred posses, in Dallas Willard’s lovely phrase, “a certain radiance.” Christ-followers shine with Christ-light.

That teaching raises at least a couple of questions for those of us who desire to live in the kingdom Jesus here proclaims: Why should we? and Why don’t we? And I might throw in one more: How can we?

Why should we shine? Presumably because we inhabit a dark world and people need to see their way around. To return to Willard, the followers of the Nazarene “make life manageable.” They “are the only ones who can actually make the world work.” People, in other words, need to see where they’re going. Bat-blinded by technology and greed we scuttle across the floors of silent seas and puncture pockets of oil that surge to the surface and slosh death everywhere. Mole-blinded by physical drives we couple mindlessly with random bits of flesh or pixels and carve up our hearts on the sharp edges of emptiness. Cataracts of anger clog our social insight so we trade violence for violence like foolish firefighters who spray gasoline on an oil fire in some hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-me psychosis.

If people could only see what they’re doing, they might not do it. If people could only see what they need to do, they might do that instead. But they can’t, Jesus says, if we don’t bring the light.

Elwin Ransom, hero of C. S. Lewis’ space novel “Perelandra,” finds himself trapped in the subterranean caverns far below the surface of Venus and begins a long, lonely climb upward. “The starvation for light,” Lewis writes, “became very painful. He found himself thinking about light as a hungry man thinks about food - picturing April hillsides with milky clouds racing over them in blue skies or quiet circles of lamp-light on tables pleasantly littered with books and pipes.” Citizens of the kingdom, Jesus promises, can prepare a table of brightness before such light-starved souls in the presence of the defeating darkness.

We need to shine. Our world needs us to shine. Whether as humble candles in tumbled homes or mega-watt metropolises on hilltops, we need to blaze until truth ceases to be controversial and simply becomes the obvious way to live.

We need to shine. So why don’t we?

It costs to let one’s light shine. Jesus has already begun to outline a life that works so backward to the blinded methods of the majority that incandescence looks more like insanity. If we want to shine, we’ve got to burn; if we want to blaze, we’ll wind up singed. We’ll have to bless our persecutors and suppress our appetites. We’ll have to serve Jesus in secret and live poor in public. We’ll have to believe so firmly in prayer that we can live as if God mostly helps those who don’t help themselves. There will be needles’ eyes and narrow gates that only a bulimic downsizing of self can squeeze us through.

To be light, we must burn. It costs to burn; it hurts to be light.

Abba Lot, one of the desert fathers, went to his colleague Abba Joseph with a question. “I’m a pretty good monk,” he said in effect. “I fast off and on, pray, and I’ve memorized a lot of the Bible. I stay away from HBO and ‘Desperate Housewives’ and use canvass grocery bags instead of plastic. What more can I do?” The crazy old holy man stood, and as he spread his gnarled digits skyward his fingers shone like ten candles. “If you will,” he replied, “you could become a living flame.”

If you will; but will we?

Annie Dillard, in her book “Holy the Firm,” tells the story of a moth that flew into her camp sight candle as she sat alone in the woods reading Rimbaud.

And then this-moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning - only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

Looked at in that light, the question ceases to be “Can we shine?” and becomes instead, “Dare we?” I’ve heard people complain - have done it myself - that no one can actually live the Sermon on the Mount because to do so would be suicidal. Have we never understood that Jesus orders us to take up the cross? Suicide is a meaningless concept to one whose whole life is a long walk along the Green Mile.

The poet Don Marquis anticipates Dillard’s imagery in a poem called “the lesson of the moth.” It begins

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires.

The narrator queries the insect on this bizarre behavior that seems to define his species. It is not a lack of common sense, the bug argues, but an excess of uncommon sense.

we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while

The speaker disagrees with the moth (which by now has torched itself into oblivion on a cigar lighter), opting for “half the happiness and twice/the longevity,” then concludes wistfully:

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

That’s really the only question that counts when it come to being light: is there anything we want that badly?

Of course, that sort of burn-out is, for the believer, only temporary. Jesus offers us the ignition that taps into eternal resources. “And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever,” promises Daniel 12.3. Better a blazing instant than a boring eternity, but why talk about such a Sophie’s choice when our Master offers both the light and the longevity?

Well, to wrap up: What might it look like for the church so to shine? Probably something less dramatic than we think, nearer to hand and at the same time available only to a Christ-lit imagination.

The First Baptist Church of Battleboro, Vermont, had two precious resources: a Tiffany window that brought light to the sanctuary and a homeless shelter that brought broken lives into the fellowship hall. The one-hundred-year-old window depicted St. John in a garden; the shelter collected lives tossed out with the garbage. The window was worth a lot of money; the shelter lost money. So the church, looking at the thing in the light of her Lord, took a bold step: they sold the valuable window to minister to the unvalued people. They decided to let less of this world’s light into their place of worship so that they could welcome the Light of the World in their place of service. They gave up a picture of John’s body to obey the substance of John’s teaching - love one another.

Let’s be light. Let’s become windows on eternity: not stained-glass saints who gaze through gaudy glazing on comfortable congregations, but open gaps torn through the dim world’s walls that get out of the way of the One who truly shines.

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June 14, 2010 by djackson.

This is a slightly expanded version of the sermon I preached yesterday at the First Baptist Church of Falfurrias, Texas.

The Romance of Redepmtion
Luke 7.36-50

Scottish theologian T. F. Torrance served as a chaplain during the Second World War. He recounts that as he held the hand of a dying nineteen year old soldier, the young man had one question. Later, as he visited the death bed of the oldest woman in his congregation in Aberdeen, she asked the same question: “Is God really like Jesus?”

That, it seems to me, is the one question really worth asking if you are a Christian. Because our only truly unique claim is not that we believe in God – every religion does that, and some believe in a great many more gods than we do. No, our unique claim is that we believe in the God who reveals himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and that by looking at Jesus, we can know with certainty who this God is whom we will face after death.

And that, according to this little story from Luke’s gospel, is good news! Because Jesus readily receives sinners, which means that we do not need to doubt whether the Father of Jesus will receive us into Heaven. Yet the Bible clearly tells us that not everyone will wind up in Heaven. Why? Well, oddly enough, the problem is not how Jesus receives us, but how we receive him!

You see, we are prone to read this story as if it is about how to treat sinners. We can choose Option 1, the Simon Gambit, and refuse to forgive them. Or, we can choose Option 2, the Jesus Way, and forgive them. But that reading misses the point of the story. As Fred Craddock has pointed out, this is not a story about two different ways that righteous people respond to sinners; this is a story about the way two different kinds of sinners respond to Jesus! Jesus receives sinners because sinners seek Jesus. Seekers reject Jesus because they don’t know they’re sinners.

Jesus sits at the center of this story as he sat at the center of that dinner table, as Simon and the sinner rotate around him. Luke starts with the woman, who does everything wrong. Her actions read like the script of an old episode of “I Love Lucy,” where hair-brained schemes quickly unravel and each effort to repair the damage only makes things worse. In fact, this fiasco reminds me of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

First, she explodes the accepted etiquette. Scholars argue that it was not unusual, in that society, for outsiders to blunder into a private dinner just to see what was going on. Maybe so, but Luke hints that something has gone wrong right from the first. In the King James, verse 37 begins with the word, “Behold,” and that is the correct rendering of the original text. It denotes surprise, at least, if not absolute shock. Though other drifters and hangers-on might have entered without offense, the presence of this notorious sinner clearly offends everyone.

But it doesn’t stop there. I think probably that this woman had no plans beyond wanting to be close to Jesus. In fact, she may have hoped simply to sit at his feet unnoticed. People like her quickly become adept at social invisibility. Remember that in this day and culture people did not sit up in chairs around the table, but reclined on low-slung chaise lounges so that their feet faced away from the table and nearly touched the wall. Thus she had a good six feet of Jesus between her and the rest of the crowd.
But whatever her original intentions in crashing the gate, she immediately launches into a series of missteps that telescope out of one another until the social oil slick spreads like a billion barrels of crude all over the inner circle of the social elite.

Next comes the attempt at a top-kill. “She began to wet his feet with her tears.” This wasn’t part of the plan – if she had a plan at all! She simply found herself so overcome with emotion that she burst into unrestrained sobs which inadvertently soaked the feet of Jesus. Remember that he had not washed his feet (v.44) and now we see the seriousness of that social faux pas: her tears turn the dust to mud and make the Lord’s feet grimier than ever.

Now, her cover completely blown, she goes for the junk shot: she grabs whatever comes to hand to mop up the mess, and it happens to be her hair. Understand, in that society, as in most Muslim countries in the modern world, a woman did not display her hair in public but kept it tightly bound and covered. Hers is the act of a wanton woman, thus re-enforcing the image that everyone had of her already. Not to mention that human hair does not work well as a sponge.

In a final desperate act, she tries to cut the riser pipe. It may be that she had intended all along to anoint Jesus’ feet. That would explain why Luke mentions the vial in verse 37 when he first introduces the woman. On the other hand, scholars tell us that the women of Jesus’ day frequently wore a small sachet of scent on a cord around their necks in order to overcome the rich aroma of human bodies in a hot climate with no running water. It is possible that, surveying the muddy, hairy mess she had made of Jesus’ feet, she smashed the neck of this little bottle of Channel Number Five and smeared it on to of the slick hoping, at least, to cover the smell.

If this is the case, she could not have made a worse move. If exposing her hair was the act of a temptress, pouring out this vial was the gambit of a seductress. The one other biblical reference to this custom comes in the Song of Solomon, that beautiful love poem that has been embarrassing Christians for centuries. Speaking of her beloved the young woman cries out, “A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.” (Song 1.13) In a room full of biblically literate Pharisees, few people would have missed the connection.

The scene now shifts to Simon the Pharisee. Simon is no stranger to us. He is that person you secretly hate – the woman whose hair never seems to sag beneath the South Texas heat and humidity; the man whose khaki trousers never show a wrinkle; that couple whose kids are always clean, whose bumper is covered with stickers that proclaim, “My child is an honor student.”

Simon, it seems to me, is a seeker. And the problem with seekers is that they misunderstand the burden of proof when they come before Jesus. His whole attitude is summed up in the first word he says in verse 39: “if”. The phrase hints that Simon had been observing Jesus, putting him to the test, attempting to determine if this supposed Messiah was really what Simon sought.

Before this, he has a careful approach to Jesus: he invites Jesus to dine, which he considers such a huge compliment that he feels no need to attend to the common social courtesies: no water for a guest to wash up, no gracious greeting, not even a squirt of liquid hand-sanitizer before dinner. Perhaps he foregoes such attentions until he knows whether Jesus is worth such effort. After this, he has no real interest in Jesus. His, “Say it,” in verse 40 and his “I suppose” in v.43 both indicate a sort of languid indifference to anything this Nazarene upstart might have to tell him.

That’s the problem, really, with all of our talk today about being “seeker sensitive.” Seekers, it seems to me, come to Jesus with a cool sense of superiority, waiting to see if Jesus will deliver what they want.

And Simon decides that Jesus has failed. “If he were a prophet” (which he is not), Jesus would shun the touch of this tainted specimen. Simon lolls back on his little divan, moodily chewing a cheese blintz, and from the towering height of his religious resume rejects Jesus as a decent indicator of the nature of God.

Again, I think this is why seeker sensitive churches don’t tend to major on Jesus’ teachings about giving up all you own or turning your back on your nearest kin. After all, seekers come to church to find out how they can plug God into their own agendas, agendas largely driven by making money and straightening out their kids. Who needs a Savior who is all about lavish displays of clumsy worship?

Now, at this point Jesus intervenes. Jesus, I think, always tends to speak up either when we are at our worst or when we are at our best, either when we’ve made the biggest pig’s breakfast possible out of our opportunities or when we think we have finally found our way to the top of the heap. He tells a little tale about two debtors whose balance sheet differs by a factor of ten. It doesn’t take a certified public accountant to get the point of the comparison: this is Bernie Madoff vs. two missed payments on your Mastercard; this is Fannie and Freddy vs. being a little late with your utility bill.

But don’t miss the point here! Jesus does not ask, “Which one will be forgiven.” He’s already said that the lender forgave both. No, he asks a question about relationship: “Which one will love more?” And that is just the point: the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not about getting God to love us; the Gospel is about getting us to love Jesus!

Simon suffers from what I call the small-sin syndrome. Simon the seeker rejects Jesus because he doesn’t know he’s a sinner. The problem with small sins is that, like small debts, they mount so quickly we don’t see them adding up!

One of my favorite books is C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, where Lewis imagines a senior demon (Screwtape) writing letters of instruction to a junior tempter (Wormwood) on how to lead a soul to Hell. At one point, Screwtape tells his protégé that, like all young tempters, he is over-eager to lead his man into spectacular sins. The problem with that, Screwtape hints, is that these sins can awaken a person to the reality of his own damnation and cause him to repent. On the other hand, the expert tempter argues, “the saftest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Most of us, like Simon, see ourselves as pretty good people – and we are! Pretty good – but not truly good. If we will stop and ponder, we will see that while we have steered clear of the big-ticket items, we have gone on for a lifetime steadily committing fifty-denarii sins until the total has become staggering.

And there’s one more thing worth noting. Jesus says both men had gone in hock to a ‘moneylender.” Luke here uses a very specific Greek word that means a professional Shylock, a guy who makes a living at it by charging interest. It is a very different verb, for instance, from the one in Luke 11.5 where a friend asks his friend to “lend” him some food to serve an unexpected guest. The idea is that the meter keeps running on what we see as small sins, if we even see them at all!

That great Baptist, John Bunyan, in his immortal work The Pilgrim’s Progress, hints at his own conversion when he has one of his characters, in describing his salvation, employ a similar metaphor: “If a man runs a hundred pounds into the shopkeeper’s debt, and after that shall pay for all that he shall fetch; yet if this old debt stand still in the book uncrossed, the shopkeeper may sue him, and cast him into prison till he shall pay the debt.”

The sinful woman, on the other hand, benefits from what St. Augustine called felix culpa, the happy guilt that drives us to God’s throne of grace. Jesus receives this sinner because this sinner seeks Jesus. The question is not how high she has piled up sin, or how wide she has spread the mess of her mistaken worship, but how deeply she has fallen in love with her Lord. “She has loved much.” It seems to me that all great love stories begin with one who cannot get over the shock of being loved.

When Elizabeth Barrett first met her future husband, Robert Browning, she fell deeply in love but thought there was no hope. He was a dashing and famous poet – a sort of rock star in that Victorian era – and she, six years his elder, was a confirmed invalid whose tyrannous father had promised to cut her off without a penny if she dared to marry anyone. But Robert fell madly in love and courted her passionately for two years until she consented and he took her, aging, penniless, and ill. He spirited her off to Italy where, between his love and the healthy climate, she recovered her health and even bore him a son.

She wrote a series of sonnets during their courtship, pouring out her sense of awe that she could find herself truly loved by so great a lover. When she showed them to Robert years later, he said they were the best sonnets written in English since Shakespeare, and insisted that she publish them. Embarrassed to have such personal emotions made public, she pretended they were her translations of the work of a Portuguese poet and released them under the title of “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” In one of them, number eight, she writes words that could have come from the woman in Luke’s story,

What can I give thee back, O liberal

And princely giver, who hast brought the gold

And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold,

And laid them on the outside of the wall

For such as I to take or leave withal,

In unexpected largesse? am I cold,

Ungrateful, that for these most manifold

High gifts, I render nothing back at all?

Not so; not cold,–but very poor instead.

Ask God who knows. For frequent tears have run

The colours from my life, and left so dead

And pale a stuff, it were not fitly done

To give the same as pillow to thy head.

Go farther! let it serve to trample on.

In 1937 King Henry VIII of England shocked the world when he renounced his throne and his crown in order to marry the divorced commoner Wallis Simpson. Years later, speaking to a group of friends on the secrets of a happy marriage, Edward quipped, “Of course, I do have a slight advantage over the rest of you. It helps in a pinch to be able to remind your bride that you gave up a throne for her.” If we find ourselves lacking in love for our Lord, perhaps it is because we have forgotten that he not only gave up a throne for us, but embraced a cross; that he not only laid aside a crown of glory, but took up a crown of thorns; that he not only abandoned the praise of angels, but embraced the jeers of men.
Oh, that God would give us the gob-smacked grace to see ourselves as the big sinners we are, even if we got to be big sinners one small sin at a time! Then perhaps we could truly sing with the great hymn writer Ira Stanphill,

I work so hard for Jesus” I often boast and say,
“I’ve sacrificed a lot of things to walk the narrow way,
I gave up fame and fortune; I’m worth a lot to thee,”
And then I heard Him gently say to me,
“I left the throne of glory and counted it but loss,
My hands were nailed in anger upon a cruel cross,
But now we’ll make the journey with your hand safe in mine,
So lift your cross and follow close to me.”

And the beauty of this is that when we love Jesus that way, our worship becomes acceptable as an act of that love. This woman has done everything wrong, but Jesus, in front of everyone, makes it all right. Those spilled tears become more precious than the mere water that common courtesy should have offered. Her hair he sees as richer than a mere washrag. Where Simon failed to offer the cheap olive oil that was only good manners, she has invested valuable ointment.

You see, much talk about church these days has led us to believe that we have to do things on a grand, fancy scale. Why? To please the seekers, those church connoisseurs who coolly evaluate our performance and then offer a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Jesus is much easier – and harder – to please, because all he asks is that we act out of love.
Years ago my wife and sons and I all appeared together in a production of Shakespeare’s marvelous play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I played the part of Theseus, the duke of Athens. We don’t like this guy much; he’s pompous and arrogant and is forcing his bride to marry him at the point of a sword. But he redeems himself at the end. A group of local tradesmen come to the wedding and offer to perform an absolutely terrible play – it is badly written and badly acted and absolutely hilarious. Everyone tells the Duke to skip it, but, as he explains to Hyppolyta, his fiancé:

Where I have come, great clerks have purposed
To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practised accent in their fears
And in conclusion dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome. Trust me, sweet,
Out of this silence yet I pick’d a welcome;
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity.

That is why I would rather love Jesus than impress the Simon Seekers of society. That is why I like your worship best when you make your own music. Because out of our disastrous stumbles, out of our embarrassed silence and sour notes and slips of the tongue, Jesus constructs praise and glory that shames the very angels before his throne.
Perhaps the whole of this story – and the whole of anyone’s eternity – turns on the single question of who we think is lucky: Simon-like seekers think Jesus is lucky to get them; big sinners know that they are lucky to get Jesus.

I think that’s really the point: we won’t fall in love with Jesus until we realize how lucky we are that he has first loved us! Or, as the great German pastor Helmut Thielicke once wrote, “I make bold to say that even the most otrthodox churchman will not enter the kingdom of heaven unless he is continually surprised that mercy has been shown him.”
When Eugene Peterson was working on his famous Bible translation, The Message, he came across that famous word “blessed” with which Jesus begins each of the Beatitudes. He wanted to translate it lucky. His publisher told him that he couldn’t do that, that too many Evangelicals think “luck” is a superstitious concept and the work of the devil, so Peterson backed off. But he tells the story of what that seemed to him to be the right word. There was a woman who attended Peterson’s church – just showed up one day. She came from a rough background of open sin and couldn’t get over the fact that Christ had welcomed her – and Christ’s church had done so as well. “I feel so lucky,” she kept telling the pastor week after week. “I feel so lucky to be here.”

So, I suppose, your entire eternity really comes down to a line from a Clint Eastwood movie. As you look into the face of the God of all Eternity, you have to ask yourself: Do you feel lucky, punk?

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June 9, 2010 by djackson.

I’m about to get a lot happier if I don’t kill myself first.

Those are my conclusions based on some conflicting research I recently came across. A recent Gallup pole published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that at fifty people’s sense of satisfaction tends to rise with a bullet. If we hang ride that rocket for the next thirty-five years we end up being as happy as we were at our previous peak age of eighteen. The difference, of course, is that at eight-five our happiness includes reality, whereas at eighteen we’re just too stupid to know better. And the half-century mark seems to be the Rubicon for both positive and negative emotions: anger, sadness, worry - after fifty they start dropping like the Dow Jones Average.

On the other hand, the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control show a spike in suicides between the ages of forty-five and fifty-four. For the last three years, this tranche of the population has offed itself at a higher rate than any other. Over seventeen percent of this demographic dies by its own hand, and men at a rate three times as high as women.

So, since a shiny new AARP card with my name on it slithered out of an envelope in yesterday’s mail, I can’t help but wondering: should I be laughing all the way to the morgue? That latest zero on my odometer begins to take on a new significance, but just what does it signify?

Well, there is this: the Gallup people report that happiness tanks big-time after the teenage years. I have a theory about why that may be. Perhaps beyond that point, as we lose that bullet-proof varsity letter jacket and the bullet-proof pecs that filled it out, we learn that our own bodies - and our own selves - aren’t sufficiently durable vehicles to get us all the way to the finish line. We marry and have kids, we commit to a job (we thought it was a “career” or a “vocation” but most days it ends up being a job) and must do that job in a community of coworkers. If we’re the Evangelical type, we leave the youth group and discover that we must now follow Christ and even attend church without big events featuring hip knock-offs of secular T-shirts and regular cry-fests at various camps and retreats (though serious addicts can do the Promise Keepers or the Walk to Emmaus as a sort of methadone). In other words, we cease building a self and begin instead investing it in those around us. We learn to apply the wisdom of Jesus in the social as well as the financial aspect: we stop storing our treasure in the increasingly moth-munched, rust-rotted, time-pillaged vault of our own bodies and minds and instead sink more and more of it into the unpredictable argosies of other people.

And then, after a long time of perhaps feeling that God has suckered us in a shell game where the pea isn’t under any of the three cups, we look up and discover that the prize is all around us in meaningful relationships with Christ and other people.

All of this is on my mind because in addition to celebrating my entrance into 1) The Happiness Demographic, 2) The Suicide Sector, and 3) the AARP, I am celebrating something else today: my twenty-sixth wedding anniversary. AND, just over a week ago, I performed the ceremony as my older son married a wonderful young woman who (for reasons best known to her) loves him madly. Fifty years of crawling between earth and heaven; twenty-six years of loving, honoring, and cherishing. Twenty-four years of trying to raise a son who, I found out early on, was smarter than I was. Where did the time go? Into my Lord, who turns my stumbling steps toward him into true transformation. Into my wife, my two boys, the three congregations I tried to serve, and the students I now teach. So I haven’t lost my youth; I know right where it is. I simply put it into relationships: Mortality Tupperware, containers that can keep it fresh.

So on my anniversary, I think I’ll round things off with the words of a better writer who, long ago, said much the same thing:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,–and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings’.

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June 5, 2010 by djackson.

This is the funeral sermon I preached on June 3, 2010, for Vivian Eubank, who died of cancer at the age of ninety-four. I’ve had a couple of requests, so I am publishing it here.

I Will Arise
Song of Solomon 2.10-13
Vivian Eubank: Funeral
Thursday, June 3, 2010

Death has won today, but death has not won.

Christians should never make light of death. Death entered this world as a result of sin, as Genesis records and Romans affirms. For this reason death is an enemy, and a frightening one at that. And this is true even for one like Vivian Eubank, who lived a long life, died a well-prepared death, and trusted in a deep, abiding faith.

Vivian Eubank lived a long, happy life before death came. I never knew anyone more vital, who accomplished more or touched more hearts. I will never forget her own epitaph on her life. The last time Becky and I went to dinner with her, as we were walking out to our car, she suddenly stopped, fixed us with that imperious gaze and said, “Be happy. It’s a good world!”

Vivian saw death coming well in advance. For two years after her initial diagnosis she defied all the odds by continuing to live a strong, vigorous life. In fact, she once told me she regretted that lengthy hiatus: “It was embarrassing to be dying for two years!” she admitted.

Vivian faced death in the strength of a life-long Christian faith that was both deep and practical. She did not simply pocket the promise of salvation the way others would clutch a lucky rabbit’s foot. She proclaimed the love of Christ by both her words and her actions throughout all of those nine decades. She was a dedicated and gifted Sunday school teacher, a faithful church member, and a dear friend and supporter to her pastor.

Yet for all her long, happy life, and for all her advanced warning, and for all the undoubted depth of her Christian faith, Vivian looked at death with a certain amount of fear. In one of my final visits she asked me to read Shakespeare to her, specifically the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. When I reached the line where the Bard describes death as “that undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” she stopped me. “That’s just it,” she whispered. “We don’t know.”

But that didn’t – and doesn’t – bother me. Fear in the face of death is not a failure of faith, nor is grief following death a denial of our blessed hope.

Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus though Our Lord already knows that he will raise his friend to life moments later (Jo 11.35). Jesus cries at his friend’s funeral because death reminds us of the presence and power of sin. Jesus also cries because he identifies fully with the sense of separation we feel when a loved one leaves us for the last time in this life. N. T. Wright has wisely reminded us that the tears of Christ show his full presence in our griefs and sorrows, and that not until we see that “the Word who is God can cry with the world’s crying will we discover what the word ‘God’ really means.”

I urged Vivian then to feel no shame in her fear of death, and I urge you today to feel no shame in your sorrow that she has died. Tears are more than a tribute to the loss of the one we love; they are an act of defiance in the face of an enemy whose invasion goes all the way back to Eden. They are an act of faith in the goodness of a God who never intended that we suffer this anguish. The stinging salt tears of our Savior at that tomb outside of Bethany sanctify every sorrow felt in this place today. After all, death has won today, and that is bad news.

But there is good news: Death has won today, but death has not won.

In the text that I have read this afternoon, the beloved bride hears the cry of her lover as he hastens to her from afar. In poetry at least as beautiful as anything Shakespeare ever wrote, she describes how he bursts upon the place of her confinement, the house that holds her in and holds her back from his embraces. Winter has kept her housebound but now spring arrives, and what was a shelter quickly becomes a prison. So her lover charges onto the scene with the good news that she no longer needs to remain locked behind those barred doors and barricaded windows that separate her from him.

Rise up , my love, my fair one,
And come away!
For, lo, the winter is past , the rain is over and gone ;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come ,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
And the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise , my love, my fair one,
And come away!

Bible scholars through the centuries have seen in the Song of Solomon a picture of the love of Christ, the bridegroom, for the Church, his bride. Jesus himself uses this imagery to speak of his return for his church. “Now learn the parable from the fig tree: when its branch has already become tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.” (Mk 13.28) Jesus utters this saying not long after the famous miracle where he withers a fruitless fig tree. (Mk 11.12-14, 20) In context, his words mean that though the destruction of Jerusalem will appear to leave the redemptive work of God as futile as a blasted fruit tree, Christ will arise to give new life to his church and then will return to redeem her for himself.

That is the hope in which Vivian Eubank died. Cancer had ravaged her body until it was like that ancient fig tree whose ability to sustain life had finally left. What had been a shelter for nine decades suddenly became a prison. But the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that though this progression from health to death is the normal, seasonal pattern of life, it is not the last word or the best word. The fig tree, Jesus promises, will blossom again. The winter of death will give way to the bloom of the resurrection. Death wins for a day, but death does not win!

Solomon’s sonnet reminds me of another poem that Vivian and I shared in her final days, William Butler Yeats’ great work “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” In fact, the last time I spoke with her, she asked me to quote it to her. It’s lines echo, for me, those of the Song of Solomon:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

I think these two poems summarize Vivian’s life and death. Vivian once told me the motto by which she raised her family: “We run a hard race, but when we crash, we really crash!” Vivian had run a hard race, and a good one. She could truly say with the Apostle Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.” (2 Tim 4.7) She had earned her rest; she was ready to crash. Yet Mary told me that despite the pain and difficulty involved in even the slightest movement, and despite her increasing weakness, Vivian insisted every morning that she have her bath, put on a fresh gown, comb her hair and put on her makeup. Some might see that as vanity, but I don’t. It’s simply what any bride does when she knows her fiance is going to visit.
And so she was ready when she heard her Beloved, her Lord, the Lover whom she served so faithfully, call out to her as she huddled behind the barred windows of a body that had become a prison, a cage that kept her from His unmediated presence:

Rise up, my love, my fair one,
And come away!
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
And the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise , my love, my fair one,
And come away!

And she recognized the voice of the One who had promised her a cabin where she could dwell with him forever, who had told her that he went ahead to prepare her place in the many-roomed mansion of glory. “Arise,” he sang out to her, “and come away!” And Vivian responded with some version of the words of the poet, “I will arise and go now.”

And this is not a matter of the mere dreams nor the hope of deluded people unable to face the harsh reality of death. Because Shakespeare, great as he was, got it wrong! There is One who has returned from the unexplored bourn of that undiscovered country, One who did not cheat the grave but instead defeated it, the risen Lord Jesus Christ who by bearing our sorrows died our death and so, by conquering his grave conquered ours as well. It is because of that historical fact, and for that reason alone, that we can truly say once again with the Apostle Paul, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 15.55-57)

But there is one more important thing to say here, because just as the Christian life is not isolated but communal, not individual but congregational, so the Christian death is not lonely but relational. You see, to imagine Vivian all alone, even in some idealistic setting custom-designed to her likes and desires, is not to imagine her in Heaven. Because for all her many talents and gifts, her vast intellect, her indomitable will, and her organizational skills, Vivian’s true genius was for relationships. She touched lives and drew those around her into a web of love and joy. She reminded me of the beatified woman in C. S. Lewis’ Great Divorce: “Every young man or boy that me her became her son. . . .Every girl that met her was her daughter.”

Indeed, I’ve told you that she had some misgivings as she faced death, but for the most part, she did not fear for herself, but for those she left behind. She worried about all of you, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She wanted so much for you to do well in life, and she worried what would become of you without her around to keep everyone in line. For Vivian, then, isolation could never be Heaven; it could only be Hell!

Because Jean Paul Sartre got it exactly wrong when he wrote that “Hell is other people.” For the Christian, Hell is the absence of other people; Hell is isolation; Hell is the solitary soul twisted tightly around the sterile stem of the self.

But rejoice – the Christian God is a Trinity, which means that relationship rests at the heart of Heaven! One by one as believers die, their Lord calls them into eternity. But this is not the end. The Apostles Creed teaches us to affirm that we believe in “the communion of saints,” the unending fellowship of that great cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 12.1. Vivian has entered the presence of God, but also of those she loved who are beloved of the same Lord, there to await the arrival of the rest of us.

Because this promise is for all who trust in Christ. The whole of the New Testament buzzes with the news that one day all broken relationships will be restored in Christ, and all separations repaired. Last Sunday Jesus said to his servant Vivian, “Arise, my love, my fair one and come away,” but on that great and final day he will say it to his whole Bride – the Church. In that final hour, the Bible assures us, those who remain alive will not precede those who have died, but the redeemed dead will return WITH Christ and the living saints will return TO Christ and we will forever be together IN Christ. Heaven is not, as we too often imagine, a big family reunion where we rejoice with our friends and relatives while God hovers somewhere comfortably in the background. Heaven is all the church arisen in the unity of the worship of the one true God. And what Vivian wanted – and wants – most, is to see all of you there on that day.

And that is why I can say again: Death has won today, but death has not won, and death does not win! So arise, Vivian Eubank, and come away! Your Lord and Lover has come for you, the winter of dying is past, and the voice of the Spirit coos like a dove to welcome you into eternal life. Arise , my love, my fair one, And come away!

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