What Happens When We Die

The Rev. Thomas B. Woodward

St. Paul’s Peace Church, Las Vegas

I want to talk this morning about death – about our death and about our dyings. But first, as we look at various aspects of death and our dyings, the key to nearly everything that follows is the question: "Why were we created?"

What our faith tells us is that we were created for God's enjoyment and to be in full relationship with God. That reality undergirds everything that follows – so let’s keep that in mind in any thinking about death.

So, first, what happens when we die? What can we expect when we die? From most of the recounting of near-death experiences, we can expect calm, serenity, light and perhaps a welcoming presence to guide us across the threshold into our new life.

A friend of mine, Jim, who had experienced a temporary death or near-death experience,

told me that it was all light and peace. He said, "Tom, I may be afraid of a lot of things, but there is one thing I am not afraid of any more – and that's death." Now there is one thing you need to know about Jim. If anyone I've ever known had reason to fear what death might bring, it was Jim. Mostly, what we can expect is calm, serenity, light – and a welcoming presence to guide us.

The other thing we can expect in our dying (in cases of dying from natural causes) is a gradual narrowing of our world. As our condition worsens, our world narrows from a world in which we are focused on the news of the day, on our to-do lists of tasks and projects, and appointments to the world of our bedroom at home or a room at the hospital or nursing home,

where our focus is on a little bit of the outside world, but mostly on the comings and goings within the room, itself. That world eventually gives way to the world surrounding our bed and the visitors to our room – and then to the world comprised just of our bed, itself. Finally our world is narrowed to the sound of our own breathing – and then we let go. In all of this – and this is so important -- we never seem to have more to deal with than we are able.

What should we say when visiting someone who is dying? The answer to that question is simple. There are no magic words. The important thing is showing up. The words, themselves, probably don't matter much, except for the words of love and that you will be staying close in body, prayer or spirit. And in that, do not make promises you won’t keep, like “I’ll be back real soon.”

What does Scripture say about death? What our Bible says is this: In our Baptism we are joined with the risen Christ. In the early church being baptized was literally like being drowned (dying) as you were pushed under water – and then reborn when you were brought back out of the water into the new life of the Baptized. It was the experience of a real death and resurrection. In the greater scheme of things that was our primary death, because we are no longer rooted – our destiny is not confined in this physical world. In a real sense, our address has changed. This is how that is described by Paul and by John and Jesus:

We are “in but not of the world.”

We are citizens of heaven, ambassadors from heaven.

Jesus is the vine – and we are his branches (his life giving us our life).

In a wonderful metaphor, we’re like the free spirit Murray in Herb Gardner’s “A Thousand Clowns.” With his custody of his nephew is on the line with a social worker, Murray responds to is demand that he come back to reality: “OK,” he says, “OK, but only as a tourist.” Murray’s life was not defined by the world and its standards – or its reality. We’ve died to that. And we can see that same thing over and over again in Jesus’ own life, as he dies to allegiance after allegiance to the surface world he lives in:

- in the temptations in the Wilderness; - to Peter's admonitions to compromise/get along - "Get behind me, Satan." - confronted by the Syro-Phoenician woman, he rejects his own inherited racism Mk 7:24-30. - in the Parables of the leaven and Lost Coin, the Kingdom of God is like a woman."

- in the Parable of Marriage Feast, the marginalized are fully a part of the Kingdom - with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the alien/enemy is embraced and honored. - in the Passion, Jesus does not respond to the demands of Pilate, who represents the State.

The basic Creed of the world is “First you live: then you die.” The Christian faith reverses that: “First you die, then you live.” And life is, in reality, a series of dyings. When we go off to school for the first time, life was changed -- and we die to something. And the same is true with a change in jobs, a change in housing, living, in our physical abilities and all that goes with. In all that there are deaths, as well as a rebirthing. Life is not a continuum, but a series of deaths. And part of our belief, our hope as Christians is that we can let go and entrust our lives to God. We believe in the resurrection of the dead – and not just the physically dead, but the resurrection of the depressed, the guilty, the worn out or overlooked.

So, the next important thing about what happens when we die has to do with the resurrection of our bodies. There is nothing in Christian Scriptures about the immortality of the soul: it is resurrection of the Body. We will be persons -- recognizable. We will not be amorphous souls all kind of blended in with one another. We will be embodied persons. And then in John’s First Letter, we read about the character of the resurrected life; “Beloved, we are now God’s children, but it is not yet clear what we shall become. We know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he really is.” I John 3:2-3. The healing, the compassion, the commitment to personhood, the beauty and the power we know in Jesus – that is what we grow into, that is what life will be like.

So, back to the basics: Our relationship with God is not changed by physical death. When we die we remain Christ's – and we remain joined to one another, to the living and the dead. We continue in another dimension, the dimension of the Holy – not another "place," but within the reality of the Holy.

There are several things I have tried to say in almost every funeral sermon I've preached.

The first goes something like this: "When someone has died, we often say that 'she now belongs to God.' But she has always belonged to God – in her Baptism, through her childhood, her teen-age years, young adulthood, middle age and now in her dying. She has always belonged to God, just as you and I belong to God, now and through eternity.

The second thing is this: we belong to Christ in life – and we belong to him in death.

And in both our living and in our dying we are enfolded by the Communion of Saints. Our Lutheran and Episcopal prayer for All Saints Day says that “our lives are knit together –

the living and the dead.” Knit together. So our ongoing relationship with those who have died,

that relationship is changed, for sure, but it is not ended. Knit together.

Lastly, How can we face our dying? The first emotion most of us will feel as we face our dying is fear. For us to fear the process of dying is natural – just as it was natural for Jesus. We speak of his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane – and so it was. There was deep, deep agony in the heart of Jesus. But that was not all that was there – and that is not all there is for us.

There comes a time for many people in their dying when they decide to let go. . to let go of life

and begin that process of transformation into resurrection. It is a real blessing to come to that point where we simply let go and allow ourselves to be borne, simply, by the loving hands of God. For others, their dying is dominated by a struggle to stay alive – a determination to fight death .. as thought death were really an enemy. So there is a holding on at any and all expense.

But as the writer of Ecclesiastes says, "There is a time to live and a time to die." (Ecclesiastes 3) And it is important for us to know which time it is.

My father knew. One of my most vivid memories of my father is when he and my mother were living in Wickenburg, Arizona. My father was very sick and he had been in near constant pain for several years. He and I were out walking in the desert when we spotted a large group of buzzards circling overhead. My father looked up at them, raised his by then emaciated fist at them and shook it, shouting "Not yet, you sons of bitches! Not yet!" He was not ready to die.

He was not ready to let go of anything.

There is a time to live and a time to die -- and for us, the necessity of knowing which time it is. The meaning of our lives is not counted by the number of days we spend on earth.

And the end of our lives – those daily, monthly, yearly deaths we die, as well as the last breaths we take . . .are all preludes, not endings.

In the end, we do not belong to the expectations or the limitations of this world. Nor do we belong to the precepts of this world. We have been, we are being born into another order.

First, we die . . . then we live. Always there is that opportunity, that process of moving into the light. Always we have that choice.

Bless us, dear God, in all our living. . . and in our dyings.