advent1

First Sunday in Advent, 1999
Series on the Four Last Things
The Rev. Jerry D. Kistler

“Death”

Well we come to the beginning of another Church year. The long season of Trinity, the long season of
expectation, has finally passed, and now we begin, once again, to walk alongside of Christ, as it were, through
the days of his humiliation, to his glorious ascension to the right hand of God.

This is the season when the Church’s calendar and our cultural calendar get all our of sinc. Two days ago, the
day after Thanksgiving, the Christmas season began - according to our cultural calendar. ‘Tis the season to go
shopping. ‘Tis the season that we’ll see all the wonderful decorations - the lights on Candy-cane Lane - go up,
and everybody’s minds will once again be focused on celebrating - celebrating something, anything, whether
that be the love and joy of family, or the opportunity to party, or maybe, just maybe even the birth of the Son
of God.

But according to the Church calendar this is New Years day. And the new year does not begin with celebration,
but with solemn reflection and penitential preparation. Advent is a penitential season, a season in which, like
Simeon and Anna, we wait and watch with prayer and fasting for the coming of the Savior, the child who in
symbol will be born to us again on Christmas day.

Advent is a penitential season also because it reflects that critical time just prior to the revelation of Christ, the
time when John the Baptist cried out in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make strait his paths,”
and baptized with a baptism of repentance, that when Christ was revealed He would have a people prepared to
receive Him, and for Him to receive.

But Advent is also a season of solemn reflection and self-examination because it is the season that we specially
look forward to the Second Advent of Christ when He will come to judge the world. And so, although it may
clash with our cultural calendar - our season of celebration and joy - I’m going to take these four Sundays in
Advent as an opportunity for us to reflect and meditate upon the very solemn topic of the Four Last Things:
Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven.

I want us to look at these four last things, not from any morbid curiosity, but to gain a true Christian
perspective on them in order to increase in faith and hope as we would approach their inevitable reality. And so
we’re going to ask the same questions Blaise Pascal asked in his book The Pensees, “How am I to die a good
and holy death? How am I to meet Judgment before God? How am I to avoid Hell? And how am I to obtain
Heaven?” These four questions will serve as the basic outline for our Advent meditations.

But this morning we need to reflect on the first of the last things: our own eventual deaths. It’s not a subject
that any of us like to think about for very long. And in our culture death has been removed from our eyes like
in no other time in history so we don’t have to think about, and that we don’t have to be daily reminded that we
will one day die. Our hearts will stop pumping, our limps will fall limp, the breath will slip out of our lungs, we’
ll grow cold, and the process of decay will begin to convert us back to the dust from which we were made. It’
s not a pleasant prospect, but it is an inevitable one.

Death happens, and it happens to each one of us. Karl Barth once wrote, “Someday a company of men will
process out to a churchyard and lower a coffin and everyone will go home; but one will not come back, and
that will be me. The seal of death will be that they will bury me as a thing superfluous and disturbing in the land
of the living.” We die. We’ve been dying since we were born.

But death has become a terrible inconvenience in our culture. We don’t know quite what to do with it. It
throws a huge wrench into the works of our materialistic, atheist way of life. Because from an atheistic
perspective death destroys all meaning to life. The atheist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre said, “Death makes life
absurd.” You see, Sartre saw the true implication of atheism: he saw that if there is no God, then death is, to
quote one author, “the terrible annihilating presence awaiting us all, the blank everlasting vacuity we must
someday enter.” And so from the perspective of death, from the perspective of that total blankness, that
everlasting nothingness, what could it possibly matter whether in life you were a saint - a person who loved
others and was loved, a decent person who paid his taxes on time and never did anything to hurt another
person - or whether you were a psychopathic murderer and a hater of anything virtuous and good. It makes no
difference, says Sartre. Your choice to live as a decent citizen is no better than your choice to live as vicious
murderer, because when you’re dead, you are no more and your choices are no more. Therefore, death makes
life absurd. Death renders our decisions in life meaningless.

The problem with this philosophy is that you can’t live with it. And as a matter of fact, Sartre says that the
only really authentic choice you can make in life is to commit suicide. But most people don’t want to commit
suicide, but most people do want to live their lives as if there were no God. And so the only way to deal with
the contradiction is to hide death as far away from their eyes as possible, to barricade themselves behind the lie
that as long as they don’t have to think about their own deaths, life will just go merrily along. Death is like a
giant elephant poised to stamp out their little materialistic house of cards, but instead of looking at it square in
the face and dealing with it, they vainly try to cover it up. Have you ever tried to hide an elephant? They try to
hide it away in huge memorial parks on the outskirts of town. They have celebrations of life, rather than
funerals. They spend their fortunes on plastic surgeons so they can avoid looking at the image of death on their
own faces.

Now in utter contrast to this way of looking at death - or not looking at death, in this case - is the Christian
view of death. St. Benedict wrote in his famous Rule: “Keep death always before your eyes.” Benedict says,
Don’t hide from the reality of death. Don’t try to cover your eyes from seeing your inevitable passage through
death’s doorway. Rather, meditate upon it every day of your life.

There was one Bishop whose practice it was to begin the day by going outside and looking up toward the
heavens to remind himself that he lived under God. Then he looked around on the horizontal to remind himself
that he was here to serve his fellow men. Then he looked down at the ground on which he stood to remind
himself of where he would one day be.

Some of the Benedictine monks took Benedict’s rule so seriously that they went to the extreme of sleeping in
their coffins. Why? Why would Benedict counsel us to meditate every day of our lives upon our eventual
deaths? Because for the Christian, who knows that there is a God, who knows that it is appointed for man
once to die and then the judgment, far from making life absurd, death makes life imperative. What we do in this
life has real consequences for our lives in the world to come. And death is the seal. Death seals the deed. Death
seals our faith, and hope, and love. Therefore, death makes life imperative.

In other words, Benedict sees meditation upon our eventual death as an instrument of faith and good works.
When you know for sure that one is coming for you, your life and faith take on real moral urgency. It’s why
blinding yourself to your death is so costly.

Jesus told a parable about a certain rich man, a man that could be anybody in our modern materialistic society.
He says the ground of this rich man yielded a great crop. And he said to himself, “What will I do, since I have
no room to store my crops?” So he said, “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and
there I will store all my crops and my goods. And will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for
many years: take your ease: eat, drink, and be merry.” But God said to him, “You fool! This night you soul will
be required of you: then whose will those things be which you stored up for yourself.”

Meditating on our own eventual death turns us from the love of this temporary world, and teaches us to long
for the city which has foundations, our true heavenly country. It teaches us to lay up our treasures in heaven
and not on this passing earth.

But why do we die? I don’t mean, why is there such a thing as death. We all know that through the sin of
Adam death entered the world. But why do we as Christians die. Didn’t Christ die for us? Didn’t Christ take
our curse on the cross so that we shouldn’t have to bear it? The Heidleberg Catechism answers the question
this way. It says, “Our death does not pay the debt of our sins. Rather, it puts an end to our sinning and is our
entrance into eternal life.”

Do you hear what the catechism is saying? It’s saying that for the Christian, because he is in Jesus Christ,
because Christ fully took upon himself our curse when he died on the cross, death is no longer a curse, but, if
you can hear it, death is now a means of grace, the last means of grace: it puts an end to our sinning, and is
our entrance into eternal life.

What the catechism is alluding to is that, for the Christian, death itself died on the cross and has been
resurrected and transformed so that now it is the means of our beatification. It is the means by which we are
made to share in the glory of Christ, the glory he received through suffering and dying. Death for the Christian
is the first resurrection.

So how are we to die a good and holy death? - in the faith that Christ has already died our death, our curse, and
has transformed it so that it is now the means by which He draws us into His eternal presence. That is how die
a good and holy death. May Christ be praised! +