Feb 18

1. Once there was a grandpa and his young grandson who went out for an afternoon of fishing, just the two of them.^{^[i]} They talked and fished, and fished and talked as they drifted aimlessly in a rowboat on their favorite pond. The fish weren’t biting all that well; grandpa took a nap and the boy became restless. He leaned over the side of the boat to look into the water. There, just beneath the surface, a bunch of water beetles flitted around as if they were all out on the playground at recess. As he watched, one of the water beetles crawled up on an oar. When it got halfway up, it stopped, attached the talons of its legs to the wooden oar – and died on the spot, right in front of him. The boy poked his grandpa awake to show him, but since the show was apparently over, they went back to fishing. About three hours later, the boy looked again at the dead beetle. He couldn’t believe his eyes! The beetle had dried up, and its shell started to crack open. Astonished, both of them watched silently at what unfolded before their eyes. Something began to emerge from the crack in the beetle’s shell: first long tentacles, then a head, then moist wings, until finally a beautiful dragonfly emerged. They continued staring at the new life unfolding before them. The dragonfly began to move its wings, slowly at first. Then it hovered gracefully over the water where the other water beetles were still playing, as if to say, “Hey, look at me!” They didn’t even recognize the dragonfly. They didn’t realize that it was the same beetle they had played with only a few hours earlier. The boy took his finger an nudged the dried-out-shell of the beetle. It was totally lifeless – like an empty tomb.

2. The “Fear of Our Life” this week is the fear of dying. If we (including myself) were paying any attention to the “fear of suffering” last week, we would know that both the fear of suffering and the fear of dying should never cross our minds. We know there is more to life, something akin to a beetle transforming into a dragonfly. The fear of suffering is embedded in believing no one loves you, which is simply not true for Christians. God in Christ Jesus loves us – the Bible tells us so. And every now and then, no matter how obnoxious and unlovable we may actually be, someone comes into our lives to love us, and remind us of the One who loved us first. We do not suffer! And because we live in the hope of the resurrection through Christ Jesus, we do not fear death. We may not want to die just yet, because there are places to go and people to see, but we’re not afraid of dying. One such person was on the news last week. One of the networks ran a story about a woman whose “full-time” job is being single mother to her two young daughters – maybe 5 and 9 years of age. Her “part-time” job, the job that provides the money for them to live, is directing an adoption agency. She has placed hundreds of parentless children in homes where they can have everything they need. The story on the news was about her finding a loving home for her own two daughters. You see, that woman has stage 4 cervical cancer. There is a 90% chance she will not live to see her girls grown and able to take care of themselves. She wasn’t afraid of her own death; she didn’t fear what would happen to her. Her daughters were afraid of what would happen to them. They were too young to take action; so she did it for them.

3. And that, I believe, forms the crux of our fear of dying. Like that mother, we’re not petrified about what may happen to us when we die (a little worried, maybe, depending on what we’ve done or haven’t done), and we’re not concerned about what will happen to someone we love who is about to die (depending, once again, on how that person has lived). What does make us tremble and cry and bring us to our knees is trying to imagine what we will do after the death of someone important to us. Like those young daughters, our own lives will never be the same. There is a place in our hearts where that person fits, and our hearts will have a huge empty place shaped like that person when death comes. And we don’t know what we’ll do.

4. What will we do? We have a couple of options. It always helps relieve our fears if we can identify at least two counter-actions we can take. The first option is to follow right along behind them. When someone we love dies, we can decide to die also. After all, with that big hole in our hearts, how could we live? From time to time, we read about a couple who has been together so long that when one of them dies, the other follows quickly. That’s one option – dying ourselves. The second option, tho, is to live. I saw this option in action when my own mother was about to die. My parents had been together 65 years – 62 of those years as husband and wife. Sixty-five years! That’s more years than I’ve been alive (which should come as no surprise, I suppose, since I am their firstborn child!). But that’s not the point. The point is that my Dad could have chosen the first option -- curled up into a little ball and died himself. But thankfully he did not chose that option. Even in the midst of his heart-breaking grief, he was saying things like, “Next Christmas, I think I’ll put a tree on top of that table.” Or, “When this is over, I’m going to do this or that.” Then, a month after Mother died, I invited him to fly to Virginia with me for the baptism of one of his great-grandchildren. And he did, because, as he said, “I’ve always wanted to see that part of the world.” He still had a lot of living to do, and he had faith that God would see him through.

5. Paul was absolutely right! “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. When we live, we live to the Lord, and when we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we’re alive or dead, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.” We can entrust those we love into the never-failing care of God; and we can trust our own future into that same never-failing care – whether it be a dragonfly, a child, a parent, a friend, or ourselves!

6. Today is the day we celebrate The Transfiguration of Jesus, the Sunday before Lent begins on Wednesday. When Jesus took Peter and James and John upon the mountain top, they got a glimpse who Jesus was – the One God sent to give them hope. They wanted to hold onto that vision forever. Build a monument for that moment, build at hut for their hope. But that’s just not possible. God is always leading us into the future, filled as it is with joys and sorrows, health and illness, wealth and poverty. It is into those tomorrows that God is leading us, individually and as a congregation. So the next series of sermons will take us through the valley of the shadow of Lent, side by side, until together we reach the joy of Easter morning. Thanks be to God!

However, there are more deaths than the death of our bodies. Those deaths will be the subject of the next series of sermons through Lent -- “Death and Dying.”

^{^[i]}”Transformation to New Life (adapted)” by Cecil B. De Mille, in More Sower’s Seed – Second Planting, edited by Brian Cavanaugh, Paulist Press, 1992, p. 41