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Real life: Preach as if you are dying

ABOVE THE DESK IN MY STUDY I have the advice modern mystic Annie Dillard gives to those who ask her about her craft. “Write,” she says, “as if you are dying. Write as if you are writing to an audience of terminal patients. For, after all, we are.” Preach, I want to tell my students, preach as if you are dying. Preach as if to an audience of terminal patients. For after all, we are.

Somehow I never quite manage to get those words into the lecture. Who wants to talk about death? Like most folks, I look the other way whenever I can. Give me the close at hand, the cozy hearth, and what one writer has called, “the easy settling for second best and home before dark” and I’ll take it. I might never, in fact, look up. Give me the doable task, the round of chores, the errand of mercy and I might never be still. Give me my retreats and my circles, my latches and my lock-ins and I might never look out. I’m like most folks. But, it turns out, the last thing we want to come to grips with is the most necessary thing to come to grips with.

It’s life’s major challenge. For those of us who live between the already and the not yet, 1 Corinthians 15 describes it as a challenge we face every waking minute and some of the sleeping ones as well. Even when we avoid thinking about it directly it is the Challenge — the Enemy — the Force of Darkness that haunts us. You might even say that for us the greatest enemy is not death itself but death’s thrall — the hold death has over us, a hold it maintains by virtue of the fact that we are so desperate not to see it.

Perhaps this is especially true for us living as we do in the age of anxiety. Probably it has always been true. As the novelist Walker Percy said, “Death in this century is not the death people die, but the death people live.” Not disease, poverty and hunger — but the fear of cancer, the dread of financial insecurity and the guilt over the hungry. The death we live is worse than the death we die and will be so until we settle this account.

The good news, of course — the news that Paul preaches — is that facing up to death is exactly what Christians are uniquely equipped to do. Nobody is prepared to look death in the eye like the person who is in Christ — not Stormin’ Norman Schwartzkopf or Clint Eastwood or Shirley MacLaine. Nobody is equipped to look death in the eye like the person who has placed their trust in God.

We believe in that God, right? We believe in the God who offers not an easy gloss, a cheap buy or an e-ticket ride, but real life and real resurrection. We believe in a God who brings new life at of the very place where life and death cross. We believe in a God who has already started hauling in the harvest of new life. We believe in the God of Paul and Isaiah, of psalmist 118 and John of Patmos. The God who has destroyed the veil, cast off the shroud, thrown back death’s thrall and dragged us all out from under it to a party. The God who will wipe away every tear and swallow up death forever. The God of the new creation.

We believe in that God and that is why we preach to an audience of terminal patients. For, after all, we are.

Jana ChildersJANA CHILDERS is dean of the seminary, vice president for academic affairs and professor of homiletics and speech communication at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, California. She is the author of several books on preaching including “Birthing the Sermon: Women Preachers on the Creative Process” and “Performance in Preaching: Bringing to Sermon to Life.”

 

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