Why Your Life Has More in Store Than You Could Ever Imagine

What can you say?  We sat.  We shared stories.  We ate.  We drank.  Folks said words they meant to be comforting.   You can be grateful for the years you had together.  Just know that you were there for her.  She felt your support, your love.  And yes, the words meant something.  But they fell short.   Any words would fall short. 

Last week, I sat at the home of a bereaved husband, the husband of our church’s beloved bookkeeper, Nathalia Meier.   A year ago, Nathalia had seemed health, whole, and now she was gone.   And yes, she and her husband Doug had seven wonderful years together, but they should have had thirty.   Now teenaged kids don’t have a mom in those years when they so need one. Cancer has taken that away.

This week, I got an e-mail from my sister, Becky.   She wrote that her husband, Randy, had maybe six months.   The disease of ALS was slowly taking his speech away.  He could no longer swallow anything but shakes and smoothies.  He could barely walk.   Sure, his spirit remained strong and positive.  But it wouldn’t stop the progression of this disease, the one that has taken Lou Gehrig and so many others.  In fact, this same week, I sat with Joe Dorsey, an old member of the church I lead, and learned that it was ALS that had killed his beloved wife, Marilyn.

And what each of these folks faces everyone will face if they haven’t already.  No one escapes death.    And long before you die, you face the incredible pain of losing those you love.    No matter how old or young they are when they go, their loss still hurts in ways that nothing else does.   That’s why the words that you’re about to hear have such huge importance.  How do you navigate a world where death lives, where it often even seems to rule?   In these powerful words, God shows the way.   Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

I Corinthians 15:35-41, 50-57

How do you find comfort and hope in the face of death, not simply your death, but the death of those you love?   In these words, God tells you.  God says.  Christianity doesn’t simply give you a philosophy to live your life.  In Jesus’ resurrection, Christianity redefines what life is.   So, what is your life in that redefinition?   Your life is a seed.  That means, the greatest, most wondrous part of your life is still to come.  

But before you get to this whole seed thing, you first need to understand how God views death in the first place.   In God’s eyes, you don’t ignore death and you certainly don’t befriend it.  You fight it.  And in Jesus God did exactly that.  God fought death and won.   That means.  Christians don’t have any delusions about death.   Death is awful and brutal.  It’s ugly and wrong.  But it’s also defeated. 

Today, generally our world tends to go in two directions when it comes to death.   Some folks ignore it.   It’s too painful to address.   I had friends whose cat died.    How did they deal with it?  When the kids were at school, they buried the cat.  When they got home, they acted as if the cat hadn’t ever existed.  Eventually, the kids figured it out.  Now, that’s extreme.   But our world has lots of ways of denying death. 

Why do stars of a certain age have a hard time getting big roles.  They look old.  It’s why so many of them get plastic surgery.   Heck, in South Florida, where I live, lots of folks get work done for the same reason, to not look old.   After all, old means you’re getting closer to the whole death thing.   And already, parts of your life start dying long before you do.  You may need to give up your car or your home.   Your health gets more and more limited.  So, folks find all sorts of ways of denying what death brings.     

Now, other people say.  Let’s befriend it.   Think of dying as just a natural part of living.  It’s a nice thought if it were true.  But no human being thinks of death that way really.  We resist death, even the death of our pets.    Why do we fight disease, look for cures, celebrate the growth of life spans?   We do it because we know deep within.  It’s not supposed to be this way.   Death isn’t our friend.  It’s not even natural. Death is our enemy. 

So, Christians have no illusions about that or about denying that death exists.  At the center of our churches we even have an instrument of death, a cross.   And, in a lot of churches, we show God brutally dying there.  Heck, right outside these doors we have a place where we bury the ashes of the dead.  So how can Christians be that comfortable around death.  Christians know it’s a defeated enemy.    That’s why Paul even taunts death here.  “O Death, where is your sting?   Where is your victory?”   

And that means death doesn’t bring the end.  It becomes a door to something more, more than anything you or I could imagine.   Forget all those images of harps and clouds.  You won’t find them in the Bible. Think instead of a seed as Paul does here.  

It’s been forty years since I’ve helped to plant a garden, but I still remember how the whole experience kind of bewildered me.  You’d begin with this tiny seed.  Then, often fairly quickly, this tiny seed produced this exponentially bigger, incredibly abundant living thing.  It’s why centuries ago, people thought of human procreation like that, like planting a seed.  It makes sense.  From these microscopic cells comes a being rooted in the cells yes, but so, so, much more than those cells, that it’s almost incomprehensible that one came from the other. 

And Jesus describes his death as a seed.  Paul describes your death as a seed too.  Do you get what that means?  Death’s defeat has opened the way to something extraordinarily more.  It will be a life deeply rooted in your life here.  You won’t be a drop in the ocean or a spirit floating around.  You’ll be you in the deepest sense of the word.  But you will become infinitely more than that.  You will become so infinitely more that it will be almost incomprehensible that one came from the other.   

And when you know that, you don’t need to deny death.  It’s real.  And it still brings heartache and pain.   It’s still an enemy.   But it’s an enemy that has lost the last word.  God in Jesus has that.  And in God’s love, a glory awaits you that cannot be even imagined.  For you are but a seed of what is to come.  In the words of Paul, “what is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor.  It is raised in glory.  It is sown in weakness.  It is raised in power.”   That will be your life to come, a life so wondrous, an existence so breathtaking that it goes far beyond anything we could ever imagine.   It's that good.