Preparing for Death

Luke 23:46 and Romans 14:7-8

Sermon by Dan Schrock

November 15, 2009

^23:46 Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Having said this, he breathed his last . (NRSV)

⁷ We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. ^{8 8} If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s . (NRSV)

Some years ago, a woman and her infant daughter went to the shopping mall. They parked their car and went inside the mall to shop. When they finished buying what they wanted, they walked back out to the parking lot and started to get into their car. Of course there was nothing unusual about any of this—millions of people go shopping every day. You and I go shopping once or twice a week.

What happened next, however, was far from usual. As the young mother was buckling her infant daughter into the car seat, a masked man suddenly appeared, stuck a pistol into the mother’s rib cage, and demanded that she get out of the car and give him the keys. Not knowing what else to do in the shock of the moment, the mother did as he demanded: she handed over her car keys. The masked man then got into the car and drove off with her daughter inside.

The woman found a phone and immediately called the police. Some hours later, the police found her stolen car abandoned along a country road. To everyone’s great relief, the infant daughter was inside the car, unharmed, still strapped into her car seat. The masked man was eventually found and arrested. Consequently this story ended well: no one died; no one was harmed; no property was damaged; and the kidnapping thief was caught.

These events, however, profoundly changed the mother’s inner beliefs and attitudes. Going through this experience of armed robbery and kidnapping changed her self-image, her parenting, and her faith. Before this incident, she thought she had the power to create a safe and protected world for her daughter. But afterward she realized that her power to create a bubble of safety was in fact very limited. Before these things, she thought God would never let harm happen to her, a good Christian woman, or to her daughter, an innocent child. But now she realized that harm can happen to good Christian people, even to innocent children. All these assumptions died in an instant when the masked man appeared. Though this young mother was alive and physically unharmed, she had experienced a kind of living death.¹

Because of that day at the mall, she began to reflect about her own death and the death of her daughter. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she faced death in a visceral and immediate way. With a flash of gunfire, the masked man easily could have killed both her and her daughter. He did not do that; but events caused the young woman to ponder both what actually happened and what could have happened. She spent months sorting through her many feelings. She talked with her family and friends. She breathed hundreds of prayers to God.

In other words, this young mother turned her experience into what we call a spiritual practice. A spiritual practice is something we do with the intention of connecting to God. In recent decades a growing number of Christians have recognized how important spiritual practices are for the development of a mature and healthy Christian life. Christians have always recognized this, of course. Longer ago we Mennonites used to talk about “the devotional life,” which often centered mainly on worship, prayer, and Bible study. Later we shifted to talking about “spiritual disciplines” in order to include additional activities like simplicity, solitude, celebration, and so on.² Now the preferred term is “spiritual practices,” probably because the word “discipline” can imply that we do these things out of duty, obligation, and drudgery, rather than out of joy. When speaking about spiritual practices, we mean to include a wide variety of spiritual activities that can be joyful, meaningful, fun, fulfilling, and faithful. There are easily hundreds of specific spiritual practices, if not thousands of them. The common characteristic in every spiritual practice that I know about is its intention. For Christians, a practice becomes spiritual only when we do it with the intention of communing with the triune God. To select an example germane to this time of year, raking leaves—or soon, shoveling snow—can become a spiritual practice when we do it with the conscious intention of communing with God.

We are in the middle of a series on the reality of death, with a specific focus on preparing ourselves for the inevitability of our own deaths. Back in September when Anita and I sketched out this series, I breezily thought I’d be able to do a little research and find 10-20 excellent spiritual practices that we can do to prepare for our own death. I even had dreams of creating a small booklet of these practices that I could give you this morning. But to my surprise, I could only find a couple of spiritual practices.³

Of course we do have some spiritual practices that help us to prepare for death. In the regular, on-going worship life of the church, we have excellent opportunities to reflect about death in general and our own death in particular. Funeral services obviously help us do this, but so do Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services. In this congregation we have a memorial service for the dead on the first Sunday of every November, when we recall those friends and relatives who have died. In some congregations, Ash Wednesday services also help us to prepare for death through those simple but powerful words “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.”

20 years ago the College Mennonite Church published a 28-page booklet called “Dealing with Death: A Guide to Resources,” which they revised about 10 years ago. It’s a wonderful booklet with information about things like wills, advance directives, funeral planning, organ donation, and which hymns and scripture passages you might choose for your funeral. Planning for wills and funerals is a very good thing, one that can even become a spiritual practice, but those tend to be things we do once and then set aside for the next 10 or 15 years. They are not on-going, daily spiritual practices.

What practices can we do again and again in ways that transform the way we think about God and ourselves in relation to our own death? The story of what the young mother did after her encounter with the masked man illustrates the repeated nature of a spiritual practice: in the months that followed, she kept reflecting and feeling and processing things through the prism of her relationship with God. She probably processed those parking lot events for years afterward. The events of that day summoned forth in her a repeated spiritual practice that prepared her in new ways for the inevitable day when she will die.

But a meaningful spiritual practice that prepares us for death certainly does not have to begin with a dramatic or traumatic event, as it did for that woman. So in the time that remains, I’d like to offer you two spiritual practices that I think could help us to prepare for our own deaths, whenever they may come.

The first practice comes from our own history as a Mennonite people, and it is the habit of cultivating Gelassenheit. Over the course of our history, people have interpreted Gelassenheit in various ways, but its basic meaning is self-surrender, resignation in God’s will, yieldedness to God’s will, self-abandonment, opening to God’s willing, and peace and calmness of mind. Our Anabaptist founders did not invent this this idea of Gelassenheit; instead they borrowed and adapted it from the late medieval Catholic Church.

I think the best way to understand Gelassenheit is to meditate on the words and actions of Jesus, especially in the gospel of Luke. Some people have pointed out that Luke, more than the other gospel writers, crafts his gospel to show how Jesus carefully prepares himself and his followers for the fact that he is going to die.⁴ Therefore in Luke, Jesus becomes an example of how we can prepare for our own dying. Although Jesus has oodles of techniques to prepare for dying, the one I want to focus our attention on is the last one, the one he does just before he dies. In Luke 23:46, Jesus prays, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” and then dies.

A few years ago, I turned these words into a spiritual practice that has become hugely meaningful for me. I memorized these 8 words and began to pray them repeatedly throughout the day—sometimes while getting ready for a meeting, other times while walking in the neighborhood, or sometimes in bed before going to sleep. When you repeat words like these long enough, they become a part of your being. They shape your soul. They change the way you think. They alter your worldview. Saying these words hundreds of times has become a wonderful way of cultivating Gelassenheit. They help me to prepare for death because they yield my spirit to God, who waits for us on the other side of death. In recent years I’ve also proposed this practice to a handful of people I meet with for spiritual direction, many of whom are pastors; and after a period of time some report that this spiritual practice is both life-giving and easy to fit into their daily schedule.

The second practice I want to propose is singing a hymn. There are many hymns to choose from; but I especially recommend #607 in the blue hymnal, called “Today I live.” In the 18 years since this hymnal was published, I think I’ve heard a congregation sing it one time—and only then because I suggested it to the song leader. I’ve never heard it sung at a funeral, although if I die while I’m here in this congregation, you can sing it at my funeral! “Today I live, but once shall come my death. One day shall still my laughter and my crying, bring to a halt my heartbeat and my breath. Lord, give me faith for living and dying.” That is the first verse; the words of the other verses also invite us to meditate on our dying in the presence of God in such a way that we can live more freely in that same divine presence. So the spiritual practice here can be as simple as singing the song while you’re washing dishes or driving to the grocery store. Sing it once a week, or once a month, or whatever pattern fits you. As you sing it, the words and tune will settle themselves into your subconscious, thus affecting the way you think and feel about your death.

By the way, Fred Kaan, the author of these words, died 6 weeks ago today, on October 4, the day of our church retreat at Camp Friedenswald. Although he slowly moved into Alzheimer’s over the last 3 years, we may believe that during his process of dying, he gently committed his spirit to God, as verse 3 suggests.⁵

Whether you choose one of these spiritual practices or another one that you find more appealing, our goal is to live the reality that Paul describes in Romans 14:7-8—“We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. ⁸ If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” In other words, ultimately it does not matter if we live for another week or another 60 years. It does not matter if we die this coming Tuesday, November 17, if we die on Thursday morning, January 24, 2013, or if we die on Friday afternoon, May 10, 2069. What matters is that in both our living and dying, we trust God to the fullest extent possible. What matters is to look our own death in the face so that we can live now—in the present moment—freely and fully.

Notes

1.        Adapted from Jean Stairs, Listening for the Soul: Pastoral Care and Spiritual Direction (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 79.

2.        Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, published in 1978, likely helped to influence this shift in language, though it was not the only factor to influence the shift.

3.        I confess I never got around to reading Jeremy Taylor’s book The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651) which might have provided some spiritual practices to get ready for death. The Ars Moriendi (early 15^th century), another classic from the tradition, mostly has prayers to be used at the bedside or on the battlefield just before a person dies; they are not designed for spiritual formation over a lifetime.

4.        See Christopher P. Vogt, “Practicing Patience, Compassion, and Hope at the End of Life: Mining the Passion of Jesus in Luke for a Christian Model of Dying,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 24, 1 (2004): 135-158.

5.        News of Kaan’s death is found at www.spiritual-pilgrimage.com/main/fred-kaan-the-hymnwriter/.