What's Tony Thinking

Last Things

As I mentioned in a blog earlier in the week about the coming Advent season, the medieval church had a different set of themes for the four Sundays of Advent than the contemporary church.

These days the four Sundays are themed “hope,” “peace,” “joy,” and “love.” I’m not sure who decided this. Maybe Hallmark? In the middle ages, the four Sundays of Advent were devoted to the so-called “last things,” i.e. “death,” “judgment,” “heaven” and “hell.” Who decided that? Maybe a pope who had a corner on the market but needed to raise money? That said, life spans were far shorter then, and death a constant presence.

There is something to be said for attending to life’s harder realities. No one gets out of this alive.

One of you readers has been after me to write something about judgment. I may get to it. And maybe 25 years ago I preached one sermon each on “heaven” and “hell,” at the request of a friend who was doing a doctoral project on what preachers were saying, if anything, about those topics. The sermons were preached in July, but those two summer Sundays were surprisingly well attended. Make of that what you will.

That leaves death. This is the time of dying in the cycle of nature. The leaves fall off the trees. The grasses wither. The flower fades. The salmon spawn to die. The bears head into dark caves and a sleep of death. Each day now grows a little shorter, a little darker (at least in the Northern Hemisphere).

Lately, I’ve been reading through Paul’s Letter to the Romans and I came, the other day, to several of my favorite verses in all Scripture, which do have to do with death (and life). They are Romans 14: 7 – 9.

“We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. 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. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.”

There’s a lot there. I won’t try to unpack it all. But I like it; hell, I even believe it. The idea that all of life, including our deaths, are lived unto and before a gracious God. I’m not sure a lot of people think that way these days, that life is lived “before God.” Perhaps many think, without much thinking about it, that we do “live unto ourselves alone.”

Living before and unto God doesn’t mean to me that there’s a celestial scorekeeper monitoring our behavior like the Santa of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.” It means that there is an ultimate reality beyond what we can see, touch and measure. We live our lives before this gracious reality.

And to me this means that when I die and am laid in a casket and lowered into the ground, Christ has been there before me. My grave has been hallowed by his presence. Or should I be placed in a fiery furnace, Christ has been there too, sanctifying it as his own, by his presence. “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord.” “Nothing in all creation can separate us from God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord,” as another verse in Romans puts it.

In this way, I hold that Christ Jesus not only died for us, as most atonement theory holds, and which I believe with some qualifications, but that Christ dies with us. In life, in death, in life beyond death, we are not alone. “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”

I hope you find as much comfort and grace in this as I do.

Tomorrow is the final Sunday of the current church year, designated “Christ the King” Sunday. So we end the year with the  reminder, the assertion really, that Jesus Christ — and no earthy ruler or leader — alone is our sovereign, our only leader. Ultimate loyalty is due no other.