I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. My first worship service at TCPC after my brain surgery was the sweetest I’ve ever experienced, and yet I could barely sing and confess faith through my tears. I teased Pastor Randy for his song selections (like this one, this one, and this one), which seemed determined to confront me over and over with my renewed sense of my own mortality. He didn’t deserve the teasing, though, and we both knew it. The truth about death is always there in our liturgy, and if I failed to reckon with it before, it was because of my own near-sightedness.

In the hours leading up to my Christmas Eve surgery, April wanted to jot down the thoughts I was having. One passage in particular was haunting me, from an essay by C.S. Lewis called “Learning in Wartime.” Allow me to quote the passage at length:

“What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how many years we have behind us… Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows.”

The reason Lewis’s observation about death was with me in those moments before surgery was because I realized that, as a preacher, teacher, and pastor, I know the reality of death and reckon with it regularly. My trip to the ER and my subsequent surgery and diagnosis did not make my death more likely or more serious, instead, it pushed my own mortality into my field of vision. I can no longer look past it. Death is real to me now in a way it wasn’t real a month ago. Now the stupidest of us knows.

Just as I was discussing that from my hospital bed, I read about former US Senator Ben Sasse announcing his diagnosis of stage 4 pancreatic cancer (the same sickness that ushered my father into God’s presence almost 19 years ago). And it was with some admiration, sympathy, and satisfaction that I saw him share these words: “But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.*” The dying senator gets it. CS Lewis gets it. Now, even I get it.

What we do when we gather on Sunday morning teaches us about death, to keep us from being too stupid to notice. Our worship, liturgy, and teaching are filled with promises of resurrection, with messages of hope beyond this life, with assurances of the final victory of God. But until death smacks us in the face, we can be too slow to see and understand it. Even pastors can be the stupidest of us.

One Scripture passage that has long fascinated me (and which seems relevant at the end of the Advent season) is Hebrews 2:14-15 Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

The fear of death enslaves us, and the incarnation of Jesus delivers us from that fear. I’ve preached on this before - my first Easter Sunday at TCPC. And by God’s grace that truth is so etched on my heart that I truly experience that sense of deliverance from the enslaving fear of death. The gospel of the incarnate, risen Lord not only confronts us with death, but defeats it and delivers us. The solution for the fear of death is not to ignore it, but to look to the one who defeated it.

 *Senator Sasse had much more to say that is worth reading, but I won’t quote it here. Many of his sentiments I can affirm and share, and I pray for him and his family, knowing personally the road ahead of them