Sandston Presbyterian Church
A Sermon by Ken Goodrich
January 17, 2010
Scripture: Luke 12:16-20
“Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, for Tomorrow…”
Jesus told this parable, saying, “The land of a rich man brought forth so plentifully that he wondered, ‘What am I to do with all this abundance, for I have nowhere to store all these crops?’ His solution was to pull down his existing barns and build new, larger ones, ample enough and more for all his grain and goods. ‘And I shall say to my soul,’ he thought, ‘Soul, you have all you need stored up for many years to come. So take your ease. Eat, drink, and be merry.’
“But God said to him, ‘You are a fool, for this very night your soul is required of you. And all these things you have prepared? What are they to you, then?’”
* * * * *
I am going to talk about sudden death. Not the NFL’s or PGA’s overtime periods, but the real deal.
Many, if not most, of us will die expectedly. That is, at an advanced age or after a long illness or from a disease we know is killing us. Last month a celebrity of some sort—I forget who it was—died, and the heading of the newspaper article about his death read, “So-and-So, 91, Dies From Complications of Pneumonia.” I thought, no he didn’t; he died from being 91, for heaven’s sake. Most of us will reflect the sentiment expressed by a sign posted, in of all places, a liquor store, which I didn’t see myself, but my Baptist friends told me about, that reads: “Good health is merely the slowest rate at which one can die.”
And in those cases, whether it is you or someone you care deeply about, there is time, if not too much time, to, as best we can, prepare ourselves, put our affairs in order, provide for those we leave behind, and there is the opportunity for those who love us to, as best they can, get ready for the approaching inevitability and to say goodbye.
Sudden, unexpected, never-saw-it-coming death is something else altogether. It is, by its very nature, cruel, seemingly unjust or unfair, and absolutely wrenching on so many levels for those who are brutally left behind and bereft.
One of the standard, consistent reactions in these cases that I hear over and again is something to the effect, “If only I or we had known…if we’d only had some warning…if only I had seen it coming.” We anguish over not having had the opportunity to say goodbye; we beat ourselves unmercifully for not having had the foresight to have treated that last day or acted that last week or behaved that last month differently. And we agonize on behalf of the one who has died because he or she was not afforded that same opportunity…to be forewarned in order to have the chance say goodbye or do things differently in his or her final days or weeks or months.
But there are reasons we do not know when we or those we love will die, when we or they die suddenly. Really good reasons for not knowing such bad news.
What would you do, for example, if an angel of the Lord appeared to you or the voice of God spoke to you, oh, halfway through this sermon, saying, “Psst, your soul is required tonight.” Why you would sit there quietly, patiently, calm as you please, until I finished, wouldn’t you, this being the last sermon you will ever hear?
Seriously, if you somehow knew that you had about seven hours left before the heart attack hits that will kill you, how do you possibly figure out everything you can imagine you must do and with whom to do it between now and 6:30?
Or suppose you know that your date with destiny is exactly three weeks from tomorrow? Some of you might think you would spend—would have to, would want to spend—every minute of every day hugging those you love and crying together, never letting your husband or wife or children or grandchildren or pets out of your sight. But, then, picture this, along those lines: if Tom Daughtrey tells Carol he knows for a certainty that the grim reaper is coming for him three weeks from tomorrow, Tom would hardly be able to take another breath anyway, because Carol would be holding onto him so hard he’d all but suffocate. Every step he tried to take for the next three weeks would be like this (slow side step), half-step, drag Carol, half-step, drag Carol. She’d be holding on understandably for dear life. Oh wait, I’m sorry; I’m thinking if it was Buddy (their black lab) who had the three weeks, not you, Tom.
When I was a high-school senior, I served on Memphis Presbytery’s Youth Council. In the spring of 1969 we sponsored a youth retreat at the Presbytery’s Camp, and one of the events we planned was this: on Friday night, everyone was assembled together in small groups around the tables in the dining hall talking about whatever we had given them to talk about. There was a radio playing in the background that wasn’t really a radio, but a tape recording we’d made and disguised to appear as if it were a live radio broadcast. We had arranged for a DJ to break into the music with a “Special Bulletin”—what “Breaking News” is today—to announce that the Russians had launched nuclear warheads aimed at several major cities in the United States and, though our response missiles would take out some, they could not intercept them all, and a nuclear holocaust was imminent.
What we had imagined would happen was that most of these kids would freak to some extent. We had adult supervisors guarding the doors, prepared to tell all those fleeing the place that it was a hoax—or as Lewis Grizzard liked to call it, “a ho-ax.” Instead, nobody, and I mean nobody moved, because no one took it seriously. What we had purposed by this exercise was to get them to actually consider what they would do if the end of life as they know it or the end of the world was upon them. And even though the fake radio broadcast bombed, we did have the discussion afterwards. We had everyone write down what he or she would do, knowing they had only a day or a week left, and then the small groups talked about it.
I well remember what I wrote. With my girlfriend sitting right next to me—the only girlfriend I ever had in high school, or junior high for that matter, whom I was madly in love with—I wrote that I would get myself somewhere out to the western mountain area, hop on a horse and just literally ride into the sunset. Alone. By myself. Meaning: I would not spend my last day or days with her. Which explains why I didn’t have any girlfriends all those years, don’t you think?
The Haitian earthquake…what would those 9 million people have done if they’d known the day before? I’d wager that the loss of life from the panic resulting from such knowledge would have caused just as many deaths as the earthquake itself.
Either way, in the twinkling of an eye, a hundred thousand and counting are dead, millions more are destitute and homeless. And it could happen again—it is an almost certainty it will happen again—here. In the United States, there are two major fault lines: the San Andreas that stretches from northern California to Baja, Mexico, about which geologists predict that even though we in this country have designed and require buttressing building codes, when the next “big one” hits San Francisco, it will render 150,000 buildings uninhabitable and kill hundreds of thousands of us.
The New Madrid fault potentially threatens destruction in seven heartland American states—Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi. To give you an idea of what it could do, in 1811 the New Madrid registered a magnitude 9 quake—Haiti, by comparison, was a 7—whose epicenter was the future location of Memphis, Tennessee. It was so powerful that it shook windows in Washington, D.C., rang bells in Richmond, and knocked plaster off houses in Columbia, South Carolina. From Missouri.
Geologists are predicting that either or both of these faults in the U.S. may or will produce a major quake this century, or in the next 20 years, or ten…or tomorrow.
Yet, there people live regardless. There millions of people continue living until they die…suddenly. And well they should. Live and live well, they should, until death comes, whenever it comes.
It is inevitable, ladies and gentlemen. As Franklin said it, “death and taxes are the only absolute certainties in life,” to which a more modern pundit added, “Well, it used to be that death and taxes were the only inevitability, but now there’s shipping and handling.”
But I remind you that I am talking about sudden, unexpected, never-saw-it-coming death: that, for many of us here in this room today, is inevitable.
By definition, we cannot prepare for it; we cannot prepare ourselves for its happening to us; we cannot prepare ourselves for its happening to someone we love. We certainly cannot live in the constant watchfulness of it or fear of it, because that is not living. But we can know, and we ought to know, not when, but that. Know, believe it, accept it—it is no “ho-ax”—that you or that person sitting next to you or one of your family members down the road may well die when you or they least expect it: next year, next month, tomorrow. Any tomorrow.
And so live each day, not as if it may be your last—you can’t do that; it would be half a step, drag…half a step, drag—but live it: do some good, anything good; tell those you love that you love them; lighten up; laugh and bring laughter into your world; give yourself to those who deserve something of you; pray each morning in the shower that you will belong to God this day just in case you may be required to belong to God eternally at the end of this day.
In the routine and sameness which each day brings and must, live it, live through the routine, live beyond the sameness, somehow, if only for a moment. A sign over the bar in a relative’s home reads, “We will drink no wine before its time. It’s time.” Live like that.
If I were to die today—even with the many regrets of what I have done, and with all those things I’d really, really like to do left undone—I can still say that I am satisfied and at peace at how I lived. If you can do that, if we can all do that, then whenever our soul is required of us, it will not be utterly, foolishly, unexpected.
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Thursday, January 21, 2010 9:24 AM