from The Barrel

Easter Sunday 2004
Park Presidio United Methodist Church,
San Francisco, CA


“If a man dies, will he live again?” The age-old universal human concern which has fascinated and puzzled the human mind from time immemorial was posed thus in the Book of Job. This was the classic argument, which separated the Pharisees from the Sadducees in the time of Jesus, which they debated endlessly.

I am here to testify to you today that, at least in one sense, the answer to the question is “yes”. Some of you will have learned from, our daughter, Natasha that in the closing days of January (2004) I had an episode of cardiac arrest; I experienced, what the doctors call, “sudden death”. My heart stopped beating, my breathing stopped, my eyes rolled back in their sockets and my body started to become rigid. Were it not for the fact that I was exercising at the hospital and very timely work of the code team I would not be here to tell the tale. As it was, I woke up almost two hours later in the Intensive Care unit gagging on a respirator tube and a team of doctors and nurses watching my progress. By the grace of a merciful providence I am here to tell the tale today.

I am not claiming to have had the experience of resurrection, which Easter celebrates. I want, rather, to illustrate the power of life, which will not easily be snuffed out. And, yet, life is fragile. None of us know, from one moment to another, what can happen to us in an instant. In my own case I was exercising on a treadmill. I was in better health and condition than I had been in twenty years, or even more. I could exercise harder and longer than at any time in my adult life. I was secure in the knowledge that not only was I doing well, but that I was doing very well.

And, yet, one minute before my treadmill session was done I collapsed on the treadmill with no pulse and no breath. One of the persons who witnessed the episode told me, later, that my eyes rolled back, my body started to become rigid, and I started to turn blue. Life is fragile, indeed!

Most of us live and behave as if we will live forever. We make plans, we abuse our bodies, our minds, our spirits, and we neglect our relationships. One of these days, we tell ourselves, we will get around to doing those things we know we should. We live as if we have an iron grip on life, as if we can hang on to it forever, if we so chose.

But life is fragile.

“Life is but a passing day, no tongue my tell how brief it’s span.”

Or, as it is written in the Epistle of James:

“Come now, you who say, ‘today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town, and spend a year there, doing business and making money’. Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes…”

Life is fragile! But, then, you know that.

By now you have probably figured out that this is not a traditional Easter sermon. I could easily have preached one if I had chosen to do so. I have preached them as an ordained pastor for 39 years. Indeed, I could have gone through and revised one of those and preached it here today. But you have heard traditional Easter sermons before, and you will no doubt hear them again. You were probably inspired by them, moved to tears by them, felt you faith and commitment strengthened by them. But that is not the word that came to me to speak to you today. So, I ask you to, please indulge me in this.

Many, many years ago, in my boyhood, I heard a missionary preacher say, in a sermon, “They say that there are thousands living who will never die, but I tell you that there are millions dying who have never lived.” Those words of Dr. J. C. MacDonald have come to me over and over through the years, and have challenged me not only in my thought, but also in my living.

When I was a student in Seminary in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on of my buddies was deeply scholarly. He read voraciously, and was always discussing erudite subjects. One day one of our friends said to him, “Live, Sam, live! Get yourself a car, get a girl, go out there an live!” Now that may be a somewhat immature concept of what living is, but his point was well taken, and I am happy to report that Sam took it. He continued to be a scholar, but he realized that he was more than a brain.

“There are millions dying who have never lived.” Indeed, there are millions living who have never lived! For many years of my professional life I was a busy pastor. I attended meetings all over the country, indeed, all over the world. I wrote and preached hundreds of sermons. I counseled and helped lots of people. I advocated for peace with justice. I was a busy pastor. I visited with the sick in the hospital, and the hurting in their homes. I taught Confirmation Classes, raised funds, and managed budgets. I was a busy pastor. I brought to healing and wholeness to many people.

I was a busy pastor. Too busy to spend much time at home. I had important things to do. So I didn’t always make it to my children’s band concerts. One of our daughters, to this day, has not forgotten that I missed her birthday. “But I was in India, “I protested. “But you were not there for my birthday,” she insisted. “But I’ve been there for all your other birthdays.” “But you were not there for my birthday.” So how important is a child’s birthday compared to being on a Travel/Study Tour of India under the auspices of the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church? In her mind there was no doubt of how important it was.

But I was a busy pastor. It didn’t do much good for my health. I developed high blood pressure. And I am sure it did not do much to help my genetic tendency to heart disease. Several years before I retired I decided I needed to live. I decided that the most important thing in my life was my marriage, and the most important person in the world to me, was my wife.

Do you know what the most important event in my day became, and still remains so? Every morning I sit with my wife and we eat breakfast together. Not a very elaborate or exciting breakfast: it used to be a half of a bagel, toasted, with cream cheese and a cup of black coffee. Now, a boiled egg, or a bowl of oatmeal porridge and a cup of coffee. Not an earth shattering even, I know, but I would not give it up for all the meetings, all the travel, or all the important and exciting things I have done in my life.

The question for you and me, my friends, is not, “If a man dies, will he live again?” That is a question for preachers, for theologians, for intellectual discourse, and for Easter sermons. For us, the challenge is that thrown out by Dr. MacDonald: “There are millions dying who have never lived.” The question for us is this: Is there life before death? Have you lived? Are you living? Or are you putting it off to some more convenient time. Maybe when the kids are older, or when you get that raise, that promotion, when you retire, or to whatever that convenient excuse is which we use to persuade ourselves. The question for you and me, my sisters and brothers, is not, “Is there life after death?” For us the question is, “Is there life before death?”

What would living be for you? Have you thought about that at all? What would living be for you? If all the justifications for putting it off were suddenly resolved, what would you do with your life? I spent years helping all kinds of people, but I was not there for my family. I was not a bad husband and father, but my daughter’s rebuke still haunts me: “but you weren’t there for my birthday.” It’s not that I did not want to be there for her, but she understood very well that I had other priorities.

“There are millions living who have never lived.” Are you one of them? We all are, aren’t we, to one degree or another. The poet, John Donne put it this way:

“’Tis ye, ‘tis your estranged faces
that miss the many splendored thing.”

Ah, yes, “the many splendored thing” to which we will devote ourselves one of these days. What is “the many splendored thing” for you? And what is the estranged face that causes you to miss it?

After my sudden death experience one of my friends wrote to me in an email, “there must be something that you were sent back to finish.” That may well be, but I have not spent much time trying to figure out what that may be. All that I want to do is to live each moment, savor each experience, treasure each relationship, and value each person I encounter. The poet H. W. Longfellow put it this way:

“Trust no future however pleasant,
Let the dead past bury its dead.
Act, act, in the living present…”

One of my exercise buddies said to me on the first day I went back to exercise, “Brother, you are living on borrowed time.” To which I responded, “Don’t I know it! But then, so are you!”
Life is fragile, indeed. But, after my experience of the fragility of life I am here to testify that life is good. Too good to be wasted making excuses; too good to be wasted doing things that are not truly important to us; too good to let it slip through our fingers without our having truly lived it. “There are millions dying who have never lived.”

As my seminary friend said to my buddy, so I say to you, “Live, Sam (or Sue, or John or Jane, or whoever you are), live, Sam, live!”

Amen! It shall be so.