Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey,
Pentecost, July 31, 2022, at 10:00 a.m.
By Stephen Galleher
The Dilemma of Impermanence
“I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and, see, all is vanity and chasing after wind.”
(Ecclesiastes 1:12-14)
“Even though honored, [we] cannot live forever* [we] are like the beasts that perish.”
(Psalm 49:11)
“Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
(Galatians 6:7)
The realization, which we are both honored and burdened with since childhood, is a fact we had rather ignore, at least most of the time. And that is the fact that each of us, absolutely without exception, is going to die!
For who likes to hear that one day, a day very few of us know for sure, we will cease being here? Gone from the day-to-day reality of our lives. And, to put it plainly…destiny unknown.
I suspect that we learn of this raw fact at a very early age. My first memory of it was when I wondered how I could possibly envision a life after death that lasts forever. Do any of us look forward to such a fate? Any more than strangely, we can’t envision a life on earth lasting forever, as much as we would prefer that the life we live now not end, thank you very much.
But end it does and end it must. So, let’s sit with this fact a bit and see if it’s as grim as it sometimes seemed cracked up to be.
I like to consider the inevitability of our death as just one example of impermanence. For everything I can think of in my experience is impermanent, from all the contents of nature, and all the artifacts and contents of human nature. Everything is always in flux, everything moves away from what and where it is a moment or so ago to the right now.
Here’s just a short list: my age, my family and friends, my home, my interests, my likes and dislikes, my thoughts; the weather, the skyline of Manhattan, the streets of my town, the state of politics, the leaders of my town, state, country. Yes, even mountains are moving and changing, some very slowly and, with avalanches, fires, and other physical phenomena, some quite quickly.
And the length of our lives. The tragedy of early deaths; the humble gratitude for an old age, especially a healthy one. How would you like to be a mayfly? The mayfly has the shortest lifespan of any known animal, twenty-four hours. Think of it. It never has even a slightest chance of visiting Great Adventure. And I’ve heard that Okinawa, a place in Costa Rica, a town in California, and a town in Greece, and one in Italy, are considered “blue zones,” having people there who live the longest and healthiest lives. So, don’t beat me to the airport please, even if I don’t speak Japanese, Spanish, Greek or Italian.
So, I hope I’ve made my point. Avoid it if we wish, pretend to be all brave about it if we wish, but death is in the picture for you and me. I suppose part of this avoidance is due to another fact, namely, that we have no irrefutable evidence that even one person who has ever died and returned and told us if we survive death and what lies beyond death. Not one.
But there is another side to this lament, if we wish to see it this way. And that is that life itself screams at us with other point of view. There is, first, the evidence of our faith, the faith in the grand lover, Jesus Christ. We point to his resurrection not so much as scientific evidence that he physically came forth from his tomb in Gethsemane. But that he tells us that the love he reveals in his life is our inheritance, that our life is hidden in his life: that where Christ is, we are also.
We come to believe and live this incredible promise as we see the rewards of a life lived as God wants us to live it. Don’t we feel the assurance and confirmation of Christ’s promise when we think of all the joy. The joy we have received from family members and from friends? Don’t the coffee hours we share here at Church of the Good Shepherd point to the banquet prepared for us in heaven? And I invite you to think of special moments in your life, a laugh together with old friends, a side-spitting old video of Sid Caesar, a piece of music, classical or otherwise, where you sensed, you knew, that Christ was right. That God is love, and that this love sits inside as well as outside time and space. And that we are in it now. This love will not let us go.
So, the fact of our death need not depress us. Of course, grief is real. It is wrenching to lose we love. There is mystery in loss. It is the impermanence I spoke of earlier.
But the temporary nature of our lives can draw us toward the grandest emotion of all: gratitude. We are alive now; this moment, and in nostalgia all earlier moments, the joyful and the sad ones, are part of the life we live now and rejoice in. And I think within the context of our Christian heritage, no matter how deeply we have absorbed and incorporated it in our lives, points beyond this life of ours.
For there is something permanent about love. A clergy friend of mine used that word a year or so ago. He said love is “permanent.” It is a revelatory word. Do you not agree that the love you have experienced in your life is permanent? And aren’t you and I, who have experienced this love: are we not, as well, permanent? Just as the love isn’t going anywhere, so too, we aren’t going anywhere.
Have I then been talking out of both sides of my mouth? Everything is impermanent. I made a convincing case for that, I think. And yet I am suggesting an even greater reality, that the love that this impermanent life manifests is permanent. Can we hold both things in our two hands—impermanence and permanence?
Perhaps we can attend to the opening sentences of the funeral service. In our Baptism, have we not already died and been raised?
For none of us has life in himself,
and none becomes his own master when he dies.
For if we have life, we are alive in the Lord,
and if we die, we die in the Lord.
So, then, whether we live or die,
we are the Lord’s possession.
“Your life is hid with Christ in God!”
Amen.