Fly Away

Years ago I worked out at a YMCA housed in a big, old, and aggressively ugly three-level building. The middle level had a reception desk and some offices. The lower level was divided into half a dozen small rooms that held free weights, punching bags, and some of our nation’s original workout machinery. Those rooms had cement block walls, no windows, and low ceilings. This level of the facility had the look and feel of a boxing movie made in the nineteen-forties. In fact, when I exercised down there I had the strange sense that someone was filming my workout in black and white.

The upper level was better. It had a big airy gym where people played basketball or threw each other around in judo or practiced ballroom dancing, although ideally not all at the same time. Beyond the gym were some exercise rooms with modern equipment and decent light. In one of those rooms stood a long line of treadmills, strategically placed before a row of windows that offered a pleasant view of the street below. One nasty winter I did a fair amount of training for a marathon on one of those treadmills and spent many hours looking out those windows.

I enjoyed the light and the view until I realized something distressing: across the street from the gym, directly in my line of sight, stood the city’s largest funeral home. It occurred to me that I was spending quite a lot of my life running toward the funeral home, which seemed full of unpleasant symbolism. I immediately quit the treadmill and went back to running the slippery winter sidewalks of Ann Arbor. There I fell down hills, and sometimes up them; I slipped in front of moving trucks, and sometimes into them; I tripped over fallen branches, and sometimes whole trees when my glasses fogged up; but at least I wasn’t staring death in the face and running right at it.

None of us want to face death. We avoid thinking about it until life leaves us no alternative. Humor helps; it can prompt us to laugh about the absurdity of our mortal condition. I remember a New Yorker cartoon that shows a man sitting behind his office desk, the Grim Reaper standing on the other side. The man is saying “Thank goodness you’re here. I can’t accomplish anything unless I have a deadline.”

Mostly, though, we deal with death by ignoring it. Some of us even deal with it by fleeing it, by trying to recapture our youth, by turning away from the funeral home and running as fast as we can in the other direction. This sells a lot of convertibles, Caribbean cruises, and cosmetic surgery.

But life has a way of reminding us of death. And, for most of us, before we confront our own mortality we confront that of others, including those we love. Over the years I have lost people I have cared about to cardiac arrest and cancer, to automobile accidents and suicide, to old age and young recklessness. I have attended funeral services for newborns and ninety-year-olds. I have attended memorials where people wailed and grieved; and I have attended wakes where people laughed and remembered. I have lost count of the number of funerals I have attended. I suppose this goes with the territory of getting older.

I think, though, that all of these funerals have had one thing in common. At some point in the exchanges of sympathies someone has said: “I just can’t believe they’re gone.”

I understand why people say this. It doesn’t seem to matter how long you’ve had to prepare yourself for the loss, it still comes as a shock. My father had been ill for many years before he passed away and yet I still found myself saying at his funeral: “I just can’t believe he’s gone.”

The Gospels do not tell us much about the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the day between the crucifixion and the resurrection, a day some have called “Silent Saturday.” But the Gospels don’t need to tell us much about that day. Our own experience with funerals probably gives us a pretty good picture.

We can imagine the disciples gathered together, trying to understand what has happened. We can imagine their grief and fear and confusion. We can imagine their silence, their awkward conversation, and their efforts to comfort each other—and to find comfort. We can imagine their sadness, their loss of hope. We can imagine them saying: “I just can’t believe He’s gone.”

When someone we care about passes away we find ourselves in that same place the disciples occupied on that desperate Saturday two thousand years ago. We try to understand what has happened. We share our sadness and fear and confusion. We retreat into silence and emerge into awkward conversations. We try to comfort each other—and to find comfort. We feel an irreconcilable emptiness. Often, shortly before the death, we have come to a moment when we have told each other “there is no hope,” and that sense of hopelessness clings to us even after the passing, like dust we cannot shake off and leave behind.

I am not a psychologist, but I think most mental health professionals would tell us that under these circumstances we need to allow ourselves to grieve and to recognize our loss. I have great respect for psychologists but this is, actually, very old advice. “There is nothing new under the sun,” the book of Ecclesiastes tells us. And then the book goes on to remind us that there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. Everything has its time, including grief and loss and death, and including getting beyond grief and loss and death.

One of the most important messages of the Gospels is that all of the times of our lives are times for hope. And one of the most significant messages of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is that death does not extinguish hope. Indeed, theologian Patrick Fannon has written this: “There can be no hope without death.” That bears repeating: “There can be no hope without death.”

In order to understand this truth about death we must first recognize a truth about life. In
our experience, some lives seem hard and some seem easy. Some seem like failures and some successful. Some seem surrounded by community and some lonely. But one thing is true of each and every one of us: in this life we can only fulfill part of our destiny.

That is why—if we think about it carefully—we would not choose to live these physical and earthly lives of ours forever. Those lives are by their very nature limited, unfulfilled. So, as Patrick Fannon puts it: “[o]ne simply cannot be satisfied with an endless day-to-day existence.”

Indeed, an endless life as we know it can seem like a terrifying proposition. The Greek myths tell a story about a prophetess who once had an opportunity to ask anything she wanted from the god Apollo. She bent down, grasped a handful of dust, and asked for as many years of life as she had grains in her hand; the god granted her wish. And the myth tells us that as she grew older and older, she also grew smaller and smaller, shriveled, terrible, until she prayed for death. It is with this myth in mind that T.S. Eliot says, in his great poem The Waste Land, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

Death gives us hope because it presents the possibility of something beyond this life and its fearful limits. Death gives us hope because it is the necessary condition for rebirth. Death gives us hope because it is only through death that we come to realize that we are more than a handful of dust or a small pile of ashes—much, much more.

We do not have this hope because we are in a state of denial or delusion. We have this hope because we are in a state of affirmation and faith. We have this hope because we believe that something happened on the Cross that did not end on the Cross.

On that saddest of Saturdays long ago the disciples must have bowed their heads and said to each other, as we sometimes do, “all hope is lost.” But on Easter Sunday, the day of resurrection, hope returned. It returned to the disciples. And it returned for all of us.

On Easter Sunday, the stone was rolled away and the tomb was found empty. In the days that followed, Jesus reappeared to the disciples and spoke with them. But He did not reappear as a being wholly disconnected from his life and ministry on earth. To the contrary, He reappeared in a way that expressed the continuing fulfillment of everything He had done on earth among them. And He did not just return and commission the disciples to pursue his work—He reassured them that He would be with them always, “to the close of the age.”

Patrick Fannon summarizes it beautifully: “Our New Testament records are at pains to show that the risen and transfigured Christ was in some state of real continuation with the earthly Jesus. Whatever personal development was His on earth was preserved and transformed in His new mode of existence. The Christian hope of the disciples derived precisely from this: that all they had achieved in this life would be maintained and transformed, too, in their life with Christ after death. Faith in the resurrection of Christ implies the hope that, because of Christ, whatever is of real human value in a person’s life on this earth … would also have an eternal value and meaning.”

It may well be that on that terrible Saturday two thousand years ago the disciples gathered together, mourned their loss, shook their heads, and expressed disbelief that their loved one was gone. But if the words of Saturday are “I can’t believe He’s gone” then the words of Sunday are “Don’t believe it, for He is not gone.”

Not gone because the best of this life is “maintained and transformed” in the next.

Not gone because whatever was “of value” in this life continues to move toward fulfillment in the next.

Not gone because our lives—like the lives of the disciples—carry forward all we have learned from all those we have loved.

Not gone because death changes us but does not extinguish us.

In spring, my backyard is full of bird nests with fledglings in them. Some of those nests are constantly assailed by threats, others seem happily protected. But all of those nests have one thing in common, no matter how much warmth and comfort they offer: a fledgling cannot become a bird in them. At some point, the fledgling must fall out of the nest and find the fulfillment of the wings it had been growing all along. At some point, the fledgling must go beyond the possibilities of growth afforded by the nest, drop into another world, and fly.

I’m sure many of you know the old spiritual called I’ll Fly Away. “Some glad morning when this life is over I’ll fly away to a home on God’s celestial shore—I’ll fly away. I’ll fly away, oh glory, I’ll fly away. When I die, hallelujah by and by, I’ll fly away.”

We have our time on this earth, in the nest. We grieve a little, grow a little, suffer a little, sing a little. We work on our wings. Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time for all of this.

But the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in which we all share, tells us there is also a time after than time. There is a time for the transformation we call death, when we fall out of the nest.

And that is the time when—praise God—we discover that we can fly.

Amen.