{"id":1769,"date":"2021-10-17T11:02:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-17T18:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/?p=1769"},"modified":"2024-09-17T16:49:27","modified_gmt":"2024-09-17T23:49:27","slug":"life-and-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/?p=1769","title":{"rendered":"Life and Death"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As we approach the season of holidays from many traditions that reckon with the afterlife we will look at several beliefs about what might come next. We will also ask what it is about this life that makes another life feel necessary.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Click here to watch a video of this sermon<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my worship planning for the year, you might remember, I planned a year of worship focused on the three elements of a complete faith:  Beliefs, Values, and Actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our faith is made up of three elements.\u00a0\u00a0What we\u00a0believe<\/em>\u00a0or know about ourselves and the world we live in; the\u00a0values<\/em> and principles that we hold to be important and use to guide our lives; and the\u00a0actions<\/em>\u00a0that we take, hopefully in line with those values – the way we live our faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A complete faith is all three.\u00a0\u00a0Not just what we say we believe, but the values that derive from those beliefs, and the actions we take in support of our values, actions which are sometimes more revealing of our true beliefs and values than what we say we believe and value!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our worship this year, I\u2019ll spend a season on each of these.\u00a0\u00a0Beliefs for this fall season.\u00a0\u00a0Values for the winter.\u00a0\u00a0And Actions in the spring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now by \u201cbeliefs\u201d I don\u2019t mean just the narrow definition of belief as something you hold to be true without evidence.\u00a0\u00a0What I mean by belief is everything we know, or think we know about ourselves and the world.\u00a0\u00a0Faith begins with our description of reality.\u00a0\u00a0What really exists.\u00a0\u00a0What the truth is, about human nature, the nature of God, the age of the universe, climate change, race and sexuality, everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of the word belief, you might use the word, \u201cWorldview.\u201d  What do you see when you look out at the world? Our worldview includes both those beliefs we have good evidence for, like the world is round, the sun is 93 million miles away, the universe is 14 billion years old, evolution describes the natural development of all species, including humans.  I believe all those things. And also, beliefs about important parts of ourselves and the world that science can\u2019t prove or disprove.  Beliefs about god, for instance.  Beliefs about the moral nature of human beings.  Beliefs about life and death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faith begins with a description of reality.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s everything that I hold to be true about myself and the world around me.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s my worldview.\u00a0\u00a0Science is a great tool for discovering the truth about some parts of reality:\u00a0\u00a0the physical parts.\u00a0\u00a0We can also use logic and reason to push a little further into finding the truth about some parts of reality beyond the reach of science.\u00a0\u00a0Our beliefs shouldn\u2019t contradict each other or contain ideas we know can\u2019t be true logically.\u00a0\u00a0But then, there are also important parts of reality where there is no evidence, where science can shine no light, where many beliefs are equally plausible and beyond proving or disproving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And some of those are the most interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On our Fellowship\u2019s website, on the page titled, \u201cOur Faith\u201d, there\u2019s a section titled, \u201cOur Beliefs\u201d.  And in that section, there is a reference to four topics central to most people\u2019s sense of religion or spirituality.  I will talk about all four this fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Existence of a Higher Power, which I preached about a couple of weeks ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life and Death, which is my topic for today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sacred Texts<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Prayer and Spiritual Practices, which I\u2019ll get to next month and in December.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life and Death are the central mysteries of religion.  The mystery of death might even be the starting point for all religion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, and others, hypothesize that religion began when people contemplated the difference between a living person and a dead person.  What is the difference?  A dead body looks exactly like a living body, for a time.  What changes, when a human dies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From that observation it\u2019s easy to imagine a life force in a living body that leaves the body when it dies.  Call that a soul.  And if the soul was the bearer of life, and the body just a housing for the soul, then perhaps the soul could continue to live somewhere else, perhaps in a different realm, like an afterlife, or in a different body, like reincarnation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For that matter, how does \u201clife\u201d get into a body in the first place?  Perhaps God takes a scoop of mud, no different from the rest of the earth, shapes it into a body and then breathes life into it.  Life as a kind of spiritual breath that goes in through our nostrils, and goes out, when we breath our last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word spirit means breath.  We inspire, when we breath in.  We aspire when we hope and pray.  Many church buildings have spires, to symbolically link us to the highest we can imagine.  And when we die, we expire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some, this coming close of life and death, separated by a single breath, can feel frightening.  And so religion steps in to ease our fear.  We feel loss when a loved one dies, so religion speaks comfort and continued connection.  We feel confusion, so religion preaches certainty.  Life doesn’t seem fair, so religion assures us it will all work out eventually. And for the left-over pieces of life we all inevitably leave behind when we die, religion provides a way for life to continue, until all the undone things can be done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know any more than anyone else what really happens when we die.  But let me think about it with you for a few minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There seem to be three general ideas about what happens after we die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first idea, the simplest, is that nothing happens.  Life ends.  We end.  Our bodies decay back into the elemental particles from which we were made.  Any personal \u201cself\u201d was only ever an emanation from our physical bodies, and with the body dead, so dies our self, as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second idea has to do with the self merging into a larger form of existence.  Of course the body decaying back into the earth is also a kind of merging with a larger existence.  But this idea imagines that a living body contains some kind of non-material existence, like a universal consciousness, or perhaps a Spirit of Life, or the “stream of life” as Rabindranath Tagore calls it.  In this idea, there is an essential part of each of us, and perhaps all living things, that exists with the body but separate from the body.  At death, we no longer exist personally, as individuals, but we continue to participate in this larger thing.  Like a wave that appears on the surface of the sea, and then sinks back down into the sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most robust kind of afterlife belief, is a continued existence for the personal self.  We, as the individual persons we are, continue in some way in some other realm, or reincarnated in new bodies, or resurrected on a transformed earth at the second coming.  Our lives keep going, in this belief, with new experiences and learnings, another round of existence.  The soul, in this belief, is not just a generalized life force, but a carrier of our own unique self, our personalities, our memories, our cares and concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the way of introducing myself to you, I would place my own belief somewhere between the first and the second of those three ideas.  Probably nothing happens after death, I believe.  Probably, this life is entirely dependent on bodies and our one life begins at birth and ends at death.  But I\u2019m also open to the idea that the life spirit within me also participates in a larger form of spiritual existence.  When I\u2019m most spiritual I feel myself deeply connected to something larger than myself, and that thing might be eternal, and might contain my spiritual essence after this particular form of being I\u2019m living now comes to an end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I can\u2019t imagine continuing after death in any kind of personal way, where I have new, continuing experiences that are \u201cmine\u201d the way I live my life now.  That seems unlikely to me, and contradicts my understanding of the \u201cself\u201d which I think is kind of an illusion even while we\u2019re alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I may be wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wonder which of those three you believe in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing happens?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A merging into a larger existence?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or a continued personal existence in another place or body?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we approach the group of holidays at the end of this month and the beginning of the next that focus on life and death, now is a good time to think about your answers to those questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the spirit world simply an amusement for children, as Halloween has become in American culture?  Are the dead frightening to us, or malevolent, as in the scary stories of Halloween?  Is the afterlife sad, or lonely:  a shade of this life as the ancient Jews and Greeks believed?  Does the spirit world draw near to us this time of year, as the pagan holiday of Samhain tells us?  Do the dead have messages to whisper to us, words of comfort, or lessons to teach?  Are the All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and the Dia de Los Muertos holidays, a time to remember our ancestors, honor them, and to keep those connections alive even past the boundary of death, or are they more about recommitting to our ideals, and celebrating our family connections and stories?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I think about the mystery of the afterlife in connection to those kinds of questions, I notice that our thoughts about what comes after death are very closely connected to issues that trouble us on this side of death.  That is, I think, we design pictures of the afterlife in order to address problems that we can\u2019t solve in this life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For instance, think of the problem we have of injustice.  While we live there seems to be no direct connection between being a good person and being happy.  Some bad people seem to be very happy.  That doesn\u2019t seem right.  And some very good people suffer much more than we think they ought to.  That doesn\u2019t seem right either.  Shouldn\u2019t it be that good people are rewarded with happy lives?  And if anybody has to suffer, shouldn\u2019t it be the bad people who cause so much pain and trouble to the rest of us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, because that doesn\u2019t seem to be the rule while we live, maybe we can imagine an afterlife where good and bad and reward and punishment get sorted out correctly.  Good people get their heavenly reward.  Bad people, well, I\u2019m a Universalist, but maybe bad people get reincarnated as cockroaches!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think also of the problem we have during life of separation and loneliness.  While we live, we\u2019re constantly meeting people and making relationships.  And very often, for one reason or another, we lose that other person.  The relationship ends.  Our loved ones die. We miss them.  We suffer.  Wouldn\u2019t it be nice if we could always be connected to the ones we love?  Well maybe we can imagine an afterlife where our ancestors aren\u2019t really gone, but they\u2019re still watching over us and caring for us.  We can still talk to them and they can listen.  And when we die ourselves, we will be permanently reunited with everyone we\u2019ve lost while living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And one more living problem that some believe will be solved by an afterlife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While we live, much about the universe seems puzzling, mysterious.  There\u2019s so much we don\u2019t know.  And a lot of questions are inevitably still going to be unanswered when we die.  For some people that gap in our knowledge is aggravating.  But what if, in the afterlife, all the mysteries could be explained to us?  All our questions answered?  We could sit at God\u2019s knee and ask question after question until we were satisfied.  We\u2019d finally know the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So these are three sufferings:  Injustice, loneliness, and ignorance, that we suffer with while alive, and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence that our beliefs about the afterlife claim to solve them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That observation doesn\u2019t mean that the afterlife doesn\u2019t exist, or that an afterlife can\u2019t solve some of the problems of this life.  But I think that observation kind of throws the question of the afterlife back on us living this life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you feel that injustice, loneliness, and ignorance are problems in this life, then they should be problems we try to solve<\/em> in this life, too.  It\u2019s not wrong to hope that the next life will be better, but suffering in this life should be a call to work on ending suffering in this life, not merely waiting for the next and hoping for the best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s also possible that those problems have no real solutions, either in this life or the next, and that our spiritual task is not to overcome those problems but to accept them as part of reality, which is where faith begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This coming Saturday I\u2019m going to officiate at the memorial service of a good friend of mine.  He died back in March after dealing with cancer for a few years.  It was pretty hard for him at the end.  I\u2019m glad I got to talk to him the day before he died.  His wife, his widow, decided that we would wait to hold a Memorial service until we felt it was safe to gather in person.  So that\u2019s this weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael, my friend, was a kind man, an intelligent man.  He was creative, compassionate, hard-working.  He enjoyed a martini, and the opera, and reading good books, all of which he had in common with me.  He was a long-time and faithful Unitarian Universalist, and a leader in our churches and in the District.  He wrote for the UU World<\/em> magazine.  I miss him a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I loved him.  Many people loved him.  And he loved in return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I will try to say at his Memorial is the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know where he is now, or if he exists at all any more.  If there is a part of him still around I don\u2019t think it\u2019s the particulars of his self that we enjoyed while he lived that still exists, but perhaps some of that great Spirit of Life and Love that flows around and through all things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While he lived, I felt so greatly that Spirit of Life and Love in Michael every time I was with him.  He assumed that Spirit into his body, and through his life he used that Spirit to create a life of meaning and satisfaction for himself, and intimate love for his wife and friends, and blessings for everyone that knew him and for us all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He leaves behind, I don\u2019t think, a ghostly self still hovering over us.  In fact, I hope that he is far separated from this life and all its troubles.  But his legacy of love remains.  That\u2019s what I feel hovering around me.  I see the lives touched by his love.  The people changed by his love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That beneficial impact he had on the world is permanent now.  It is eternal.  Every future moment will forever now contain the mark that Michael and his loving spirit put on this existence while he lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the life immortal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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