John 20:1-18

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed, for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Sermon Text

Any of us who are old enough to grapple with our own mortality have probably fought with a few questions about our death. What do we do with those fears and anxieties we cannot let go of? How do we make our passing easier on those we leave behind? What is the best thing to do with our mortal remains?

Each of these have their own different elements that we have to tackle. I’m going to skip my usual habit of taking a bit of time to set up my points and instead am just going to launch into talking about some of these issues. I’m also going to try and do that while straying as little as possible from our source text – namely John’s description of the resurrected Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene. It has about every answer we can hope for to do with death.

First, let’s talk about fear of dying. If you are a living person, you will have moments where you are afraid of dying. I think that it is a great injustice for any person of faith to tell another person they should have no fears associated with death. The reason I say this is that we are seldom afraid of dying. We have assurance enough in our heart of Christ’s all sufficient sacrifice that, with the exception of notable low points in our faith, we trust we will not meet our final end in death. Still, we fear the conditions around death – the pain it might cause, the people we leave behind, the mystery of how exactly our soul takes flight from our bodies. These things can make us worry, and that worry quickly becomes fear.

I think the actual thing we ask when we talk about fear of dying is whether that is a sign our faith is not strong enough… Well, I think I have an answer for that.

Straying from our text of the resurrection for a moment, let us look at Christ’s crucifixion. While Christ was on the cross, he called out to God in a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” While this cry is in part Jesus living into a prophetic passage out of the Psalms, I don’t know what you would call that cry except a cry of fear. Death is creeping into the life of the eternal son of God, and now as he suffers he voices that fear, first felt in the Garden, aloud on the cross.

If Christ is allowed to voice fear, I would say that you are justified to feel a twinge of fear now and again. Christ knew resurrection was coming, but death still had to be faced. In the same way, I do not think we need to worry about our salvation because, occasionally, we get a little overwhelmed at the idea of dying. I myself tend to wake up with some level of death anxiety in the middle of the night sometimes. My best advice is for moments you feel that pop up: go, get a drink of water, turn on the tv for a bit, and fall asleep in a comfy chair. Usually your body just tricked itself into feeling bad, a quick reset will fix it.

The next question people have is to deal with is making their death easier on others. Our scripture shows that, after Christ was killed on the cross, his disciples were lost in the midst of grief. When his body disappeared, the men among the disciples withdrew to speculate what came next, but Mary sought after her Lord. She found him, resurrected in the garden, but we’re not ready to talk about that just yet. I want to use her, instead, to talk about the best way we can help people deal with our death.

Plan out a funeral! People need the closure of saying goodbye to a loved one. Mary was going to bury Jesus properly after his hasty burial days before. She and the other women had brought spices and herbs and resins to conduct the burial. They would have washed Jesus, wrapped him, and then buried him with songs and hymns sung the whole while.

We need the opportunity to say goodbye. Planning ahead for that ensures your family will do what they need to do to honor your memory, and also ensures that they will actually follow through on in. These days, people are more comfortable not having services and I think that ultimately does us all a disservice. You can have your funeral be short or long, you can make it a time for people to think seriously about life and cry, and you can make it a place they laugh and tell jokes. Kudos if you manage to make it tackle all three! Just be sure to give people that time to mourn. Preplanning with a funeral home is a great idea and so is writing your will. Do both long before you think you need to, because you never really know when you’ll need it.

Finally, let’s talk about burial itself. People ask me, pretty often, about whether or not there is a proper “Christian,” way to be buried. The short answer is no, but the longer answer is, absolutely there is. How are both true? I’m so glad you’ve asked!

Firstly, it should be said that we all will someday be raised from the dead, in the flesh, in the same way Jesus was. Our eternal life is not something we live out only as disembodied spirits, but as perfected versions of the body which we presently inhabit. God is capable, regardless of what we have done with our body, to raise us again from the dead and into eternal life. God is not limited by how we treat our body and no matter what happens to it God can do something with it. That is why the first answer of the state of our body not mattering enters the picture.

I’m going to prove this logically more than textually. Let us say that a person dies in some manner that causes their remains to be lost. An explosion or a fire or something like that. More mundanely, let us suppose they are buried or lost at sea, such that their remains are scattered across the ocean. Would we suppose God would not raise them from the dead all the same? Of course God would and is able to. In this way, God is not limited by our burials.

Still, I do believe that we protestants would be right to learn from our Catholic siblings and speak about the dignity of the human remains we leave behind. We do well to treat our mortal remains well because they will, in time, become our homes once again. If we are to be cremated, then I think it is better for our cremains to be interred in a single place together. If we are to be buried, I think that the less processing the body goes through the better. I advocate for this, not out of necessity, so as to suggest that anyone who does otherwise has damned themselves, but simply because, in my mind, honoring our remains in this way makes a definitive statement about our future resurrection.

That being said, the best thing you can do with your remains is to look at your options and choose what is best for you. Unfortunately, cost is often a barrier between people doing what they want with their remains and their funerals, but that is where that preplanning comes in. If you can plan ahead, look at the options and the costs, then you can make a decision with much more freedom than if you’re finding out last minute.

Did you know that not every cemetery requires a vault? Or that natural burials are legal and fairly common in West Virginia? What about the difference between a coffin and a casket? If you ask these kinds of questions, you can have a good amount of choice, and might even save yourself a bit of money.

Death, it comes for us all. We will not always face it down bravely, sometimes it will overwhelm us. Yet, in the course of our life, Christ has led us forward. In our death, Christ precedes us. In our resurrection, Christ will lead the way once again into a new life beyond the present world. Next week we talk about Heaven and all that it has to hold for us, but today I hope you feel a little more comfortable about death. Life is eternal, death is sure, but God is good and the resurrection awaits. – Amen