Death is a scary thing. We volunteer disaster chaplains do some ‘death duty’ from time to time, being present when a person has to identify their loved one who died in some sort of tragic event or when the emergency medical service extracts a body from some rubble or accident scene. I was called to come to the offsite recovery area for the two aircraft that crashed together this week near Hoboken, but fortunately for me I had a good excuse this time and wasn’t able to go. But doing this sort of work is an experience one doesn’t take lightly.

I had never been present with someone dying until I took my Clinical Pastoral Education unit in the summer of 1985 at Goldwater Hospital. That hospital housed several hundred patients that had been moved there from Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan who had incurable spinal or brain problems—some due to accidents, some due to diseases. Many lived on life support from the moment they came to that hospital, fearing every moment of their lives that their breathing tube would be disconnected from their respirator or some other unexpected emergency would snuff out their lives in an instant. Life and death were always hanging in the balance in those hospital wards on Roosevelt Island in the East River of New York. Jenny Wong Nam who visited us a few weeks ago from Hong Kong was also one of the chaplains in my group.

Part of the pastoral training was to sleep over at the hospital one night every now and then, somewhat like interns have to do, and to ‘take care’ of emergencies along side of the doctors and nurses. Generally such emergencies involved the ebbing of some poor soul’s life in the midst of large open wards where many other patients whose lives were hanging by threads would be within ear shot or eyesight of the terminal event. Part of our job as chaplains was to help comfort those around the dying one, those whose emotions could not get too far out of balance or they themselves could go into crisis. When one can barely breathe, one can’t easily cry or panic without dire consequences.

As things turned out, the first very hot day and night of the summer happened during my ‘watch’, and five patients expired during that night due to a fractional rise in temperature in the constantly air conditioned and controlled environment. I wasn’t really prepared for even one death.

I came home after my very long shift and told Jan I was really ready to ‘quit this thing’ or some sort of comment of that nature. It was so traumatic for me. However, I had faced my own father’s sudden death due to a home fire accident, so such a sudden occurrence was already part of my ‘make up’, if that is possible. But we chaplains had to either be present during the “calling of a Code” for resuscitation or to say prayers over the deceased before the coroner would move the bodies to the morgue. Death, in a word, isn’t all that pretty; I will spare you further details. But that experience seemed to have been a harbinger of what would happen on September 11. However, on that day none of my patients from Ground Zero died; all survived, praise the Lord, despite their unbelievable injuries. We chaplains are called upon each anniversary to help with the loved ones of the deceased, several of whom still suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorders, oftentimes triggered by these anniversary events.

So Jesus’ cry to the multitudes that he gives his flesh for the life of the world is a graphic acknowledgement of how very basic and extreme death is. Death can be mitigated by only one thing, Christ’s death that vanquished death for all who follow Him. To have that confidence is a terrifically wonderful thing, something that Christian believers can claim at the moment of the extreme in their lives and in the lives of their loved ones. We are not left ultimately bereft; we and our loved ones who also are believers by the grace of God, are spared eternal death by Christ’s death for us, even in our sinful state. But we are also aware of the importance of eternal life for all who surround us, and pray we can be instruments of salvation for them by expressing Christ’s love for all. It is the grace of God that saves anyone, it isn’t ultimately a human endeavor, but we are part of the plan of God by being the hands, feet, voice, and love of Christ to a dying world, a world that goes to the extremes to deny death, but which in its heart of hearts knows that the end is something nothing alive can escape, only deny for a brief time.

Someone described to me this week how their loved one was in surgery for replacing a stint for a brain aneurism. That surgery is routine nowadays, whereas not even ten years ago such an aneurism had a morbidity rate close to 100 percent. He described how the surgeon fed the new stint through the carotid artery of the wide awake person’s neck up into their brain by operating a robotic device with a dial and levers while watching an x-ray screen, not using any scalpels or clamps. And the patient was released to go home later that day. Similar life saving surgeries are now routinely done for aortic aneurisms as well as gastric aneurisms.

So we live even closer to the edge of life and death now with the advanced surgical procedures and implant devices.

There is an uncanny connection between what I do now in pastoral and a special project I worked on while a graduate student at Harvard Medical School. My task then was to interview dozens of engineers and medical doctors who were beginning to explore a variety of new techniques for saving lives using micro engineered devices and new fabrics and materials which would not cause instantaneous clotting when in contact with human tissue. It was really far out stuff at the time. On top of Children’s Medical Center beside the Med School was a herd of calves which had been implanted with mechanical hearts, unheard of at that time. Now routinely, mechanical hearts are used during heart replacements, and some keep people alive for several days while they await matching donor hearts. We live in an absolutely amazing age. But an age that lets us go into nearly permanent denial of death.

Our wise Prayer Book has an extended rubric on Page 445 for the “Thanksgiving for a Child” that reads: “The minister of the Congregation is directed to instruct the people, from time to time, about the duty of Christian parents to make prudent provision for the well-being of their families, and of all persons to make wills, while they are in good health, arranging for the disposal of their temporal goods, not neglecting, if they are able, to leave bequests for religious and charitable uses.”

Episcopalians are thus instructed to have wills, to remember to include care for their families, and to leave bequests for religious and charitable uses. Even though the care of life is now in a new technical age, we all know that one can determine the maximum number of years they have left by simply subtracting one’s age from 120, the maximum life span even the Book of Genesis knew millennia ago. All life must one day come to an end, so be prepared!

And of course a key part of being prepared is living the life of a Christian, if we have been chosen to be part of the body of Christ. For we are the way others are encouraged to become Christ followers. Unfortunately, statisticians have demonstrated that church members have about the same foibles as non-church members, sadly to say. So our credibility in the world of effecting a loving community has been held in somewhat disrepute. Our own denomination is still greatly torn by divisions over sexuality, interpretation of biblical passages, and care for the last, the least, and the lonely. We have no claim on sainthood, in other words. We use others as ‘vectors’, hurling their weaknesses and strengths like javelins, claiming to be more loving, more caring, more of just about everything but tolerance of competitive ideas. In a word, we don’t show love in a way the world can see makes much sense. Our philosophical correctness outweighs our theological grounding. And at almost every point in time, someone is claiming someone else ‘isn’t a real Christian, in the real sense of the word.’

But overarching all these philosophical arguments is the fact that life and death for each of us are just as close as four minutes on the clock dial. We gain a few minutes in extreme cold, but in general, only about sixty breaths and 240 heart beats lie between our living and our dying. How much fear, how much hate, how much indifference, how much uncaring, how much vindictiveness can one hurl in sixty breaths? A lot, actually. But we need to recover from this feeling of immortality and ‘get with it’, become the Christians we were called to be, if we were indeed called to be Christians. Christ did not come to give us endless strife; Christ came to show us love and give us abundant life. Christ did not come to show us how to be more logical than the next person; Christ came to show us how to be more loving.

What the world needs now is love, true love. When we find the love in the heart of the Christ that gave his all for us and express that love to others, we will have made a major turnaround in our world. Our prayers will begin to be answered. The kindness we find for others will become the kindness we receive; but even when we receive no kindness, we are to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give up the extra coat, and return to Christ all that we have been given, showing once and for all that we do have the eternal life that he died to give us. Amen.