"In the face of death..." - Luke 13:1-9

During my high school years, my family lived in a small community that had its own weekly newspaper. It was a gift, one that all too many small towns have lost, and the paper did a fair job of reporting the happenings of the town from the local politics to which church was hosting a spaghetti supper. The cover page of the newspaper, however, was always a source of either amusement or horror. Occasionally, the lead story would run with a headline such as “Swallows Return to Bridge,” which reported that the local Cliff Swallows had once again taken up residence on the highway bridge over the river. At my school there were a set of quintuplets, and every birthday since their first had been a front-page story. Most often, however, the paper featured what the locals called the “wreck of the week.” From two cars locked in a mangled mess to a single car wrapped around a tree, the lead photo and story documented the disaster.

This small-town newspaper brazenly embraced a tendency all of us have. When there’s a wreck, a fire, a medical emergency, or even a crime scene, we want to look and see what happened. Disaster draws our eyes. But it is also, often, more than disaster. The more time I’ve spent as a priest, I’ve come to recognize that what often lies behind our fascination is death itself. We look over at the car wreck and we see the uncomfortable truth that life will end. But no sooner has that truth arrived then we begin our search for explanations as a means of escape. When someone dies, we want to know “why.” Was it a health problem, an accident, the result of some miscalculation? We want to know so we can be assured the same will not happen to us.

It was not until I read the philosopher Martin Heidegger that I came to understand these questions. Heidegger says that human beings have a profound tendency to avoid death. Rather than facing the reality of our own end, the bare fact that we will all die, we try to keep that truth away from ourselves. This is not to say that we don’t recognize that human beings die, instead Heidegger says that we deny that we will die. Death is something he we keep in the sphere of what he calls the “theyself,” a generalized crowd in which our individual personhood both lost and shielded. That’s why we need explanations for why someone died; it is why we are fascinated by wrecked cars and toppled buildings. By finding reasons for a disaster, however tenuous, we insulate ourselves from the truth that death will come for each us.

Long before Heidegger, Jesus knew this part of human nature. He understood that we look at the deadly disasters as a way of keeping ourselves from facing our own mortality. And he knew that we often create reasons that others suffer that don’t apply to us. That’s why in the face of two disasters in his day, Jesus asks: “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others?” A question he answers with a firm “No.”

Jesus wants his disciples to know that death can never stay comfortably on the front page, fenced behind the explanations of what happened to other people. And this is all the more true when Death itself is a power, an agent of those anti-creational forces that are at the heart of every Empire. Rome like all the Empires before it and after it, did not seek flourishing for the whole, but instead relied on extraction and exploitation to maintain its vampiric life. Its power was kept in place by maintaining the fear of death, of which crucifixion was a key tool and threat.

It was that fear that Jesus confronted by willingly dying on a cross. He did not keep death at a safe distance, locked away with the horrors that happen to other people. He faced the worst that the powers could bring, and he showed that Death is not the last word.

But before the cross, and the victory of resurrection that follows it, Jesus calls on us to confront the power of Death in our everyday lives. In our Gospel Jesus calls this move metanoia—repentance, a change of heart and life.

What does this repentance look like? Over the last few weeks, I’ve been wrestling with this question, for the powers of Death have again been at play. The forces of Empire still make idolatrous claims over the given world of creation and human life, bowing to money and power as its chief gods. And as a result the creation stands ravaged, the poor exploited, and the rich take an ever greater share of what was meant to be the commonwealth of all the living. I’ve found help in finding my way toward repentance in such a world from a lawyer named William Stringfellow.

In the tumultuous middle decades of the last century William Stringfellow brought the Word of God into confrontation with the powers of this Empire. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he moved to a slum in Harlem and set to work defending the poor against illegal evictions and discrimination. His work was directly rooted in his close reading of the Bible and was an expression of his baptism. For Stringfellow, as one biographer put it, “being a faithful follower of Jesus[meant] to declare oneself free from all spiritual forces of death and destruction and to submit oneself single-heartedly to the power of life.”

Stringfellow went on to write more than 15 books that would make him one of the greatest theologians the Episcopal Church has ever produced. In one of those books, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, he offers a rousing call to confront the powers of death. I have the passage typed out and posted in my office. It’s opening line and central call is this: “In the face of death, live humanly.”

“In the face of death, live humanly.” That line has become a kind of mantra for me, a summary of the change of heart and life to which Jesus calls us. In what does this human living consist? To live into our fullness as human beings, in the Biblical understanding, is to use our hearts, minds, souls, and power for the love of God and neighbor. Working out the expression of that love in our contexts is a matter of discernment, but some general principles apply. For instance, as Ivan Illich pointed out, it is hard to love your neighbor while bombing them. It is hard to love your neighbor while subjecting their lives to constant surveillance and abuse for the sake of your own sense of security. And it is hard to love God with all our strength, that is with your resources and powers, when your money is invested in the very extractive economy that is destroying what God made and called good.

On its most basic level, living humanly means recognizing that we will die and that’s okay, because the God of life is with us. When we know that truth deeply, we no longer have to strive to ensure our status or value. We can live instead into simplicity and enoughness, a participatory abundance rather than a possessive one. For my part, what I hear our Gospel this Sunday calling me toward is a slowing down, a deepening of my life. I want to read long novels for long hours. I want to cook meals from scratch for my family. I want to do as much good as I can and harm as little as I can. I want to have time for interruptions, especially those that come from neighbors in need. I want to spend less time looking at screens or trying to achieve some fleeting sense of success. I want, most of all, to live with the presence that marks any love—a presence to God, a presence to those near to me. Such presence is not possible in a rush of busyness, it is not achievable when my mind is set on the next thing, the more to which I am always tempted. Jesus is working to remind us that all too often this rush is just a way of avoiding the truth that death will come for us all, and it will dominate our lives if we fear it. Instead, Jesus offers us the freedom of repentance, a call to change our hearts and lives so that in the face of death, we can live humanly. Amen.