Wisdom 1:13-24, 2:23-24
Psalm 30:2-13
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43

"In Him Was Life"

God did not make death. For He alone is life, and life alone is Him.

Are you familiar with the Fermi Paradox, named for the great physicist, Enrico Fermi (an Italian scientist who became a U.S. citizen during WW II)? It goes like this: Given what we know about the prerequisites for life, the statistical probability for life on other planets is extremely high ... well nigh certain. Yet there is no evidence for any life beyond our planet. I did not say, "very little evidence," but rather no evidence. We might be inclined, therefore, to say that we are a planet teeming with life, sitting alone in a universe of death. But that would be wrong-headed. The universe is not dead. The other planets are merely places where God has not acted with His one-of-a-kind and mysterious power we call life. To impose the word death on the extraterrestrial universe would be an act of the human imagination.

It is humans who elevate death to a category, a name, an event, even a thing to be most feared. We say things like "a life-death situation" or "the day of our death" or our "death bed." It is humans who have made death into a thing, even a thing to be feared. But this is not God's work. In fact, as our Gospel lesson reminds us this morning, Jesus was repeatedly nonchalant about death. He brushed it off as nothing to take too seriously. Yet the phrase "the day that I die" continues to exert greatest power upon our imaginations. People will beg not to die, are willing to do anything, compromise themselves in the furthest extreme, to avoid what they call this "horrible fate." We hear more and more today about humans someday soon living forever. (Now, there is a horrible prospect!)

With the poet Dylan Thomas, we should say, "And death shall have no dominion." For God did not make death. Among the myriad things He created, one would search in vain for death. Death is a human construct, bounded off by humans, tricked out by humans with a bony face, a black, hooded tunic, and carrying a long sickle or scythe. But God is not impressed with our Halloween foolishness. God is life. As St. John writes in his great Prologue, "In Him was life."

Yet, the human fear of death far outstrips the human fear of God. (Recall that the fear of God is the beginning of all understanding.) In that sense, death has become a kind of god, an idolatry. The date of one's death is the stuff of countless books and plays and television programs all asking the question, "What is the time and day of my death? If only I knew!" I recall a television series called "Run for Your Life." The protagonist's life revolved around the date of his death, which he knew. And I hear people in the world now talking about their "bucket list." I had never heard of this until recently, and certainly I do not have one. But I look in the faces of the people who do, and they view death as the end of all things.

But all of this is an illusion, not to say a Hollywood industry. For the only reality, which is God's, has no category for death as a place or destination, not for those who fear and respect and love God. Death has no meaning in the sphere of God's marvelous force and supernal light. What we call death is no more than a line in the sand, a gate through which one passes from life to greater life. From life to life.

Think of it! Think of the great irony! This blackest day, this day of weeping and woe, on which people wear somber clothes and dark veils and armbands of mourning. It is on this very day, the selfsame day, which is, in reality, the most joyous day of one's life. — the moment when one passes from all that we value, which is life, to the greater life, passing from day to endless day, passing from a brief season into eternity, where no clock is able to measure time.

Do you know which timezone Heaven is in? It is .... now, always now. Heaven's timezone is the one which renders all other timezones meaningless. Before the departure from Eden, time had not yet ticked. It is hard for us to grasp, yet this unending now, this always-eternity, is inscribed in the deepest recesses of our souls. Mystics of Eastern religions have been contemplating an eternal now for thousands of years. Catholic natural law teaches that God's truth is inscribed on the fleshly tablets of the human heart first, before it was to be revealed by the Prophets or Evangelists. It should be no surprise to us that religious figures of the East have been contemplating an eternal now. In our own time, freelancing spiritual gurus have counseled people to Be Here Now (Baba Ram Dass), to cite the name of a bestselling book of the Sixties.

The ancients of Greece and Rome imagined an afterlife whose principal attribute was forgetfulness, rendering a state of being which amounted to an eternal now. Those who entered the classical Hades drank from a river which washed away all the past, and, of course, there was no future from here. The river's name is Lethe, the Greek word for oblivion (ληθη). The idea was to be granted the great blessing and relief of living only in the present moment .... and to remove the clutter of memories along with their inevitable regrets.

It might be difficult for us to grasp an eternal now, a sensibility which is oblivious to the past or the future. But I would suggest that we have it backwards. It is the past and future, which are an illusion. For the past is nothing else but a string of nows held in memory. And the future is nothing more than one now after another. The past and the future are also constructs. We grant them a certain reality that they do not possess. There is only now. It is the now which alone is real and actual — a constant unfolding from moment to moment organically wed somehow to every cell of our beings and to every firing spark of our consciousnesses.

The medievals believed that the essential quality of Heavenly life was play, that endless now which every child knows as certainly as he or she knows the warmth of the sun. You would depart from the house on a Saturday morning, and it was one now after another. You were lost in the moment .... and then the next moment and then the next, until the sun descended, and someone stood on the front porch and rang a dinner bell or called for you, for the day was done. We did not have to learn how to do this, for the now is the natural state of being. We had to be trained to keep schedules for the future and scrap book, diaries, and photo albums to preserve a past, which otherwise would have evaporated, for that is also the natural state of things. And the Lord of Life, our Master, teaches that until we have that, the heart and imagination of a child at play, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Because the Kingdom of Heaven is now. You will not fit in, in the Kingdom of Heaven running about and writing in your schedule, for everyone else is living in an eternal now. Let us say that Heaven is the moment of the heart and compassion and prayer and the love of God.

With the advent of CPR, tens of millions of people have reported what it is like to step through the gate into the greater life ... if only for a few moments. Their words and descriptions are remarkably consistent. You become enveloped, they all say, by a white light, which fills you with such joy that you feel that you might burst. As a young man, I spent afternoons with a man who was something of a hermit, who lived in a shack in a hollow in the dairy country of upstate New York, where I went to college. We worked on cars together and took breaks smoking our Camels and Luckies, swapping stories and getting to know each other. This man, this ancient man, who had no television nor seemed able to read, lived alone and survived by doing small jobs on his neighbors cars. On a day he shared his experience of crossing the gate. He described the room, the window, the corridor, that joy-endowing white light, which surrounded him and filled him. "Oh! I'd never been so happy in my life," he said. I marveled at it. It was too particular, too finely detailed and, pardon me, too far beyond this man's powers of invention to be anything by the truth. And his sincerity, and the certainty of his telling it, rang of truth. I heard this story ten years before the first book on any Near-Death or After-Death Experience had been published. And you can imagine, I was astonished when I began reading these stories, one after another, exactly the same as my friend's.

That light! That white light! That first thing God created! Einstein taught us that light is not "in" time or space being affected in no way by either. It is a law unto itself, a singular fountain of life, certainly regulating and sustaining all life on earth. It is the fountain of life which bathes this world with its goodness, which radiates from within us when we attain to goodness, and which envelopes us with unspeakable joy as we prepare to meet the One Who is this light.

And when all the powers on earth which are opposed to life attempted to swallow this Lord of Light and to hold Him in its "Halls of Eternal Death," the Light shattered the Darkness and then asked,