I have a funeral today. For many people that’s odd; not in my profession, though. I officiate funerals fairly often. But today’s funeral got me thinking about death, resurrection, and the numerous ways we experience both throughout our lives.

Little Deaths & Big Deaths

Most of the time when we think of death, it’s the big one: the end of life. One of those pesky consequences of being alive is that, eventually, we will die. Late-modern society has certainly done everything it can to pretend that our own deaths and the deaths of those whom we love are not inevitable, often to our detriment, but that doesn’t change the reality of death. This life, unfortunately, ends in death.

But many other deaths exist, some more figurative than others. After billions of years, eventually our sun will die, turning into a red giant, consuming much of the solar system, and then burning out into white dwarf. The “heat-death of the universe” exists in some models of physics, when the universe itself ages and decays to a point at which everything is at equilibrium and only nothing can really happen anymore.

Then there are the smaller deaths, deaths that are not an end of life or a star as much of an end of a moment: the death of a marriage ending in divorce; the death of a friendship from lost contact or conflict; the death of a job, or another opportunity; or the death of a moment in time, like the end of a sunset or a dragonfly you’ve been watching taking off from in front of your window.

These little deaths all mark the end of something—ends that we will mourn. They hurt, obviously some more than others, but they all cause us to grieve. There’s a sadness in the loss, great sadness in some and small sadness in others, but these deaths all make us sad. Something once was, and now it is not.

Resurrections

Yet from many of these deaths, something new may spring. The death of job or career can lead to a much more fulfilling pivot to something else. The death of the star, especially the violent death of a supernova, is the birth of something new: to quote the late Carl Sagan, we are made of star-stuff. The death of one relationship might lead to the beginning of a new one. Even in the theorized heat-death of the universe there is also a theorized beginning of new universes.

And, of course, I am a Christian pastor. I believe in a resurrection of even the dead to new life, a life that I don’t fully understand, but a resurrection into a renewed world without the pain and suffering and tragedy of this one. There will be a reunion with loved ones, and with the risen Jesus, into the fullness of what humanity and everything else we know could be.

Or, if it’s more your speed, I offer the immortal words of 90s alternative band Semisonic: “Closing time; every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

My “Death” & Resurrection

About two years ago, I faced a death of my own. Some of y’all reading this were there for this death, and I appreciate your support. For years I had tried to live out my understanding of who God is and what kind of life God is inviting God’s people into while serving as a pastor in an organization who held a different view. Many people do that without much struggle. I imagine that most Christians do not fully believe what the church they attend claims to believe. But when you’re a pastor, sometimes these things play out differently.

The details really don’t matter. I did my best to be clear to my superiors in ministry about my disagreement with certain core beliefs of that organization, with the understanding that I would profess those things outwardly as a representative of the organization. That worked for a little while; I wasn’t happy, but it was something resembling sustainable. I felt secure in my self-identity as a Lutheran pastor.

And then I died.

Not literally of course, but that identity died. The full story, again, isn’t relevant. My identity as a Lutheran pastor went through a relatively fast “illness” leading to its death. I didn’t quite know what to do. It took some time to get there, but I, somewhat accidentally, found a resurrection within the United Church of Christ.

Now I have found a denomination that rejoices in a diversity of interpretations of who God is, both in its clergy and its laypeople. I’m the pastor of a delightful rural congregation who is present in their community, seeking to live out their witness of God’s reign as best they know how. Getting here was hard, and there were some painful times in the midst of the death of my “Lutheran pastor” identity, but at the same time, I think the resurrection on the other side was worth it.

That’s also the Christian hope: death is not the end; resurrection follows. Whether the big death at the end of this life, or the countless smaller deaths we experience, we hope for a new life, because we trust in the resurrection victory of Jesus over the deaths of our world.