When You Know the End is Near

Deuteronomy chapter 31, we're gonna read together verses one through seven, and then 14 through the first part of 16. You can find this in your bulletin or on the screen behind me. If you would join your voices. It's our practice to read God's word aloud together.

Then Moses continued to speak these words to all Israel saying, I am now a 120 years old. I can no longer act as your leader. The Lord has told me, you will not cross the Jordan. The Lord your God is the one who will cross ahead of you. He will destroy these nations before you, and you will drive them out. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you as the Lord has said. The Lord will deal with them as he did Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and their land when he destroyed them. The Lord will deliver them over to you and you must do to them exactly as I have commanded you. Be strong and courageous. Don't be terrified or afraid of them for the Lord your God is the one who will go with you. He will not leave you or abandon you. Moses then summoned Joshua and said to him in the sight of all Israel, be strong and courageous for you will go with this people into the land the Lord swore to give to their ancestors. You will enable them to take possession of it. The Lord said to Moses, the time of your death is now approaching. Call Joshua and present yourselves at the tent of meeting so that I may commission him. And presented themselves at the tent of meeting, the Lord appeared at the tent in a pillar of cloud and the cloud stood at the entrance to the tent. The Lord said to Moses, you are about to rest with your ancestors. — Deuteronomy 31:1-7, 14-16

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

So we're back in Deuteronomy for a particular purpose. One is I couldn't have skipped the end. The book of Deuteronomy is really a series of sermons that Moses gives on the very cusp of the promised land. And the end of the book frames the whole thing. Moses is about to die. And it's hard to even overstate what a big deal that is for God's people. Moses, their leader through all these years, is about to die. And the entire book could be viewed as the last words of Moses. In fact, a lot of commentators teach it that way.

And today, I'm actually using this as a launching point to a short five-week sermon series on dying and death called "Facing Death by Faith." I realized that for years I've done a lot of teaching in this congregation on the resurrection and on Jesus' return, and on heaven and hell, and all those things which are terrific doctrines for you to know about and to learn about. But unless Jesus returns very soon, all of us will face dying. And so it's really important for us to think about these things together.

It's been said that the job of a pastor is to prepare a congregation to die well. And I know that phrase "die well" doesn't make sense to a lot of people. What do you mean die well? Well, here's my goal for this series. A couple of things really briefly. I want to help us process deaths of those we love who've gone before us. I would like us to be able to think biblically about our own deaths, and I'd like to take the stigma out of the room in talking about dying.

Two things I want to say—really, two acknowledgments—before I begin. One is I want to really honor two people who've been instrumental and helpful in preparing me for this series. One is Kristi Knutson, who's part of our congregation. Her profession is end of life, and she has provided all kinds of resources. You're going to get some of those resources today and the rest the next couple of weeks. She's also willing to help you and be available and use her professional skills with our congregation. So if you don't know Kristi, I hope you'll get to know her.

The other person is John Allsdorf. John and Catherine started the New City Fellows. Some of you have been part of the New City Fellows program. And John did the same kind of teaching with a sister church in town, Holy Trinity, a couple years ago. And I was like, "Oh, you can do that?" Okay. You can do that. So I want to acknowledge those two people.

I also want to acknowledge that this is not a theoretical topic for anybody. And so before we begin, I think it's right for us to pause and remember those whom we've lost. And I'm actually going to light a candle and take a moment of silence if you would join me in that.

Here's my theme for today: The God who goes before you. The God who goes before you. We see in Moses someone who faces his own death with clarity and honesty and confidence because he's resting in God's presence.

And because God goes before us, we also can be people who can face our mortality without fear and denial. So here's my outline for those of you who take notes—only two points. So getting off easy this morning. Living in denial, facing death, facing reality by faith.

Most human beings want life to continue indefinitely, and we sort of act like that's the case. We do a great deal to make sure that we don't have to think about death on a regular basis. Cicero was right. He says this: "No person is so old that he does not think he can live another year." I think that's really wise.

We accept our mortality in theory, of course. No one would say, "I'm gonna live forever" unless you're singing the theme song Defame. That was a deep cut, y'all. But we approach every day as if we have an infinite number of days ahead, even though we know that's not true.

So a little humor may help us in this. David Sedaris is from Raleigh, his hometown. He's an essayist and a humorist. And he writes in his book "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" a story about going shopping for his partner. He's trying to find a unique gift and he lives in Paris, so he's going through all these curio shops, vintage shops, and he comes across an antique human skeleton on a stand. He's like, "Nobody's got this. Nobody's got a human skeleton." So he brings it home and he works from home as a writer. He didn't realize how the skeleton would drive him crazy. He felt like everywhere he goes in his apartment, he's hearing the skeleton say to him, "You are going to die."

Since Sedaris is a writer, here's the humor. I'll just give you an excerpt:

Having been dead for almost three hundred years, there's a lot the skeleton doesn't understand. TV for instance. "See," I told him, "you just push this button, entertainment comes into your home." The skeleton seemed impressed by this, so I took it a step further. I invented television myself to bring comfort to the old and sick. "You are going to die," the skeleton said. He had the same reaction to the vacuum cleaner, even after I used the nozzle attachment to clean his bones. "You are going to die." And that's when I broke down. I just said to the skeleton, "I'll do anything you like. I'll make amends to the people I've hurt. I'll bathe in rain water. You name it. Just please say something, anything else." The skeleton hesitated for a moment. "You are going to be dead someday." And then I put the vacuum cleaner away thinking, "Well, that's a start."

The whole point is he's using this humorously because the skeleton becomes a symbol for him of his own anxiety about death. And he actually stops smoking as a result of having this in his home.

It's not just that humans live in denial of death. It's also that we have systematically removed death from our view. Take church architecture for example. If you drive out into rural North Carolina, you'll see all these little country churches surrounded by graveyards. Every Sunday, if you went to that church, you have to walk past tombstones that remind you where you will end up. Now we've taken graveyards and put them on the edges of our cities. We hide them. We put them in places we don't see them very often. There's an impact of that.

In addition, think about the structure of the family. Used to be that people died at home with people in their extended family. The family was the senior living community, the assisted living facility, the independent living community, the retirement community. Now we have special places for those. So we've taken death away from our view.

And lest you think I'm just pining away for some good old days, I wanted to remind you that this denial of death—the first quote from my sermon here came from Cicero. Cicero is not a modern rapper. This is a guy who lived a hundred years before Jesus, and he's saying we deny death. This is nothing new for humans. This has been part of the human condition.

Memento Mori

There's a type of art known as memento mori. Now I have an art history wife, so I have an edge up on many of you on this one. Memento mori are objects that help people meditate on death. This is a very common theme in art history. There'll be paintings that have a skull in them, and they're meant to be a reflection piece where people are remembering their mortality.

I want to put up a picture of one of these. This is maybe the most famous one, according to my wife, by Hans Holbein the Younger, called "The Ambassadors," and it's a picture of two men in a room. Now what you may not be able to tell from this picture is that there is a weird blob on the lower part of the painting. Can you tell, sort of at the bottom? Something doesn't work right there.

Well, this painting, if you go see it, it's meant to be viewed from a particular perspective. Because if you hang this up on the wall and you stand at the lower left, this is what you would see. Let's go one more slide. Now what is Holbein doing? He's saying death—it's always right there. This is a part of human existence. We know that this is part of what it means to be finite. And yet it's right in front of us and we don't see it. This is a little trick of the eye painting.

There's a great phrase for that one too. I can't remember how to pronounce it correctly. But how he does this is meant to tell us, and just like the painting's name, the ambassadors, he is doing something with this. He is, as an ambassador, telling you, reminding you: you are going to die, like the skeleton said. Being human has always meant living in denial of death. But what does that do to us? What does it do over time to live in denial? There's a cost to that that I'm not sure that we often interact with.

Now I got this from Kristi Knutson, who's written an article about this. And this is what she says: very unfunny consequences to avoiding death.

Number one, the cycle begins with cultural avoidance of death. That shift took root in the mid-twentieth century where death moved from the home to hospitals. Death became a medical failure. Death shifted to sterile institutions and grief became both rushed and very brief. What was once accepted as an ordinary part of life and even in your own home became awkward and a frightening topic to discuss. And this leads to stage two.

We avoid conversations that make a meaningful death possible. We avoid asking partners about life support. We hesitate to discuss estate planning with our parents. When scans bring up frightening news, we focus on radical experimental treatments instead of asking: what are my goals of care? Even when we work up the courage to ask, the idea of dipping our toe into this water is overwhelming.

Third stage, the fallout of pushing planning to the margins. This is really sad. Without planning, people often receive the most aggressive treatments, most aggressive medical interventions in their final days and months. These treatments rarely help. Instead, they actually rob a family of the one thing that they really want: time. Time with the people that they love. And trying to gain more, we lose more. Hospices can offer tremendous help. But we have so put this off that now the average length of a hospice stay is eighteen days or less. When there's a power there to actually prolong a good, quiet death.

Stage four then means that grief is heavier than it should be. Grief is heavier than it should be. Illness then is marked by confusion and crisis care, guilt, missed conversations, and it just makes grieving harder. Anybody been through this? Anybody felt this before? Like, this shouldn't be like this. This shouldn't be this hard. And so it compounds increased distress. It makes grief more complicated. And it leads us to do what in the future? Deny death. Avoid death. And the cycle just starts over again through all those stages. It's a train wreck of horrible consequences.

So here's the question for us going through this series: Is there another way? Is there another way? How do we face reality? And this is where I think Deuteronomy is really helpful to us. I think this passage and the chapters that come behind it are really helpful.

God tells Moses privately, you're not going to go into the promised land. And then he tells them publicly in this chapter in front of all the people, you're not going to go. Moses is not going into this promised land. And I'm sure that was hard—actually hard for two groups: for Moses and the people.

Let's think about this. For Moses, Moses knew his end was coming. God had said that way back. If you could go back to Numbers chapter 20, God had told him, this is coming. You are not going to get to go in. And this is what we see in Moses though. In this chapter, he's done some work. He's faced this with reality. He even tells this directly to the people in verses one through six. Hey, I'm going to die. I've lived one hundred and twenty years and I'm going to die. Clearly, he's accepted this.

I want you to think about that moment. What would it be like to be told by God when your end is coming? What would that feel like? What would it be like to know that your life was coming to a close? How would you spend your last days or weeks? How might that frame the way that you approached the end of life? What would you want to say to people that you loved? What relationships might you want to mend?

Now here's the question: Are we so different from Moses? See, the reality is God has told you that you don't have an infinite number of days. His word says this over and over. Let's put these scriptures up on the screen.

This is what he says.

Your life is a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. All flesh is like grass and its glory like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flower falls off. Our days on earth are as a shadow, and there is none that stays. Everyone is but a breath, even those who seem secure. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle and are spent without hope.

God's word tells us over and over again, you're going to die. You have a limited amount of time on this planet. And not only do you hear that in God's word, we see that in natural revelation in the natural world all the time. What did you do this fall on a good nice sunny day? You raked up the dead leaves. You cut off the plants that die. You bury pets from time to time. The natural world tells us as well—it's another witness to us—that we also have a life cycle.

I'm sure this was hard for Moses. And Moses seems to be in a place of peace around this. But I'm sure this was even harder for the people of Israel. All the people he was going to leave behind because while facing our own death is really hard, facing the death of those we love is way harder for many of us.

Here's some questions we ask when we think of losing somebody we love. We say, how are we going to keep going without him, her? What is life even going to be like without them? What are we gonna do without them? How can we think of a future where they aren't here? I can't picture my house, our Christmas, our family vacation, our church, my life without blank. How can I go on?

Well, friends, I can't think of any more significant person in the Old Testament than Moses. This is like your president, your dad, your grandfather. This is the biggest person in Israelite history by a long country mile. And I'm sure for the people, they're like, Israel doesn't exist without this guy. Who leads? What is gonna happen? I'm sure that they ask questions like this. How do we keep going without Moses? What's life gonna be like without Moses? How are we going to do it without Moses? How can we think of a future without Moses being here? I can't picture our tent of meeting without Moses, or our festivals, or our trip into the promised land without Moses. They're asking all the same questions we are. They're grieving.

How do you face death with faith? That's going to be our topic over the next several weeks. We're going to get at that a little bit every week. But here's what we see briefly today in the beginning of this conversation with Moses.

First: The Honesty of Mortality

Moses acknowledges his failing strength. He names it. I'm now 120 years old and I'm no longer able to lead you. He's honest with himself. He names it as truth. He doesn't shrink back from what is real.

I had a friend named Bob when I was a pastor in Philly, and Bob worked for a ministry in town, and he had a unique tattoo on his forearm. There was a woman named Lynn in their church that had died and had a really just—it was a very public death. It was slow and it was really hard. And that entire church community was really affected by this. And after her death, he calculated how many days that she had been alive, and he had that tattooed on his arm. And I was always struck by this because I was like, oh yeah. Everybody has a number. There's a number that you have. You don't know it. God knows it.

It's interesting because Moses wrote one and only one psalm in the Old Testament, in the book of Psalms. Psalm 90. And in it, Moses said:

Lord, teach us to number our days aright that we might gain a heart of wisdom.

Moses was like, I got a number. You got a number. God knows that number.

Second: The Stability of God's Presence

This is what anchors him. Listen to what he says to Joshua. This is profound. He says this first to Israel and then to Joshua:

The Lord your God, the Lord your God himself will cross over ahead of you.

Now he's obviously thinking about the boundary into the promised land. They're standing on the very edge of the Jordan River about to go into the promised land. God is gonna cross that boundary ahead of you. God is gonna go before you. But there's another boundary that Moses is about to cross, isn't he? He's about to cross a boundary from life to death. And these words are really important.

The Lord your God himself will cross over ahead of you.

We could say that as very much about death as we could about the promised land.

Over the next five Sundays, I'm gonna give you homework. I know. Homework in church. Who would have thunk? So on the way out today, you're gonna be handed two pieces of paper. You're also gonna get an email in case you lose it.

So there will be a homework assignment and a set of resources. And today's homework is to write your obituary. Now somebody's gonna have to write your obituary. And instead of putting that on your family members or friends, take a stab at it. Now I know some of you are like, what are we talking about? I'm like, I'm in college. Why would I have to write my obituary? Listen. Take this as a practice, a spiritual practice in facing mortality and saying, I got a number. And trusting in the stability of God's presence. He goes before me. He crossed—he will cross the boundary ahead of me.

You know, and look, I want what I want you to do is to take this and share it. You're gonna write this out. It'll be really imperfect. I don't care. You're gonna take it and you can take it to community group. You're gonna take it over lunch with a friend. You're gonna talk about it with people you care about and care about you. And then you're gonna put it in a folder. And I'm praying at the end of this series, you got a collection of some homework and some resources. So complete it if you would. I'm not gonna grade it or check on it, but I trust you.

The Legacy of Courage

Finally, the legacy of courage. Moses takes this conviction that the Lord your God will go ahead of you and he turns and he uses it in a powerful way to give strength to Joshua. It's like he said it to himself and then he can turn to say to Joshua, the Lord will go ahead of you. And read this. This is in verses seven and eight. We have this on the screen.

Be strong and courageous. You must go with this people in the land the Lord swore to their ancestors to give them. You must divide it among them as their inheritance. The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you. He will never leave you or forsake you. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged. — Deuteronomy 31:7-8

See, those who have taken this in can encourage others. When I was in high school, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. My mom's best friend from high school had been an astronaut, and I was like, yes. I want to be on the space shuttle. Went to space camp two times for reals. And I was obsessed with reading about all the people who had done the first things. So Chuck Yeager, first guy to break the sound barrier. I read that biography several times. Yuri Gargarin, the first person to go into space around the earth, obsessed with him. Neil Armstrong, first person to set his foot on the moon, obsessed.

All these people were the first to do things that nobody had ever done before. And they immediately became authorities on the subject. So you want to know, hey, what is it like to break the sound barrier? What's it like on the other side of the sound barrier? You go ask Chuck because he knows. You want to know what's it like to leave the planet? Go ask Yuri. You want to know what's it like to step foot on the moon? You go ask Neil.

In the same way, the most simple gospel presentation I could ever give you is this. Jesus was crucified and he died and he was buried and he rose again. You want to know what it's like to cross the boundary? Ask Jesus. This is the anchor for our souls.

So we start this series, one simple thing I want you to know. Not the Lord God will cross ahead of you the boundary—the Lord your God in a way that Moses could never have imagined crossed the boundary ahead of you. The authority on life and death is the one who calls you friend. Anchor your souls to him. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Let's pray. Father, this is a hard road, and we're not ready. And doing something that the rest of the world doesn't want to do, which is live in reality, is gonna be really hard. And some of us are scared, and some of us are nervous, and some are trying to figure out when in February we can come back to church. But Lord, give us courage. Thank you that we could do these things together. Thank you that Lord we know the one who crossed the boundary and came back. Lord, anchor us more deeply in you. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Let's stand and sing together.