"The Third Question: Knowing I Will Die, How Shall I Live?"
Ecclesiastes 1:2-9
October 18, 2009

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains for ever.
The sun rises and the sun goes down,
and hurries to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south,
and goes round to the north;
round and round goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they continue to flow.
All things are wearisome;
more than one can express;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
or the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.

Wayne Muller, our spiritual guide during this October sermon series, begins his
discussion of the third question that he thinks we she should ask ourselves in order to
reveal the meaning and beauty of our lives, the third question being, How Shall We
Live, Knowing We Will Die?  He begins:  

Here are a few journal entries from Forrest Hallmark, four years old.  At the end of
each day, his mother would ask Forrest if there was anything he wanted to remember,
and she would write it down for him in his journal.

Thursday, May 5 1994

I love dinosaurs.  I love ‘em love ‘em love ‘em.  I love sharks.  T Rex is the most fearless
hunter.  It is Thursday today.  My days are getting different now cause we’re doing
different stuff.  Why do bunny rabbits hop?  I just don’t know how bunny rabbits hop.  

Sunday, June 12, 1994

I’m happy today.  I wish we goe’d on a hike and I wish there were butterflies in rain
forests.  Is there a rain forest in Micronesia?

I played on my tricycle…I slipped and almost fell but I didn’t.  I ran over Sis’s tail and
hand.  Sis growled.  I said I’m sorry.  I want to go to the rain forest sometime soon.  

When we read this, we are undoubtedly struck by the natural curiosity and
thoughtfulness of this four year old.  Forrest’s parents were considering moving the
family to Micronesia to work for the government, and so he is wondering how it will be
there.  His name, Forrest, arose partly out of his father’s deep love of nature.  As it
happens, Forrest had developed a fascination with rain forests.  

If our time with Forrest and his journal ended here, it would be simply a sweet moment
in the life of a bright and vital young boy.  But two weeks after this final entry, Forrest
was killed in an automobile accident.  He died at the age of four—with his brother,
Bryce, who was two years old, and his grandfather, who was seventy-five.  Forrest’s
mother, who was driving the car, somehow survived.  After the funeral, she and her
husband gave me a copy of his journal.  

Now, let us go back and read the entries, knowing that two weeks later, this boy would
meet his death:  

I’m happy today.  I wish we goe’d on a hike and I wish there were butterflies in rain
forests.  Is there a rain forest in Micronesia?

I played on my tricycle…I slipped and almost fell but I didn’t.  I ran over Sis’s tail and
hand.  Sis growled.  I said I’m sorry.  I want to go to the rain forest sometime soon.  

What strikes us about the writing now?  What emotions arise as the words touch our
hearts?  What do we feel about the boy’s life now that we know the circumstances of
his death, which would soon follow?  Does each word become more poignant?  Every
event naturally carries more weight.  Our attention is riveted on young Forrest, on these
moments from his brief life on earth.  Thus it is with a life framed by death.  With death
as its companion, each moment of life becomes instantly more compelling.   (Muller 148)

When I read Muller’s words here, it reminded me of an idea that I came up with, months
and months ago, perhaps a year and a half ago, an idea about doing a grand and
pretty radical experiment, based on a book that had fascinated me, a book by Stephen
Levine called A Year To Live.  If you remember, I had proposed that a small group of us
take on the personal experiment of thinking and living as if someone had given us one
solitary year to live, and to do the things that need to be done in that time, both the
practical things, like filling out the five wishes, making sure to think and plan for our
funeral services, but also to make sure that we did the emotional and spiritual things
that need to be done before we pass, like doing a review of our life, of making sure that
we have made peace with all those we need to make peace with, and confronting our
fear of death, in whatever form it comes.  Out of this year long experiment, out of this
year framed by death, to use Muller’s words, I hoped that those who chose to go on the
journey, including myself, would come to learn the value of life, and the fragility of the
time we are given.  

After putting the idea into the bulletin, I got a few interested inquiries from people who
were really intrigued by the idea, like I was, but oddly enough, I also got some very
viscerally negative reactions to the idea, people who were really turned off by it, and it
was voiced to me that that this experiment seemed to diminish the reality of getting
such a sentence, a sentence of one year to live, and how, in fact, could one ever really
mimic that reality?  How could you play with such a horrifying idea?  Now, all of these
objections and concerns were all respectfully voiced and shared with me—something I
think we generally do pretty well around here—but I was really kind of taken aback by
some people’s concerns.  Certainly I hadn’t meant to trivialize the idea of an impending
death, and have tasted from that cold dish myself, with the loss of family and friends
that I lost.   And even more telling to me was that, aside from a couple of people, I
couldn’t get anyone really interested in the idea—very few people indicated any
interest at all, at least to me, and so I quietly dropped it, as I often do with many of my
poorly received ideas.  

But the reaction of some to that little thought experiment has not left me, because it
surprised me, it really did, it surprised me that somehow this little experiment in
conscious living, and conscious dying, had touched a nerve in a few folks.  Even in an
age that gives us more life, more time, on this earth, than most of our ancestors could
have ever imagined because of advances in medicine, some of us really do struggle
with what it means to die, to be no more, at least no more on this side of eternity.  As I
said in some sermon a few months ago, one of the earliest ways the Christian church
came to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection was not through the
idea that he died for our sins, though that was one lens that used to understand that
moment, but rather it was this radical idea that in Jesus’ death and new life, in his
resurrection, God had defeated the power of death forever—and in the ancient world,
where so many died so young, where death was a constant specter, haunting the
dreams, and realities of so many, this was indeed good news.  O death, where is your
sting…the New Testament Scripture asks ironically…

But, still, even for those of us that believe that there is more to the story, that there is
more life on the other side of this life, beyond the veil of this world, the reality is that to
comprehend the end of this life, the end of this world…it’s a challenge for most of us.  
Most of us—not all of us, but most of us—don’t want to deal with the issue, and so we
cling to the hope of many more years for us on life’s schedule.   We know it’s a fool’s
game intellectually, but we can’t seem to make it seep down to our marrow, the
realization that we will not escape the rhythm of this life, of this world, the rhythm of life
and death.  The writer of Ecclesiastes, in our text today, looks it straight in the face,
and names it, reminding us that all our plans for more time will have already been
preceded by the plans of others who thought they too would have more time—but the
only thing that is promised, the only thing that is assured is that generations will come,
and generations will go, and wind and the sun will go on without us—what is eternal,
Ecclesiastes, is not us, but the woof and rhythm of the world.   And yet, as one
observer, Susan Ertz, has written, “Millions yearn for immortality who don’t know what to
do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”  (Muller 156)  But discovering what
do on the Sunday afternoons, and all the afternoons of the week, has been the point of
this series, with our first question, asking the core of question of “who am I?” which
needs to be followed by the second question, “what do I love?” If we know who we are,
if we have plumbed the depths of what makes us, us, and we have unpacked the
reasons that we love what we love in this world, it still doesn’t answer the question of
what to do this afternoon, on this Sunday afternoon, or the next afternoon, or every
afternoon of our life?  And so here comes the third question, the one framed by death,
the one framed by an ending to life on this earth, though not an end to life forever—
“how shall I live, knowing I will die?”  Underneath that question is this truth:  “if we know
we will die, then we will know we are alive.” (Muller 160)

And that is the point of this question—not to be macabre, not to dwell on the fact that
all of our stories will end on this plain, in this world, that we will have to meet our own
death, one way or another.  The point of asking this question, of asking how we will live
in this world, in light of knowing that we too will die, is to make sure that we do not waste
our lives, that we do not make the mistake of thinking that life in this world, on this plain,
is eternal.  The simple fact is that we do not have forever, and if we know that truth in
our bones, it makes life sweeter, more incredible, more beautiful, more poignant, just as
when we heard 4 year old Forrest’s words through the lens of his death—what he said,
who and what he loved, dinosaurs and dogs named Sis, is not just cute and adorable,
but absolutely and wondrously beautiful and incredibly poignant, all because it was
framed in the reality of death.  We do not have forever, and the ones we love do not
have forever—we don’t even know if we have the next moment, the next minute, the
next day, the next year, of our own lives.  If we can simply be present with the fact that
we do not have forever in this life, forever to mend the old fences that need mending
with our loved ones, and the ones we struggle to love, if we can simply acknowledge
that forever is not on the agenda, then we can root ourselves in the moment, in the
here and now, and we can do what needs to be done.  Through the lens of our death,
and even the death of others, we can see the world and the people we love, and even
the people we struggle to love, differently—we can both heal ourselves and help heal
others, with our words, with our decision not to hold onto old grievances, old wounds,
and failed expectations.        

So, you and I know we do not have forever, we know that we shall die, and, so the
question is then, how shall we live?  To know of our coming death, is to pay attention to
our present life and to live it out more carefully.  If I know I will die, will it mean that I love
a bit more deeply?  Will I attend to my spiritual life a bit more, tend to that which is
eternal inside of me, the Holy Spirit in me?  If I know I will die, will I pick up the phone
more often and connect with my mother and my sister, and my nephew Drake?  If I
know I will die, will I be able to let go of petty gripes I have with others about them not
doing it this way, or their insistence on doing it that way, the way that is obviously the
wrong way?  You know, I want to learn these lessons before I have to, and I think you
probably do too, if you’ve not already learned them.  

Wayne Muller shares the journey of a young man named Paul, who had a terminal form
of cancer.  Paul was struggling with being both ready to go to the next world, and yet
wanting to stay in this one.  Muller shares:

“What would you do if we could give you those ten years [you were just wishing for]?   
What would your life look like?”  I finally asked

Paul spoke easily and certainly.  “I would be kind.”  I would live my life with kindness,”
he said.  “I would be kind to children.  I would teach them to be kind, too.  This is all I
ever really wanted to do, just to be kind, to be loving.”  He was quiet for a moment.  A
few months ago, when I was still feeling strong, I thought I would treat myself, so I
walked into a bakery and ordered two of my favorite cookies.  I told the girl behind the
counter they were my favorite, and she said she loved them, too, but that they were
very expensive.  When I left, I thought about it for a minute, went back and bought
another cookie, and gave it to her.  ‘This one is for you,’ I said.  She was so surprised
by my kindness.  ‘You are such a kind man,’ she said.  I felt absolutely wonderful.  Such
a small thing, such an easy thing to do.  This is how I would live my life, if only I had
more time.”

Wayne continues: In the face of his death, Paul saw his life.  His death clarified his
heart’s desire: to be a kind person.  Everything else fell away, and he simply saw what
was precious and valuable.  To be kind—this was the most sacred thing, the most
perfect and accurate offering he could make with this, his single life.  (Muller 149-150)

Indeed, all we have is this single life in this world, this world that is still a gift from God,
even in the midst of some of the hardship and pain that comes our way—there are two
realities in this world, pain and joy, cross and resurrection, and the sooner we make
peace with those realities, the better.  But the time with which to make peace with that
reality is now, the gift of this life is not eternal, the gift of this life in this world, on this
earth, and though we are promised more, and given more life in the world to come, that
is no reason to squander this gift, and to waste this one life.  If we think towards the end
of this part of the journey, if we can face the truth of the ending of our lives, then
maybe we can make the rest of journey worth taking, the rest of the journey worth
going on.  Amen and amen.