as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, January 12, 2025
Thank you for joining us this morning. I do not typically begin my sermons with an expression of gratitude. Today is different. The subject promises to be heavy. I know that many of you come on Sundays seeking uplift and a smidgeon of hope. And today’s focus… well, death is difficult to face.
Death is difficult to face. This is true even now, when we are in the heart of winter, which might be called the season of death. The sky grays. The wind is chill. The sweet Earth freezes. Green things go dormant, die. Leaves fall. Branches are bare. In the garden the last of the growing things perish or go dormant or wait for spring’s coming warmth. In winter death is everywhere.
Death is everywhere because life is everywhere. “Religion,” wrote the Unitarian Universalist theologian Forrest Church, “is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” Alive, you and I are aware that we will die. Alive, we carry with us the grief from mortal losses: deaths of friends, lovers, family members, grandparents, parents, and, hardest of all, sometimes children. Alive, we are aware of absence. Alive, we are aware that our presence will end in absence.
Alive, we are always confronted with the question the poet Elizabeth Alexander asked after the tragic early death of her husband, “Which is stronger, death sitting in the corner, or life in New York City?” Death is always sitting in the corner. Life is always freighted with beauty. Every minute of every day, until we reach our last, we are confronted with the question: which is stronger, death sitting in the corner, or life? How do you answer the question today?
This month, as part of our “Future Visions, Future Selves” series, we are taking up this most religious of subjects: death. As you might recall, over the course of a year, we are exploring three aspects of the future–societal, personal, and planetary. Together, we are asking questions like: “What does the future hold? How might we prepare for it?”
We raise up the most personal, most difficult, of futures, death, during a time of profound loss. The philosopher John Clark has named our age the “new era of death.” The journalist Ezra Klein quotes another philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, “Now is the time of monsters.” The climate catastrophe and a global resurgence of white supremacy are entwined. Democratic societies are under threat. The world is burning. Species go extinct at startling rates. Wars rage. Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, there has been more organized mass violence in the last five years than in the two decades prior. Los Angeles is aflame. A least sixteen people have lost their lives. The property damage could be the costliest climate related destruction in the country’s history. Here in Houston, Mayor Whitmire made the decision not to open warming centers. A man froze to death while sleeping at a Second Ward Bus stop. Which is stronger, death sitting in the corner, or life?
John Clark, in his reflections on our new era of death, has observed that the political class is meeting these challenges with denial and disavowal. Denial, the rejection of truth. This is not happening. That is not happening. We are not in a time of monsters. Disavowal, the silencing of truth, the refusal to recognize that our decisions–or at least the decision of the political class–have lit the world afire.
Which is stronger, death sitting in the corner, or life? Our religious tradition challenges us to ask this question and confront denial and disavowal. We are called to recognize what is happening, to name that we live in a new era of death and reject denial. We are pushed to accept that we have some responsibility for what has brought us to a time of monsters.
It is only through rejecting denial and disavowal that we can fully embrace life. I sometimes refer to this process as undergoing the resurrection of the living–to waking up to the world as it is and acknowledging our places in the great misorder of things.
The resurrection of the living, moving beyond denial and disavowal, a new start to life, it is something that many of you come to First Unitarian Universalist seeking. Confronted with the question of which is stronger death, sitting in the corner, or life, often you arrive in our sanctuary, or encounter us online, searching for a way to answer life.
I know this because you tell me. As part of our membership process, I ask potential members to meet with me. I do this so I can get to know you. I am better equipped to minister to you if I know something of your stories, your religious backgrounds, and your concerns.
During these meeting I usually ask you, “What brought you to First Unitarian Universalist?” Your answers vary. You just got married. You are from different religious traditions and want a congregation that will honor both of your heritages.
You recently started a family. You are looking for a community in which to raise your children.
You are a lifelong Unitarian Universalist. You just moved to Houston and want to connect to your faith community.
You know your stories.
Loss is a common tale. After the death of a partner, a spouse, a parent, after the loss of a job, after a personal catastrophe, come with profound grief. You are seeking a community, a tradition, that knows how to face death and devastation. You need a sanctuary where, within the brick weight of the walls, upon the silent age of the pews, under the light filtered through trees and clear glass, you can proclaim that life is stronger than death. You need a religion that after tragedy will empower you to move past denial and disavowal and wake up to the world as it is–one in which the price of life is death.
The price of life is death. Every moment of our lives we creep closer to its advent. Decades ago, the British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote of this truth:
Hark! death is calling
While I speak to ye,
The jaw is falling,
The red cheek paling,
The strong limbs failing.
Death is calling, our Unitarian Universalist tradition offers us aid in making sense of this difficult future in two principal ways. First, it provides guidance on how to live with loss. Second, it helps us make peace with what is to come. The Irish poet Dylan Thomas might have advised, “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage rage against the dying of the light” but the wise have often given different counsel.
Each of us, confronted with mortality, confronted with grief, are challenged to make some meaning of it all. This morning, as we struggle with death, I want to offer four lessons from the world’s wisdom traditions that might help you with grief and loss. I put them before you in the hopes so that you might have the strength of life in the presence of death. I share them as an aid to rejecting denial and disavowal and waking up to what is.
First lesson, no one has found a way to escape death. Morally bankrupt billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison might dream of using their absurd wealth to avoid it–cryogenic freezing and treating death as a disease is all the rage amongst the Silicon Valley elite. Violent conquistadors once pillaged their way across the continent in search of the fountain of youth. They never found its soothing waters. They all have turned to dust. Death comes for all of us.
Some Buddhist traditions teach us to move beyond the denial and disavowal of this reality through a profound practice: the corpse meditation. It begins:
Aware of my body alive and
breathing, I breathe in.
Smiling to my body alive and
breathing, I breathe out.
Taking the practitioner through the stages of death and bodily decomposition, the meditation ends:
Seeing my mortal remains being
mixed with the earth, I breathe in.
Smiling to my mortal remains being
mixed with the earth, I breathe out.
The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that the purpose of this meditation is to help “us become accustomed to the fact that sooner or later we all … die. It is … a way of meditating on the impermanence of the body. … If we … become familiar and comfortable with the idea that makes us afraid of death, we shall begin to transform that fear. We … begin to live our lives more deeply and with more care and awareness.”
Life is stronger than death when we recognize that death is part of life. We cannot escape it. If we embrace this truth, then we can shed our fear of it.
I will not pretend that this is easy. Religious practices like the corpse meditation are called practices because we need to do them over and over if we are to absorb their lessons. There are times when I struggle with the fear of death. And there are times when, aware of the fleeting nature of life, I find myself overcome with the world’s beauty. How is it for you?
Second lesson, this time from the Greek humanists, can be found in the words of the poet Glykon:
Nothing but laughter, nothing
But dust, nothing but nothing,
No reason why it happens.
We make our own meanings in the face of death. Some find comfort in religious narratives that speak of ultimate celestial destinies. Others talk only of life on Earth. In our community we recognize that no tradition has managed to unveil an ultimate meaning that every person on the planet can embrace. What you make of your life, what you make of your death, in the end, no matter the great forces of the world that batter and buffet you, is up to you. You can embrace this religious tradition. You can embrace that one. But we are thinking, feeling, creatures capable of making a great choice: my life signifies this or my life signifies. Within the limits that I lived–and for much of humanity the choices of life can be severely limited–I made what I could of the breaths I took between the womb and the tomb.
We make meaning from the deaths of others as well. Next Sunday, we will celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His death, and his life, have meant many different things for different people. The same is true, on a smaller level, for all of us.
I have learned this through my decades of conducting memorial services. For one person, the deceased was primarily a mother. For another, she was a friend. For a third, a former President of the congregation’s Board, a teacher, a social activist, a smiling presence who brought food and flowers and kindness into the world.
Always, we are asked, in the words of Mary Oliver:
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Your one wild and precious life, here we turn to the wisdom of W. E. B. Du Bois. At the end of his life, he claimed “always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life; that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others.” Coming into the world, if life is to be stronger than death, then we challenged to answer life’s question–what will you do with your one precious life?–through making the meaning we can of it.
A third lesson is the recognition that many deaths are not the will of God. They are the result of choices that we make. William Sloane Coffin held up this point when he was reflecting on the death of his son Alex. Alex died in a car crash. He had been driving drunk. His death, Coffin wrote, was not “the will of God.” It was not God’s will “that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his, that he was … driving too fast in such a storm, that he … had a couple … too many … [it is not] God’s will that there are no streetlights along that stretch of road, and no guard rail separating the road and” the water.
Death can only be faced honestly, confronted fully, if we recognize the human actions and choices connected to it. The homeless man who died in the cold on Monday likely died because the city did not to open warming centers. The fires that are raging across Los Angeles come from human choices that have fueled the climate crisis. Would they be happening if more people in 1980 had embraced the truth telling of Jimmy Carter rather than the denialism of Ronald Reagan? Would they be happening if Los Angeles developers did not repeatedly build homes in dry hills which burn regularly in the local climate?
Jimmy Carter understood that the human choices have a profound impact on who lives and who dies. After he left the White House, he devoted himself to lessening the death in the world. One focus of his was the eradication of Guinea worm disease. In 1986, there were more than 3.5 million cases reported around the globe. This past year there were 11. I think a moment of appreciative applause here would be in order for the memory of former President Carter.
Like all of us, former President Carter was confronted with the question which is stronger, death sitting in the corner, or life? After his presidency his answer was clear. He did what he could to strengthen life. His legacy invites us to make similar choices. How shall we choose?
Fourth lesson, from the Christian tradition, captured in the famous verses in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8: “Love is patient and kind. … There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, its endurance. Love will never come to an end.”
Love will never come to an end. Perhaps this is the most helpful balm for the reality of death. The love we bring into the world–and each of us is capable of bringing love into the world–lingers long after we have gone. If we have children, it remains in them. If we are part of a community, it endures as long as the community lasts–perhaps even longer. The love of the members of our Chalice Society who blessed us with bequests continues to be with us. The love President Carter had for the people of the world will remain long after he has gone. His dream of eradicating Guinea worm disease has almost come true. When it does there will never be another person who suffers from it–an act of his enduring love.
Love, this is ultimately the answer placed in the question, which is stronger, death sitting in the corner, or life? If we love the world our life will always be stronger than death because our love will remain. Writing of the death of her husband Elizabeth Alexander said, “I can always see him.” Thinking of my own beloved dead, I know there is some part of them that I always feel, always remember–a story, a sense, a shared laugh, a wise offering. I suspect the same is true for you.
The endurance of love, a recognition of our human responsibility for death, the knowledge that we each make our own meaning, and an acceptance of the truth we each will die, these are four lessons from the world’s wisdom traditions. They each invite us, in this wintery season of death, to find some peace and comfort as we face what is to come.
They are bound up in a fifth lesson. The question–which is stronger, death sitting in the corner, or life?–is easier to answer when we find a community in which to seek an answer for it together. I am grateful for having this community to seek my answer in. It is easier to search for answers in good company than on my own. That collective seeking is why so many of you join us.
In the hopes that our time together will help you find something of what you seek, I close our sermon in prayer:
Oh, Spirit of Life,
passing through each
and binding each to all,
inspire to answer yes to the beauty of life,
and remember that we have the power to create meaning,
the strength to do something–large or small–
to better the lives of others,
and hold within us
and can share around us a love that endures beyond all endings.
In the face of death,
let us embrace life.
Let us always be vessels healing,
hope, and love,
that it might be so,
I invite the congregation to say Amen.
