I don’t think I’ve ever shared this with Kirstie or anyone else, but every week when I finish writing the sermons for Sunday, it puts me in a somber but peaceful mood. This is not because the work is complete. I am rarely satisfied with the finished product, and as was reportedly the case with E. B. White, I simply have to stop working on it due to a deadline rather than because I am happy with it. But I am somber because every week it occurs to me that these may be the last sermons I ever write. One of the reasons I began manuscripting most of my sermons several years ago is that I did not want their content to depend on my delivery. So every week once the manuscript is complete I reflect on the fact that if I die before the Lord’s Day, my wife and children will still be able to read what I planned to say.
I’ve had a similar experience the last three weeks in recording sermons to be studied on Sunday. It is very odd to be finished “preaching” on Friday; I certainly don’t want to make a habit of it. But it has occurred to me each week that if I am struck down by the Corona virus or hit by a bus or drop a kettlebell on my head before Sunday… at least the sermon will still be available.
I hope your day is not made more morbid by eavesdropping on my thoughts today. That’s not my intent. Some of us were introduced to our own mortality quite early, and it gives one a very different perspective on life. I am sharing this not because I’m in the mood to bare my soul, but because every one of us, and our children, has an opportunity right now to reflect in positive and helpful ways on our own mortality. Death is a certainty, unless the Lord returns first; being born creates a terminal condition. We need to live like people that know it. Someday I will preach my last sermon. It may be when I am old. It may be many years from now. Or it may have already happened, and I am simply unaware of it. Am I prepared for this sermon to be my last sermon? What about my last conversation with my kids or my spouse? We cannot live every day as if it were our last. That would be unworkable, but we can resolve as Jonathan Edwards did many years ago “never to do anything, which I should be afraid to do, if it were the last hour of my life,” “that I will live so as I shall wish I had done when I come to die,” and “to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death.” The writer of Ecclesiastes teaches us it is “better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men; and the living will take it to heart” (Ecc. 7:2).
Thinking of the certainty of our own death should not make us morbid or sad but rather joyfully somber. Perhaps one of the ways this pandemic will positively affect and sanctify is by helping us to think more often and more productively of our own mortality and to live more faithfully as prepared people. -JME
