This short essay is an expansion and significant revision of a shorter post I made in April 2020.
I am a preacher. It is my vocation and has been my full-time occupation for more than twenty-three years. Every week I write sermons, new sermons, sometimes one, sometimes three, and I have done so continuously for almost a quarter of a century. That is a lot of sermons, literally thousands. Not all of them have been good. Some have been very bad. Quite a few I would gladly disown and dissent from what I taught in them. But I wrote every one, for better or worse, and preached them to thousands of people who came to hear a word from God.
When I finish writing my sermons for the week, it puts me in a somber but peaceful mood. This is not because the work is done. In one sense, it never is. As E. B. White said somewhere, writing is never done but is only due. I have a deadline to meet whether I am happy with the product or not. But I am somber when the last line is written and a final Amen is tacked onto the end because I am mindful that this may be the last sermon I ever write.
Some people never discover their mortality until relatively late in life, perhaps when a parent dies or they have a mid-life health scare. I became acquainted with mine when I was ten years old, and I have lived with it ever since. It has been my closest companion. Not a day goes by that I do not think about my own death. Memento mori is not merely a slogan; it has been, necessarily, my way of life.
For several years I preached without notes of any kind, simply studying the text intensely during the week, planning the general outline of what I wanted to say, and then delivering the message extemporaneously. Several years ago I decided to manuscript almost all of my sermons, and I have maintained that discipline ever since. It requires a much greater level of precision and attention. I do not adhere rigidly to the manuscript in the pulpit; I do not merely read it. But I am disciplined in what I want to say and how I want to say it. My earlier unscripted lessons had a fresh, powerful feel that some of my later messages may lack, but what the later sermons lack in extemporaneity, I hope they make up for in substance, structure, and longevity. One of the reasons I began manuscripting my sermons is that I did not want their content to depend on my delivery. So every week once the manuscript is complete, I think about the fact that if I die before the Lord’s Day, my wife and children will be able to read what I planned to say.
In “A Last Lecture: On Essays and Letters,” James Schall reflects on being invited to present his “last lecture.” He observes: “We would want our ‘last’ lecture to be ‘serious,’ but only in the sense that it pointed to the highest things and to our place within them.” And again: “We naturally suppose that anyone would want, on such an occasion, to leave something lasting, something profound, something altogether serious, though not neglecting the delight of being and the amusement of our lot.” It is not only academic lectures and sermons that ought to be reflected on in this way, but our entire lives. I enjoy running, but I have laid in a hospital bed three times expecting not to be breathing when I left it, so every time I finish I run, I thank God for the opportunity to run one more time. Are conversations with my wife and children any less precious? A sense of our own mortality is essential to gaining “a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).
Death is a certainty, unless the Lord returns first. Being born is terminal. We need to live as 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 do not know it yet. 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).
One day each of us will make our final contribution or enjoy one last act of participation in the areas that have occupied and largely defined our lives. The last lecture, the last sermon, the last run, the last family dinner, the last kiss with your wife, the last conversation with your child. Few of us will know when the last one has arrived. So resolve to make each one count. Thinking of the certainty of our death should not make us sad but joyfully somber. It can make us more contemplative, more productive, more humble, and more grateful people. –JME
