A Good Obituary

September 6, 2020 | Proper 18 | Romans 13:8-14 | The Rev. John Reese

Scott Entsminger was a Cleveland Browns fan who died at the age of 55.  Perhaps the professional football team’s play contributed to Scott’s early demise.  The Browns have had 12 straight losing seasons and haven’t made the playoffs in 18 years.

Well, Scott was such a big Browns fan that the family encouraged everyone attending his funeral to wear clothes supporting the team. But here’s the real kicker – he wanted his pallbearers to be some of the Browns players.  In his final wishes, he wrote that he “Respectfully requests six Cleveland Browns pallbearers so the Browns can let me down one last time.”

Ah, the poor Browns. They even manage to get beat by the deceased!

So, how would you write your own obituary? What would you consider to be your essence? Family? Church? Heritage? The Cleveland Browns?

In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul has instructions on how Christians can lead meaningful lives, ones that lead to inspirational obituaries. He challenges us to act in ways that fulfill the law of God by loving our neighbors as ourselves (v. 10). All of the commandments, from “you shall not commit adultery” to “you shall not covet” can be summed up in the word “love,” according to Paul (v. 9). Love is so important that it is the only debt that Paul permits.

“Owe no one anything,” he insists, “except to love one another” (v. 8).

Our time to love is quickly running out. Paul tells us that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers,” so we better jump on every opportunity to love our neighbors as ourselves (v. 11). “Lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light,” urges Paul. “Live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy” (vv. 12-13).

In other words, live your life so that the preacher won’t have to lie at your funeral.

We are writing our life story with the choices we make each day – choices that will eventually end up in our obituaries, the most important stories of our lives. What you do for yourself invariably dies with you. What you do for others lives on and forms legacies.

Have you noticed that when people die, their eulogies celebrate life very differently from the way we define success in our everyday existence?

No matter how much a person spends his or her life burning the candle at both ends, chasing a toxic definition of success and generally missing out on life, the eulogy is always about the other stuff: what they gave, how they connected, how much they meant to the lives of the real people around them, small kindnesses, lifelong passions and what made them laugh.

So the question is: Why do we spend so much time on what our eulogy is not going to be?

“Love one another,” said the apostle Paul. However you phrase it, that’s the core of the Christian life.

What, then, are you doing today to write your own obituary? Every choice you make is adding a line to the story of your life. Whether you perform “works of darkness” or “put on the armor of light,” you are revealing the core of yourself in ways that will eventually be reported (v. 12). So write your story in the way that you want to be remembered.

Maybe you want your obit to report that you loved your neighbor as yourself (v. 9). To receive this write-up, you don’t have to climb the corporate ladder, achieve impressive political victories, reach a high rank in the military or invent a life-saving technology. You simply have to love.

Not every aspect of our obituary is going to be easy to talk about. Along with loving actions and honorable deeds, there may be drunkenness, debauchery, quarreling and jealousy. Our challenge is not to pretend that we are perfect, but instead to “lay aside the works of darkness” (v. 12). The story of a person who turned his life around is every bit as inspirational as the obituary of a person who never stumbled and fell – maybe even more so.

A little “Living Funeral Therapy” might help us focus.

“Living Funeral Therapy” is when people attend their own funerals to get fresh perspectives on their lives. It is becoming increasingly popular in South Korea. Surrounded by photos of dead celebrities, groups of up to 40 participants choose their funeral garments and the digital background for the photo that will sit on their coffin, before spending 30 minutes in semidarkness, filling out [an obituary] form. They read out their new wills, then lie down in cold wooden coffins. As they close their eyes, an employee places a white chrysanthemum flower in their hands and closes the lid, banging away at the four corners to simulate the coffin being nailed shut.

Some of Korea’s largest companies, including Samsung and Hyundai Motor Company, regularly send their employees to their own funerals – partly as a measure to prevent suicides among the workforce, and partly to motivate employees to live more fulfilling lives. Samsung is especially fond of the therapy and has made it mandatory for many employees to spend time lying in a coffin, vividly imagining their own deaths. The company has even built its own mock-funeral center for convenience.

Lim Su-jeong, who has participated in the session with her mother Ok-ran, realized inside her coffin that she had been neglecting her husband. “I feel like I’ve been reborn,” she says. “I want to call my husband, to tell him ‘thank you,’ and ‘sorry.’”

The greatest challenge for each of us, as we write our own obituary, is to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 14). This means seeing the world through the eyes of Jesus, and trying to be the hands and feet of Jesus. No one does this perfectly, but Henri Nouwen came pretty close.

After Nouwen died of a heart attack in 1996, writer Philip Yancey reflected on his life. Trained as a psychologist and theologian, Nouwen spent his early years teaching at Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard, writing books and traveling widely as a conference speaker.

But then he realized that his own spirituality was being suffocated, and he made a major change. He moved into a home for the seriously disabled, and spent the last 10 years of his life caring for a young man named Adam. Every day, Nouwen spent hours working with Adam – bathing and shaving him, brushing his teeth, combing his hair and helping him as he tried to eat.

You might think that this would be a big sacrifice for Nouwen. Yancey wondered if this was the best use of Nouwen’s time, and asked him if there was someone else who could take over the manual chores. Nouwen informed Yancey that he was not sacrificing anything, insisting that “It is I, not Adam, who gets the main benefit from our friendship.”

The same is true for anyone who is willing to “put on the Lord Jesus” (v. 14). We don’t need to live full-time in a home for the disabled, but we can be the eyes, hands and feet of Jesus in our own home, school, workplace, church and community.

When we do this, we discover that we get benefits from the friendships we develop. Yancey writes that Nouwen “had learned to love Adam, truly to love him. In the process he had learned what it must be like for God to love us – spiritually uncoordinated [and] able to respond with what must seem to God like inarticulate grunts and groans.”

Each of us is writing our own obituary with the choices we make each day. Let’s not leave anything to chance.  Let’s focus on loving our neighbors as ourselves, laying aside the works of darkness and putting on the Lord Jesus. For those choices will create the core of a life worth living, and an obituary worth reading.