I love our communion anthem today. The words teach us what love is, insomuch as words can. Edith Williams, the author of the poem, was a former missionary who earned the Croix de Guerre and the rare Czarist Cross of St. George for her nursing services in France and Russia in the First World War.

She was self-taught, which impresses me greatly. Her father could not afford to send her to school, and she began writing poetry at age six! Her depth of spiritual understanding and love is reflected in her poetry. She was also a gifted artist, painting landscapes of rural Russia. In 1902, she emigrated to South Africa and served as a missionary for the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel. Becoming fluent in Sesotho and other African languages, she conducted services there and gave sermons, cycling wherever she went.

At the outbreak of the First World War, she volunteered for service in France where she oversaw a casualty-clearing station on the Western Front. How interesting. Here was a woman faced with the horrors of war, and she writes this in today’s anthem, “teach me how glorious death is to be.”

Solomon also picked up on this wisdom – “For love is strong as death.” Death teaches us. How? I haven’t known anyone personally who has experienced it firsthand. In his book Life after Life, Dr. Raymond Moody interviews hundreds of people who have been through a near death experience. (I highly recommend it!) By all clinical definitions, these people were dead – some as long as 20 minutes or more with no pulse. The medical profession can’t quite pin down a solid definition of death, and it has changed over time.  

If the brain shuts down, is that death? If the heart and lungs stop, is that death? How far into the process of the body shutting down can one decidedly proclaim death? Lazarus was dead for four days! The definition of clinical death keeps changing, and there is widespread interpretation. I thought dead was dead. Apparently, I am dead wrong!

Edith Williams intuited the gloriousness of death, even though she witnessed the horrific nightmare of war and killing. Everyone in Dr. Moody’s book sang the virtues of death too, recounting how beautiful and peaceful it is. Returning made them reconsider living. We cannot agree what constitutes death, what do we know about living? “That I should see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living!” (Today’s Psalm)

Our anthem’s composer this morning has set these words perfectly with simple, enchanting music. Lowly, lonely, and broken. That’s how each verse begins. That’s how we live, currently. Then the last verse, mighty and free. Does that mean that this life is a means to an end? No. It means you have a chance to die now. Die to fear, to worry, and to meddling in the future, a concept. There is a kind of death, the death of the conceptual world, and a kind of new life, one which openly accepts reality as it is, as it always has been, and as it always will be. Call it a midlife crisis, but my conceptual world has died. And birth into the real world, now, is resurrection. If you can welcome death, why fear? Once you figure out that living is gloriously free, you’ll wonder why the grim reaper used to scare you to death. It was just a little shake down to help you remember who you are, the incarnation of love unconditioned. Now that’s glorious. Soli Deo Gloria!