Funerals and Earthquakes

Without wanting to, I've been forced to reckon with the idea of death lately.  Last week, a beloved coworker tragically and suddenly lost her 21 year-old brother in a late night single car accident.  This week, an earthquake erupted for an uncomfortably local visit.

There is nothing that brings you face to face with your powerlessness like the prospect of death.  Our culture professes power over virtually everything else.  But death, no one escapes.  No one in their right mind can pretend to exert power over it.  We have the capability to control so many other things- disease, time, pregnancy, careers, location, colors, styles, tastes, textures, smells.  The list goes on and on.  You name it, we can choose it.  If we can't choose it, we can change it.  But not death. 

The chilling shock of death when we see it, experience it in those we love, and consider it as a probability for ourselves is just as much a shock to our controlling tendencies as it is to our expectations.  It's not just that we didn't see it coming, it's that we didn't choose it and we can't change it.  Our power is not useful here.  Our self reliance is not relevant.  The status quo is not reliable.
  
Because of both a recent tragedy and a narrow escape from it, I am reminded of our powerlessness when faced with the grave.  We don't choose, although Lord knows we would like to.  Believer and atheist, Jew and Gentile,  scientist and philosopher, Muslim and Christian- all confess that we are empty handed and powerless before the grave.  

But what is the response?  For the skeptic, it may be one bad night's rest and a decisive banishment of the thought to a dusty corner of the mind.  For the believer, we are keenly reminded of the singular Hope that appears most certainly in times and places in which we lack.  Death is too large for us to control.  We are powerless before it.  We need someone larger than ourselves. 

So grace it is... it's all we've got.  God so loved the world that He gave... so that we could hope.

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.  Hebrews 2:14-15.