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And this year, I cried during my own sermon as I looked in to each face of each of the 40 people sitting in the small Lutheran chapel in Laramie Wyoming while I told them, we are all going to die. God forgive my arrogance. Thank you for reminding me humility.
Words are more than just black ink on a page. Words have meaning and power and I find these words here, even a year later, still have a power over me...
Forgive the formatting, this is similar to what the text looks like when I deliver it and I do not have a version which is paginated in a more normative fashion.
Happy New Year, I hope we all were inscribed for a long, rich and beautiful life.
Yom Kippur Sermon, 5770, Laramie Wyoming:
We are all going to die.
Not just us,
but the people we care for as well.
And, not only will our deaths come,
but they will come on a time table not set by us,
not according to our schedule.
None of us want any of this to be true,
but it is.
We build our lives ignoring these facts.
With great arrogance and flippancy
we do things like plan for the future.
We make commitments we cannot necessarily keep when we say see you tomorrow.
We don't know.
But we insist on making this contract with God
We agree to the following terms:
Everyone in the world
-especially me and those I care for the most-
will die old.
We will die peacefully.
We will die in our sleep outliving the people we should outlive,
having accomplished all that which we wish to accomplish.
This seems to us like a fair death.
We sign on to this contract but this agreement is one-sided.
No one,
no thing
is signing on the other side of the page.
And when this contract is broken,
we get very, very upset.
When someone dies young,
suddenly, or painfully, we claim
"this is not fair! This is not right"
But no one other than us agreed to these terms.
Since there is no contract-
no rules have been broken
we alone feel this is “unfair”
Our Yom Kippur liturgy
is designed to remind us
of the end of our lives.
We recite the same psalms and
say the same penitential
and confessional prayers today
which are said at the deathbed.
We do much to feel like we are approaching death.
We abstain from eating and drinking.
We abstain from physical intimacy
Many do not adorn themselves in any manner,
do not bathe or brush their teeth.
We treat our bodies as if they do not exist.
By the end of the day today,
we will feel a bit closer to death.
Some will choose to not wear leather and
to wear only white.
Some wear white, cotton robes called kittels.
These are worn in traditional Judaism at Yom Kippur, one's wedding, and in one's burial.
We do all of this to practice for the day
when we do stand in judgment before God,
for the day that will inevitably come,
when we die.
We are forcing ourselves to ask,
how have I lived my days thus far?
Have I really lived at all?
We are about to read from parashat Nitzavim
found in Deuteronomy.
This text occurs at the end of Moses' life.
He is giving the Israelites their final charge
before entering Israel to conquer it.
The people are re-committing to the covenant with God,
not just for those who were there but for those not there as well, meaning for us too.
The portion has a simple message;
you will sin and make mistakes
(we are people, this is what we do)
but we can always return to God,
we can always tshuv, turn, change or repent
The portion closes with the following lines:
יט הַעִדֹתִי בָכֶם הַיּוֹם, אֶת-הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת-הָאָרֶץ--הַחַיִּים וְהַמָּוֶת נָתַתִּי לְפָנֶיךָ, הַבְּרָכָה וְהַקְּלָלָה; וּבָחַרְתָּ, בַּחַיִּים--לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה, אַתָּה וְזַרְעֶךָ.
I bring to bear witness of all of you this day, the heavens and the earth. The life and the death I give before each of you, the blessing and the curse. Each of you, choose life so that you may live, each of you and your descendents.
But how can we choose life?
Death is inevitable.
Opting out is not an option so
what on earth does this mean?
Recently, I seved as a chaplain in training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC working with the pain and palliative care unit. I spent a large amount of time this summer with dying people and their families. One morning, I went to work and went straight to see Andy, a twenty-seven year young man and his huge extended family. Cancer brought him from good health to his last day in three short months. By the time I arrived, he had already died. I spoke with his mother who just looked at me and said, but he was so young?!? It is so unfair.
I could tell you many stories of the unfairness I encountered there, but I don't need to bring stories from New York. You know the unfairness of death right here in your own community. Lori Schneider, Deborah Wasser, and others who all died too young, too soon.
When my father's Dad passed away about three and a half years ago at the age of 85, he said he felt his father's death was sad, but fair. I wondered, what makes a death fair? His response was that death is fair if you have done all you want to do. “Death is never fair,” I replied “because there is always more we want to do-including just live another day.” My dad then revised his thought. “I think it was fair,” he explained, “because my father had said all he had needed to say.”
I think there is more fairness when that happens. The fairness is not about doing all you wanted to do because that is impossible but perhaps, death is more fair when someone dies knowing they have said all of their I’m sorries and their I love yous.
Have you said all of yours?
But I think fairness in death
is not only about having done enough
or said enough.
It is more than that...
One of the chaplains at Sloan Kettering, Jane,
said to me,
you know,
the greatest lesson I take from this place
is the constant reminder to live-
the reminder to live my life
the way I want to have lived it when I die.
Repeat this...
I think this is what today's Torah reading is about,
why we read this today on Yom Kippur
In our Torah text, God says,
“This life and this death I give before each of you, the blessing and the curse. Each of you, choose life so that you will live, each of you and all your descendents.”
God is not setting before us a choice of bodily living or dying. That is not up to us.
The choice is in the kind of life we will live.
The text makes an analogy-
life is a blessing and death is a curse.
This cannot be referring to actual life and death
since we know of lives that do not feel like blessings,
deaths which are not curses.
But there exists this tension between life and death,
blessing and curse.
We cannot pretend death away.
By ignoring that there is an end to our existence,
we could put off until a rainy day the person we should be now.
But,
if all we did was constantly face the reality of the limits of life,
our deaths could consume us
and would rob us of the essence of living.
The choice here is in how we walk this balance.
In our text, we read the words,לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה
so that you will live.
This could also be translated as,
for the sake of being or in order that you will be.
I feel the text is telling us-
being is living and
choosing it a blessing,
living means choosing a life as the person you can be;
as your best possible self.
Death means choosing anything else:
Complacency, laziness, and plain old stubborn refusal to change
causes a kind of death
and brings with it
the curse of living a life unfilled
seen most clearly in the death which feels so unfair.
I never got to be the person I wanted to be,
I never truly got to live.
In my conversation with my father,
he added the following:
He still feels sad that his dad is gone,
he still misses him.
We all do.
He told me,
“There is more I would like to have done with him
but that is the lesson that I have had to learn and to live with.
I could have done more to be the son I truly wanted to be.
And I still can.”
We the living can bring fairness to death.
When we let death remind us to live,
to truly live,
to be and become the people we know we can
and want to be,
then,
THEN death is fair.
Two words show up over and over
in this morning’s Torah reading:
Shav and hayom.
Change and Today.
The repetition of shav,
turn, change
reminds us again and again,
we can always change.
Just because I WAS one way yesterday
does not mean that I have to be that same way
tomorrow.
And hayom,
today
Today,
meaning these words
were not not just said to the Israelite people then,
but they were said to us TODAY
as we prepare to enter the New Year.
Today is the day,
now is the time.
Tshuv hayom,
Change TODAY
At the end of the day,
we will stand before God and
seek out God's forgiveness
for our sins.
We will open the ark,
this plain pine box
reminiscent of a coffin.
It causes us to remember,
death is coming and
we do not know when,
where, how or even why.
Staring into that openness,
that abyss,
we are reminded of the unknown of what lies beyond.
That vastness asks us,
When you look back on your life,
how do you want to see it?
Who do you want to have been?
Who do you want to be that you are not yet being?
Shav, shav, shav
it repeats-turn turn turn-
change now, right now,
Today BE the person you want to be
before the gates close.
The life and the death I give before each of you today,
the blessing and the curse.
Each of you,
choose life so that you may live,
each of you and your descendents.
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