On the Tragic Death of Friends

[Joe and Beverly were decades-long mentors and friends. The following is the homily I shared at their memorial service.]

The book of Genesis records the origins of humanity’s deepest longings and most vexing and enduring challenges.

“Abraham lived a hundred and seventy-five years. Then he breathed his last and died at a good old age, an old man and full of years; and he was gathered to his people. He was buried by his sons Isaac and Ishmael.”

This passage from Genesis 25 depicts how we all hope to die—having lived to the fullest, being surrounded by those we love, reuniting with our closest of kin who have gone before us in death and passing on an inheritance to the next generation. 

But many times in life, we’re robbed of this kind of happy ending. 

If we go further back in the story, our human forebearers, Adam and Eve, after their rebellion in the garden had two sons: Cain and Abel. The sickness of sin Cain received from his parents overtook his heart and he polluted God’s creation with physical violence, killing his brother.

The Lord asked Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” and he responded, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” A chilling abdication of personal responsibility.

Since the insurrection in the Garden, humanity has longed for eternal life—or at the least, for a happy ending to our individual stories—but it been frustrated by the consequences of our sin. One songwriter said: “The fall, the fall, oh God, the fall of man. The fruit is found in every eye and every hand.” And another famous wrote: “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.”

While we were created in the image of God, as a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion, the glory of our imagebearing identity has been thwarted and perverted. Our hearts, designed to incubate what is good and pure, become seedbeds for our own destruction. 

Through Moses, God gave the Law, meant to restrain human sinfulness; but it served only to heighten and highlight it! The Lord said: “Have no other gods before me; do not make for yourself an idol; do not covet; do not murder.” But humans could not will themselves into compliance. The Law only revealed the waywardness of the human heart. 

And so God said to his people through the prophet Ezekiel: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees.”

This undergirds the brilliance and the logic of Jesus in his teaching on the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’  But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.” 

All of us who knew Joe and Beverly are desperately searching for an explanation about why they died that makes sense. How someone so close to them could do something like this?

It’s a similar reckoning we go through when leaders we respect have moral failures or friends and family let us down. We wonder, how could this happen? How could they do this? This is not the person that I knew!

But in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reverse-engineers our most shameful and destructive acts; and traces their origins back to seed form in one’s heart. 

One does not commit adultery at the drop of a hat: According to Jesus, a seed of discontent and lust is given oxygen and sunlight in one’s heart through regular attention; that seed sprouts and matures; we entertain unlovely thoughts and grow increasingly comfortable with dangerous behavior and in time, what seemed unthinkable, impossible, beneath our dignity and utterly “not us,” becomes our dreaded and shameful reality. In those moments, we ask ourselves: “What have I done?”

It’s the principle of drift. You get in the ocean at one spot and, without constant vigilance, are quietly tugged by the unseen undercurrents of the sea and end up far from home. 

And while none of us can be blamed for our shock and outrage and heartbreak over how our friends died, we would be wise in these moments to look within and ask ourselves the difficult question:

What seed of sin currently exists within me, that if given time and attention, could sprout and mature into something destructive?

Would not the path of wisdom for each of us, in response to the events of the last two weeks, be to beat our breast and say, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” 

To pray with the Psalmist: 

            “Search me, oh God, and know my heart;
            test me and know my anxious thoughts.
                  See if there is any offensive way in me,
             and lead me in the way everlasting” (Ps. 139).

Each one of us has a secret inner life. There are thoughts and ruminations under the floorboards of our hearts that we’d prefer to never see daylight. But they are there. 

But for the grace of God, our own destructive tendencies have largely (or at least partially) been contained. They’ve not yet made headlines news and their ripples have not yet reached the outer limits of our relational networks.

The invitation and the joyful opportunity for each of us is that through the gracious love of God, we can be made new. Not only forgiven for our most shameful actions and thought patterns; but actually changed by the work of the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ. 

1 John 1:9 – “If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” 

This applies to all of us. No one is too far off. No one has done too much. No one is a lost cause. 

“But God demonstrates his love for us in this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:9).

Through Jesus Christ, God addresses the reality of sin (which leads to death) within the human hearts. And he can do that in you. If we confess our sin, God is faithful and just to forgive and to purify us…

But the work of Jesus Christ is not and will not be limited to only an inner experience of the heart. In the fullness of time, Jesus will return as he promised to undo the destructiveness of our sin and defeat the Deceiver and Enemy of our hearts, and defy and undo his greatest weapon, Death. 

In the end, Jesus, who was victorious over the grave will prove victorious forever and will wipe away every tear from our eyes, lovingly call his dead back to life and he will reign over us and with us forever. 

And so in view of our present and future hope in Christ, we do not give into despair when our brothers and sisters die, even tragically. We grieve and we mourn and we lament, but not as people who are without hope. 

Because we know that those who sleep in Christ—our dear brother Joe and our dear sister Beverly—have now joined the great communion of saints around the throne. And when the trumpet sounds, and Christ returns and the dead in Christ will rise, we know that we will be reunited forever in a redeemed, restored, renewed heaven and earth.

Until that day, we heed the words of the author of Hebrews: 

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” 

—

JFO