Sometimes we have heard a conversation at a party - "... and there was this fellow there who was really alive! Always full of smart comments and clever stories - maybe not your kind of stories! But he was brilliant! So alive!" Some people - including too many Christians - are like "death warmed up". It shouldn't be so, because right at the heart of the Christian message is a discovery about life itself - especially about what we are calling "Man alive!"
"Man alive!", of course, is one of those expressions which some people use to decorate their speech without meaning anything in particular. "Man overboard!" would mean a serious, specific emergency. It would be the call for particular people to take urgent action. "Man alive!" is simply an expression of surprise at something unexpected. From time to time, we could do with something different! Too much of the same and we are bored!
It's said that the attitude of some people is, "If it moves, shoot it! If it stands still, chop it down!" One day I was talking to Dick whose farm was on the gravel road to Rivertree near Liston, in New South Wales. His cattle property bordered Undercliffe Falls, his house across a gully and about a hundred metres from the road. One day he was standing outside the house and heard a rifle shot. Then a second shot that landed a couple of metres in front of him. He screamed at the shooters and shortly heard a utility beating a hasty retreat. "The trouble is," he told me, "these young fellows have too much money for their own good and buy up ammunition. Then, on a free weekend, they drive 'bush' to shoot up some parrots. But they never think where their bullets are going to land. A stray bullet could kill someone - or his cattle!"
In so many ways today, we are surrounded by death. Death is still the great unmentionable subject - even though it is more inevitable than taxes! Whether above or below the tax threshold, all are subject to it!
Perhaps you have heard the story about a fellow who had a vivid dream. In his dream he picked up a newspaper and realised (in a way that is only possible in dreams!) that it was the paper for a week's time. A heavy better, he saw his great opportunity - he turned to the racing pages to find out which horses had won. Excitedly, he grabbed pencil and paper to write the information down. Browsing the rest of the paper, he came across the funeral notices. There he saw his own name...
No, it's a depressing subject. We put off thought about it with statements like, "I think when your number comes up, that's when you'll go!" Yet the media is presently surrounding us with images of death. In recent months we have been over-saturated with pictures of slaughter in Somalia, Bosnia, Israel, Rwanda...
And what sort of a world are we preparing the new generation of children to enter? They play video games with the main aim of shooting to kill and watch videos that should never have been produced in the first place. And then we wonder why violence is on the increase in our society!
We say we want an adult society that should have complete freedom to view and read whatever they wish - that we shouldn't really have censorship at all! But that is not freedom! Our society is beginning to have the smell of death about it! Moral and spiritual anarchy isn't life but death! The desire to fill our minds with moral trash or to bend our minds with legal or illegal drugs is a death wish, whether we recognise it or not!
U.S. General, Omar Bradley, observed that "We are nuclear giants, but ethical infants." He was thinking of the awesome power of nuclear energy and our moral unpreparedness to use it responsibly. But isn't that true of so much of our technology? At a time when the possibilities seem almost unlimited, we are raising a new generation without a sound framework for ethical decisions.
When the meaning for life is removed and prospects for employment after education are still uncertain, is it any wonder that there has been dramatic increase in violent crime involving youth - and in youth suicides? Surrounded by death, it is the ultimate trip!
Of course, we are all human and to humus we will return. This physical life is terminal but physical death is not meant to be a terminus! We all face mortality (even if we don't like to think about it!). The question is whether the hope for immortality has a real basis or is just a fantasy.
Somehow, the society with the greatest potential in history has become a society lost and doomed. At the peak of human ascendancy we are facing the prospect of death, not life.
We have witnessed the emergence of some countries from oppressive Communist regimes. A few years back their freedom seemed remote or impossible. But it has not been without its disillusionment. They have come into a Western society which is decadent, spiritually dead. What has gone wrong?
One of the joys of gardening is observing that plants have a very strong drive to grow. The key task of the gardener is to provide and maintain the proper environment for each plant. When we say that some plants are hard to grow, we really mean that some plants need an environment that we don't fully understand or that is so different from everything else we are growing that we find it difficult to give it the special treatment it needs. But we do know that for all plants, if they don't receive the balance of light and shade, nutrients, water..., they will at least be badly stunted and most probably will die.
Just as surely your plants need light and water and nutrients, so the human person is made for relationship with God. Cut off from God we die! In Romans 6.23 Paul says, "For sin pays its wage - death..." We can look at this in two ways. On the one hand, God is the Judge and sinners deserve eternal death or Hell. On the other, God is the source of our life, and to continue our lives independent and separated from him is to shut ourselves up to death.
In our society we are seeing the accumulated consequence of turning away from God and rejection of the values that he has made essential for our life and well-being. Little wonder that our society has the smell of death about it!
You might think that God would just give us up as a bad job and leave us to face the death we deserve. But God feels pain in the judgement because he continues to love those who have no time for him. "For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not die but have eternal life" (John 3.16). God's desire and plan for us is life, not death.
The gardeners know the feeling. That plant may well still die, but you are going to do all you can to save it. You believe that its true destiny is life, even though a probable consequence of the present fungus disease (following our abnormally high rainfall) may well be death. If it is a valued plant, you may well expend a great deal of effort in a last-ditch stand to set it on a path of health and life and growth!
And that is why Jesus came. His coming was part of God's love, part of God's plan to bring rescue and life to a dying humanity!
Jesus' friend, Lazarus, has died. It is four days before Jesus arrives to be with his friends Mary and Martha.
"If only you had been here, Lord…"
"Your brother will rise to life."
"I know that he will rise to life on the last day."
"I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die!"
Yes, Martha believes that Jesus is "the Messiah, the Son of God, who was to come into the world." But how can that deeply-held conviction relieve the grief of her present loss?
"Lazarus, come out!"
Lazarus would die a second physical death. But there was a life that his friend Jesus had brought him that he would carry into eternity!
That was all bound up with what would shortly happen when jealous and angry people would have Jesus crucified and, on the third day, he would become the true Man Alive!
We laid on him the touch of death, but it couldn't hold him! His death has broken the hold of death on all who reach out to him!
The decadent and dying can know his touch of life!
Man alive! Reach out to Jesus and come alive! Reach out to him to receive his touch of life!
Back to Sermons