Luther on Dying

1st Corinthians 15:16-17
For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.

Martin Luther wrote, "it has been widely said that he who fears death is a fool, for by doing this he loses life." This would be a great saying, if anyone could live by it. Everyone knows that people don't get anywhere by fearing death, they only ruin their lives and are never happy. We see this all the time in people who are in a deep sadness, anticipating death and not much else in life. They can't be comforted or feel joyful even if you wrapped them in golden robes, filled them with the best food and drink, and offered them all kinds of entertainment, even music on the string instruments! They can't feel alive because they walk around with morbid thoughts about death all the time, so they are practically dead already! People tell us that the best thing to do is to throw off this fear, force out of our minds, say to ourselves why worry, after all when we're dead we're dead! As Paul wrote in I Corinthians , "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die! (15:32) But this is a shortcut because it pretends that God's anger, hell and damnation don't exist. Christians cannot do that. We can't just toss the baby out with the bathwater, we can't just toss reality out of our hearts because we want to believe nothing bad will ever happen to us. In fact if they were to do this, most Christians would feel more fear as their faith would struggle to grow. So we comfort them by saying, friend, if you are continually distressed by life, if you feel poor and miserable, then take care of where you stand for some of these things are happening BECAUSE you are a Christian! If you were not a Christian, you wouldn't care about God's anger or hell! But guard yourself against fear, and always hold on to the fact that Christ is risen from the dead for your sake!"

Living in the 21st century it is difficult for us to imagine where Luther was coming from. When you stop to consider that the average lifespan during the time of Martin Luther was about 50, that many children and women who bore children died in childbirth, that Luther himself who was never married before he was a middle-aged man, lost one daughter to death whom he grieved his entire life, it goes without saying that we do not think of death in the same way as Luther did. People living during Luther's Day lived in constant fear of death. If disease, accidental death, poverty and starvation were not enough, there was the plague, wars and rumors of wars, brigands on the highway, in short a thousand ways to die we do not consider! Luther was pointing out what Jesus believed, that every moment between now and the time our lives came to an end are designed to be lived joyfully. Abundant Life is the calling of every child of God. In particular those who are baptized into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, must joyfully live every moment of life , because we know death is not the end! Luther and Jesus' advice to the Christian was the same, it's not about "eating and drinking for tomorrow we may die" - it's about living life joyfully because tomorrow we will die, and in death pass beyond the sorrows and cares of this world into the joys of everlasting life with Christ in the next. Living life like that makes the world a better place here and now. It opens us up to the good things around us. Jesus died on a cross to be sure, you he died for us that we would know of a certainty there was nothing to fear, because he rose three days later! Christians are baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus! It would do us well in this world, to not focus too much on the day-to-day "eat, to drink and be merry lest you die" or the "oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I'm going to die some day" kind of thinking, but rather to look at every moment of life as the opportunity God's baptized children, to joyfully live our lives as a witness that our God has overcome every bad thing we could possibly imagine, even and especially death!