Your only certain future. . .

Though the future seems more uncertain today than it ever has, it has always been uncertain.  Whether you were a child of the 1950s hiding under your school desk as protection from nuclear attack or a fidgeting in line for a job interview, what we knew well was that we did not know the future.  But that was only partly true.  We do know the future.  The only future we need to know, we already know only too well.  The only certain future is that you will die.  You do not know where or when or how but everyone knows that those born will die.  They always have and always will.

What is curious, however, is that this certain future does not seem to be all that consequential today.  Though we know we will all die, death itself is certain, the fact that we will die seems rather distant from the concerns of many, perhaps even most folks.  That is except during the Covid.  Covid brought death closer than it has been for a very long time.  Too close for most of us.  But the awareness of our mortality seems to be fading again in the pursuit of a return to an old normal in which death is not quite the major factor it once was.

We are regularly reminded of death, albeit in subtle ways.  The call to prepare for retirement is an admission of life coming to an end, the offers of estate planners remind us that we will have to surrender our goods to others, the planning for bucket lists is itself a tacit warning that life will end.  The reality, however, is that most of modern life is so fixated on the present moment that we do not give all that much attention to dying.  We are too busy squeezing as much out of this life as we possibly can.

How odd it is, then, that the only faith which speaks with certainty of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting fails to speak this message with clarity or conviction and the appeal of this message is more narrow than it ever was?  Are we so enamored with the potential of technology that solves all our problems that we no longer consider the need for God?  Are we so content with the present moment that we find death less of an enemy than a compassionate friend who spares us the part of our lives we don't want to live?  Go to any funeral today -- whether Christian or not -- and listen to the focus on the life well lived with nary a mention of another life at least its equal if not its superior.  The churches do not seem to preach it because it does not seem to fit with what people want or expect.  Yet death is our common and only future -- young, old, gay, straight, trans, homeless, landed gentry, politician, businessman and every other label on us and our lives.

Christianity ought to be flourishing because it has the only answer to death and that answer lies not in an imagined life or a virtual one but a real one in which all that afflicts this mortal life ends and all the joys that we know only in part are full.  Read 1 Corinthians 15.  Could it be that we are content to eat, drink, and be merry, and die tomorrow?  How sad that God has the more we could never even imagine and we are ready to settle for the less that we know now.  Think about that for a while...