The Corinthian church needed the reminder of the power of God. So do we.
In this Close Reading series, biblical scholars reflect on a passage in their area of expertise that has been formational in their own discipleship and continues to speak to them today.
There’s a Latin phrase that has become a part of the Book of Common Prayer: “Media vita in morte sumus.” In the midst of life we are in death.
As I age, one of the unexpected new realities in my life is the increasing amount of those “bad news” phone calls or emails that begin with “I am sad to say…” And as I age, more and more funerals occupy formerly empty spaces on my calendar. This should not come as a surprise. We are all aging. And aging, always, without exception, leads to death—morte sumus.
I have been consciously running from this reality. Or perhaps I have been subconsciously running from it by making myself overly busy in thinking, reading, speaking, writing, caring for family, and so on. Perhaps as an example of the lies we tell ourselves in order to keep moving, I have been the most optimistic man in the world, telling myself that death does not apply to me—or at least living as if it did not.
Of course, death has not been a stranger in my small circle. I have had whiffs, even if briefly, of that horrible thing. Its odor is so peculiar that you never forget it. When I was a teenager, a dear friend committed suicide with her father’s shotgun, only to be found later by her brother. It was at her funeral, under the unrelenting sun of a Caribbean island, that I first sensed—or felt—the smell of death. The evil and the power of it stopped me in my tracks.
A few years later, one of my closest cousins—a brother, really—overdosed on morphine and was …
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