America is now a culture of death. We are as upside down and sideways as ever, when it comes to the respect for life. The same is true when it comes to any sense of virtue or morality: James Comey (the now disgraced/fired head of the FBI), who is clearly a man of questionable moral character, accuses the current president (also a man of questionable moral character) of being unfit for the job, all the while being in a slobbering love affair with a woman of questionable moral character who once ran for the same job. The complete loss of virtue and morality in this nation (and the world) has led to this culture of death. We are infatuated with everything wrong, bad, and just plain evil, which would include death, no matter how one wants to approach the topic.
While not specifically American, we see the world following suit in this recent report on a fashion show in which the models carried replicas of their own severed heads down the runway. I don't even know where to begin on just how sick and twisted that is. We glorify and glamorize death at every turn (often couched in the language of individual choice), and then have the audacity to react in horror at the latest school shooting or mass murder. The gory-er and sicker a movie or TV show is, the more it is viewed, it would seem. We portray death as grotesquely and vividly as possible at every turn, and then wonder why people solve their problems by killing those with whom they disagree.
It was not always this way, either here at home or abroad. Yes, I know there has always been sin, evil, and death (murder) in our world. But yet the cultures of the world didn't always glamorize these things the way we do today. Life was a cherished possession. Death was seen as that which was the natural outcome of life. It was neither glamorized nor feared. For a long time, it seemed that much of the civilized world took Luther's Small Catechism seriously: "We should fear and love God so that we may not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and befriend him in every need and danger of life and body." Death was also seen as the gateway to eternal life, with implicit trust in the salvation through Christ in the Christianized world. Or as the late Rev. Dr. Billy Graham is rumored to have said, "Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God."
Theologically, no one has the right to rob another of their life. Remember the 5th commandment? (Or 6th if you are a Roman Catholic...) It's all a part of that lost virtue and morality that is so absent from many corners of our society today. Yet because of evil in our world, murder happens all the time. Sometimes we are left only with the option of "kill or be killed," as in the case of warfare. This speaks to the depravity of the human condition (and the need for the messiah, to point us toward our current church season of Easter). But we have so mainstreamed death, and especially the robbing of another's right to life, that we glamorize it as entertainment, and react in horror to it when it happens a little too close to home.
It is, however, one of the few real certainties of life. Everything dies. Everyone dies. We chronicled a number of "ordinary" saints throughout Lent this past Lenten season, and in a good many cases, they were robbed of their life as they were martyred for their beliefs. One of the more gruesome accounts was that of Saints Perpetua and Felicity: two women who were recent converts to Christianity in a time when it was illegal, and were executed in most brutal fashion, in 203 AD. Legend has it that Perpetua's final executioner was so moved by her resolve to die, rather than renounce her faith, that his hand trembled and he missed in his first attempt at piercing her through. This led to her guiding his sword to her neck, enabling him to finish the job he'd been called to do: to rob her of her life, all because she was Christian.
It was not the brutality of their death, but it was the hope that they maintained leading up to it. We could also look to the more recent example of the Coptic martyrs, who while their own heads were being severed from their bodies, were praying that Jesus receive them into the kingdom of heaven: expressing implicit trust in salvation through Christ alone. It is remarkable that the 21st martyr was a man who was only Christian upon seeing the resolve of the others' faith, NOT in calling for death to their enemies, but in practicing the morality and virtue of the Christian faith that is so lacking in the world today. There is no glory in death, outside of a hope in something beyond death. This means that there is no glory in death outside of Christ, who smashes death on our behalf.
Yes, death is rather unglorious. There is nothing that should attract us to it, nor should we celebrate or glamorize it. We should see it for what it is: an end to this life on earth. And if we have any desire to make it glorious at all, it can only come through a hope in something that lies beyond death: that thing we call "heaven." And heaven is not obtained by the individual in the murder of those with whom they disagree. Heaven comes only through the one who differs from all others, in dying an undeserved and especially unglorious death, all for the sake of others, and then destroying death's hold by rising from it. If you want to know which religion is the only one in which God does something about death for us, it is the religion that expresses faith in Jesus the Christ.
Don't glamorize death. Don't seek it either for yourself or for others. Don't become numb to it through a loss of any sense of morality or virtue in your own life. But above all, don't celebrate it as entertainment and then react in horror when it becomes real. And if you really want to find something glorious in death, look to the glory of the risen Christ.
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