Church bulletin for December
For two days Phil Hughes lay in an induced coma after being struck in the head by a cricket ball. Shock turned to disbelief when his life support was turned off. No one expected anything like this during a Sheffield Shield game. It was a tragic end for a talented young cricketer. Today, funerals are often referred to as celebrations; family and friends gather to celebrate the life of the deceased. Interestingly the Bible doesn’t describe death as a celebration. Ecclesiastes 7:2, “Better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men; and the living will take it to heart.”
A funeral is a time of mourning for a number of reasons:
* Death is a curse – every death occurs as a consequence of sin. Death reminds us that we live in a fallen world
* Death is a thief – it robs us of people we love; we cannot replace them with memories.
* Death is final – there is no second chance; death is unpredictable and often comes when it is least expected
The tragedy for so many is not simply that they were taken too soon, but the life they were given they lived without knowing the God who made them. It is futile to live for something like cricket. I enjoy sport a great deal but at the end of the day it is just sport; it doesn’t really mean anything; one team or player does better on the day than the other. How do you celebrate the life of a person who lived for sport, or music, or work, or money, or some other temporal thing? We were created to know God and serve Him, anything less is a waste.
The death of Phil Hughes was terribly sad, like the death of any human being. As John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee”
Christ takes the sting out of death, yet death is still a tragedy and all the more if it was preceded by a life lived outside of Him. We must all go the way of Phil Hughes, the question is, to where will we go?