Chaplain's Corner

It is 6:15 on a Tuesday evening and in 45 minutes I will be leading a group of people as they remember a young woman who passed away as a result of cancer. In some ways it will be a unique service, in other way quite ordinary. One has to become comfortable with death in the line of work that I do. Comfortable with its unpredictability for there are always those tragic deaths that come as a result of motor vehicle accidents, work place accidents, drowning and the like. In other ways death is very predictable. People dying of cancer or congestive heart failure or other diseases often follow a fairly predictable trajectory as death approaches. The length varies, the attempts to arrest the disease process varies, but in the end, many deaths look pretty much the same.

Just before I started writing I spent some time pondering what I would say at the funeral. The text, perhaps the most common funeral text of all – Psalm 23, is one I have used many times. But surprisingly, every meditation is quite different and this evening I think I will be asking those gathered to ponder the meaning of the first sentence, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” This sentence has been my companion for several years, at times during the past few years I have been reminded many times a day that if the Lord truly is my shepherd, whatever he brings into my life should be accepted with gratitude, because I completely trust him with my entire journey from here to “the house of the Lord”.

What does it mean “I shall not want”? I think it is best taken at face value. I think this is pretty much how we need to take all of God’s Word. “I shall not want” means that I am satisfied with what the Lord brings into my life, but more than that, I am satisfied with the Lord: satisfied with the provider as well as the provision. Easily said, but in a culture like ours in which “wanting” drives our economics and politics it is very difficult not to get sucked into the vortex of a “never satisfied society”.

This is also true in the human rights environment that we live in. Rights are all about how I want to be treated, how I deserve to be treated, how you have a legal obligation to treat me. A far cry from the ethics Jesus taught and lived out perfectly, the ethic that says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Meekness is a character trait that endures abuses without seeking retaliation. In our culture meekness is weakness. It is thought to be a character flaw, but that shouldn’t surprise us, Jesus’ teachings turn everything on their ear.

If Jesus would have insisted on his “rights” the gospel account would have been very different and the Gospel itself would not exist. The entire saving plan of God hinged on a perfectly innocent, spotless, blameless, sinless man laying down his life, his rights, for the benefit of others. Freeing ourselves from the need to have our rights is a significant step in finding the Lord to be enough and finding our way into a place where we are not driven by wanting: material, emotional and spiritual. This wanting often becomes covetousness which is idolatry: a state in which we place our faith in some object, some feeling, and some situation as the source of what we need.

How did I get from death to covetousness? Well, in order to be free of the wanting that controls our lives, we need to experience a spiritual death, a death to “self” with all its drives and demands and its insatiable passions and find God, the Lord to be everything we want.