On Friday I will perform a funeral for a 23 week old in utero baby and the thought that keeps running through my mind is that “death spoils everything.” Death spoils the hopes and dreams, innocence and trust of families and communities, and it produces grief and misery, loss and separation. There is nothing good about death, nor is there anything “natural” about death, not in the world that God created. It is a part of this world but it is in this world as an unwelcome visitor…an alien. What is most troubling to me is that death was “welcomed” into our world because of sin, most notably Adam and Eve’s sin. It came as a consequence of rebelling against God’s life-fulfilling instruction of not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Death could have and should have had the last word for God’s greatest creation, but by his good pleasure, he did not let death have the last word. He let his Son have the last Word, which began on the cross with his words, “It is finished,” and ended with the angel’s words, “He is risen.” Sin and death are defeated, though present, enemies and our sure hope as followers of Christ is that the resurrection of Jesus will be our resurrection and we will have glorified bodies that will not be subject to death or disease, sin or temptation. All of the sad things and sad stories of this world will become untrue and unwritten.

Death spoils everything…for now.