The Last Word

Today I meandered around on ground full of roots.  It was not the kind of roots that tugged at your feet as you walked, but the kind that tugged at your heart and memory.  The first time I went to the sacred ground of that church cemetery was in 1955 when my father was buried in that place.  I was seven then and now seventy plus five.  It is not a big graveyard out there in the middle of nowhere next to what was until a few years ago a Methodist Church, but it is where the tombstones speak the different names that are a part of who I am and that I carried with me as I walked among that place of family roots.   

While it is not possible, every church should have a graveyard next to it.  Those chiseled worn by the weather tombstones give some perspectve to the message preached inside the sanctuary about the power of the resurrection and create a spirit of vigor as the hymns about the risen Lord are sung.  It is good to walk from the sanctuary to the graveyard for one announces our mortality while the other boldly proclaims that though we die, yet shall we live.   We need the message of both in these days.  

Our society is bent toward a message which directs us toward the non-existent fountain of youth and the finality of death is obscured by messaging that uses every word except the one about us returning to the dust from which we have come.  The gospel of the cross and the empty tomb loudly proclaim that death does not have the last word.   As the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church, death has no victory, death has no sting!  (I Corinthians 15:55)  It is not death which has the last word, but the resurrected Jesus Christ.  Thanks be to God!