Mom's Eulogy

Yesterday, we had a memorial service for my mother, Nancy Mitchell, who died a week ago Friday, February 11th. Following is the eulogy I gave for her.

In 1980 popular science writer Carl Sagan produced a multipart series broadcast on PBS called "Cosmos." He introduced the series with these words, "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." This, of course, is the premise of the materialist: that human existence is reduced to matter--only that which can be touched, tasted, smelled, seen and heard.


There's a couple of big problems with this idea, though. The first is that no one can really live that way. Even the most primitive cultures understand that life is more than chemistry and meat, that thoughts are more than electrical impulses in a brain. The most cosmopolitan urban sophisticates who profess a distaste for "organized religion" will nevertheless declare themselves "spiritual"--even though they couldn't begin to tell you what they mean by it. So what are they saying? They're saying that they understand, if only on an intuitive level, that we are more than our bodies and our brains.


The second problem with materialism is that it's self destructive--and by that I mean the idea destroys itself. Even the high priests of materialism--the scientist class--never look too closely at its philosophical underpinnings for fear of being crushed by its own cornerstone. So the acrimonious atheist Daniel Dennet may call Darwinism a "universal acid" that dissolves away religion and traditional ethics, but stops before seeing that, as C.S. Lewis wrote, "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true and no reason to suppose my brain composed of atoms." Even Carl Sagan, immediately after assuring us that life is only matter, goes on to say, "Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries." You see what he's doing here? He's using mystical, almost religious language and imagery to give the material universe an illusion of spirituality.


Now, so far I've described two categories of people: 1) people who understand intuitively that there is a spiritual dimension to human life, but don't understand--or for the most part even care to think about what it is, and 2) those who deny that there is a spiritual dimension to human life, but nevertheless act as though there is. But there's a third category: those who know there is a spiritual dimension to human life, and understand its nature. Let me read this story from the Gospel of John, chapter 4:

When Jesus knew that the Pharisees heard He was making and baptizing more disciples than John (though Jesus Himself was not baptizing, but His disciples were), He left Judea and went again to Galilee. He had to travel through Samaria, so He came to a town of Samaria called Sychar near the property that Jacob had given his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, worn out from His journey, sat down at the well. It was about six in the evening. A woman of Samaria came to draw water.

"Give Me a drink," Jesus said to her, for His disciples had gone into town to buy food.

"How is it that You, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?" she asked Him. For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.

Jesus answered, "If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, 'Give Me a drink,' you would ask Him, and He would give you living water."

"Sir," said the woman, "You don't even have a bucket, and the well is deep. So where do you get this 'living water'? You aren't greater than our father Jacob, are you? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and livestock."

Jesus said, "Everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again, ever! In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up within him for eternal life."

"Sir," the woman said to Him, "give me this water so I won't get thirsty and come here to draw water."

"Go call your husband," He told her, "and come back here."

"I don't have a husband," she answered.

"You have correctly said, 'I don't have a husband,' " Jesus said. "For you've had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true."

"Sir," the woman replied, "I see that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, yet you [Jews] say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem."

Jesus told her, "Believe Me, woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."

The woman said to Him, "I know that Messiah is coming" (who is called Christ. "When He comes, He will explain everything to us."

"I am [He]," Jesus told her, "the One speaking to you."

Can you grasp the absolute confidence with which Jesus speaks? He begins by declaring that he can give a "living water" from God that will impart eternal life, an obvious allusion to the eternal attribute of the spirit, then immediately roots his authority to make such a claim in the physical realm by disclosing tangible details about the woman's life that he could have no way of knowing. He continues by affirming the spiritual nature of God and explains that, while the Samaritans may worship on an intuitive level, the Jews worship from knowledge because God revealed His nature and His law to Jews. The written revelation of the law and prophets came through the Jews, and God's plan to redeem and reconcile man came through the Jews in the person of Jesus, which brings us to His most astonishing declaration: "I am He, the One speaking to you."

The Gospels are filled with such jaw-dropping statements by Jesus, which is exactly why C.S. Lewis wrote:

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

So, first of all, we can have confidence in our understanding of the spiritual because Jesus authenticated his words by performing the miraculous. As he said in John 10:38,

even though you do not believe me, believe the miracles, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.

And we have the account of His words and miracles passed on by eyewitnesses, the truth of which the men who wrote them maintained even as they were tortured to death in an effort to make them deny it.

Secondly, the Bible tells us very specific things about the nature of spirit, so when we speak about our spirit, or God being a spirit, or "spiritual" things, we have a clear set of properties and attributes in mind: non-material, invisible, eternal, yet containing the true essence, personality, and constitution of the individual. When Jesus said, "God is spirit," we understand that he is telling us that God is not a physical, material, and finite being but rather eternal, supernatural, and transcendent.

We find in the Bible that the spirit, or the soul if you will--they are Biblically interchangeable terms-- can live without the body, but the body cannot live without the spirit. It's this capacity of our personal essence, our thoughts and memories and experiences, of that which makes us an individual to live on after our body dies which gives us our greatest hope. And by hope I don't mean something like wishing, I mean assurance and the comfort of expectation. I mean a peace born from the absence of fear.

So the Christian has the assurance that our spirits or souls retain our identities. We won't be subsumed into some sort of hive mind or cosmic consciousness as the pantheist believes. We will one day be reunited with our loved ones and we will know them -- as them -- and they will know us -- as us. This is one of the ways in which we share in the likeness of God: that we are distinct personalities. I will see my father again. I will see my brother again. I will see my mother again and we will remember. We will remember the times, when we lived in San Diego just down the street from the zoo and would go almost every week, and all the times we went to Sea World and the Scripts aquarium in La Jolla. We will remember when we would watch all of our favorite TV shows together, "Johnny Quest" "Outer Limits" "The Twilight Zone" and "Star Trek." We will remember when we lived in Phoenix in a motel and had no TV, and so every evening Mom would pop up a big batch of pop corn, and make a pitcher of lemon ice tea and read aloud to me from classic children's books. We will remember all the times we sang duets together in church. We will remember the time, when I was only 15 and had my learner's permit, that I drove all the way across the United States, from California to Florida as I followed Dad pulling the trailer and Mom sat next to me as the adult driver. (I'm sure that must have been illegal.) We will remember those and the thousands of other things that were our shared experiences.

To the materialist death is the worst of horrors. It is oblivion, a clanging iron door shut on existence, an absolute final end to all that you ever were, are, or ever will be. It is terror whose only mitigation is when it serves as a cessation of great pain. But to the Christian death is an end to one kind of life transitioning to another. Rather than a closing door, it is an opening door, as though passing from one room to another.

As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:55
"Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?" And in Philipians 1:21 "For me, to live is Christ, but to die is gain."

But the fact that the soul is immortal is, according to Biblical truth, a two-edged sword for it teaches us that there are two distinct, indeed opposite conditions in which that immortality will be experienced. Jesus himself had a lot to say about this and was very specific about it. The wonderful thing--the beautiful thing--is that Jesus assured us that if we put our trust in Him, if we accept the amazing gift of His redemption that He offers us, we can experience that immortality fulfilling all the desires we were created with for knowledge, beauty, joy, and love--and we will do it bathed in the light and presence of our creator.

I think the specifics of that existence are beyond our capacity to comprehend. But let me say that all the imagery used in the Bible is meant to convey beauty, peace, and contentment. If you had to sum it up in one word it might be: paradise. And so, in the account of the crucifixion in Luke Jesus turned to the thief who defended him from the insults of the other thief and told him, "Today you will be with Me in paradise." That's the promise of Jesus, that's the assurance to the Christian: with God. In paradise. Forever.

My mother understood this well, in fact had a rare empirical knowledge of it. She had become a Christian as a teenager, but as a young woman had, during a surgery, a cardiac arrest and became one of the first to have the now well documented "near death experience" with all its classic hallmarks: traveling through a tunnel, emerging to a bright light, the sense of God and her loved ones waiting for her just beyond a vail of light, until her heart was started again and she was brought back. For her death held no sting, no fear, only a promise.

I want to end with this amazing and uplifting story that Mom's hospice nurse, Karen Jackson, told us the morning of her passing. Two days before she died she had one of her rare lucid moments. Karen told us that Mom's face lit up and she said, "He was here."

"Who was here, your husband?" Karen asked, because Mom often talked about Dad, who has been gone now for 25 years.

"No, God," said Mom. " Is it okay if I go with him?"
Karen said she was very moved and told Mom, "If you're ready, yes, you can go with Him."

And, of course, that's exactly what happened: God came to her, and she left with Him.