During the last eight days, millions of people around the world have been caught up in the tragic loss of Diana, Princess of Wales. She was the ultimate celebrity: beauty, wealth, fashion, charm, who out of her own struggles gave her presence and her name to causes for healing and peace; a loving mother. We have witnessed and grieved the senseless loss of one who seemed to prevail against so many difficult circumstances and who came to symbolize hope that the most disastrous circumstances of life could be overcome.
This tragic loss has struck a deeper chord of almost mythic proportions, I believe, because Diana carried within herself the image of a woman hurt and hounded, who was perhaps on the brink of finding happiness and safety.
But one dark night, stalked by photographers, her dreams were shattered in a preventable accident by a driver who police say was drunk, racing three times the posted speed limit. Truly it was tragedy in a tunnel.
Then on Friday we were moved by the death of Mother Teresa at 87, a living legend of mercy for her lifelong work of compassion for those who are the poorest in our world.
But these, as well as other losses, may be seen in the light of hope shining out of the grave of Jesus Christ. This hope does not eliminate the grief and its pain nor our anger at injustice and human stupidity. But it does sustain us with the call to take the next step and the next, guided by a faith perspective born out of the tragic, senseless loss of God's own precious child, Jesus.
First, a reality check: "We find outselves always on the edge of meaninglessness." [1]
One April afternoon in 1988 one of the men in the church I served stopped by my study on his way home from the doctor's office, where he had just been told the results of his most recent tests. He had a malignancy in his pancreas and liver and there was no hope of treating it. He had never stopped by to talk with me and yet, at this moment when he had heard the news about his human mortality which he could not resist or deny, he opened his heart to the presence of God and the word of Christ. He was an aeronautical engineer, at the peak of his career. He lived in a fine home and had wonderful family and friends. He was to have but two months to live.
When he got home and told his wife, she cried out to him, "Why you? Why you?" He was at the point of retirement when they would enjoy all those things they had worked so hard and waited so long to experience. When she asked in her despair, "Why you?" he said with deep wisdom, "Because I am a member of the human race, and this is what happens sometimes when you are human."
The path we walk through life is not a straight path. It winds back and forth through victory and tragedy, laughter and tears, hope and despair, wisdom and stupidity. "We teeter on the brink of nonsense." [2]
One of the network news anchors this week on television tried to put the loss of Princess Diana at the hands of a drunken driver into perspective as he said "One British princess (and her companions) and 17,000 Americans. The last year for which we have statistics reveals there were more than 17,000 persons, mothers and fathers and children who died because of drunken driving just in the United States. When we become aware of that, we want to say, "Where is the rage, where is the outpouring of concern for these people too?"
One woman, as she struggled with her own uncertain future, wrote of the "perilous nature of our existence and the precarious character of all the relationships we prize," adding, "depth to the meaning of every present." When we are aware that the world we live in is so uncertain and so subject to rapid change, "Our sense are attuned to the beauty of this day." [3] We are aware of the love we have for those who are such an important part of our life.
The shortness of life adds to its intensity, beauty, power, and grace. I have shared with you the words from a funeral eulogy at an Eskimo's funeral, which remind us that whatever ends is short, but it is in its shortness and the awareness we have that it IS short which makes life valuable.
Faith's song echos from Jesus' grave. In the midst of the uncertainy, even though we teeter on the brink we hear the strains of truth that, "The worst thing is never the last thing that happens; it is the next to the last thing." [4]
Martin Luther, that giant of Reformation faith, struggled against the Roman Church to live the faith in which he knew he was held in the hands of God, no matter what. He experienced utter despair when he thought he had lost everything--his faith, his work, his church that he so much cared about. And yet, in the midst of those desperate times, as Paul Tillich observed for him, this was not the last word. The last word was the finest commandment, the statement that "GOD IS GOD." It reminded him of the unconditional element in human experience that we will never loos. The one thing that undergirds all things, that encircles all the rest, is the covenant of God. Paul confessed his own faith and awareness that "The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory which is to come." He went on to say, "Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? As it is written, 'For your sake, we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.' No, in all these things we are more conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Rom. 8)
Mother Teresa lived with death every day of her life, as she gave the destitute and the sickest "at least a human death," surrounded by love, scooping them off the street in their last hours of life, caring for those whom "no one else would touch." She gave them her heart of love.
Her biographer asked her one time, "How are you able to do this? How are you able to show such tenderness and such compassion day after day, person after person?" She replied, "Each one, to me, is Jesus in a distressing disguise."
Death is not the last word; love is the power of God that prevails. All that was good in Princess Diana's life and all that was grace in Mother Teresa's life will contine to live in those who have been touched and moved to receive grace, the joy, and the hope that we have experienced in Jesus Christ.