When you lay me down to die . . . just remember this: when you lay me down to die,
you lay me down to live.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”As I mentioned in my previous post, Sara and the girls and I went up to hear Andrew Peterson last night, which was a very great lift to our spirits. Before kicking into the songs from his new album, he opened with this one to set the theme. It reminded me of a time a couple years ago where I seemed to be surrounded by death. That was the time when Louie Heckert, one of the patriarchs of our little congregation and also one of the sweetest spirits I’ve ever met in a human being, was attacked and killed by a rogue bull moose; if you didn’t hear that story at the time, click the links—and even if you did, click on his name anyway, because if you didn’t know Louie, that was your loss. Around the same time, one of our long-time part-time folks died out in Missouri, as did two other long-time residents of Grand County for whom our church had been praying.To top it all off, my grandpa died at the same time, and his funeral ended up being the same time as Louie’s. As I was conducting Louie’s funeral, an old family friend was leading Grampa’s; and I could not break down, for Grampa or for Louie or for anyone else, because there were things that needed to be done. That, I think, is the hardest thing about doing a funeral, and the better you knew and loved the person who died, the harder it is: in order to honor Louie properly, in order to create the necessary space for everyone else to deal with their feelings of grief and loss, I had to keep strict control on my own. That’s just how it works. It doesn’t mean that the grief goes away, just that you don’t get to do anything with it.Nobody tells you when you get born here how much you’ll come to love it and how you’ll never belong here.—Rich Mullins, “Land of My Sojourn”As hard a time as that was, the good thing was that it all happened just before Easter, meaning that we were able to respond to all these deaths with the celebration of the Resurrection, because that is God’s answer to death; as one hymn we sang that Easter morning declares, “Christ is risen, we are risen!” because in his resurrection, “Death at last has met defeat.” That is the anchor of our faith, and it’s an anchor we particularly need when the death of someone we love dearly rocks our world. It’s not just because we want the assurance that we will see them again or because we want to believe that they are in a better place, either, though both those things are part of the equation. At a deeper level, encounters with death remind us that no matter how hard we try, we really can’t make our home in this world, because we can never fully belong here; we are temporary, and the world goes on.God is at home. We are in the far country.—Meister EckhardtWhat we tend to forget, though, is that the world’s perspective on death is something of an optical illusion; in truth, it’s this world which is temporary. It wasn’t meant to be that way—it’s the result of human sin—but we live in a world which is going to be replaced. The reason we cannot be fully at home here is because this is not the home for which we were made; we were made to live with God, and we live in a world that has rejected him. Our sin, our insistence on our own way, has opened a chasm between us and God—and the tragedy is that as a result, we have created a world for ourselves that we can’t live in, a world which can never be our home. As the German mystic Meister Eckhardt understood, we have made ourselves exiles in the far country, for no matter how hard we try, our only true home is still with God.I believe in the holy shores of uncreated light; I believe there’s power in the blood.
And all the death that ever was, if you set it next to life, I believe it would barely fill a cup.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”Another of the small graces of that difficult month was the release of Peterson’s album The Far Country, from which this song comes. The album’s title was of course taken from the Meister Eckhardt quotation above, and the album is primarily a meditation on death and Heaven. As I listened to the album, and in particular to the song “Lay Me Down,” I was blessed by the strong affirmation of our resurrection hope from a non-standard perspective. The problem, really, isn’t that we die; the problem is that we aren’t at home, we’re exiles in the far country. In this far country, we die, and those we love die, and it brings us great pain; but God is still at home, and he is here as well in this far country with us, and he sent his son Jesus to make a way, to be the way, for us to get across the gap, to go home to be with him. That’s why we affirm that death has been defeated, that it has lost its sting, because by his death and resurrection Jesus has transformed it; it’s no longer the final curtain in this far country, but the door that opens onto the road back home.I’ll open up my eyes on the skies I’ve never known, in the place where I belong,
and I’ll realize his love is just another word for Home.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.—Philippians 1:21
