I preached this sermon, on Eutychus and death, I think, on November 18th. I don’t believe there is audio, but if I find some, I will add it. Text is below.
After the uproar had ceased, Paul sent for the disciples; and after encouraging them and saying farewell, he left for Macedonia. When he had gone through those regions and had given the believers much encouragement, he came to Greece, where he stayed for three months. He was about to set sail for Syria when a plot was made against him by the Jews, and so he decided to return through Macedonia. He was accompanied by Sopater son of Pyrrhus from Beroea, by Aristarchus and Secundus from Thessalonica, by Gaius from Derbe, and by Timothy, as well as by Tychicus and Trophimus from Asia. They went ahead and were waiting for us in Troas; but we sailed from Philippi after the days of Unleavened Bread, and in five days we joined them in Troas, where we stayed for seven days.
On the first day of the week, when we met to break bread, Paul was holding a discussion with them; since he intended to leave the next day, he continued speaking until midnight. There were many lamps in the room upstairs where we were meeting. A young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, began to sink off into a deep sleep while Paul talked still longer. Overcome by sleep, he fell to the ground three floors below and was picked up dead. But Paul went down, and bending over him took him in his arms, and said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” Then Paul went upstairs, and after he had broken bread and eaten, he continued to converse with them until dawn; then he left. Meanwhile they had taken the boy away alive and were not a little comforted. (Acts 20:1–12)
The other night, my wife and I went to see a musical revue. It was delightful—it was done as a fundraiser for her church’s youth choir, and most of the performers were classically-trained church-music vocalists who, for once, were singing show tunes, and they were so obviously tickled to be soloing something so fun for once that the audience was tickled right along with them. And one of the best songs—the woman singing really got into it—was called “Usherette’s Blues.” The voice of the song is a woman who’s been tearing tickets at the Palace theatre for fifty years, so she’s seen more or less every movie in wide release for the last half-century… and has never seen the end of any of them. “Did Gary Cooper get the girl, or what?” she asks. “Did Judy Garland find her dog?” And she can’t say for sure, but she has a feeling that Kate and Leonardo drown.
What a curse, to never see the end of any of anything! Isn’t that where the payoff is? Movies make the most sense in retrospect, when you know the end and can see how all the rest of it builds toward the climax. We wait for the finales of TV shows with bated breath, we stay up late rushing toward the last page of a novel. We want to see the end.
Not to suggest that films, television, novels, and other forms of media serve to offer temporary escape from the endless thankless drudgery of daily living, but I wonder if narrative closure isn’t all the more desirable to us because, in real life, we rarely get it. Relationships do not tend to have neat arcs and clean endings. Nor can we orchestrate or even really choose the last scene of our lives. And even if we could, what would that mean? We die, and our lives are much, much shorter than history. Unless Christ returns in glory in this generation (and may he return soon, maranatha, amen), none of us will see the end.
Which brings us to poor Eutychus. First, let us all take a moment to recognize the irony of a sermon about a person who was so bored by a sermon that he fell out of a window and died.
But what happened to Eutychus is only what might happen to any of us. When Eutychus took his perch in the window, things were really getting good. Paul, the famous Paul, the one who had begun his career as a persecutor of this new sect called “the Way,” who had held the coats of the people who stoned the disciple Stephen to death, and who had be knocked off his horse by a vision of Jesus and so become the upbuilder of the sect he had persecuted, this Paul whom every believer knew, this Paul had been preaching and teaching in Eutychus’s neck of the woods for two years, everyone knew who he was, the message was spreading, energy was building, maybe something was really about to happen—Paul had gone away for a couple of months but he returned and now there was Paul, right there in the room, and Eutychus was there for it—until he wasn’t.
Or maybe things were getting really bad. Paul, the famous Paul, the dramatic convert, teacher, preacher, was leaving; despite his oratory prowess and, one would have thought, the protection of Jesus Christ, a bunch of silversmiths had nearly incited a riot against him, and Paul had left for months, and now returned but just for a few days and was leaving again. Was his triumph over? Was he on the run? Was the hope, the budding hope for something really new, really good, that Eutychus might have been treasuring within him misplaced? Perhaps these two years and change had been it, and they were over, and the kingdom of God that Eutychus might have been straining his eyes to see come over the horizon wasn’t really coming—but Eutychus wouldn’t know, because he fell, and died, and was gone.
W.E.B. DuBois, the great African-American thinker, writer, teacher, and advocate, lived for 95 years. He grew up during Reconstruction after the Civil War, a time when it seemed that things might seriously change, and then that they wouldn’t. He lived for ninety-five years. He saw both world wars, the North and the South, Harvard and Fisk and Tuskeegee and Howard, much of Europe and Asia. He wrote and wrote and wrote, taught and taught and taught. He died a year before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in Ghana, where he lived because the United States had refused to renew his passport, whether because was a Black activist or a Communist sympathizer or both.
Fred Korematsu, the man whose failed case against the US government resulted in the Supreme Court legally upholding Japanese internment in camps during World War II, took a job as a water tank repairman after the war, only to find that he was being paid half what his white coworkers made. When he went to his boss to ask for fairness, his boss threatened to have him arrested. Fred quit, and didn’t attempt to seek redress for anything again for thirty years. His own daughter learned about her father’s Supreme Court case in high school. His conviction was overturned more than forty years after the decision. The case wasn’t repudiated by the Court until this year, more than a decade after Korematsu died.
Until Christ returns, we will all fall asleep in the middle, and we will all die before the end. My mother’s life was marked by meaningful expansions in her legal rights; my own life—I am thirty—has been marked by women of my mother and grandmother’s generation wondering aloud what they had been in the streets for. Since I was in middle school, I have watched my government and my fellow citizens turn against one group and another, start wars that will be old enough to vote next year, make life harder and harder for the poor and the sick when this country has more money than any other nation in the history of the world has ever had. I have seen the election of a Black man as president and increases in deportations of migrants, real public discourse around racism as a social problem but also its increase in both power and popularity. I have, my mother has, everyone I know has been alternately grieving and celebrating, forever. We will not see an end that throws a structure or a logic back on everything we have experienced, let alone all of human history. We all fall asleep in the middle, and we all die before the end.
In accounts we find in Matthew and Luke, Jesus tells mourners that the little daughter of the synagogue leader is not dead, but sleeping. In John, he tells his disciples that their friend Lazarus, who has died, has fallen asleep. Matthew and Revelation refer to dead saints sleeping. It is not only a neat metaphor; death is as temporary as sleep is. We sleep to wake; we die to rise.
Eutychus was dead for perhaps a minute before Paul rushed downstairs to raise him, and his people took him away, greatly comforted. And Paul went upstairs and ate and kept talking: So Eutychus, restored to the story, didn’t even hear the end of Paul’s discourse; and the continuation of both men’s lives ended, of course, months or years or decades later, in their deaths. Eutychus died and was raised, once, for a time; but all of us die to rise and live.
No length of life, here, no canny strategy in our work, no careful planning for crisis, no cultivation of relationship, will allow us to see the satisfying end. We will not see perfect justice or perfect peace here; we may see a step forward and two back, a standstill, a running in circles. Jesus’s ministry ended in a cross. But we will see them: we will see perfect justice, perfect peace, perfect love, true goodness, when we stand in the presence of the Lord and behold the face of God. Jesus’ ministry ended on a cross and his death ended death and replaced it with life. Death is real, and inevitable, and temporary; it is only a thing that happens to us among other things, a painful thing perhaps and a bad one, but not the greatest and not the last.
This is not a call to escapism. What we do while we live matters, has meaning, is good, not because of the goal in pursuit of which it must be done, but because it is good and meaningful in itself. Meaning does not accrue from efficacy. Goodness is inherent. Even if we do not overturn all injustice, companionship with and advocacy for those under the boot of oppression is good. Even if we do not end hunger, to feed a hungry person and to fight against systems that keep them hungry is good. Even if the powers of the world do not return it, to put love into the world is good. To proclaim the Gospel in a world dead-set against hope is good. Even if we do not live like this forever, to love and nurture another person is good. To work is good, to care is good, to struggle is good, because our God has told us, mortals, what is good: To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God. Aesop taught that a kindness is never wasted because even a mouse can return to free the lion who spared her life, that is, we might get something out of it in the end; but in truth, my friends, kindness, real acting for others, cannot be wasted because God loves it and commands and commends it to us as good.
We do not have to see the end to make any of this worthwhile. And we know, as Eutychus did, as he saw prefigured in his own flesh, what the real end is: Christ’s reign, a new heaven and a new earth, the lion and the lamb resting together, the crushing of every evil including death. We won’t see the last act, but we have, as it were, already seen the credits; and our small piece, our small effort, in the great, sprawling, terrible story of humankind is precisely as valuable as we are: infinitely so, because we work alongside the God have come from, and we return to. Amen.
NOR ANY OTHER CREATED THING 