I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, says the Lord to Abram when he was ninety-nine years old. Now, most ninety-nine-year-old men I know are just happy to be walking at all at that age, and most of them are more worried about becoming harmless than being blameless.

But here is Abram, whose wife, Sarai, is childless 24 years after God first told him he would become the father of many nations. Sarai had even cooked up a plot to get Abram an heir by having a young slave girl, Hagar, slip into Abram’s tent. The chief benefit of that little scheme? Learning that Abram still had it in him. The chief drawback? The boy Ishmael would become the first son of the Arab branch of Abraham’s family tree. And some 5,000 years later we are still seeing the sibling rivalry between the sons of Abraham playing out all over the globe.

So now in Genesis 17, God changes the names of Abram and Sarai to Abraham and Sarah, from a couple that knew only futility together to one that would know fertility forever. In truth, the name changes are not dramatic in themselves: Abraham is a variant of Abram meaning ancestor of multitudes, and Sarah a variant of Sarai meaning princess. But the couple takes the change as going deeper—to new identities promised by God. If they can begin to see themselves named anew by a divine parent, then perhaps it might affect the self-understanding they had walked around with for nearly a century, during which they hadn’t had it in them to create life.

And that is just what happens when we trust in the promises of God. We are veritably born again. We begin to imagine our lives being directed by an omnipotent God instead of by our own impotence.

St. Paul says that Abraham’s faith is what made him blameless, not his doing everything right all the time. His faith was hoping against hope, Paul says. It was acting as if something could be so against the weight of all evidence to the contrary. When Abraham considered his own body, which was as good as dead, or when he considered Sarah’s womb, which showed no more signs of life than his loins, he didn’t waver in faith. I consider that something to crow about—what about you? I mean, when I consider my own body at half Abraham’s age, I find his faith truly an achievement of Don Quixote proportions. But it wasn’t really an achievement at all; faith never is.

Some of you read the book, and some of you saw the movie. Sister Helen Prejean wrote Dead Man Walking as a testimony to her experience with capital punishment as she ministered to convicted killer Patrick Sonnier right until the moment he breathed his last. An interesting Wilshire twist to this story will take another day to tell, but one of our new members, Howard Marsellus, was the chairman of the Louisiana Board of Pardons that upheld Sonnier’s death sentence. It was his first death penalty case of six that he would deal with. He will tell you that he still dreams of them every night, and he will tell you of his own regret and his opposition today to the death penalty. But the lesser point to be made today is in that title phrase, “dead man walking.” Picture death row and imagine the moment when the jail cell of the condemned prisoner is opened and the guards are about to lead the man to the executioner. All the fellow prisoners can hear it happening. When he takes his first steps out of the cell, the other inmates declare, Dead man walking.

The point is that the man going to the electric chair is already as good as dead. It’s a paradox, to be sure, that at that moment he should be dead and alive, even as they reckon him more dead than alive.

But here’s the thing: Aren’t we all? Aren’t we all really dead and alive? Aren’t we all the walking dead? From the moment of our birth, isn’t there a death sentence pronounced over us? News flash: Nobody gets out of this alive. We are all as good as dead.

I was talking to Steve Brookshire the other day about our upcoming plans for a church endowment campaign. I told him that Kim and I were naming the church as beneficiary of a life insurance policy. Many of you can do the same. He was telling me about a conversation with a friend about his financial affairs. The man began by saying, If I should die. … Steve corrected him: No, it’s when I die. There’s no if about it.

We all live with incredible denial about death. But if we ever really get our minds around the idea that we are all dead men and women walking, we might change the way we live each day.

Steve Jobs is the founder and, for the second time, CEO of Apple Computer. In his commencement address to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford University, he said some important things about this. The speech is all over the Internet and worth reading. He talks about three experiences that have shaped his life—all three having the effect of teaching him about how life can come out of death, but generally not without it.

The first was his adoption. A mother had to die to her parental rights in order for him to live with the family that would be truly life-giving for him. His birth mother knew she could not afford to send him to college and wanted that for her son. The second learning experience had to do with his ouster from the company he co-founded. Only after accepting the death of his leadership of Apple did he move on to found two new companies—NeXT computers and Pixar, the company that produced the largest-grossing animated movie in history, Toy Story. During this time he met the love of his life, the woman who would become his wife. And then in a lovely irony, Apple bought NeXT and brought him back to Apple to lead the company. And now Pixar has merged with Disney. Go figure. None of that would have been possible had he not learned to reckon himself dead to the past and keep on walking and working anyway.

The third experience was pancreatic cancer. Again he had to reckon himself dead, based upon the diagnosis, but he hoped against hope nonetheless and determined to live until he died. Fortunately, his cancer was a form rare enough to be successfully treated by surgery. Here’s a snippet of what he said to the students about it all:

“This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

And isn’t this just what we learn from Abraham? The inner voice of God that he heard in his heart, the intuition he felt in his soul that he could find no rational explanation to give to others—this would become his guide. He had to give up trusting in common sense and give in to the promises of God that filled his heart with hope. He had to choose which way he would live. And so you. And so do I.

Listen, where else do you hear this stuff? Where else can you go in our world that they will tell you the bottom-line truth that for all your efforts, you’re going to die, and you’d better get round to dealing with it? This is where we do the unpopular things we think are good for us anyway, like observing Lent. Who likes a spiritual season that operates in the minor key, buries alleluias until Easter, and blows out candles instead of lighting them? Who likes hearing things like Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust—from dust have you come and to dust you shall return? You can’t even sexy that up. It is what it is. It’s just the truth.

On the other hand, if it’s the truth, it will set you free. And that’s the other thing about all this. The other side of the Lenten coin is the good news that you have something, or rather someone, to believe in that is not dust. God Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, can move heaven and earth to give you a future and a hope beyond your dreams. But you have to live into it, first by letting go of what leads you only to dust and then by getting going in the direction of the promises of God that lead to eternity.

Preachers have to learn this, too. My buddy Glen Schmucker wrote in his church newsletter about a chance encounter with someone who asked how things were going at Cliff Temple. Almost without thinking, Glen said, My knee-jerk answer was, “Once I give up my ego, the rest is a piece of cake.” I understand that.

And isn’t that just what we all struggle with? Isn’t the real spiritual challenge we all face the one that gets ourselves out of the way to make room for God? Isn’t the secret of the spiritual life really about how we learn to shove our egos to the side and let the mind of Christ get front and center in our lives? Isn’t it about how we will stop trying to control everything and everyone around us as if our life will have meaning if we can, and instead just try to walk before the Lord blamelessly?

So how do we do that? How do we walk before the Lord blamelessly? Well, as we said earlier, it isn’t a matter of doing everything right all the time. It’s a matter of doing what we believe God calls us to do—even if that may sometimes seem crazy to others, or to us. For Abraham, that meant loving his wife in ways he couldn’t imagine would bear fruit. For you it might mean the same thing, or it might mean loving someone enough to let her or him go. Or it might mean forgiving yourself for falling off the wagon one more time and deciding to concentrate on what’s left rather than what’s lost. Or it might mean dropping dead to all the bitterness and resentment you have been carrying around toward someone that gives you power but deprives you both of friendship and maybe love.

Kyle Matthews is a friend to some of us. He is a Christian singer and songwriter with soul that goes deeper than a style of music. He wrote a song called We Fall Down. It’s about a man who stumbles onto a monastery and thinks they must be perfect in there. Listen to what he learns. …

“And he wondered how it would be

To live in such a place

To be warm, well-fed and at peace

To shut the world away

So when he saw a priest

Who walked for once beyond the iron gate

He said, Tell me of your life inside that place.

And the priest replied:

“We fall down and we get up

We fall down and we get up

We fall down and we get up

And the saints are just the sinners who fall down

And get up

 

“Disappointment followed him home

He’d hoped for so much more

But he saw himself in a light

He had never seen before

’Cause if the priests who fall

Can find the grace of God to be enough

Then there must be some hope for the rest of us. …”

 

Indeed there is. You may be a dead man, but you can be a dead man walking. When you fall down, get up. And when you get up, get on with it. Get it?