The past couple of weeks we've been wrapping up things that we started before Christmas; sort of tying up loose ends. Before we leave the book of Philippians behind I want to make one more attempt to highlight the Philippian theme of death and resurrection. And I want to do this, very, very carefully. It would be all to easy to give a message that would seem to indicate in one way or another that Christians ought not to treat death as if it were any big deal. It would be easy to overlook how serious of an experience death is. So I want to start by acknowledging that the experience of losing someone close to us can be a very difficult experience. It leaves us with a gaping hole in our lives where a person once added joy and happiness. It alters our plans for the future and leave us struggling with what "might have been." And faced with these things it's o.k. to grieve our loss. It's necessary for us to grieve our loss. And having said all that I want to say that death remains a terrifying experience for most people in our culture. But it hasn't always been this way. As I think I mentioned before, in the ancient world people had to deal with death. They would have to prepare the deceased for burial, they would have to prepare the tomb for burial. Then sometime later they would have to go back to the tomb to dissemble the bones and prepare the tomb for the next burial. It was unavoidable in ancient cultures. In our own culture funeral homes are a relatively new invention. Not long ago it used to be that funerals were held in family homes. In a collection of essays on the experience of death and dying, Greinacher Muller explains the change in attitude that has taken place in our culture:

Attitudes towards death and dying in Western society have changed within the space of a century. There are many signs of this. There are people trying with complete seriousness to outwit death by the use of refrigeration techniques. Social critics talk about a new form of existence in a world in which a total transformation would lead to the abolition of death. Others deplore the way people are forced to die in public institutions. They condemn the way in which they dying are banished from society and death is made taboo or merely private or even a commercial affair, since this results in those faced with death feeling uncertain and helpless. Historians of ideas have isolated an intellectual change. Until well on in the nineteenth century, they say, the Christian faith dominated Western thinking, formed people's world-view and influenced their experience of death. This influence is fast disappearing

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