Ordinary 18C (Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21)

I would like a natural burial, or something close to it. Wrap me in a shroud, stick me in a pine coffin, and plant me deep enough that the coyotes won’t snuffle and paw around for my corpse. Three feet ought to be enough.

I even know where I want to be buried: in the churchyard of my current congregation. It’s on a wooded slope literally at the end of the road, a narrow dirt trail lined with fences and birdhouses as it bumps across a farmer’s fields. Mostly you see sparrows as you go down the lane. Sometimes a bluebird will alight on a post, once in a while a Cooper’s hawk. Stand at the other end of the long driveway and the terrain drops more steeply to a basin—I call it a pond, the churchpeople call it a swamp—of reeds and open water. I breathe deeply every time I visit. It’s home of a sort, a good place to rest and await.

At the end of each semester, my wife invites me to speak to her psychology students about death, about the final stages of human development. I lecture on how the major causes of death change over the course of a lifetime, how the experience of death has changed in the past century, and how the grief of  survivors plays out.