Explaining Death — Morning Devotions

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Transcript

I’m sure you know the very popular TV kids’ show, Sesame Street. What an enormous hit that’s been for millions of children who’ve watched that around the world. Now, the people involved making it said, if you hold the attention of children, you can actually educate them.

And that’s quite true. What I found interesting is that one of the popular adult characters, Mr. Hooper, actually disappeared from the show. He was played by Will Lee.

And Will Lee died of a heart attack back in 1982. So Mister Hooper, he was loved by the kids, and the producers faced a big problem. How would they deal with this topic of death to their 10 million viewers at the time? I think they’ve got more than that now. And most of these viewers were under the age of 6. So here was a tricky situation. The experts in child development warned the producers not to say he got sick and died because you don’t always die when you’re sick.

Addressing the difficult subject of death

And they were warned, don’t say you went to hospital and died because people go to hospital all the time and usually come out alive. So they devised a plan to assure their young audience of death’s reality. Mister Hooper will not be back, and he’ll be missed.

So it’s OK for children to grieve when someone they love dies. They wanted to assure these children that death brings out all sorts of emotions, sadness and anger and frustration. So this topic of death, it’s a huge one, isn’t it?

We prefer to think of more pleasant topics, but the reality is that death is there with us all the time. Do we really take the time to explain to children, for example, what death’s all about?

Madonna was talking one day about her mother who died when she was young. She said, my mother’s death was just a big mystery to me when I was a child. No one explained it to me. My mum was really religious, so I never understood why she was taken away from us. It just seemed so unfair. I never thought she’d done anything wrong. So oftentimes I’d wondered what I’d done wrong. So those were the comments from Madonna.

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So death is this mystery that does puzzle a lot of people.

You know that the earlier generations were, I think, better prepared to deal with the heartaches of life like death. For example, in Russia, it used to be a custom, in the villages of Russia when a child died to have a mourning hut actually on the outskirts of every town. So all women who lost their children were sent to live in this hut for a month of grief and solitude. And at the end of the month, amazingly enough, the hut was set on fire.

And the woman who was mourning the loss of the child would have to decide, do I live, get out of here, or do I die in the flames. And so usually she came out of the burning hut, and then she rebuilt that hut for the next woman who was mourning the loss.

The Bible tells us of a story of a man named Lazarus, who was a friend of Jesus found in John chapter 11, and Lazarus lived in the village named Bethany. He had two sisters, Mary and Martha, and Lazarus was sick and he was gravely ill, and the sisters called for Jesus to come. He waited 2 days, and in that period, Lazarus died. In fact, it would have been 4 days since Lazarus died, and Jesus met up with the two sisters. They were very upset, of course, and they believed that Jesus could have done something.

But Jesus, in the midst of their anger, I guess, said, Your brother will live again. What they didn’t know was that Jesus would perform an amazing miracle and bring Lazarus back from the dead. And then He said to the two sisters, I am the one who raises the dead to life. Everyone who has faith in me will live, even if they die, and everyone who lives because of faith in me will never really die. So here were the remarkable words of a saviour, Jesus Christ.

And that’s the answer. With faith in Jesus, even death will not destroy us. Martha and Mary knew the devastation of their brother’s death, and they knew what separation was like.

So just because you’re a friend of Jesus doesn’t mean that you will not get your heart broken. I mean, as I said, Mary was angry because she believed that Jesus could have helped in that situation.

But John, who wrote this, said that even Jesus shed tears on that day as he considered his friend’s death, and Jesus called Lazarus to come out of the grave, and he had a second chance at life. This is a true story from the Bible.

Let’s Pray

Well, dear Lord, we thank you for the reality that even with death there is another dimension that you offer us – eternal life in the name of Jesus. Amen.

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