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The following message for the moment is delivered by Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled "Soliloquy over the graves of princes." Let us continue in worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in two passages in the Old Testament. I read first from 2 Chronicles chapter 21 and I

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begin at the verse numbered 16. "And the Lord stirred up against Jehoram the anger of the Philistines and of the Arabs who are near the Ethiopians. And they came up against Judah and invaded it and carried away all the possessions they found that belonged to the king's house, and also his sons and his wives, so that no son was left to him except Jehoahaz his youngest son.

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And after all this the Lord smote him in his bowels with an incurable disease. In course of time at the end of two years his bowels came out because of the disease and he died in great agony. His people made no fire in his honor like the fires made for his fathers. He was 32 years old when he began to reign and he reigned eight years in Jerusalem and he departed without being desired.

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And they buried him in the city of David but not in the tombs of the kings." The second reading is from the first book of Kings, the 14th chapter, and I begin this reading at the verse numbered 17. "Then Jeroboam's wife arose and departed and came to Tirzah. And as she came to the threshold of the house, the child died. And all Israel buried him and mourned for him according to the word of

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the Lord which he spoke by his prophet Ahijah. Now the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred and how he reigned, behold they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel. And the time that Jeroboam reigned was 22 years and he slept with his fathers and Nadab his son reigned in his stead." May God bless to us and to our understanding these readings from his word.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I do not like to come here. It's not that I mind cemeteries. In fact, I sometimes prefer the silence of cemeteries to the loud speaking of those who surround us in the living of life. But it is better sometimes to be amongst those who are the buried dead instead of with those who are the

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unburied dead, those whose hearts and souls have died within them but whose bodies still move with some kind of life. It's not the special silence of this place that troubles me. It is not the elm trees which cover over the scene. It's not the quiet waters that stand so nearby. It's not even the memories that are carved in the tombstones at my feet. I don't mind, you see, coming to

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cemeteries. I just don't like coming here by the riverbank where the young princes are buried, the ones who died in the prime of their lives. And yet I have to come to this place again and again and again. The young girl was known as the most valuable athlete on her team, and she had already won for herself medals and honors of many kinds, and she died. And I walked with other teenagers

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as we carried her body to this place by the waterside. I've heard this little dell echo with the crack of the rifle fire and the click of the polished heels as the soldiers ended their salute and saw the flag folded precisely according to the rules and handed to the weeping mother while the father looked straight ahead trying to be very brave. And then when the pageantry was over,

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I've come back later when the quiet was here. I watched the young prince swim one day. He was in the water with many other young princes and princesses, the royalty of youth, and I can still remember how the sun glinted off his wet, curly, black hair. And then he threw himself backward into the water, stretched his white belly toward the sun one last time, and was seized and

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sank. And we stood there and waited till they found him, and then I walked with his parents to the morgue and to the church and then here where they bury young princes. There is a city in California which is called Carmel-by-the-Sea, and it's a very beautiful city, and they have a radio station there with the call letters KAML, and they describe themselves as a radio station which

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broadcasts only sunshine news. You never hear any bad news over this radio station. They never list obituaries. No one ever dies, you see, in Carmel-by-the-Sea. I assume they have some kind of rule that says when it comes time for you to die, please do it elsewhere. And then they very quickly sweep the memory of you under their Persian rugs. But I've never lived in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

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And I don't expect to live there. And I have no Persian rugs. I have to come here to the place where the young princes lie, where the stones are very old, but the epitaphs written upon them are still quite clear. Look at the two at my feet today. "Here lies Jehoram. He departed without being desired. And here lies Abijah. And all Israel mourned for him." Some gravestones you

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see are carved very early. We lament especially the passing, the dying of young people. Now, Jehoram died of a particularly dreadful disease which caused him a long illness across two years. He lingered in dying. Abijah, on the other hand, he died in but a single day. The word of his illness and the word of his death came within minutes of each other. Now, we all understand

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that none of us are going to get out of life alive. But isn't there a special hurt that comes when one so young die, whether suddenly or taking a while? There is a story which comes out of Buddhism about a woman named Kisagotomi whose son died. And she sought the Buddha and asked the Buddha to give the son life again. And he said he would do so, but first she must go and find a home

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where the sting of the death of the young had never been felt. And from that home, she must bring a mustard seed. And with that mustard seed, he would bring her son to life again. And so she started out and she went from house to house and from village to village and from town to town, trying to find some place, some home where the sting of the death of youth had never come,

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where no young person had ever died, where no relative who was in small number of years had ever perished, where no young friend of the family had never suddenly been taken away by life. And she couldn't find a single place where that was the case. And finally she got the point. She recognized that she was not alone, that all of us have felt the death of young princes. And so she

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did not go back to Buddha, but instead gave herself to a life of contemplation. We are all close to stories like this, and when we confront stories like this, we ask why. And sometimes the answer is obvious. It is because of their sin or because of the sin of others. Sometimes it is because they have foolishly thrown themselves against natural law and paid the price. Sometimes

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it is because, well, sometimes it is because of the gone wrongness of things. But even when we've heard these explanations, we are not satisfied. A question stays with us. We ask why, when they're so young, do they have to die? I think that's a question which only those of us who are living think. I doubt if any of the young princes take any moment to think about that question. You see,

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the light of eternity makes even the brightest light of life into nothing but darkness. I read about a girl who was dressing for her high school prom, and she died. And you know, I do not think she missed the prom. I do not think that she lamented the fact that she missed her graduation, that she didn't have the thrill of getting her first job and making her first success at it. I

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doubt very much whether she missed having a partner in life. Why? Because after death, such things are very trivial. Whether we live in poverty or in fortune, whether we live alone or in the midst of a multitude of friends, whether we have gained much wisdom or very little at all, after we are gone, it makes no difference. So I think the young princes do not ask the questions

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we do about their early dying, unless, of course, unless they are ashamed of the epitaph which they have written. Every life, you see, leaves an epitaph. Take Jehoram. His reign was a relatively short one, and yet it was unspeakably ugly. He married a very evil woman, and together they practiced all kinds of abominations and cruelties, and they tempted other people to do the same. And

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this was so much the case that when he died, no one was sorry. No prayers were prayed for him. See how his stone reads. It says, "He departed without being desired." I've known some people like that who died and were never missed in the church, were never missed in the school, were never missed at the office, were never missed even at home. You don't have to live a very long

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life to make some kind of mark here. Keats died when he was 26. Shelley died when he was 30. Schubert died when he was 31. Mozart died when he was 36. You don't have to live a lot of years to leave something that is memorable. Some epitaph is written by all of us, no matter how short the course of our days may be. Look at Ahai-Jehir. He died of a fever. It hit him quickly. One day,

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he was gone in a matter of minutes, and look what the epitaph says. It says, "And all Israel mourned for him." The whole country wept. It was as if every family had lost a son. The fragrance of his life, you see, drifted across that tiny land. Look at that swan swimming there upon those silent waters. Surely the swan is the most graceful of all birds, and it took the most incredibly graceful

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of all human beings to dance like a swan. You remember her name, Anna Pavlova, and she danced Tchaikovsky's "The Dying Swan," and after she herself had died, they held a memorial program, and the theater was packed. Every seat was taken, and the orchestra began to play the music of "The Dying Swan," and the curtains opened, and the stage was absolutely bare, except for the light

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of one spotlight, which fell upon the stage, and it moved just as if it were following Pavlova as she danced, and everyone stood and wept. You see, her light was shining still, and that's the way it was with Obaidah. He left behind him a light that lingered, that shimmers still after all these centuries because we can still read it on his tombstone, and all Israel mourned for him. Every

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life leaves an epitaph. One moment we are here, and the other moment we are gone, but in that moment, the worth of what we have lived is written down forever. Nicholas Burdaev, the great theologian and philosopher of the Orthodox Church, has said that one soul is of greater value than all the armies, all the empires, and all of the revolutions that have ever been fought, and if that is so,

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then I have to say to myself, "Soul, what difference have you made here? If two million years have evolution, have conspired together to make you what you are, what have you done with the two million years? How have you occupied the time given to you on this earth? You have occupied space here. To what purpose? What will be my epitaph? He departed without being desired,

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or and all Israel mourned for him." We write our own epitaphs, of course. It is not the circumstances which surround us that carve the words into the stone. When you are at a place like this, sitting beside the still waters, or perhaps in some great cathedral standing by some hoary sarcophagus, or maybe on some battlefield where many, many young have breathed their last,

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whenever you're at a place where that rest is which lasts forever, wherever you're at a place where someone like Jehoram and Debiah lies, well, you realize then that each one of us writes what is written. You see, Jehoram had a father named Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat was one of the best kings ever to rule in that part of the world. He was a man of great generosity and fairness,

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and he lived close to God, and so Jehoram had every kind of advantage that any young son could desire, and yet it says of Jehoram, "He departed without being desired." And Debiah, on the other hand, well, his father was one of the most wicked men ever to sit upon Judah's throne. His name was Jeroboam. He gave himself to unspeakable evils of almost every conceivable kind, and what do we

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read as the epitaph for the son who grew up under that kind of father, and in that kind of environment we read, "Here lies Abijah, and all Israel mourned for him." You see, it's not what surrounds you that makes the difference. It's what you are that makes the difference. What one writes, one writes. I know this goes against the grain of our time. I understand that. We're taught by the sociologists

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and the psychologists that we are in large measure influenced by our environment, and that's what makes the difference, but it was not so for Jehoram or for Abijah, and it was not so for Jane and Al. Jane and Al were born on the same block in Chicago, and Jane grew up, Jane Adams grew up, to establish the Hull Houses, one of the great charitable institutions of American history,

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and Al, he grew up too, and he died a slobbering syphilitic, paroled from Alcatraz for his last years. His name, of course, was Al Capone. They grew up, mind you, on the same block. To say that what is about us makes us what we are is to surrender to a fatalism and to a pessimism. It is to surrender all of your freedom. The fact is we are made in the image of God, and no matter

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how bent that image might become, it is still of God, and that means that it is never absolutely necessary for us to surrender. Life is the druggist who fills the prescription that we ourselves write. And now some find, when they look at what they have written, that they are ashamed. Death comes, and the words are scribed for everyone to see. It is not necessary, really, that we should

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ever surrender to anything. There is always at least the alternative of death. So I say to my soul, will you be like Jehoram? He departed without being desired? Or will you be like Abijah, and all Israel mourned for him? Whatever the words are, they're the words I have chosen. So these are the reasons that I come to stand every once in a while by the graves of the young princes to remind myself

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that the young too may die, and to remind myself that no matter how long or short a life, it leaves behind some kind of epitaph, and to remind myself that whatever epitaph is written, we write it for ourselves. So I say to my soul, think about this. Think about how you are living. You know, we all die, and in this we are one with nature, but we are the only creatures in all of nature that know

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we are going to die. We are the only ones who understand that our earthly existence will come to an end, and that is what leads us to transcend nature. All of us know this, even the young princes. I am no longer one of them, but I would say to young princes and princesses wherever they are, do not be foolish with these younger years. If there is any time to be foolish with life,

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it's after you've lived your life, perhaps in those declining years when there is little left except the memory. Then if you want to jest with life, you may jest with life all that you wish, but when you are writing in the very course of your days, when you are young and what you scribble is going to make out the future that's going to be yours, never spend that foolishly. It's like

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those soldiers in World War I who were being entertained by some Londoners in England before they went across to France to fight, and at the end of the party, the commanding officer of the American GIs asked one of his younger officers to express thanks to the group, and this young man was well-spoken and attractive to look upon, and he had a ready wit and an ability to frame his

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thoughts with his words, and he got up and he did so and gave a most eloquent thanks, and then for some reason, a reason which he himself could not later explain, there tumbled out of his lips the words, "And now we go to France and to the trenches." It would have been all right if he had stopped there, but somehow it kept on coming, "And now we go to France and to the trenches, and

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perhaps to die." And then he said, "Can any of you tell us how to die?" And there was an embarrassed silence in the room, and then one woman got up and walked to the piano, and seating herself, played and sang very softly those words from Scripture set down to music by Mendelssohn, "O rest in the Lord." That was the secret of a byges life. It says in the Scriptures that there were good things

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in him toward God. He was not honored because of his looks, he was not honored because of his talents, it was not because of his personal goodness, it was because he rested in God, his hope was in God, and that is always the great touchstone of destiny, to live with God and to die with God. For God, too, is a father who watched his young prince die and then sat mourning a while,

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by his grave. Oh my soul, my soul, what will be your final scene? Will you die at home? Will your life come to its end on a highway, in a hotel room far away, in the antiseptic surroundings of a hospital? It will come somewhere and sometime, and when it comes, what epitaph will you have written? When the spirit leaves the flesh, what words will you have carved upon your stone,

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oh soul of mine? May all those who read our stones, may all those who come by the still waters and stand under the covering elms, may all those who look down upon whatever memories we have carved in marble, may they look down and say, "He died saying, 'Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit,' and then bowed his head and gave up the ghost." Let us pray.

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All of our hearts, our Father, are directed toward thee, for we have talked of those things that are hard to speak of and confronted at least with whatever small courage there is in our spirits, the reality of our own dying, and longer still have looked at the perishing of our young people. We have reminded ourselves that life is ours but a little while, even as it is perhaps

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theirs for a little while, and so we must be about the careful carving of our stone. For when we are gone, the epitaph will stand. Grant that we might so rest in thee, whether old or young. Grant that we might so welcome thy son into our hearts, whether in our 90s or in our teens. Grant that we might so experience [silence] be convicted and changed by thy spirit. Grant that this might

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happen to us with such power and purity that we may die unafraid and never pause to worry even once about what writing we have left behind. We pray our prayer in the name of the young prince of peace. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]