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[Music] [Music] Soliloquy or the Graves of Princes, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. Let us give reverent attention to the reading of God's Word,

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as it is recorded in the book of 2 Chronicles, the 21st chapter, beginning the reading at the verse numbered 16. "Moreover, the Lord stirred up against Jehoram the spirit of the Philistines and of the Arabians that were near the Ethiopians.

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And they came up into Judah and break into it, and carried away all the substance that was found in the king's house, and his sons also, and his wives, so that there was never a son left him save Jehoahaz, the youngest of his sons.

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And after all this, the Lord smote him in his bowels with an incurable disease. And it came to pass that in process of time, after the end of two years, his bowels fell out by reason of his sickness. So he died of sore diseases.

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And his people made no burning for him like the burning of his fathers. Thirty and two years old was he when he began to reign, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years, and departed without being desired.

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Albeit they buried him in the city of David, but not in the sepulchres of the kings." And the second reading is from the book of 1 Kings, reading from the 14th chapter,

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and beginning the reading at the verse numbered 17. "And Jeroboam's wife arose and departed and came to Tirzah, and when she came to the threshold of the door, the child died, and they buried him.

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And all Israel mourned for him according to the word of the Lord, which he spake by the hand of his servant Ahijah the prophet. And 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.

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And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to their understanding." Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son,

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and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I do not like to come here. It is not because I dislike the presence of the dead.

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It is sometimes better to sit beside the graves of the dead and to listen to their silence than it is to walk the highways of life and hear the ceaseless, careless prattle of the living.

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I do not like to come here. But it is not because of the buried dead, for I would rather be with them than to than to have company with the unburied dead,

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with those who walk and talk, but in whom love and peace and joy and purity and faith have long since died. I do not mind coming to this cemetery of time and standing beneath these ancient covering elms

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beside this water that flows so gently. I do not mind these marble markers with memories etched upon. It's just that I do not like to come here, to this part of the cemetery of human experience,

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to this place where the young princes lie. Yet it is to precisely this place that I must come again and again. I come with uniformed airmen as they bear the body of their fallen comrade. The announcement from the War Department said,

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"The catapult failed to function as it was intended to function." And he died. And now we lay what's left of him away, while his spirit, soaring higher than any lark or eagle ever dared dreamed,

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reaches out across the windswept space and touches the face of God. While we sit by the grave of a young prince. I've come to this place with athletes

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carrying the body of the one called "Most Valuable." In his young life he had already covered himself with honors. And then so quickly and so soon it all was ended. I've heard this place echo with the sound of rifle fire and the clicking of heels.

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And watched the soldier boys as they folded the flag exactly according to the rules and then carried it and handed it to the mother and father, standing strong and tall and looking straight ahead lest they break under the emotion of it all. He had written last, "I'll be home soon."

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And he was carried home by his comrades. And we stood there by the grave of a young prince. I do not like to come here. But in my ministry again and again I have had to come to this place most recently,

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just a few days ago. His was a blithe spirit. I can see him now with water sparkling in his black curly hair. And he said to the gang that he'd swim to the nearby point.

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And expert swimmer that he was, he started out across the water and then suddenly rolled over on his back, stretched his white belly to the sun, and seized somehow, sank.

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And I stood with the young princes and the young princesses, the royalty of youth, while we watched and waited till they found him, and then walked this selfsame path to this selfsame place

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where the young princes lie. Where now is that loud-mouthed hedonist who every time he sees me slaps me on the back and says, "You've got the best job of all, preacher, just one hour a week." Where is he when the telephone rings at midnight?

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Where is he when I go hurrying down a hospital corridor? Where is he when I interrupt a Father's Saturday afternoon television football game with the words, "Sir, I'm afraid I have some very bad news." Where is he when the questions ask and I struggle to answer,

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and even before I answer, the one who's asking is gone? Where is he when the grip tightens and the sheet is lifted? Where is he when he's loud-mouthed, "Only one hour a week." I'd like to have him here now,

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to enter into soliloquy with his own soul, as I speak to mine by the graves of the young princes. The two before us are Jehoram and Ahijah. Read the stones. Here lies Jehoram, and he died, and no one desired him.

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And here lies Ahijah, and he died, and all Israel mourned for him. I stand before these stones, and there is in me a great passion of lament. I lament the death of the young. Jehoram lingered a while, a long disease, and then an awful death.

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For Ahijah, it was all over in but an evening. But for both of them, it was so early. The clock of time is wound but once, and no man has the power to know just when that clock will stop at late or early hour.

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And for both of them, it stopped so early. And I think of them. I think the legend comes out of Buddhism, about a woman named Kisugotami,

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whose son died, and clutching him to her breast, she went and sought someone who could give cure. And meeting the Buddha, he said to her, "I will restore life to your son if you will bring to me a mustard seed,

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which you have gotten from a house where the death of the young has never touched the place." And so she set out to find a house where no young one had died, where no young friend had been lost,

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where no young relation had been taken away. But to every door that she went, her answer was the same. We know the hurt of the death of the young.

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And gradually the truth came to her that the suffering which was hers was the suffering that belonged to everyone. And recognizing this, she laid her child away and gave herself to contemplation.

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And I sit by the graves of the young princes and I contemplate and I ask, "Why?" Sometimes the answer is obvious, "Soul, you know that as I know it." Sometimes it is their sin. They give themselves to addiction and kill themselves. Sometimes it is the sin of others.

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They ride their bicycle on a beautiful afternoon and some alcohol-soaked individual behind the wheel of a car crushes and bruises the life out of them. And sometimes, sometimes it's just foolishness.

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I'll swim the whole way across the lake and it's too far and it's too much. And sometimes it's just the gone wrongness of things, living in a world where men give themselves more to the creation of the instruments of death than they do to the creation of the instruments of life.

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But beyond all of these partial and passing explanations, the question still stands, "Why?" when they are so young. The only thing of which I'm sure is,

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they never ask the question, "Which is mine?" They are as different from me as their condition is different from mine, and I do not think they pause to ask for even a moment why they have gone so early. The brightness of eternity is so infinite

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that the most sparkling moments within time seem to be nothing but darkness. I knew a girl who dressed for a party, and as she dressed, she died. And I do not think she thought for one moment about missing the party. I do not think that as they look back upon what might have been,

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they regret the classes that were not taken, or the partners that were not found, or the sales that were not made. Whether they die in poverty or in wealth, in a palace or a slum, whether they die known or unknown, young or old,

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I am sure that within one minute after they are gone, all that was before is as nothing. So some epitaphs are written early, like Jehoram's and Abijah's. "He died, and no one desired him."

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"He died, and all Israel mourned for him." And I think they thought not at all about the early hour at which the words were carved, unless, unless it was to think, "Would I had the opportunity to rewrite my epitaph?"

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So, remember, that though the sand in the glass be in short supply, every life does leave some mark, does write some epitaph. Jehoram here was evil, and so he wrote in evil. He was selfish, he dishonored women, he lifted idolatries before God,

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he was warned of Elijah the prophet, but he replied, "I am young, and I am strong, and I am a prince." And he did not seek to keep his evil to himself. Why is it that those who give themselves to evil are never content to keep it to themselves,

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but always seek to tangle others in the self-same web? Why is that? And he died. And no one desired him.

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No one was sorry. They lit no memorial fire in his honor. No one came to the funeral. No one wept. I've known that to happen when people died. They were never missed in church. They were never missed in the community.

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They were never even missed in their family. So given to selfishness and narrowness, to belligerence, to cruelty, to indifference, to callousness, that if there was anything when they were gone, it was only a sense of relief. But even in a life that ugly, some mark was made.

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The epitaph is there to be read. And Abijah's saying was short also. But when he died, all Israel mourned for him. His death was sudden.

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The announcement of his illness and of his passing made at the self-same moment. And all the people of Israel, rank upon rank, the rich and the poor, those of prominence and those who nobody knew, they all stood and wept for him as if a son in their own family had died.

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That swan that swims upon the still waters, surely it's the most beautiful of birds. And it took the most graceful of humans to imitate it. I never saw Anna Pavlova, the great ballerina dance,

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but it was said that her technique was incredible and her compassion limitless. And she died. And when she died, a memorial concert was held. And at the concert, they played the music for which she was best known, the Dying Swan.

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And the curtain lifted and the stage was darkened, all except for one spotlight which fell upon the boards at the place where she would have been standing had she lived. And as the music was heard, the spotlight moved across the stage,

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following exactly the steps which would have been hers. And everyone stood in silent grief. And there was such a light in the life of young Abijah that when he died, it lingered. Everyone stood, all Israel stood, in silent grief.

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A mark was made, you see, there's always an epitaph sold. Death is the final identity crisis. It's when we discover the worth of everything that's gone before. The worth?

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Some people think of life in terms of worth. But my Lord only called one man a fool. And that was the man who measured his life in terms of his worth and gathered to himself all that he could and built great barns

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and then said to his soul, "Eat, drink, and be merry. Take your ease." And that very night, his soul was required of him. And Jesus said to him, "Thou fool." If none of us know how much sand there is in the glass,

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then what stupidity to waste what is there in getting and spending. Is there in the end any epitaph so ridiculous as the one written in dollar signs? What's the name of that picture that Salvatore Dali painted? A bleak landscape, broken branches, an oblong box,

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and hanging over the branches in the box watches, clocks, all soft and malleable they are, like wash hanging on a line. He called the thing the persistence of memory. And what he says in the picture is that time is ours and we can mold it as we will,

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but there comes a moment when time is no more for us, and at that moment the epitaph is written, the record is clear, and it cannot be changed, the mark is made, and no tear can take away a line of it. That Bacuda witch doctor was wrong.

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I met him in Central Africa, and he had this trick of taking a bowl and filling it with water, and then pouring colored sand upon the surface of the water and making portraits. And with a breath, he'd blow the water so that all the picture, in a rainbow swirl, would disappear away.

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And I would say, "Make that face again." And he would say the same thing every time, "He's gone." But you see, we're not gone like that. We don't disappear in just a swirl of color.

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There's always an epitaph. There's always a mark, even when the life is short. And so the ultimate tragedy is not to die. The ultimate tragedy is to die without having lived. I've known those who've had four times the days of the young princes,

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and yet in all the time that was theirs, have not lived as one like a Baija lived. Instead, prosaically and anonymously, they've sat in the back row of the silent majority and nibbled on their fingernails and never become involved with life so that anyone missed them when they were gone.

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Nicholas Burdiaf, the great Orthodox theologian, says that the worth of a single life is greater than all the battles, all the wars, and all the revolutions ever fought. So soul, my soul, what is the worth of what you've done? You stand here the product of a million years of evolution.

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You occupy space. You use time. And what mark do you make? Is anyone changed? Is anyone lifted? Is anyone loved? Because of you.

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If not, then when you die, the stopping of your heart will be nothing other than the biological announcement of a death that occurred so many years before. Here lies Jehoram, and he died, and no one desired him.

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Here lies Abijah, and all Israel mourned for him. Ah, you think deep thoughts when you stand by the graves of young princes. I think, for example, that both Jehoram and Abijah wrote their own epitaphs. No one wrote them for them.

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I mean, Jehoram was the son of Jehoshaphat, one of the greatest kings Judah ever had. He grew up in a beautiful environment surrounded by things of goodness, and yet he deliberately and willfully chose to make himself an emissary of evil. Some are unpopular because of the stands they take.

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We admire them because of the positions which are theirs. One might say we honor them because of the enemies that they've made. There is a kind of unpopularity that can come from standing against that which is evil, but the kind of unpopularity which was his was his because he ruined his life.

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Circumstances didn't. He did. And Abijah, this one whom all Israel mourned, it is recorded that his father Jeroboam was the most wicked king that Israel ever had. He grew up the son of a wicked man in a wicked family, in a wicked land, at a wicked time,

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but he grew up like a lily on a manure heap. And all the beauty that was his was his not because of circumstances, but because he made it so. Soul, my soul, there are always two things.

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There's what happens, and there's what you do with what happens. I know this goes against the grain of what the sociologists and psychologists say, but look at Jehoram, and look at Abijah, and look at Jane and Al. Jane and Al grew up on the same block in Chicago.

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They knew each other as children, and Jane went on to live one of the most charitable and magnanimous lives that has ever been lived, founding the Hull Houses of Charity across the whole eastern part of the United States. Jane Hull. And Al, her next-door neighbor, well, he made a name for himself, too,

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and he died a pathetic and drooling syphilitic on parole. Al Capone. Jane and Al, making of themselves what they ended as. To think that we are molded by our circumstances and confined by our environments, that we can for one moment blame what we are upon what we have or where we've been,

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is fatalism and pessimism and far from what our faith ought to be. There is a kind of liberty abroad in the land, where people separate themselves from the responsibilities which are theirs, and do what they do, oft times cruel and murderous and unkind and vicious and selfish and narrow and callous,

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and blame it on the crowd and say it's because this is all I've seen. It will not wash, because there's always what happens and what we do with what happens. And I remember when I went to Germany and visited the concentration camps, and I had believed them when they said they did not know what went on there.

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And then I saw the camps, not a few of them, but over 700 all across the land, built beside villages and towns and cities. You cannot burn six million bodies without the stench of it filling the land. And didn't the one who delivered the bread and the mailman who brought the mail to the commandant's desk

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and those who rode their bicycles past those barbed wire gates, could they not know in all of that? Well, they knew and said they were forced to go along. But no one can ever be finally forced to do anything.

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There is always another option, even when it's only death. So Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian martyr, stands against it, and there came that Sunday and the guard said, "Come with me." And Bonhoeffer turned to those with him and said, "For me, this is the end and the beginning of life."

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And he went out, and the camp doctor reported that he knelt in prayer at the foot of the gallows, and then mounted the steps strong, and the doctor wrote, "Gave himself submissively to the will of God." He did not blame environment. He stood against it. He did not understand himself to be playing the game of life with a stacked deck.

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Game of life? You play chess. You know how it is in chess. White always moves first. You play chess as poorly as I do. You can win or lose,

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regardless of whether you're white or black, moving first or second. But there is a level of championship play where the grandmasters do battle in chess, where it's an understood thing that if you don't get the first move, if you draw black and must move second, that the best you can hope for is a tie.

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The preeminence of just that first move gives to the other the assurance of victory, or at best, a tie. And some people look at life and say the best they can make is a tie. But when I think of them, I think of Ephem Bogolyubov, the great chess master of the '30s, who used to say, "When I am white, I win because I am white,

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and when I am black, I win because I am Bogolyubov." Please turn your cassette to the other side. He understood, you see, that the outcome of the game was in his hands, that there's always two things, what happens and how you let what happens affect you,

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or how you affect it. The epitaph is not written for us. We write it ourselves, "And he died, and no one desired him, and he died, and all Israel mourned for him." Well, we had best leave this place. It is not too good to stand too long by the graves of young princes. We think here of how the young die, and of how even the shortest life has an epitaph,

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and how the epitaph is one we carve for ourselves, but, soul, we must go away from here. And as we go, think to ourselves that man dies as everything else dies, and that asserts his oneness with nature. But man alone, of all the creatures of God, knows that he will die, and that puts him above all nature. We know for us there will come a time when the last line is carved.

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Even the young princes know that. So you see, there is no time for foolishness, even for the young princes. I say sometimes, "Let them be foolish in their youth." That is not true. That is unwise counsel. That is perilous advice. For the young, every step they take, every move they make, the fountains from which they choose to drink will be for them fountains of life or fountains of death.

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If anyone can be foolish with life, it is the old. It is those who have done what they're going to do and now just wait for the curtain to fall. If anyone is to jest with life, let them jest, but never the young. Life is serious business.

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So those soldiers who gathered in the basement of that church in London on the night before they went to war in France, and were entertained by the congregation, heard their colonel say to one of the young officers, "Please express our thanks." And this young man, who was gifted of speech and had a sweet spirit, stood up, and with his mastery of words, expressed the gratitude of all his soldier companions to those who had entertained them.

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And then he went one sentence too far. It slipped out before he had a chance to stop the words. He said, "Tomorrow we go to France and to the trenches and perhaps to die." And he wished he hadn't said that. And the silence was awkward and embarrassing. And then he said, so softly only a few could hear, "Can any of you tell us how to die?"

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And one older woman moved to the piano and sang and played that great aria from Mendelssohn's Elijah, "O rest in the Lord." That's the way to live, resting in the Lord. And that's the way to die, resting in the Lord. The scripture says of this young prince of Ija,

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that all Israel mourned for him because there was found in him some good thing toward God. It was not his looks, not his wealth, not his position, not his ability, his gifts or his talents. It was this good thing in him that he rested in God, that his trust was in his father. That's the touchstone of human destiny.

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And in our living and in our dying, are we resting in the Lord. In our Father God, in the King of all the universe, who because he was a king, when he had a single son, called him Prince, and who took that only child of his, that Prince, and in great love gave him for us, and then sat by the grave of his young prince and mourned a while.

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Here in time with us, until on Easter, he gave to him and to all of us life and that eternal. So soul, my soul, I speak to you. Do not think of where you'll die, on highway or in hospital, or when you'll die, at late or early hour. But think of this, when the moment comes for spirit to bid farewell to flesh,

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will you be resting in Christ? And will he be, this young prince, who was the same yesterday and today and forever, will he be so much with you, that those who come to this place, where the ancient elms cover over and the silent water drifts by and the memories are etched in marble,

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when they come and look at your epitaph, will they say, "And he prayed, '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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O Jesus, Prince, so be with us in life and in death, that our end will be nothing but the most beautiful of beginnings. And the Lord bless you and keep you.

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The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace.

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Amen.