Here's one you can definitely file under "what will they think of next?"  Someone has designed a computer memory chip that can be imbedded in, of all places, tombstones.  Recorded on the chip will be all the biographical data about the deceased as well as remembrances of that person by his loved ones.  With a laptop computer and the right attachment anyone can walk through a cemetery and, in a sense, listen to people calling back from the dead.

Actually, I think this may have some possibilities.  Up until now I have been amazed at how much history one can discover in rather simple epitaphs.  Like the one discovered on one tombstone:  "See, I told you I was sick."  Now, it will be possible to get the details.  Don't you sometimes wonder what the dead would say if they could speak?  Or, do you sometimes wonder what others will say about you when you're gone?

When it's all said and done, however, I'm not afraid of dying or what others will think about me after I'm gone.  To be honest, I'm too worried about what they think about me now to add the afterlife to the list.  And, to be really honest, I'm more concerned about not living than I am about dying.  To put it another way, I am not afraid of going to heaven.  I'm just not ready to not be here.  God did create me for this life, too.   I'm still anxious to learn what his purpose was behind that and I think I am just beginning to get a clue.  I'd hate to leave before I finished that work.  It's not what will be on the tombstone at the head of my grave someday that concerns me as much as the prospect of being under it in the first place.

"Mary Magdalene" and "Mary the mother of James" were a little concerned about that, too.  Not for themselves but for Jesus.   He had been dead since Friday and it was time to finish preparing his body.  So, as they came to the place where Jesus had been buried they realized that they had a very big problem.  Since a huge stone had been rolled in front of Jesus' grave, someone would have to move it if they were to finish their work.  They began to worry, "'Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?'"

Not a bad question, is it?  Who will roll away the stone?   I think the two Marys meant their question quite literally.   But, in their thinking, they only needed it moved for a little while.  Just long enough to finalize the preparation of Jesus' body in a proper way.  More and more, I find that question to be one I mean, quite literally, in a more permanent sense.

Whatever else midlife is, it is the time when you finally awaken one day to realize that, any way you measure it, you are closer to the grave than the cradle.  Of necessity, knowing that causes the questions of life to change.  Most of us, in our early years, were busy asking and trying to answer, "who wants to be a millionaire?"  I now find myself asking, more and more, who will roll away the stone?  And, I hear others asking it, too.

Yet another call came this week from yet another young man whose pastor I once was whose wife has left him.  He was just about to start the seminary.  He and his wife had all these dreams for the future in the ministry.  But, without knowing it, he and his wife left the door to what was sacred unlocked and now, another man, like a thief in the night, has stolen his hopes for family and marriage and he's having to go to court just to get the right to see his little girls a few days a month.  He didn't use the words, but I still heard him asking, who will roll away the stone from the grave of what used to be his life?

It was sobering when I got to thinking of the number of people in our church family with whom I have visited in just the last two weeks who are facing some kind of life-threatening illness.  Without exception, their courage has shamed me when I think of the simple pettiness that can so easily ruin one of my days or with which I can so easily ruin someone else's.  Here they are staring death in the face and smiling back.  To a person, they have all reminded me that we will, in time, all wonder.  Who will remove the barrier that keeps death in and life out?  Who will roll away the stone?  It's their smiles that amaze me most.  It's like they have already asked the question about that stone and gotten the answer their faith always promised.  Their days, though filled with struggle, are seasoned with hope and even laughter as death draws closer.

They remind me of my friend, Jesse, an older minister with whom I worked years ago.  About ten years ago Jesse had an impossible headache and went to the doctor only to discover that he had inoperable cancer.  The first time I stepped into his room he impressed me with his courage.  He said, "we know what this means."  He was saying more than his words let on.  Death was no longer something that eventually happens to everyone but something that was about to happen to him.  Yet, he wasn't despairing.  And, he wasn't just faking it.  He seemed to really know something about the answer to the question about who would roll the stone away.

What is it that gives these people hope?  A friend of mine came to see me this week.  About the time I became your pastor his wife left him and he had to resign his church and change careers.   Two months after that his daughter, away at college, was brutally raped.  I know how people survive the death of a marriage.  I honestly don't know how people survive when something happens to one of their kids.  Yet, here he was, not three years later, sitting in front of me smiling, full of hope, and telling me of the ways in which he is now, though scarred and wounded, still ministering to others.  How do people do that when death has rolled such a big stone on top of their dreams?  What do they know that gives them a hope that keeps them alive even after every one of their dreams is dead?

My senior year in high school Win Moore showed up for class one morning with a terrible scar all the way across his throat.  It looked as if someone had tried to cut it with a knife.  As it turned out, the night before, he had been at his girlfriend's house and stayed later than his parents allowed.  So, he was trying to make up time getting home by taking a shortcut through alleyways and backyards.  It was getting dark.  He was running with his head down and, sure enough, took a shortcut right under someone's clothesline.  Eventually, we either learn to follow our parents' advice to watch where we are going or we pay the price.

It seems to me that people with who live with the hope that only knowing how the stone will get rolled away can bring are people who are watching where they are going.  And, isn't that the resurrection challenge?  To watch where we are going?  "So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth . . .."  (Colossians 3:1-2)  This seems to be one of the biggest differences in people as I've observed.  People who aren't watching where they are going seem to constantly get clotheslined by things the scripture warns are "earthly:  fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed . . .."   (Colossians 3:5)

It can happen to the best of us.  None of us is above that kind of petty living.  If we don't, as our Father has warned, watch where we are going, we can find ourselves stumbling through dark alleyways getting cut down in our tracks by our own petty choices.   All immorality, no matter what form it takes, is always the cry of a hopeless heart.  A heart filled with hopelessness because it cannot see beyond what is stealing its life away to the only One who can give it back.  But, if we watch where we are going, if we look up, we will find ourselves even being able to stare death itself in the face with a smile on ours.  Because, looking up, we'll know.  We'll know what the two Marys knew that day they were wondering who would roll away the stone and looked up.

Now, it couldn't have meant to them in that moment what it means to us in this moment because we know something they wouldn't know for just a little while.  But, as they got close to the grave where they thought Jesus' body was and as they asked each other, "'who will roll away the stone for us?'" something happened.  The scripture says, "When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back."

You can't see that when you're looking down and walking in dark alleyways where only hopelessness reigns.  You can only see that when you look up.  Up and beyond the momentary pettiness and sin that so easily distracts.  But, when you look up you can see it, if you will.  The stone, the one that closed out the light and life for which you were created in the first place, has "already been rolled back."

And, that is what my friend, Jesse, knew, and what my friend who came to see me this week knew and what those among us for whom death has come closer already know.  Death comes.  In many forms.   Sometimes it comes too soon.  Sometimes it comes hard.   But, it always comes.  For all of us.  And, the weight of it rolls over us like a boulder closing out the light.  But, our gospel celebrates, "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and . . . he was buried, and . . . he was raised on the third day . . .."  (1 Corinthians 15:3-4)  Death has come but God, in Christ, has rolled back the stone that closed us in its tomb.

One of our folks attended a seminar on death and dying this past week.  It was full of instruction on the issues related to the end of life that eventually confront us all.  At one point in the seminar the participants were all asked to fill out their own death certificates.  They had to come up with a description of the time, place and manner of their own deaths.  It was rather sobering to listen to him describe what someone will eventually do for all of us.  But, it made wonder how I would script the words by which my life would be remembered if given the chance.  How would you?

In Jamestown, Virginia, I stumbled onto a tombstone that seemed to say that very thing.  Death had come in 1697.  Yet, long before there was even the possibility of computer memory chips or death certificates this one had left the only words by which he wanted to be remembered scrawled on the stone that sealed him in the grave.   "Here lies William Sherwood," it read, "a great sinner waiting for a glorious resurrection."

William Sherwood, whoever he was, went to his grave with absolute confidence that he would not stay there.  And, he went there looking up.  And, in his looking he saw what the two Marys saw, that someone had already rolled back the stone.  He knew who he was - a great sinner.  But, he knew his God, too.  There he lays, he said, a great sinner, absolutely confident that the Jesus who walked away from his grave would someday come and retrieve him from his.  A great sinner waiting on a glorious resurrection.  Aren't we all?