Celebrities and Mortality

The list of celebrities who have died this year is growing long.  February 18 Gene Hackman died in his New Mexico home.   April 1, Val Kilmer died.  August 7, astronaut James Lovell, commander of Apollo 13; September 16, Robert Redford died peacefully at his home in Utah. And October 11, Diane Keaton succumbed to pneumonia in Santa Monica.

 

Somehow we don’t think of celebrities as mortal.  Their images on the screen make them bigger than life:  Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, Little Bill in Unforgiven; Doc Holiday in Tombstone; Tom Hanks portrayal of Lovell in Apollo 13; the Sundance Kid, Roy Hobbs in The Natural; Louise Bryant in Reds, Nina Banks in Father of the Bride.Their cinema performances made them seen immortal.  But, they weren’t.    

 

The truth of Scripture appears stark.  “The days of our lives are but 70 years, or if by strength, 80, for soon they are gone and we fly away,” (Psalm 90).  “For the Lord God knows our estate that we are but dust.  For man is like the grass of the field that flourishes as a flower, and after the wind passes it is no more and its place remembers it no longer,”(Psalm 103).     

 

My grandchildren have no recognition or remembrance of some of the icons who shaped the world in my youth.  Paul Newman. (Did he have something to do with coffee?)  Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Ricky Nelson, Annette Funicello.  I’m not sure they even know who John Wayne was.  “… After the wind blows …”

 There is One who lived who remains. James Allen Francis captured his significance in a sermon in 1926: "He was born in an obscure village, a child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another obscure village where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty.  Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher.  He never had a family.  Or owned a home. He never set foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place he was born.  He never wrote a book or held an office.  He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. While he was still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him.  His friends deserted him.

“He was turned over to his enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves.  While he was dying his executioners gambled for the only piece of property he had, his coat. When he was dead, he was taken down and laid in a borrowed grave.  Nineteen centuries have come and gone and today he is still the central figure for much of the human race. All the armies that ever marched, All the navies that ever sailed and all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned put together
have not affect the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as this One Solitary Life.

 Job asked the question, “If a man die, shall he live again?”  After a long ordeal of sorrow, disappointment, doubt and despair he arrived at his answer, “Yet as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last, He will take His stand on the earth.  Even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I will see God, whom I, on my part, shall behold for myself, and whom my eyes will see, and not another,” (Job 19:25-27).