A student died last night. That is all I know right now. I don’t know who he or she was, I don’t know if he or she was a freshman or a junior. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know if he or she was a Christian. I don’t know if we will see this student in the Resurrection. I don’t know if he or she saw it coming. 
Sometimes being a pastor of students is a little strange. Compared to the demographics in Christian churches throughout the country, especially Lutheran churches – we deal with less death at University Lutheran. Having a non-student community, we still deal with it. We deal with the death of members and friends. This is something that, while tragic, is also good for us. There are student-only ministries throughout FSU’s campus that don’t have to deal with the frailties of human life – the fragility of the infant who is brought forward to receive a blessing at communion, the fragility of the person whose needs cannot really be comprehended completely by someone who is 20-something, and finally, the fragility of life that informs us that we too, will die.
Throughout my time here, I have worked with several students for whom their own mortality came crashing down on them in a sudden wave of fear and insecurity. I have listened as these students have, with tears in their eyes, explained experiences in which it dawned on them that they are not immortal. I give thanks for those students, and for those albeit frightening revelations. I give thanks because to have that revelation is to understand life in life’s context. You could argue that outside of the wisdom of knowing God, that knowing your mortality is the greatest of human wisdoms. It is the wisdom of Ash Wednesday, of Good Friday, of the funeral service – “what is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable,” (2 Cor 15), “you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” (Gen 2), “we hold this treasure in jars of clay,” (2 Cor 4).
To ignore death is to ignore wisdom, to ignore death is to ignore the Cross and Resurrection. To ignore death is to ignore that our calling to bring the Gospel to students is not mere vainglory or window dressing – it is not something that we have the right to procrastinate as I have heard often “until they want to get married or have their first child or get their first job.” To ignore death is to complain that the “all of this churchy stuff just gets in the way of my life.” To ignore death is to ignore what should be driving our lives: the good news of a Resurrection that while assured for us, should never be assumed.
This is why Christ died and rose, because a student died last night. Pray for that student’s family, pray for yourself, and pray in thanksgiving, not assumption, that you will live forever in an eternal Resurrection won for you.