I took some time at lunch today to watch the online feed of the memorial service for Tim Keller, who passed several weeks ago from cancer.

Keller, founder and lead pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, was a giant in evangelical circles, if nothing more for his constant Christocentric approach to church and community, and his heart to bring people to hear and to know the gospel message. Keller wrote a number of celebrated books that provoked thought, at least in me, about the nature of God and about the nature of His love for us seen through a Biblical lens. Keller was overwhelmed by the love he felt from God, and he wanted to share that with others around him.

The service was held in majestic St. Patricks Cathedral, and it was full. Among others, his wife and sons spoke about him- and for him, as Keller had actually authored the service in the last months of his life, as he underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer. In his time of decline, his spirit was still charged to minister, and to care for people around him.

It was a moving service, naturally. Any funeral should be, as it reminds me us of the centrality and the certainty of death. We’re all on that train, and we can’t get off of it. We all go to that station.

But that was a subpoint in the service. Keller’s ministry focused on the singular act by Jesus that turned death inside out, and stripped it of its terror.

That was the whole push of his life’s work. God’s love goes beyond the finality of death, and we are invited again to trust in His deliverance of what we are, of who we are, beyond it, to where Jesus invited us to come, resident with Him.

It is the whole cardinal premise of Christianity, and the aim of Scripture- to persuade us that God made us, God knows us, and that God also knows we need Him within us to see beyond the limits of life in this world.

I went to a doctor’s appointment this morning, hours before the service, with my mind less attuned to theological assertions. My body doesn’t act quite like it did when I was a 40 years-old, and it is certainly a distance from when I was 20, not far out of my teenage years. Things don’t work quite right in an area or two, according to normal biology. There is unknowing in some of the odd functionality, but with dysfunction, my mortality is also underscored.

These bodies were not meant to live as they are forever.

This reflection, united with musings on a handful of losses and near losses in lives close to mine, have cast a shadow over the last few weeks. Well, the last few months, really.

Such is a realization of later life, if it has not been grasped earlier on. Inevitability is always lurking down the road.

But so, too, does hope.

That is embedded in the gospel message, in redemption, which is at the heart of Christ’s gift given on the cross.

Where there is suffering, there too will be love.

Tim’s wife Kathy shared, among other things, a few verses from Psalms 34 which I heard and thought about for a few moments:

“I will extol the Lord at all times;
his praise will always be on my lips.
I will glory in the Lord;
let the afflicted hear and rejoice.
Glorify the Lord with me;
let us exalt his name together.”
– Psalm 34:1-3

David, displaced, disheartened, and harangued, is in flight from his crazed king, Saul, who wants to kill him- so he feigns craziness and seeks refuge in the courts of his traditional enemy, the Philistines.

He invokes a charge for his heart to yet praise the one who meets him in his place of pain and fear.

It’s an attitude, a choice, that David forwards about God. He will trust Him, and praise Him.

Death is ever present in our world, but we are wired (or desensitized) to keep it out of our peripheral vision until it visits us. And when it does, we try to make sense of the invisible monster that robs us of beloved beasts, loved ones and friends, and ultimately, ourselves. We are bruised and broken in the losses we are given, until we recall that we are not alone in our grief. He went before us to touch these moments with His spirit, with redemption, with recovery.

With hope.

Death becomes more real for most as they are granted passage into the later decades of life. There is an awareness of endings that dots our days, when places and presences and possessions and people that have been part of our life succumb to transition and translation. The familiar is gone, and we feel its absence.

But hope whispers to us that, in Him, all has been collected and stored, for visitation later, when He renews all things.

A comforting meditation in times of life when there is so much displacement, disappearance, disposal.

Keller’s service was encouraging today because, even in death, Keller continued to encourage those present and watching elsewhere that his message was unchanged.

God loves us, and He is always present for us, especially in our darkest of days.

To the believer, that is a key teaching of the Gospels: Jesus is Emmanuel, “God with us.”

Or, as Jesus said it in the Word, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age (Matthew 28:20).”

If we would, if we could, just believe and embrace that proposition.