are all going to die. Yet for various reasons we live in a culture that focuses on the present, on the unending “now,” not on the one thing that is more certain than taxation. Today death is not a popular subject for sermons: We expect to be healed, medically or miraculously. So when death arrives, as it inevitably does, it almost always seems too early. But considering how often the Bible looks at death squarely and demands that we reflect on the afterlife, such a stance is at best shortsighted,