What does death mean for us? I don't mean our experience of bereavement and loss in the face of death, enormous as that is for us to cope with. I mean: what about your own death? The fact that you will die is the one certain thing about everybody's life. Reflecting on that fact is a traditional part of Christian life, like the memento mori of a decaying corpse in stone in Exeter Cathedral where I used to be, with the inscription: 'Look at this, because one day this will be you'.

What does our own death mean for us? For some of us, it's sad but hopeful at the same time. St Francis of Assisi sang: O thou most kind and gentle death. For me to live is Christ and to die is better, said St Paul to the Christians in Philippi. On this view, death is a friend and a gateway to life with God, even if dying is a painful and undignified process.

Or do you go with St Paul when he says to the Corinthians that death is the last enemy to be destroyed, and to the Romans that the wages of sin is death, with death opposed to life, and death being thoroughly an evil thing?

The first thing to say is that the world is made for life, and life is resilient and persistent. The urge to live is very strong: which is one of the things that has made life work in often difficult circumstances. Microbes can live in impossible places under the sea and in the middle of ice-caps. Although up to 99% of all species that have ever lived are extinct, there's still a lot of life around today.

And the second thing to note is that death is essential to that process of life. Death in the natural world is a form of recycling, making space for new things and new forms of life to emerge. If nothing died, then nothing new would be able to happen. Without leaves dying and falling there would be no soil and no growth in the spring.

And the same is true in human lives too. If no one died, there could be no babies – the world would become full up and unsustainable for human beings. Growing old and dying is part of the natural process that make life possible. Although dying young is a tragedy, dying old is a fulfilment; our modern achievement in developed countries of raising the average age of death to nearly 80 is historically amazing, but should be treated with caution. Our aim isn't to eradicate death, because it's part of the natural world, but to live life as well as we can while we have it. The Old Testament book Ecclesiastes is a meditation on how humans are like the animals, and how death levels us out, and how then we should live when we know we're going to die. An essential part of living well is knowing how to die well. In one sense the whole of life is an opportunity to learn how to let go, so that we're ready when our turn comes to die.

Nearly all of the human race has lived in a world where mortal sickness and violent death are a common part of life, always over your shoulder, and it may be literally today or tomorrow that your turn will come. We live our lives in the shadow of the valley of death.

And yet there's also hope. From a Christian perspective, death is the gateway to meeting with Christ, the ultimate new beginning – yes, as Andy was saying last week, with the element of judgement and accountability for how we have lived - but also knowing that the one judging us also loves us without limit, and longs for us to share eternal life with God.

But it's not as easy as that, is it? In order for life to succeed, the drive and desire for life is inbuilt in us and is very strong. We physically don't want to die; our bodies generally fight to live. It's hard to go through the process of dying.

And as well as physically fighting death, we do so emotionally and spiritually. We experience death as loss, as painful, as an undignified loss of control: and we try as hard as we can to overcome it, as modern medical advances have shown. We want to be immortal, not to die, not to let go of control over our life and ourselves; which is why people who desperately want to live are prepared to ignore or even kill other people to achieve it.

A doctor called Sherwin Nuland wrote a book 15 years ago – 'How we Die' – about the physical processes of dying. In it (p.258) he tried to explain why doctors often give up on patients who are beyond recovery. 'Of all the professions, medicine is the one most likely to attract people with high personal anxieties about dying. We [and he's talking about himself of course here] become doctors because our ability to cure gives us power over the death of which we're so afraid, and loss of that power poses such a threat that we must turn away from it, and therefore from the patient who personifies our weakness.'

In the Hebrew Bible, death basically means extinction. The shades of the dead are left in Sheol or Paradise, but with no relationship with God or one another. It's only later in the history of Israel that people came to understand that God loves each of us individually as well as together, in a way which outlasts even death. Before then, you'd only be remembered if you had descendants who remembered your name (hence all those long lists of names in the Bible!), or if you did something that went down in history.

And if you don't have a community to remember you, and you don't believe that God loves you, then you've got to do something that people won't forget - and building great monuments to make your mark on the world is much harder than killing a lot of people and being remembered for that. We remember Hitler or Stalin of course. And what about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? They're the teenagers who shot dead 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999, whose stated motivation was that “they would like to leave a lasting impression on the world with these acts of violence."

Power & control are closely linked with death, for doctors or for others. Using death to control others is something done especially by men, though women can do it too. Like men who kill their wives and/or children so no one else will have them, because they can't abide losing control over them. Or people who are pro-life and anti-abortion and so murder doctors in clinics. Or people who chant 'Death to America' because they feel powerless. Or suicide bombers and those who massacre the defenceless - people who might say that they are acting as God's agents of judge­ment, but who in fact act from entirely evil motives.

They do it because they want to be in control of their lives, because they don't believe that others deserve respect, and because they want to live for ever - either in the paradise with which they believe that God will reward them, for what are actually their evil deeds; or that they will live for ever in the memories of the people around them. And this is where death triumphs as an evil thing, grown out of sin: that death is the hatred of life, even my own, and that death is the outcome of pride which refuses to acknowledge anything other than me myself I.

Death is the ultimate affirmation of our powerless­ness. We can try like Howard Hughes to stave off death by wrapping ourselves in a plastic bubble; or we can book the time of our death in the Dignitas Clinic; or we can be a bringer of violent death to others: but it's all only an illusion of power. Real life, life that lasts for ever, comes with letting go of what we can control and trusting in the love of God which is greater than death.

What does our own death mean for us? Well, God created the world as a place for life – and we should thank God, and live life to the full. Let's embrace life; for others as well as ourselves – life and love are for sharing.

And as for living longer – why worry? It's quality and not quantity that count; it's friendship and love that matter. Jesus Christ our Lord lived for only thirty years or so; yet through him we can have a quality of life, eternal life, that outlasts death itself. As we get less able and lose our friends, as the world moves on and we don't, then perhaps we can come with St Francis to see death as a friend – we could do with a good long sleep!

As Minnie Haskins said: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied ‘ Go into the darkness and put your hand
Into the hand of God; that shall be to you better than light And safer than a known way!’
So I went forth and finding the Hand of God trod gladly Into the night.
And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day In the lone East.