The Lutheran Hour

"You Don’t Know What You Have Till It’s Gone"

#93-31
Presented on The Lutheran Hour on April 5, 2026
Speaker: Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler
Copyright 2026 Lutheran Hour Ministries

Text: 1 Corinthians 15:26

Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen from the dead, Alleluia! Today is Easter. And that’s something a lot of Christians say at Easter: “Alleluia, Christ is risen,” which means: Jesus is alive. He’s not in the tomb anymore. And we celebrate because the Lord is alive from the dead.

And also, we celebrate, a little bit, because it’s not Lent any more, which means that if you gave up chocolate or coffee or red meat on Fridays, you don’t have to do that anymore. The fast is over! You’re free! You can savor those flavors again.

Now, maybe you’re not part of a Christian tradition that does that sort of thing, that observes Lent, with fasting or other spiritual disciplines. Or, I don’t know, maybe you’re not a Christian at all. Even still, I think you can get the basic idea behind giving something up for a time. I think the idea is this: you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. Sometimes, that’s how it is, we don’t appreciate what we have until we lose it.

So, for me, this Lent I gave up colors—not all color, just the color on my smartphone. My son showed me how you could do this. Apparently, there’s a setting on the phone called color filters, and you can go in and adjust it and turn everything black-and-white and shades of gray. And it seems like it would be a small thing, but let me tell you, you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. It really cuts into your dopamine hit. Without the colors, the phone stops feeling like stepping into a miniature Imax theater in surround sound. Feels more like doing your taxes.

And I think it helped me see my phone for what it is—it’s a tool, sort of a digital Swiss Army knife with a flashlight. It didn’t feel like a window into a new and better and more interesting world anymore. And it made the actual world around me and in front of me more interesting, more colorful.

In his novel, The Book Thief, Markus Zusak depicts Death as the narrator of the story. And Death tells us that as it goes about its work, it takes time to notice the colors—the colors that we humans tend to overlook. Humans, Death muses, humans only notice colors at the beginning and ending of the day. “But to me, it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment … A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them.”ⁱ

In the novel, Zusak depicts Death as tired—tired of this morbid job taking life, being the enemy of life, the destroyer of worlds. After all these years of death-dealing, Death can’t help but admire life. Death is haunted by life. And in a round-about way, Death unwittingly serves life.

Now how does that work? How does death serve life? Well, have you’ve ever had a brush with death, a close call? When I was 12, I was hiking with some friends in the mountains, in Colorado, and we found a cave, the entrance of what turned out to be a very large cave in the side of the mountain. And we went in to explore, but we took a wrong turn, several wrong turns, and got completely lost. And I actually thought we were going to die. I didn’t think we’d ever make it out of there. An hour or so later, we spill out of the mouth of this cave, rubbing our eyes in the daylight, and drinking in the colors around us. The colors never tasted so good. Those moments that followed were some of the most alive I’ve ever felt.

Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

And maybe that’s why, in Zusak’s novel, Death is so interested in life. Death drinks in all the colors. Death tells us, “It takes the edge off the stress—the billion or so flavors, none of them quite the same, and a sky to slowly suck on. It helps me cope, considering the length of time I’ve been performing this job.” But what really stresses Death out, what haunts it to no end, is not so much the job, but the people, the survivors, the humans left behind, “crumbling in the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair, and surprise.”ⁱⁱ

“How do they do it?” Death wonders. How do they carry on? How do they go on convincing themselves that life is worth it? Death can’t answer these questions, so it tells stories about us, to cope.

And we return the favor, don’t we? We tell stories about death. There are three stories about death I remember hearing, growing up: One of these stories re-defined death, another normalized it, and a third tried to cheat it.

The story I heard that tried to redefine death came from the original Star Wars movie. In the movie, one of the main characters, an old soldier named Obi-Wan Kenobi, is fighting against the evil general of the Dark Side, Darth Vader. You learned along the way that Darth Vader, before he turned bad, had been a student of Obi-Wan. But now, years later, Obi-Wan is an old man. And Darth is clearly the stronger fighter. And he knows he’s got Obi-Wan beat.

But Obi-Wan says something as they’re dueling. He says something surprising. He tells him, “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” And that’s exactly what happens. In the movie Darth Vader runs him through with his saber, but Obi-Wan doesn’t so much as die but disappears. He becomes a sort-of omnipresent ghost that can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. So, death, we learn, wasn’t the end for him, but a new beginning. He had changed the definition of death.

So there, I had a story that redefined death, but then another one that normalized it. This story came to me from my biology textbooks, in school. This story said that death was natural—a necessary part of life, part of the process of evolution. It’s the fate of all living things to die, to decompose, to be recycled so that the next life forms can carry on without us. Here, I was told, death is just a normal part of life. It always has been, always will be. Just accept it.

A third story I heard tried to defy death. I heard that there were these companies that can make arrangements for you to be cryogenically frozen after you die, with the promise that one day you’ll be revived when medical technology is advanced enough to delay death indefinitely.

I also saw this story satirized once in an episode of The Simpsons. The scene flashes forward hundreds of years into the future, and there’s old Mr. Montgomery Burns, the token rich guy in the show, not just run-of-the-mill rich but filthy rich. And there he is, old Mr. Burns, centuries in the future, and he’s got his head preserved in a plexiglass bubble, attached to a robot body, prancing around a post-apocalyptic hellscape, still cheating death. And some people are betting on that story for themselves. They want to be preserved and revived when we supposedly will have the technology to delay death indefinitely.

So, there—three possible windows to the world in the form of three stories about death—one that redefines it, another that accepts it, and a third that wants to cheat it. So, what about you? What stories help you cope with death? What helps you believe that life is still worth living, in the face of death?

For me and my community, it is these eye-witness accounts of Jesus Christ we revisit every Easter: how He came, claiming to be the Messiah, the Son of God, saying and doing things that only the Creator of life can do: healing people, forgiving their sins, putting color back in the faces of former corpses. But this upset the keepers of the sacred stories. So they had Him killed. They put Him to death. They crucified Him. And when He was gone, they thought they knew what they had had: just another guy with some story.

But then He came back, alive again. Not cryogenically revived like bionic Monty Burns, but fully and truly alive again, alive in His same Middle Eastern, sun-browned body with discolored scars on His hands and feet and side to prove it. He’s the same Jesus, but different now, out of death’s reach, off of death’s list, expunged from death’s records. Death didn’t have any more claim on Him anymore.

Jesus hadn’t cheated death. He had started a chain reaction to destroy it. And He made a promise to His followers, to me, to you. He promised that if you go with Him, if you trust Him, He will raise you from the dead, just as God, His Father, raised Him from the dead.

Now it’s going to take some time for this account to sink in, to wash away those other stories about death. We’ve become accustomed to accommodating ourselves to death on our town terms, trying to redefine it, normalize it, cheat it, or just scroll on our phones to put it out of our thoughts. Sometimes we try to fit the account of Jesus’ death and resurrection into our old stories. This is what some of the earliest Christians did, 2,000 years ago. We hear about it in a letter written to them, the First Letter to the Corinthian Christians, a letter written by a first-generation Christian preacher name Paul.

Paul had heard that some of them had been saying there is no resurrection of the dead. Apparently, they believed that Jesus had risen from the dead, but they didn’t think this had anything to do with their eventual death, other than that they got to go to heaven when they died, because God accepted Jesus’ sacrifice for their sins. But they didn’t see any connection between what had happened with Jesus and what’s going to happen with them. So, Paul goes over it with them once more in 1 Corinthians 15. It’s a great chapter. You should go, read the whole thing. In the middle of that chapter, Paul has this important image. He says that Jesus is the “firstfruits” of those who have died.

Firstfruits—it’s an agricultural term. A vineyard owner, for example, might bring a small bit of an early crop of grapes from his field to show a prospective buyer what the rest of the harvest is going to look like. Those were the firstfruits—like a display piece in a department store. The firstfruits were representative of the rest of the inventory in the back, the full harvest yet to come. Paul says that’s what Jesus is for us. Just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so also you and I, we who belong to Him, we will be raised when He returns to restore all things. And until then, Jesus will continue to rule and reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. And the last enemy to be destroyed is death (see 1 Corinthians 15:26).

Step back and think about this a bit with me. See, the Bible gives us an apparently contradictory, paradoxical view of death, from our perspective. On the one hand, death is the enemy of life. On the other hand, death has become the servant of life. First, death is an enemy—and enemy that will be destroyed, swallowed up, the Bible tells us. (See Isaiah 25:7, 8.) Death is not natural. It’s not a part of life; it’s the opposite of life. Death wasn’t part of God’s good original design for His creation. It’s not a portal into the spirit world. It’s not the next great adventure. It’s not a medical problem that we can delay indefinitely. Death is the wages of sin. Death is the result of breaking faith with God. Death is God’s judgment upon us.

Death is an enemy, but it’s not a free agent. Death doesn’t come and go as it pleases. Death is a servant. It’s part of what makes the story of the Passover and the Exodus so haunting. When death—the destroyer—comes to take the lives of the firstborn in Egypt, it’s not a rogue agent that does it, it’s God’s angel. God’s servant deals out death. Death is God’s servant, and in Jesus, God makes death become the servant of life. You know what that’s like, if you’ve ever had a brush with death, a close encounter with death. If you’ve ever lost a loved one to death, seeing death’s thankless, colorless work up close can make you cherish life, can make you long for life all the more. Maybe it’s part of our fallen nature that we don’t know what we have until it’s gone. But with Jesus, you have to reverse it, because you won’t know who He is for you, you won’t know what you have in Him until everything else is gone.

Death serves you, only when it turns you back to the One who is the Author of Life. Death reminds you that you’re not a free agent. You can’t do as you please. Life doesn’t work like that. Life is a gift from God. And without God in your life, the gift is empty: a blank, windowless, colorless prison cell locked from the inside. Life without God is hell. And God wants to save you from that. And so God, for a time, has sent death to do its work, taking the things and the people that you love, eventually taking everything. And there, in that empty, windowless, colorless space, there you’ll see Jesus, and with Him hidden, everything—all the people and all the places and all the experiences you loved. It’s all from Him, and through Him, and in Him. When the end comes, when Jesus returns and death is destroyed and the dead are raised with bodies just like Jesus, then we’ll taste and see in full color that it all belongs to Him. And it all belongs to us, because we belong to Him, and Jesus belongs to God. And God will be all in all, everything for everyone.

This year during Lent, we lost a friend. Dr. Dan Paavola was his name. If you’re a regular listener to the program you might recognize his name. Dan had been a frequent guest speaker and conversation partner with us for the last few years. Dan died about a month ago from injuries he sustained in a motorcycle accident. Dan loved riding motorcycles. He had ridden just about every day for years. The day of the accident, Dan was riding along a highway near his house. He had the right-of-way. But the driver in the other vehicle involved didn’t see Dan, pulled out in front of him, and there was no time to do anything. Dan was pronounced dead on March 2, 2026.

But the truth is, the pronouncement had come years ago, when Dan was baptized into Jesus. That was the day that God gave everything that belonged to Dan over to death, but held onto Dan himself, because Dan belongs to Jesus, and death has lost its hold on him. And in Baptism, God holds out the same promise for you.

My friend Dan was a writer of books. He is gone from this mortal life, but I thank God that I can still read his words, and see how he saw the world in full color through the window of faith in Jesus. Dan told lots of stories in his books. He wrote about the red canoe they rowed up his street when his home and neighborhood were flooded with muddy brown water back in 1997, and how this event helped him appreciate the blessed disaster of God’s grace that floods every corner of our lives.ⁱⁱⁱ

Dan described with his words the bruised, burnt sienna bananas his mom used to bake into bread the color of chocolate, and also the God who brings beauty out of ashes, and life out of death.^iv Dan wrote about it—the rusty blue Model T Ford he and his dad rescued and worked on in his dad’s golden years, and also the evergreen work of God with us.^v

My friend Dan is still helping me see these colors all around. And I thank God for him. Even though Lent is over, I think I’ll leave my phone black and white for a while, and just let Jesus be my window.

Would you pray with me? Lord Jesus, by Your resurrection from the dead You have torn the covering that is cast over all people and one day You will return and swallow up death forever. Open our eyes by Your Spirit so we can catch a glimpse of the colors already breaking through. Because You live and You reign with the Father and the same Spirit, One God, now and forever. Alleluia! Amen.

i Markus Zusak, The Book Thief, New York: Knopf (2005), 4.
ii Ibid., 5.
iii Daniel Paavola, Our Way Home: A Journey Through the Lord’s Prayer, St Louis: CPH (2017), 105.
iv Daniel Paavola, Patience and Perfection: Finding Peace in God’s Plan for You, St Louis: CPH (2018), 157.
v Ibid., 28.

Reflections for April 5, 2026
Title: You Don’t Know What You Have Till It’s Gone

No reflection segment this week.

Music Selections for this program:

“A Mighty Fortress” arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“Crucifer” by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands” arr. Henry Gerike. Used by permission.
“Awake, My Heart, with Gladness” by Paul Gerhardt & Johann Crüger, arr. Robert Buckley Farlee. From Hymns for All Saints: Lent, Easter, Pentecost (© 2006 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.
“Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.