“Thrust into life…” — Sermon for Sunday, April 16, 2023

(This sermon was in response to John 20:19–31)

How do you define life? Does that sound like an easy exercise to you? Defining what life is, is kind of important. There are ramifications based on how it is defined.

Did you know that there are at least 123 definitions of life? 123. That’s amazing, isn’t it?

What does that tell you? That there’s no consensus and there has never been a consensus on what constitutes life. Part of this lack of consensus comes from the reality there are so many different ways to look at life.

There are the sciences — biology, chemistry, and physics and their many offshoots. You have a range of biological characteristics of life, of which you’ll find lists that range from 6 to 11 essential characteristics of life depending on who you ask, to systems theories, to other ideas that I don’t understand in the slightest.

Philosophy has been debating what life is for centuries, along with how to define such things as person and consciousness. These aren’t easy things when you really dig in because there are plenty of situations that don’t fit nice tidy definitions — and what do you do then with your working definition of these terms?

Life has been debated in legal circles as well — mostly from the standpoint that there needs to be a guideline for society of when it is legal to declare a human being dead — which sets in motion a whole set of legal and financial…