Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Today is All Saints’ Day. In a few minutes we will read the names of those who died this past year, that is November 1, 2008 to October 31, 2009. We will light a candle in their honor just as we gave them or their parents a candle when they were baptized and recited the words Jesus said from the Sermon on the Mount. “Let your light so shine that others may see your good works and give glory to your Father in Heaven”.
It is one of those sobering feast days of the church’s calendar. It is filled with joy, yet it is tinged with sadness. We will all ultimately be claimed by God and returned to him. We have to give up this life to do that. This life is all we know; we take the next life on faith.
The scriptures we read on this day remind us of the future God plans. Our creed’s last section ties it all together very neatly: I believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
All that is quite a mouthful isn’t it? What happens to us in this future God intends and in fact promises? When does this “afterlife” begin – when we die or when God resurrects us and all who have died to the new immortal life? Do we go to heaven? If so, where is heaven? Do I have a body in heaven that eats and drinks, dances and kisses? What about the new heaven and the new earth that we hear of in St. John’s Revelation, words we just read. Will the earth be transformed and made eternal?
The mind boggles at contemplating such weighty thoughts. Yet, inevitably we have to. It is my job as preacher to give you as coherent a picture as possible knowing full well that as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthian 13, “Now we know only in part, we see as in a mirror darkly. Then we shall know fully, even as we have been fully known”. These last words “even as we have been fully known” refer to the incarnation – God’s becoming one of us in Jesus.
At a funeral a dear friend and parishioner once asked me as we were walking away from the graveside. ”Tell me where my Daddy is now? I need to know. Help me understand”!
Well let’s take two phrases from the Apostles’ Creed. I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. As Luther would query in the Catechism, “What does this mean”?
Before we can answer that question, we have to talk a bit about eh Bible’s multiple understandings of space and time. Let’s start with space. The first thing we need to remember is that all space is pervaded by God and the consciousness of God. God is by definition divine and ubiquitous. God is everywhere at the same time. This is a very hard concept to truly grasp because we are limited beings. We exist in a concrete, tangible, seeable, touchable physical realm. Yet science teaches us that we live in an infinite, ever-expanding universe. The minute we try to describe the essence of this (which is of course, the essence of God) we lose its meaning. How can the universe be limitless and ever expanding at the same time? Even though we won’t understand this, the important thing to remember is that God is not off, away from us, in some distant heaven, or in some galaxy far, far away. God is right here, in our midst, in this room, in our closest thoughts.
This is very comforting. God, the all-powerful God, is right at hand, by our side. God is listening to our inmost thoughts. Because God is everywhere, heaven is somehow everywhere as well.
So much for space.. Let’s talk about time.
God is eternal. God’s existence and reality stretch back and forth in time. God lives in an eternal now. God enters time in Christ, so that the all powerful God of the universe may know how terrifying it is to live in a frame of reference that is surrounded by death. We are born, we live and have our being, and we die. Time ends for us. We end. We stop. It is a horrible reality. Fear of death and awareness of it affects almost every decision we make. Fear of death is the mother of all religion anthropologists say.
The intriguing thing about God and God’s love though is this. God is the consummate steward. God loves us because we are unique. We are God’s children, God’s creation. And like a mother who cannot hate what she has given birth to, God loves us even more powerfully. God just cannot let us go. God cannot just let us die and go off into oblivion, or the abyss of nothingness and non-being. God covets our company; and God wants us to know that a future Is planned for us. That is why Jesus is the first human being to be resurrected
Scripture calls Jesus the first-born of the dead. Jesus is the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep. Like the first tomato of summer or the first apple of the fall, the first fruit is simply a sign of the harvest that is soon to come.
Theologians talk about Jesus resurrection as proleptic. Proleptic means that what is to be, that is to say, what will happen in the future is made manifest in the present. All will be resurrected. Jesus is simply the first one.
We have many scripture passages which describe what will happen. 1st Corinthians 15 is the classic text. St. Paul talks about what is sown perishable must be raised imperishable. What is sown mortal must put on immortality. Each little “snippet” of scripture gives us more information. These snippets from a mosaic or a quilt, but they do not give us a wholly coherent, or a systematic presentation. What we get are visions or images. They are all from God and are certainly to be trusted, but they don’t constitute a map or model. We shouldn’t expect that.
If you recall the picture John 20 gives us the eleven disciples gathered behind locked doors in someone’s home, huddled in fear that the High Priests soldiers are going to come for them. Jesus miraculously comes and appears right in the middle of them. It is obvious that his new body, his resurrected body is vastly different from ours yet somehow in continuity with it. Everyone recognizes him. They can touch him. Yet he enters and leaves the room without using doors and windows. All is not explained. His new “imperishable”, “immortal” body can do things your can’t. He is a new creation. He is part of the new order of life that does not decay or decompose. He will not age because he belongs to the eternal world. He is outside of time as we all will be.
Our lesson from Revelation gives us another image of our world transformed – the new creation. Look at your bulletin. The “New Jerusalem” comes down out of heaven from God. She has been pre-fabricated in heaven – like a modular home – and is now to be presented to human beings as their eternal dwelling place. Notice St. John says that God will dwell with his people. In other words, we will see God face to face, and all the old enemies sin, death and the devil will be not only departed but gone.
The festival of All Saint’s serves as one reminder. We are so precious to God, life is so precious to God, that we are given an eternity to enjoy God and frolic and play in his love. That future can invest our present reality with hope and faith and a peace that passes all understanding
Happy All Saint’s Day.
No worries mate!!
Amen.
Pastor John