You may have noticed there is a lot about rivers in the service. A river is featured prominently in both our readings for today. One is an actual river in the ancient city of Philippi, where Paul went to pray, and where he met Lydia. The other river is from John the Divine’s vision of the New Jerusalem, where a river runs through the heavenly city. Continue reading
Our two scripture readings today both speak about crying. The first reading speaks to the church on earth today, what I was taught as a child to call the church militant, and the second reading speaks to the church in heaven, what I was taught to call the church triumphant. Perhaps those terms are too martial for us today, but by whatever names it is the distinction between the church here and the church hereafter.
In the first reading Paul admonishes the Roman Christians on how to be the church now, and one of the things he tells them they need to do is to “rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep.”
The second reading is from the Revelation of St John the Divine. I have a soft spot for the writings of St John the Divine, as I was baptized at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, which is the world’s largest gothic cathedral (so I come by my high church inclinations honestly.)
In this beautiful passage from Revelation, St. John describes the holy city, the New Jerusalem at the end of time and history. He says then there will be no more crying there because God will “wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
So in engaging these two texts about the here and the hereafter, I started thinking about the function of crying in our lives, and especially in the church. I did a little research on crying, and discovered that we don’t know all that much about it. There are several competing theories about why humans cry, including those theories of evolutionary biologists who think it may have some social function. Continue reading
“Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’”—Genesis 28: 16
In Jacob’s dream he sees a stairway to heaven with angels ascending and descending it. He named the place Bethel, “the place of God.” The ancient Celts called such spots “thin places,” where the distance between heaven and earth collapses.
Thin places can be famous holy spots such as the Isle of Iona or the Cathedral de Notre Dame, but more often than not they are ordinary places, such as Bethel, or a dusty road on the way to Damascus.
You can search for thin places, but, as with Jacob, it is more likely that they will find you.
Such unexpected encounters with the Holy seem to happen in times of crisis: Jacob running away from home, Saul on his way to persecute the church.
Is it the place itself that allows for these glimpses of the advent of God? Or is it some special state of mind and heart? Either way there are times and places when the ordinarily reliable distinction between heaven and earth gets erased.
Even if we see no burning bush or ladder to heaven, nor hear the voice of Jesus, we are no less certain that we have come upon a thin place, and can say, as Jacob did, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”
Prayer: Keep us alive and alert, O God, in all places and times, that we may not miss the moments of your visitation.
(This is my daily devotional for today from “Wonder,” the United Church of Christ’s 2015 Advent Devotional booklet. Photo meme by Pilgrim Press)
I have been asked to speak about “Christian teachings about the after-life.” This is final installment in a series of helpful presentations on preparing for death. There have been presentations on wills and bequests, end of life care, grieving and the like. And once again Max (Stackhouse) has asked me to bat clean-up and talk about theology.
One of my friends in the church said to me last week, “Oh, your talk is theology, so it won’t be practical.” She was kidding, I think, but let me respond to her remark by suggesting that a theology about death and what comes after it may be the most practical aspect of all for the Christian preparing for death. It is a shame how theology has come to have a bad name, even in the church.
Because theology is not some specialty for professional theologians, but simply the way we talk about God. That is what theology means, the logos of the theos, the word about God. And everybody has a theology, at least implicitly, so the more we can make it examined and explicit the more chance we will get it better rather than worse.
So right off the bat let me suggest a better title for what I hope to do here. I much prefer the phrase “life after death” to the term “afterlife,” because I think the former rightly expresses the Christian belief in the reality of death, while the latter can obscure the boundary between death and whatever comes after it.
I want to explore with you four ideas or concepts: 1. The reality of death, 2. Immortality of the soul, 3. Resurrection of the body, and 4. Eternal Life. Finally, I want to summarize the features of an adequate Christian theology of life after death, and the promises of the Gospel that are our hope in the face of death.
1.The Reality of Death
The first concept to ponder is the reality of death. Some of the earliest thinking about death in the Bible is about its not only ending one’s natural life, but also severing our relationship with God. For Israel human purpose was to praise God, and death put an end to it. This relational view was visualized in spatial terms, so that places like Sheol and “the Pit” were places far from God.
Christianity inherited this relational view of life with God, and sees death as its cessation and the opposite of the fullness of life that God intends for us. So unlike some other religions that view death as an illusion or an escape, for Christians, death is real, as are the sense of loss and grief that accompany death, which are also real and nothing to ashamed of or denied. I have said at countless funerals: “There is nothing unchristian about grief; Jesus himself cried at the grave of his friend Lazarus.”
Moreover, Jesus himself died, and his own death provides a template for thinking about this. The creeds say quite simply, “He died and was buried.”
So accepting the reality of death is an important first step in thinking about it properly as Christians. In my nearly forty years of ministry I sometimes counseled people who wanted to deny or blunt this reality. People often asked for much-loved sentimental poems to be read at the funeral. I would gently suggest something more appropriate, but I was pastorally sensitive enough to allow their selection to be read if they insisted, knowing that I would get up and say something quite contradictory in my homily.
Let me give you some examples of poems that deny or minimize the reality of death, and I apologize in advance if these are your favorites.
Here’s a line from A. L. Frinks’ the Rose Beyond the Wall:
“Shall claim of death cause us to grieve
And make our courage faint and fall?
Nay! Let us faith and hope receive–
The rose still grows beyond the wall,”
Another and even better known poem about death is James Whitcomb Riley’s Consolatio:
“I cannot say, and will not say
that he is dead. He is just away.
With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand,
he has wandered into an unknown land.”
“We do not sorrow as those who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13), but we do sorrow. So while as Christians we have much more to say than death is real, it is where we must start, reminding ourselves that Jesus, in his human nature, really did die, as all human beings do.
To make this point I once began an Easter sermon years ago by saying that “On Good Friday Jesus was as dead as a doornail.” I wasn’t trying to be shocking, but I was surprised by how many people took offense to this statement.
I know something of death. Both my parents died too young, I have worked in a funeral home, been an EMT, and a minister for nearly four decades. I have been present at many deaths, and each time I have been struck by how clear the line is between the living and the dead. And yet everything I know about death is on this side of it, as it is for us all. But one thing I do know about death: it is real.
So if the first theme is the reality of death, how shall we properly think and talk about what comes after?
2. Immortality of the Soul.
One very prevalent idea of life after death is immortality of the soul. I would like to explore this popular idea with you, and show you why it is an inadequate view for Christians, admitting that in my early years it was my own view.
Let me share something about that with you. My own theology of death and what comes after it was shaped, at least in part, by my childhood bedtime prayer, a somewhat terrifying one from the New England Primer:
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but in my child’s imagination I had adopted a somewhat Platonic dualism about the human person, separating body and soul into the perishable and imperishable.
My own children, at the insistence of my wife, had a more sanitized version of that prayer that didn’t get them pondering sudden death in the nighttime. Whether they are better off for this is open for discussion. But in my own early thought-processes I figured that if such a sad event as my childhood death did take place, it would only be my physical body, and this invisible spiritual thing “the soul” would go swiftly to God. This is the essence of the idea of immortality of the soul.
I was taken aback to be told that this view, while widely held, was not particularly Christian. I learned in seminary that the Hebrew word translated as “soul,” nephesh, more rightly means “self,” in other words, the whole person. Harrell Beck, my wonderful Old Testament professor, liked to say that your fingernails are as much a part of your soul as any other part, which is to say human selves are embodied. Or as I like to think of it: we don’t have a body so much as we are a body.
It is from the Greeks, and especially from Plato, that we get the notion of a disembodied soul housed in a physical body, an idea that still clings to many Christian ideas about an afterlife.
These ideas were ambient in the ancient Near East and in the Hellenistic world in which the New Testament was written, and they lived in uneasy tension with the more holistic Hebraic views of personhood. We even get a whiff of Greek dualism in the New Testament, such as in First Corinthians, one of the undisputed letters of Paul. He writes in 1 Corinthians 5:1:
For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
So if the disembodied immortal soul flying away from the perishable body is not the Christian theology of life after death, how are we to think about it?
3. The Resurrection of the Dead
Resurrection of the dead is the cardinal Christian idea of life after death. It is rooted in the resurrection of Jesus, which pervades all New Testament thinking. In Jesus’ resurrection God has vindicated the humiliated and crucified Jesus, and begun the eschatological process of the salvation of humanity and the world, a process to be completed at the end of history, when Christ comes in glory to judge the living and the dead.
This distinguishes Christian theology from other views that see life after death as something intrinsic to the human person. Resurrection of the dead, on the other hand, is about the discontinuity between life and life after death. The rupture of death is overcome only from God’s side by God’s action. So resurrection of the dead is not resuscitation, but a new creation analogous to the first creation. It is not resurrection of the flesh, but resurrection of the body, a new kind of life that we can only guess at. When Paul speculated on what kind of body we would have in the new life he employed the oxymoron “spiritual body” to refer to what form are we raised.
There are clues to this mystery in the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. After Jesus is raised he appears to the disciples in bodily form; he is the same, but also transfigured in some way. The accounts contain mysteries: sometimes he is recognized, but other times he is not, as in the road to Emmaus story, when the disciples only know him when he breaks bread. Yet he still bears the marks of the Roman nails in his hands and feet.
However we want to take these narratives they point to the consistent conclusion that the new life postmortem is embodied life. The Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead is a theological interpretation based on the death and raising of Jesus. The expectation of a resurrected body also emphasizes the continuity of personality and the integrity of personhood. I said that Christian views stress discontinuity between life and life after death, but here we see continuity of personality after death. So we have both discontinuity and continuity as the person really dies, but in the new life is the same person as before death, although changed. So it is not some spiritual part of you that lives the new kind of life; it is you, embodied and recognizable to God as you. This contrasts to various views of a disembodied postmortem existence, such as immortality of the soul and reincarnation.
It is important to remind ourselves that, while we are not surprised by the claim of Jesus’ resurrection and have difficulty with the idea of a general resurrection, for the people at the time of Jesus death it was just the opposite. A general resurrection vindicating Israel involving a Davidic messiah or the Son of Man was part of the general religious imagination. The resurrection of an individual however was not, which is why the raising of Jesus was understood as the beginning of the eschaton, the final reckoning, restoration and vindication of God and his faithful. We hear this in the language of Jesus being the first-fruits and the forerunner.
The raising of Jesus then is the primary theological template by which all things are measured, including death and life after death. Consistently in the New Testament death is viewed through the lens of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In 75 places in the New Testament the principle Greek adjective that means “dead,” nekros, is the object of either egeiro “to awaken” or anastasis, “to raise.
This raising from the dead makes Christianity an Easter faith, and so the Christian sees death in Easter light. Because Jesus is raised we too will be raised with him. This is a far different idea than immortality of the soul. Let us take a few moments to contrast them.
The great scholar Oscar Cullmann wrote an important book in 1956 called Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead in which he starkly contrasted these two views. Some of his critics have complained that he contrasted them too sharply. They may be right, but the book remains an important one for understanding the predominant Christian views.
Cullmann’s thesis is, and I quote, “The widely accepted idea of ‘The immortality of the soul’ is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity. The concept of death and resurrection is anchored in the Christ-event, and hence is incompatible with the Greek belief in immortality.”
Cullmann deftly illustrates his point by looking at the death of Socrates in contrast to the death of Jesus. He writes:
The death of Socrates (as described by Plato) is a beautiful death. Nothing is seen here of death’s terror. Socrates cannot fear death, since indeed it sets us free from the body. Whoever fears death proves that he loves the world of the body, that he is thoroughly entangled in the world of sense. Death is the soul’s great friend. So he teaches; and so, in wonderful harmony with his teaching, he dies — this man who embodied the Greek world in its noblest form.
Cullmann then turns to the death of Jesus:
In Gethsemane He knows that death stands before Him, just as Socrates expected death on his last day. The Synoptic Evangelists furnish us, by and large, with a unanimous report. Jesus begins ‘to tremble and be distressed’, writes Mark (14:33). ‘My soul is troubled, even to death.’ . . .
In Luke 12:50 it is completely impossible to explain away the ‘distress’ in the face of death, and also in view of the fact that Jesus is abandoned by God on the Cross [Mark 15:34], it is not possible to explain the Gethsemane scene except through this distress at the prospect of being abandoned by God, an abandonment which will be the work of Death, God’s great enemy.)Jesus is afraid, though not as a coward would be of the men who will kill Him, still less of the pain and grief which precede death. He is afraid in the face of death itself. Death for Him is not something divine : it is something dreadful. . . .
Here (in Jesus’ death) is nothing of the composure of Socrates, who met death peacefully as a friend. To be sure, Jesus already knows the task which has been given Him: to suffer death; and He has already spoken the words: ‘I have a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how distressed (or afraid) I am until it is accomplished’ (Luke 19:50). Now, when God’s enemy stands before Him, He cries to God, whose omnipotence He knows: ‘All things are possible with thee; let this cup pass from me’ (Mark 14:36). And when He concludes, ‘Yet not as I will, but as thou wilt’, this does not mean that at the last He, like Socrates, regards death as the friend, the liberator. No, He means only this: If this greatest of all terrors, death, must befall Me according to Thy will, then I submit to this horror. Jesus knows that in itself, because death is the enemy of God, to die means to be utterly forsaken. Therefore He cries to God; in face of this enemy of God He does not want to be alone. He wants to remain as closely tied to God as He has been throughout His whole earthly life. For whoever is in the hands of death is no longer in the hands of God, but in the hands of God’s enemy. (Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead)
Here Cullmann has eloquently expressed the New Testament view of death as the enemy of God. For another example we can turn to Paul, who calls death “the last enemy.” Because death in the New Testament is not merely the end of biological life, it is also a power that insinuates itself into our living of these days. I’ll say more about this now as we turn to the idea of eternal life.
4. Eternal Life.
The final concept I want to explore is eternal life. One of the problems we have as moderns in understanding the world of the New Testament is its conception of time. There is a persistent eschatology that sees events both in the present and the future. Theologians refer to this as “the already and the not yet.”
Advent is a good time to talk about this, for while we have too often boiled Advent down to merely preparing for celebrating the birth of Christ, it is also a season of anticipating Christ’s second coming.
We see this in the memorial acclamations of many Christian liturgies: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. ”
Eternal life is one of those concepts that sits in an eschatological frame, or to put it another way, has an “already but not yet” quality about it. In early Christian preaching Jesus is said to offer eternal life to his followers, not just post-mortem, but now before death. In John 5:24, for example, Jesus says. “The one who hears my word . . . has eternal life: he does not come unto judgment, but has passed from death to life.”
But this realized aspect of eternal life does not take away from the reality of death, and the promise is that eternal life in its fullness lies on the other side of the resurrection.
The words said at many graveside committal services speak of “the resurrection to eternal life.” For example, this one from the Book of Common Prayer:
“In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life
through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty
God our brother or sister N.; and we commit his or her body to the ground;
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Notice the reality of death here expressed in the ashes and dust.
As I mentioned earlier, death in the New Testament is more than the final cessation of biological life, but also a power that can insinuate itself into our living. In some sense the realized eternal life in Christ is the opposite of the power of death, which Christ defeated by his cross and resurrection.
And eternal life is not an individualistic state. Eternal life is life with Christ and in Christ and by extension a life in community, in the church, which is his body. Many contemporary speculations about life after death are very individualistic, but the Christian hope is a corporate and communal hope, the hope to join the communion of saints.
There is a wonderful sermon by Jonathan Edwards, the second pastor of this church, on 1 Corinthians 13: 8-10, called Heaven is a World of Love in which Edwards explores the metaphor of the communion of saints as a heavenly choir.
How many of you know it? (No hands) I wish it were better known because it is a better example of the essential Edwards than the terrifying Enfield sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which everybody seems to know.
In Heaven is a World of Love Edwards begins by beautifully describing heaven and all its social arrangements, and in so doing puts forth a protest against the social arrangements that we know so well on earth; for in Edward’s heaven there is no pride or jealously, there is decency and wisdom, and an equal prosperity among all. He says, “Love (poured out from God) resides and reigns in every heart there.” And then he says: “Every saint there is as a note in a concert of music which sweetly harmonizes with every other note, and all together employed wholly in praising God.” So life after death is life in community.
5. What then can we say about life after death?
Having said all this, and leaving much more out in my brief time today, what can the Christian cling to in the theologies of life after death? I’ll sum up my main points:
The basis for all this is, of course, faith in the God we know here and now, the God revealed in Jesus Christ. In Don Hammond’s (the outgoing interim pastor) graceful ministry among us he has said again and again in a variety of ways something like this, “Whoever you are, whatever you have done, know that you are truly and forever loved.”
The Christian hope for this life and the next is rooted in this Gospel truth about the love of God, that God’s grace is greater than our sin, that God’s love is stronger than anything else in the world, even death, the last enemy, which God defeated on the cross.
There are numerous eloquent witnesses to this love in the New Testament, but none is better than this by the Apostle Paul in Romans 8 and I will close with it:
If God is for us, who is against us? 32 He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? 33 Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. 35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.
I delivered this paper at the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, MA on December 9, 2012, the Second Sunday of Advent.
There are a lot of us here tonight: organists, choristers and choir members, family of the singers, parishioners, visitors. We make a grand congregation! But as impressive as we are, there is another important group involved with us in our worship that we shouldn’t overlook. The church from its beginning has pictured its life and mission, and especially its worship, as taking place in the unseen but very real presence of our ancestors in the faith. Our liturgies nod to it. We pray phrases such as “with the church on earth and the saints in heaven” or “ with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.”
So how might we picture the presence of the communion of saints with us? “We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses . . .” says the writer of Hebrews. The image is drawn from the stadium where the athletic games were held. The cloud of witnesses is the huge throng of spectators cheering on the competitors, who are admonished to “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely” just as a bicycle racer will try to have the lightest materials possible. This one is a foot race, though, and here Jesus is pictured as the lead runner, the pacesetter, “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”
“We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. . .” In 1980, when I was a number of years younger and many pounds lighter, I ran in my one and only marathon road race, the Paul Bunyan Marathon in Bangor, Maine.This 26-mile race began at the Paul Bunyan statue in Bangor and meandered through adjoining towns until it ended on the oval of the football stadium at the University of Maine in Orono. I will never forget the ending of that race.
You have heard about the “loneliness of the long distance runner.” There’s truth in that phrase, for even when you are physically prepared for these long races there is a mental and emotional side that is quite daunting. The first half of my race was fun and at about mile ten or twelve I was euphoric, but around mile twenty I began to run out of gas and I had to struggle to keep on running. A solitary debate began in my mind:“Can I finish?” “Should I quit?” “Will this cramp go away, this ache subside, this tiredness abate?” By the time I hit that oval track in the stadium at Orono I was just glad to be finishing. And then a strange thing happened. I was pulled out of my reverie by the sound of cheering, and, since I knew that my wife and her parents were the only ones present at the race who knew me, I wondered who the cheering was for.I looked ahead and saw that there was no one else on the track. What’s more, many of the cheers were naming me by name, “Way to go, Rick!”“You can do it, Rick!” which puzzled me still more.
What it was, of course, was the cheering of the other runners who had finished ahead of me. With my race time of three hours and forty–seven minutes there were scores of other runners ahead of me and there were many other spectators and they all had a program sheet with the names and numbers of the runners and I had my number pinned to my shirt. Those cheers were wonderful for my morale, and I straightened my shoulders a bit and quickened my step and put on a little burst of speed for that last lap.
I carry that image in my mind as the very image that the writer of Hebrews wants to evoke here. The communion of saints are the ones who have finished the race before us. They are in the stadium seats watching us, they have finished the course, and now “from their labors rest.” We in the church militant are engaged in the same task as they were and they cheer us on, encourage us, support us, and call us by name. They are the great cloud of witnesses.
The word “witness” has a nice double meaning. It can mean merely spectators, which carries through the athletic metaphor of the passage. But witnesses here are more than passive spectators. They are those who bear witness to the truth they have known. Keep in mind that the Greek word we have translated as “witness” is martyr. During the early generations of the church so many witnesses sacrificed their lives for their faith that in time the word “martyr” took on that additional meaning.
So these witness who surround us are not idle spectators. Do any of you remember the comedian Flip Wilson of “The Church of What’s Happening Now!”? He once said, “I’m a Jehovah’s Bystander.They asked me to be a Witness, but I didn’t want to get involved.” So the cloud of witnesses not only supports us by their presence, they bear witness to the truth of God they have known.
This is such an important way to think about the church. In this century we have been learning to think of the church ecumenically; to consider the breadth of the church across denominational lines and national boundaries. But how quickly we forget the length of the church, its trans–temporal reality across the generations.That is where the role of tradition comes to play in the church, the place where the communion of saints gets their say. As Chesterton put it, “Tradition is only democracy extended through time.” Jaroslav Pelikan’s famous epigram rightly distinguishes between, tradition, “the living faith of the dead,” and “traditionalism, the dead faith of the living.” Too often, traditionalism has given tradition a bad name.
But a church that forgets what the saints have learned from generation to generation will hardly be equipped to be the church in its own generation.So the church rightly remembers the communion of saints, and even more than that, claims that in Christ, we share with them in the divine life.
Let me change the metaphor so that we might imagine the communion of saints as a choir;a large choir, like one of those Welsh men’s choirs made up of a thousand voices. When I was in high school our choir would go to county–wide and state–wide choral events with thousands of voices.Do they do that any more?
So let us imagine that as we sing tonight we sing together along with the voices of the great cloud of witnesses. Let us take quite seriously the claim of our various liturgies that when we sing we join our voices “with all the faithful in every time and place.”
There is a wonderful sermon by Jonathan Edwards on 1 Corinthians 13: 8-10, called Heaven is a World of Love in which Edwards explores the metaphor of the communion of saints as a heavenly choir. First he beautifully describes heaven and all its social arrangements, and in so doing puts forth a protest against the social arrangements that we know so well on earth, for in Edward’s heaven there is no pride or jealously, there is decency and wisdom, and an equal prosperity among all. He says that “love (poured out from God) resides and reigns in every heart there.” And then he says: “Every saint there is as a note in a concert of music which sweetly harmonizes with every other note, and all together employed wholly in praising God.”
Heaven is a world of love, and here below the church with all its imperfections witnesses by word and deed to the truth of that love. “We feebly struggle, they in glory shine.” So we are not alone. We carry out the mission and work of the church by sharing in the very life of God, and we are surrounded as well by so great a cloud of witnesses who cheer us on.
When I was a small boy I thought that God dwelled somewhere above the chancel of my local church, not exclusively, but especially there. And as I came to hear about the communion of saints I pictured them surrounding God, as one might see in medieval paintings, a big crowd of folks in white robes. Most of the people I had known in my short life were still living, so the crowd was for the most part an abstraction. My father’s parents, who had died before I was born were there, I was sure, and the little boy from my Sunday School class who had been run over by a car when his sled went into the road.Kim was his name.Kim was there, I knew.
The Puritans had a saying that, “The commonwealth of heaven becomes more dear with each loss below.” As I have grown older and have known many more people who have died I have returned to something very like that childhood picture I thought I had outgrown. I invite you to do so as well. In the eye of your imagination you will no doubt picture different saints than I picture. You will picture people you have known among the crowd of witnesses, a Sunday School teacher, a parent or a grandparent, a neighbor, perhaps even an organist or a minister. These were people who showed you what love is by loving, what service is by serving, what witness is by witnessing to what they had seen and known and believed. In our mind’s eye, too, there will need to be ones we have not known but have only known about. Those whose lives and art, whose words and deeds have cheered us on as we have run the race and tried to be the church. It is the great cloud of witnesses. It is the church, in heaven with all its glory, and on earth with all its brokenness and folly. It is like a great choir and its song goes on, on a grand night like this and wherever two or three gather in the Lord’s name. “Yet she on earth has union with God, the Three in One, and mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won. O happy Ones and holy, Lord give us grace that we, like them the meek and lowly, on high may dwell with thee.”Amen.
(I delivered this sermon to the opening worship of the New England Regional Convention of the American Guild of Organists on June 22, 1997 at the First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts where I was then pastor.)
For those whose only exposure to the sermons of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is his infamous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” I recommend his brilliant and moving sermon, “Heaven, A World of Love.”
Reading it today we can see that the Puritan had more weapons in his homiletical arsenal than merely frightening his congregation with images of a fiery future. In “Heaven, a World of Love” his exquisite portrait of heaven, and the way people interact with one another there, might have made the faithful squirm every bit as much as his image of the spider over the flame in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
Notice the image of community as a musical ensemble, praising God together. What might we in the church on earth learn from this? Here’s an excerpt:
“And oh! what joy will there be, springing up in the hearts of the saints, after they have passed through their wearisome pilgrimage, to be brought to such a paradise as this! Here is joy unspeakable indeed, and full of glory – joy that is humble, holy, enrapturing, and divine in its perfection! Love is always a sweet principle; and especially divine love. This, even on earth, is a spring of sweetness; but in heaven it shall become a stream, a river, an ocean! All shall stand about the God of glory, who is the great fountain of love, opening, as it were, their very souls to be filled with those effusions of love that are poured forth from his fullness, just as the flowers on the earth, in the bright and joyous days of spring, open their bosoms to the sun, to be filled with his light and warmth, and to flourish in beauty and fragrancy under his cheering rays. Every saint in heaven is as a flower in that garden of God, and holy love is the fragrance and sweet odor that they all send forth, and with which they fill the bowers of that paradise above. Every soul there, is as a note in some concert of delightful music, that sweetly harmonizes with every other note, and all together blend in the most rapturous strains in praising God and the Lamb forever. And so all help each other, to their utmost, to express the love of the whole society to its glorious Father and Head, and to pour back love into the great fountain of love whence they are supplied and filled with love, and blessedness, and glory. And thus they will love, and reign in love, and in that godlike joy that is its blessed fruit, such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath ever entered into the heart of man in this world to conceive; and thus in the full sunlight of the throne, enraptured with joys that are forever increasing, and yet forever full, they shall live and reign with God and Christ forever and ever!”
When I Survey . . . 