Just shy of fourteen years ago my
father died. It was cancer. He was just 60. I remember the evening
of the funeral home visitation. The place was packed by the time I
got there. I had one objective in mind of getting to the casket to
see my father but I had to push through all those relatives and
family friends and be cordial along the way. I finally got to him.
The Lord only knows what I was expecting. My brain was humming and
for an instant I almost passed out. My always inappropriately
dramatic step-mother was trying to distract me because she thought I
was going to lose it or something. Nevertheless, there was Dad and
there he was not. Where did he go? My father, my truest friend.
The one who topped the list of the very few people in this world that
I feel love me unconditionally, whom I feel safe around. Where did
he go?
Fourteen years later, I still grieve.
I miss him. These past few years there have been times when I really
needed him and he is gone. I'm really angry and heartbroken that my children have no idea who that man in the picture
is. Will they ever meet him? You people know what I'm talking
about. Death has touched us all. It's brutal. Death is serious
business and not easily euphemized or should I say euthanized with
fairy tales of what happens to us when we die...let alone our pets.
Boy, I'd better lighten it up here a bit. So, looking there at my dad there in that
casket, where did he go? What happens to us when we die? What
should I tell my children when they want to know where my daddy is?
Well, there's myriads of pop-culture ideas floating around that we
have borrowed from ancient Paganism and still people espouse them. A
common theme among these ideas is that we have an immortal soul that
leaves us and goes somewhere else where we will be forever.
Sometimes we say something like we become a star or an angel and look
over our families. Or, we are still here watching over things but we
just can't be seen. Or, we're eternally doing all those things we
loved doing like driving tractors or hunting deer. Though nobody
ever says what happens to the deer that get killed in heaven. Do
they go on to another heaven where they get to hunt the humans or
something? Sometimes our immortal souls get stuck between here and
there and we become a ghost. Then there's the really bad among us.
They can go to Hell.
Now,
I'm going to shock you here for a minute. There is a pop-Christian
Gospel that we are all familiar with that states that if we believe
Jesus died for our sins and serve him in this life our immortal soul
will go to Heaven when we die and conversely, if we do not repent of
our sins and accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour in this life our
immortal soul will go to Hell when we die. Here's the shocker. The
Bible never claims we have an immortal soul. In fact, nothing about
us is immortal, at least not yet. Only Christ Jesus has immortality
(1 Tim. 6:13-16). Rather, what the Bible says is that because of
God’s grace extended to us in Jesus Christ by the gift of his
Spirit, the Holy Spirit, in us, we will live for a time in paradise
or heaven with Christ without bodies until Jesus returns and the
Trinity makes all things new and in the midst of that there is the
resurrection of the dead when we are given new, immortal and
imperishable bodies. It is the Holy Spirit in us by, with, and
through whom we live past death. Go and read Romans Chapters 6 and 8
and particularly Rom. 8:11 which reads: “If the
Spirit
of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised
Christ from
the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through
his Spirit
that dwells in you.” N.T. Wright, an Anglican New Testament
scholar likes to quote another scholar's analogy that our software
gets uploaded into God's hardware until the time he restores it all.
When we die everything about who we are in our entirety as persons,
the Trinity somehow keeps with and in himself until he restores us to
our bodies made anew when he raises us from the dead.
When I tell my children where my Daddy
is I say he is with Jesus and we'll see him when, as my kids like to
say, God has a body. They picked that up around Easter a couple of
years ago when their Sunday School teacher was trying to explain
resurrection to them. Bodily resurrection is our hope. Resurrection
and embodied life in a creation made new, a creation in which there
no longer is sin or death and as Isaiah said in chapter 11:6-9, “The
wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with
the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf
together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear
shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall
eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of
the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's
den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the
earth shall be full of the knowing of the LORD as the waters cover
the sea.”
The Day
will come when God's kingdom will indeed come and his will will
indeed be done here on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus will return
and reign over his creation unhindered, visibly, and righteously. He
will put things to right. In Jesus' kingdom there is justice. We
must work for it now. In Jesus' kingdom things are beautiful. We
must work to make our lives and our communities and the world around
us beautiful with art and music and picking up after ourselves. In
Jesus' kingdom there is no poverty. We must work to end it even if
it means we ourselves must live with less. In Jesus' kingdom there
is nor war or violence or abuse of power. Therefore, we must be
leery of how we use power and work for reconciliation now. What we
do now towards Jesus and his kingdom coming will endure into the new
creation as Paul writes at the end of 1 Corinthians 15, his great
chapter on the resurrection. “Therefore,
my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the
work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in
vain” (1 Cor. 15:51).
The LORD gave the prophet Haggai a
word to give to two Jewish leaders a long time ago that speaks
strongly to us today as churches seem to be dwindling away all around
us. The Lord said “Work, for I am with you.” This word came to
a small yet faithful remnant who had returned to Judah from the
Babylonian exile. When they got back they decided to build their own
houses, lavishly I might add, to the neglect of the temple and as a
result they did not find fulfillment for never having enough. God
eventually had to send drought to get their attention and when he had
it he told them to build the temple and even though it might not be
what it was in its former days, in that place, in that temple he
would grant peace. The Hebrew word for peace is Shalom and it is
more than simply the absence of enmity. It means contentment,
friendship, a kind of prosperity where everyone has enough and no one
has too much, and mental and emotional soundness...and it is because
God is in our midst.
That word is for us too. We are to work at building the temple but let me tell
you about that temple. Paul in 1 Corinthians rhetorically asks; “Do
you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells
in you (3:16)?” We are the temple; God’s Spirit dwells in us and
is evident in the fellowship we share. The temple in the Bible was
not simply a place where people came to sing hymns and hear a sermon.
It was the place where human sin was dealt with and and borne away.
It was the place where God and humanity were reconciled. It was the
place where there was Shalom. So, for us now as those who are presently made alive in Christ, who have the hope of resurrection as the
Holy Spirit is in us, our first order of work is to be building the
temple, building shalom, here and among ourselves. We do this by
confronting sin; first the sin in our own lives by prayer and
confession and avoiding it. Then, we deal with the sin in our midst
by holding one another accountable to the teachings of Scripture. In
both cases, healing and reconciliation is the goal. Our second order
of work is to bring reconciliation to the world; first, by announcing
God’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ, then by working for
reconciliation in the midst of brokenness of human community around
us and in the world. We are those who name sin and evil for what it
is and then strive to heal the brokenness left in its wake bringing
forth reconciliation. Friends, let us not neglect the temple in
which we by God’s grace freely live. Resurrection, New Creation,
and Jesus returning to put the world to rights these are our hope for
which we strive. Yet, here and now our Christian fellowship is the
temple wherein the Triune God of grace lives and moves in his very
being to make us anew right now. The way we love one another and our
neighbours, the quality of our Christian fellowship, is the
living proof there will be resurrection and New Creation and that
Jesus indeed is the Risen Lord and will return to put his world to
right. The way you people love each other is the proof my kids will
one day meet my father. Please do not forget that. Amen.
