In My Father's House

What is heaven like? None of us can answer that question; and Jesus didn't tell us much. What he did tell us, however, should be more than enough. This All Saints' Day sermon encourages us to focus on what we do know about heaven, instead of being concerned about what we don't know.

All children learn sooner or later that things aren’t done the same way in all homes. I learned that lesson early on, when I went to the home of a friend to play. Her mother expected her to help wax their bathroom floor after we finished with our playtime. I didn’t even know that bathroom floors needed to be waxed! Her chores in her home and my chores in my home were very different, indeed. I’m sure that every one of you had a similar experience at one time or another. Maybe your family always sat down at the dinner table and passed the food dishes; while the first time you went to dinner at a friend’s home, the members of his family served themselves from the sideboard buffet style. The differences are frequently small; but they signify that customs vary from home to home. You can never assume that what happens in your home also happens in every other home.

The Sadducees had an experience very much like that when they tried to catch Jesus in a theological trap. The Sadducees were a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. They were trying to discredit Jesus by making him look foolish Luke tells us that they lifted a law out of the Old Testament and tried to apply it to the afterlife. Specifically, they used a law about a practice called “levirate marriage.” (If you’re curious about it, you can find it in verses 5 & 6 of Deuteronomy 25.) It was considered shameful for a man to die without fathering a son; so much so that if a man died without a male heir, the law instructed his brother to marry the widow and produce that son. Levirate marriage also served a social purpose. A widow without a son had no one to care for her. Levirate marriage not only carried on the family name, it made sure that widows were not left in poverty without a means of support.

This scenario about levirate marriage that the Sadducees put before Jesus… well, it was absurd! “What if there were seven brothers,” they asked, “and the oldest one died childless. The second brother married the widow, but he died childless, too; and so on until all seven brothers had married her. Please tell us – when the resurrection of the dead takes place, whose wife will she be?” Can’t you just see them snickering behind their hands, like a bunch of teenage boys telling a dirty joke? They were all ready for Jesus to confess that he really didn’t know the answer to their question; and then, the Sadducees could tell everyone that Jesus wasn’t as smart as they thought he was!

But that wasn’t what happened. No, Jesus simply said, in effect, “We don’t do things that way in my father’s house. In your house, maybe; but not in mine.” That really set the Sadducees back on their heels. it slowly dawned on them that their question – the question that they thought was so clever – wasn’t clever at all. In fact, their question about the law was as irrelevant as an umbrella on a bright sunshiny day. In heaven, there isn’t any need for all the laws that are useful here on earth. God’s house is different. Well, of course things will be done differently in heaven than they are here on earth! The Sadducees should have known better. If you listen, you can almost hear the prophet Isaiah whisper, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, says the Lord, and my ways are not your ways.”

That’s not a bad thing to remember on this All Saints’ Sunday. All Saints’ Day calls up all kinds of memories of loved ones who now live eternally in God’s house. Some have died recently, while others have been dead many years. And while we know in our hearts that they are still with us, our human logic argues otherwise. We look at their graves, and we think, “They’re gone. We’ve lost them.” And, in a physical sense, they are gone. They don’t live in our house any more. But lost? They’re not lost. Jesus was very clear about that in his response to the Sadducees. “God is not God of the dead,” he said, “but of the living!” God has never once said, “Well, once upon a time long ago, I used to be the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; but now they are dead and gone, so I guess that all we can do is to remember them.” No; in God, all of the saints are eternally alive! They are with us still, as that great cloud of witnesses that the book of Hebrews talks about. And today, on All Saints’ Day, we celebrate that fact.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. We don’t know everything that there is to know about life after death. In fact, we know hardly anything! All of us have serious questions about death and about the afterlife; and those questions present an terrible problem to some people. These folks refuse to believe in the afterlife unless they know everything about it. They ask questions like, “Where is heaven? What is eternity like? Is God going to make me rub elbows with people I don’t like? And what about my personality? Does it somehow stay together even if my body is gone?” Some folks could go on for hours asking questions! They’re like the Sadducees who pestered Jesus with their riddles. In the end, these folks will never believe in an afterlife because they’ll never know all the details about it.

But, you see, we don’t have to know all the details. Jesus has told us everything we need to know. He told us, first, that in God, the dead are alive forevermore. We don’t have a clue how that works – but God does. And I figure that God has that all worked out. Jesus also told us that the dead are like angels. I don’t know exactly what that means; but I’m pretty sure that it means that we will be changed into something other than what we are now. At least, that’s how Paul understood it. He described it this way: “The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, and we shall be changed. For this mortal body must put on immortality.” It’s like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. And even though I don’t know all the details, that makes sense to me. And then, Jesus told us that we will be children of God: one family through Christ. That family will lack nothing and will never be parted from one another. And those family ties start here and now, before we go to live in our Father’s house eternally.

Do we really need to know any more than that? The saints, though they may be physically dead, are eternally alive… they’re like the angels… they’re a part of the one family in Christ that includes us, too. I don’t know about you, but that’s enough for me. I don’t need to know all the details about life after death. I trust that God has prepared a home for me, and that Jesus has my back, and that the Spirit will guide me home. That’s all I need to know! And that’s not something to puzzle over. That’s something to celebrate!