All We Need to Know

On the first Sunday in November, my congregation celebrates All Saints Day with a service of remembrance and candle lighting. My meditation today centered on what we know about heaven. The short answer is, "Not that much." But maybe we know all that we need to 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! The way things were done in her home were very different from the way things were done in my home. Rules and practices don’t apply everywhere.

The Sadducees learned that when they tried to catch Jesus in a theological trap (Luke 20:27-38). Luke tells us that they lifted a law out of the Old Testament and tried to apply it to heaven. 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.

But this scenario 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.” The question that the Sadducees 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 we have on earth. God’s house is different. 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. 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 reality.

But we don’t know everything that there is to know about life after death, do we? In fact, we know hardly anything! All of us have questions about death and about the afterlife; and those questions present a 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, that Jesus has my back, and that the Spirit will guide me home. That’s all I really know. But – thanks be to God – that’s all any of us really need to know!

Trick or Treat

It's Halloween! When we celebrate, are we worshiping the devil? Absolutely not! So, does Jesus fit in anywhere? He does for Christians! Read my sermon to find out what I think about the holiday.

Halloween is almost here! Trick or treat here in Miami County is… what… Tuesday night? You can’t miss Halloween these days. It has become a really big deal in recent years. The stores start to display bags of candy and jack o’ lanterns just as soon as Labor Day is over. As the calendar gets close to October, newspapers start to advertise all kind of attractions guaranteed to make you scream: the House of Death, the Trail of Terror and the Corn Maze of Doom. Even the grownups have gotten in on things. Whole neighborhoods throw Halloween costume parties that are definitely not for the kiddies! Halloween has ballooned from being only one day to become an entire season for merchandisers! You might be surprised to know that retail profits during the two months before Halloween are second only to those during the Christmas season. Yes, Halloween is a big deal these days.

That’s a real problem for some Christians. These folks want to get rid of all the skeletons, ghosts and witches that are everywhere this time of year – in the stores, on the television, and decorating our homes – because they believe that all the Halloween hullabaloo is evidence that we have somehow become a nation of devil worshipers. They are afraid that by celebrating Halloween, we are inviting evil into our lives. I have to respectfully disagree with them. It seems to me that exactly the opposite is true! When we surround ourselves with scary things, I think that we’re actually trying to control the evil around us.

That’s actually how Halloween got started in the first place. People in ancient cultures were convinced that supernatural evil was all around them – ghosts and ghouls and evil spirits. At the time of the harvest, when the days got short and the nights became long and cold, they believed that those spirits grew stronger; and it was only by taking actions to protect themselves that they would escape the evil of those spirits. People disguised themselves so that spirits who might want to harm them wouldn’t recognize them. They carried candles in hollowed-out gourds so that they would always be in the presence of light. They even carried sweet treats with them – just in case they had to calm down an unfriendly ghost with a sweet tooth! Nowadays, we wear costumes for fun, we carve jack o’ lanterns for decoration, and we pass out candy to entertain kids in the neighborhood. But the people who started these customs weren’t doing them for fun. They were trying to control the evil that they saw all around them.

Evil spirits were certainly real for the writers of the New Testament. The story from Matthew that you heard this morning is only one of the many gospel stories that mention Jesus casting out evil spirits (Matthew 8:28-32). Jesus has crossed the Sea of Galilee and has arrived in Gentile territory. And who are the first people to meet him? Two men who are possessed by demons. They live among the tombs of the local graveyard; and they are so violent that they attack anybody who approaches them. But -- surprise! The demons know Jesus! “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they scream at him. “You’re going to drive us out!” And that’s exactly what Jesus does. It only takes one word from him – “Go!” – and the evil spirits rush out of the two men and into a herd of pigs, who promptly stampede down into the water and drown themselves. Now that’s a Halloween story for you! If you want to read more about Jesus casting out evil spirits, there are plenty of other stories just like this one in the gospels. (I counted over 20 of them.)

These days, of course, we don’t expect to run into an evil spirit on Main Street, or even in the local cemetery. They only show up in movies like Ghostbusters or The Exorcist. We may pull them out of mothballs for Halloween; but in November, we tuck them back into storage for another year. For most of us, evil spirits only exist in stories. Lots of people, in fact, not only don’t believe in evil spirits; they don’t even believe in evil! They think that “evil” is an old-fashioned idea that was invented by ignorant, superstitious people. Instead of blaming “evil” for the problems that surround us, they talk about “poor choices” and “inappropriate behavior.” They point out – and rightly so – that many of the behaviors that used to be labeled as “evil” were really due to medical conditions. Evil spirits don’t cause seizures; they’re the result of epilepsy. When people behave in odd or unexpected ways, we don’t call an exorcist these days; we call a doctor.

I can’t help wondering, though, whether we’re ignoring something important. Do we really believe that there is no such thing as evil? It seems to me that there is simply too much pain and suffering in our world to attribute all of it to poor choices and inappropriate behavior. Students of history point to the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II: torture camps filled with emaciated men and women; and ovens that burned the remains of those who were executed in gas chambers. Today, we point to Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Mohamar Khadaffi as examples of evil. The intentional suffering that these people inflicted on innocent men, women and children goes way beyond poor choices. What can we call it but “evil”? More to the point, what can we do about it? Witch costumes, jack o’ lanterns, and Hershey Bars can’t stand up to evil that starves, tortures and massacres. It’s way more powerful than all of us!

So, do we simply have to resign ourselves to living with it? No. No, we don’t. This morning’s story from Matthew points to our hope in the face of evil. It points to the one whose power is greater even than that of evil spirits. It points to the one who can conquer evil with a word. It points to Jesus Christ. If the gospels have anything to say about Jesus, they say that he has power over evil. Wherever Jesus went, he fought evil, bringing healing to those who were broken, freedom to those who were oppressed, and relief to those who were suffering. He even brought life to the dead. Jesus is the one who can rescue us from evil. It may still be all around us; but it has no power over those of us who call on Jesus’ name!

We began our worship this morning singing the great Reformation hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God: an affirmation that through Jesus Christ, God has broken the power of evil once and for all. God is our refuge from all the suffering that evil tries to bring to us. God is our mighty fortress, the One who keeps us safe. Oh, evil is still around; and we all have to face it. You do; and I do; and even little Skylar who was just baptized will one day come face to face with it. But those of us who belong to Jesus Christ don’t have to be afraid of it; because he has taken care of it for us once and for all.

So go ahead – enjoy Halloween! Play spooky music when the kids come by… light a candle in that jack o’ lantern sitting on the porch… hand out Kit Kat candy bars! Look at all the costumes as the children parade by – princesses, pirates, witches and ghosts. Listen to them cry, “Trick or Treat!” And smile – because we know that the trick is on evil. Because of Jesus Christ, its power has been broken. We don’t have to be afraid of it ever again! Although the battle against evil is still raging, the war is won; and Christ is victorious! Now that’s a treat that we can celebrate not just on Halloween, but every single day of our lives!