St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, November 7, 2010

Hereafter – Rev. David Mundy

2 Thessalonians 2:13-17 Luke 20:27-38

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If you were rummaging around in the newspaper or on the internet this weekend looking for a movie to see in the theatres you might have noticed that one has the intriguing title of Hereafter.

The film has a big name star in Matt Damon but the people behind the scenes are just as famous. Steven Spielberg is the executive producer and the director is none other than Clint Eastwood. As most of you will know, Eastwood played a tough hombre in so-called Spaghetti Westerns. Then he was a tough cop in those Dirty Harry films. These series and other films made him an icon or a caricature of masculinity, depending on your perspective.

More recently Eastwood has taken up residence behind the camera as a director and has some impressive films in his resume including Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River and Letters From Iwo Jima, to name some of my favourites. Each of these films, in their own way, deals with issues of life and death and how we deal with the fleeting nature of our existence.

I haven’t seen Hereafter but the storyline focuses on three different characters who are all attempting to come to grips with that mystery of what lies beyond this life. One has a near death experience and another appears to have an ability to communicate with those on the other side. Critics haven’t been all that kind to the film, saying that it is unfocussed and “new agey” as one of them put it.

Clint Eastwood is 80 years old now, so while he certainly seems healthy and vigorous, he is no spring chicken. He admits in interviews with that wry, squinty smile of his that this latest film may be his attempt to come to grips with his own mortality. A professor at a Christian college was once asked to say a word or two about the resurrection of the dead by one of his young students. He replied rather gruffly that he wouldn’t discuss it with anyone under 30 because those who haven’t yet experienced failure and heartburn and impotency and death just wouldn’t get it.

That may seem a little extreme, but he makes an interesting point. Do you believe in the hereafter? – the place, not the movie. The movie we know exists because we could go to a matinee this afternoon if we wanted to, but the other is the hope and promise of our Christian faith.

You might remember that a couple of years ago I preached a three-sermon series on death, heaven, and hell. You were asked some questions in advance and one was whether you believed that heaven, or the hereafter is a place. The majority of you said yes, although there wasn’t an opportunity for you to go further and comment on what that might be like. Except that one of you wrote into the margin “yes, but not physically limited as places are in our physical world.” I think that’s a pretty good answer.

This morning our gospel lesson invites us to consider the hereafter, and specifically what it means to be resurrection people.

There were several strands of Judaism in Jesus’ day, the way there are lots of “flavours” of both Judaism and Christianity today. Most of us could name the Pharisees, who were regularly on Jesus’ case in the gospels. Even though we get the impression that the Pharisees set themselves up as Jesus’ adversaries, they shared in common a belief in a life beyond our earthly existence. More than believing in immortality, they believed in the resurrection, that it is the action of God to raise us into abundant and eternal life.

There was another group, the Sadducees, who were actually in charge of the temple in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, and took a different view. They figured that this life was it, and so they threw a scenario at Jesus that was obviously absurd. A woman marries a man and he dies, so she marries his brother, and he dies, and . . . well you get the picture. We can almost see the Sadducees playing to the crowd as they spin out this picture and then ask “whose wife will the woman be?”

Jesus counters by saying that they just don’t get it, and he realizes that they don’t want to get it. The “hereafter” is not about replicating life here on Earth, although Jesus doesn’t say that we won’t have an awareness of those we have known in the life. He does say that the God of the resurrection will bring us into a different reality. At the end of our reading Jesus says to the sceptical Sadducees “now God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

Why is that we don’t give much attention to the hereafter, or eternity, or the resurrection life?

Your immediate answer might be “You tell us, you’re the guy who gets to preach on Sunday mornings while the rest of us listen!” Part of the answer is that the majority of the lectionary readings for each Sunday focus on the quality of our present life, rather than our future existence. This is a good “fit” for United Church sensibilities because our theology tends to be more earthly than heavenly.

That said, we still affirm our resurrection faith, and practically speaking most of us wonder to some extent whether we get out of this alive, as humans always have. Virtually every culture and religion in every age has grappled with the possibility of life beyond this life. Some of you will have visited the current exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum called The Warrior Emperor and China's Terracotta Army. It is a fascinating look at the first great emperor of a unified China, who lived a couple of centuries before Jesus. He carefully prepared for his death and the afterlife, creating a vast pottery army of 8,000 or more life-size figures.

Actually, the title of the exhibit is a misnomer because this emperor didn’t just create warriors to protect him in the afterlife. There were musicians and acrobats to entertain him, and bureaucrats and clerks to take care of business.

Some Christian traditions do offer a sort of entertainment approach to eternity. They act as though they have full disclosure of the coordinates and geography of the hereafter, and even what activities will take place, as though heaven is the ultimate, eternal cruise ship. Some of you may have attended funerals where the life to come is portrayed in such a glorious way that it’s hard to imagine why we would bother with this life at all!

Some people choose to trot out the hereafter when it suits them. Many years ago an active member of one of my congregations lost her mother to cancer and while the mother was not a churchgoer I was asked to conduct the service. The member was and is a person of deep Christian faith but she warned me with a dry sense of humour that her brothers were probably going to get all religious for a few days around their mother’s funeral. Sure enough, these guys wiped away the tears and talked about their wonderful mom in heaven while the sister rolled her eyes in the background. In the end asking you whether you believe in the hereafter is probably not the most worthwhile question, because that could be a question addressed to our intellects without connecting to our emotional and spiritual core. That curmudgeonly seminary professor I mentioned had a conversation with an old friend in which they agreed that they might not believe in the resurrection every day, but they kept coming back to their affirmation of the eternal life which is God’s gift to us in Christ.

When the professor asked his friend when it is we have to believe in the resurrection his answer was “On the day you die and the day you help someone else die; that’s when you believe in the resurrection.” As someone who has sat at many bedsides with those are dying, and stood at more gravesides than I care to remember, there is a sense of truth in this observation

Our gospel reading today reminds us that while Jesus didn’t offer some elaborate, escapist image of the hereafter, there was no question that he trusted in its existence. And in the final days and hours of his life with all the anguish and loneliness, Jesus affirmed the life to come. Of course the gospel writers all tell us of an empty tomb and the surprising, powerful resurrection of Jesus as the living Christ.

The invitation for all of us is to live this life as fully as we can with an openness of new life in Christ. This existence with all its joys and sorrows is not a dress rehearsal for the “real deal,” but we can live hopefully in this stage of our existence with the promise of eternity.

This past week I was in a cemetery with members of a family as the ashes of a loved one were laid to rest. It was an intimate and quietly emotional moment as we lowered the ashes into the ground and prayed our resurrection hope. As I walked back to the car with the funeral director, I was suddenly aware of the rising sun against the brilliant blue sky. The frost on the grass was heavy giving an ethereal quality to the landscape, and the fallen leaves along one border of the cemetery glowed golden in the sunlight. I was deeply aware of the preciousness of life and the importance of receiving the moment as a gift from God.

In some respects we have the opportunity to live our eternal promise here and now, from moment to moment. In a society which is often death denying we can acknowledge that death has its sting, to use the words of the apostle Paul, but we can be freed from fear and denial through our heavenly hope.

Perhaps we will be like the seminary professor and his friend who agree that they won’t necessarily believe in the resurrection promise every day, but in the end we can live with courage toward the hereafter.

The United Church has what we often call a New Creed, even though is more than forty years old now. I have always appreciated the way this creed affirms both this life and the next, so we will join together in repeating it:

A New Creed

We are not alone,

we live in God's world.

We believe in God:

who has created and is creating,

who has come in Jesus,

the Word made flesh,

to reconcile and make new,

who works in us and others

by the Spirit.

We trust in God.

We are called to be the Church:

to celebrate God's presence,

to live with respect in Creation,

to love and serve others,

to seek justice and resist evil,

to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,

our judge and our hope.

In life, in death, in life beyond death,

God is with us.

We are not alone.

Thanks be to God.