Heaven Can Wait – Day 32 of Lent

Heaven  We had a great discussion again last night in our "Common Ground" series of dialogues between myself and Rabbi Josh Aaronson of Temple Har Shalom. Last night's topic was the "afterlife" and how our traditions view it. I think I stunned some of the crowd when I suggested that the Christian hope, biblically speaking, is precisely the same as the Jewish hope–a hope in the resurrection of the dead and new life in the "world to come." 

Interestingly, though, a recent Scripps-Howard poll said that only 36% of people believe in bodily resurrection, preferring instead to think about the immortality of the soul. The Washington Post has been running a series in its "On Faith" column where people from Billy Graham to Ricky Gervais talk about heaven, but almost never in terms of the transformation of the earth and our bodies. 

My doctoral dissertation is addressing this very dichotomy and, as my congregation knows, it's been my personal mission to help Christians recapture the deep meaning and hope of resurrection that drove the early Christians, over and against the popular Platonism of their day and ours. The implications are huge and, I would argue, the emphasis on immortality of the soul has made Christianity so heavenly focused that it has often become no earthly good. 

To that end, I offer the following, which I wrote for my "Senior Writer's Block" column in the current issue of Homiletics. As we approach Easter, it's important for us to get our minds around what it really means: 

Funeral Fallacies

One of my clergy colleagues recently told me she was preparing her 25th funeral this year. That was amazing to me because, living in a resort town, I haven’t done 25 total funerals in the almost seven years I’ve served here. This town, after all, has no funeral home or nursing home and, only recently, opened an orthopedic hospital that primarily treats the twisted appendages of tourists who crash and burn on the ski slopes. A woman in my church occasionally remarks to me that Park City is “heaven,” and although I flinch when she says that, she’s right in some sense — that the city is unconsciously zoned around the idea that nobody gets sick, nobody gets old or infirm and nobody dies.

It isn’t true, of course. All those things happen here, as they do everywhere else. When I’ve officiated at funerals here (or, more often, memorial services sans casket or urn), I’m always struck by the way that death exposes the theology and worldview of people still living. Whether the service is for a deeply committed Christian, a marginal believer or a self-professed unbeliever, I’ve noticed that the assumptions about death and what happens to the deceased are largely the same. Be they saints or skeptics, people would much rather avoid the reality of death and the presence of a body and instead focus on the spiritual life of the deceased in heaven (which even the unbelievers tend to believe in, even if they don’t get too specific).

For example, at one service in which I was participating, I heard another Christian pastor say about a young woman who loved horses and who died after being hit by a drunk driver, “God needed her in heaven to begin preparing the four horses of the Apocalypse to ride across the sky at the end of the world.” Death as the result of a heavenly labor shortage — yikes! Then there’s the eulogizer who told a raucous story about the deceased and said, “Yup, Johnny’s looking down from heaven right now with a beer in his hand really lovin’ this” (forgetting, of course, the old polka song: “In heaven there is no beer, that’s why we drink it here.”). And you’ve no doubt had people who wanted that Mary Elizabeth Frye poem read alongside the Scriptures. You know, the one that starts:

Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow. …

Nothing like a little pantheism mixed with some Platonism.

Sure, many times we’ve gone along with this stuff, thinking that a funeral isn’t a time to quibble about theology and that whatever the family wants is okay. We must always remember, however, that our call isn’t to go along with a culture that wants to deny death by spiritualizing it but rather to proclaim resurrection — the defeat of death. We are called to proclaim the real hope made possible by the empty tomb and the real future we have in God’s “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Tom Long, in his excellent and highly recommended new book Accompany Them With Singing: The Christian Funeral, writes: “The Christian funeral is about meaning, not just therapy. It is a dramatic performance of the gospel, enacting the meaning of life and death for the person who has died, for the Christian community and the communion of saints and, indeed, for the whole of humanity. Left to its own devices, death always seems to have the last word, the last laugh. The mourners need to be assured, the church needs to remember, the world needs to be told, that death does not in truth speak the final word” (94).

Whether you officiate at five or 25 funerals this year, each one is an opportunity to preach an Easter sermon — and to teach people that our ultimate hope isn’t found in the disembodied, disconnected and disappearing vapor, but in the embodied, grounded reality of resurrection. God doesn’t “need” us in heaven — God needs us right here, doing the work of the kingdom. Death interrupts that work, but the promise of Easter is that, ultimately, our lives and our work will not be in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58) …

and that, someday, all funerals will be canceled forever.

—Bob Kaylor
Senior Writer
bkaylor@HomileticsOnline.com

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