Will We Meet Again?

Growing by Giving
October 25, 2015
All the Way In
November 8, 2015

“Will We Meet Again?”

Listen to the sermon here.

As Halloween approached, I received well-meaning words of wisdom about how to get to heaven.  One friend joked, “What is the best way to get to Heaven?”   Turn right and go straight.  You have to think about that one.

For those of you who like classic rock music another friend posted on Facebook recently, “If there is only a stairway to heaven but a highway to hell, what does that say about expected traffic flow?”

I’ve heard tell that on his deathbed, Oscar Wilde, opened one eye, looked around, and said, “Either this wallpaper goes or I do.”

Yogi Berra, who passed earlier this fall advised, “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”

It’s ok to laugh a bit, even about difficult subjects, for life has enough serious stuff.  When it comes to the subject of death, we wonder about the future.  We wonder where we and those we care about will all end up.  But in the end, I do believe we will smile.

Let us pray.  Loving God you made us for life, help us to know our life will ultimately be found with and in you.  Amen. 

We gather on All Saints Day to give thanks for those who went before us in faith.   For all the saints who from their labors rest.

Presbyterians don’t talk about saints as people who end up appearing in stain glass windows, but rather those people whose small acts of dedication, kindness and faith, were examples to us and made our lives better.

I talked with several people in our congregation this week who miss someone.  I have sat with several members in this sanctuary as they expressed thoughts about loved ones. 

One person asked, “Will I see him on the other side?   Will we meet another time?   Will we recognize each other?  Will we see each other again?

As it rains outside today people often think of rain as tears of heaven.  Eric Clapton wrote in his song of the same name about missing his four year old son who died and wondering if he’d see him again.

The Bible does not have a whole lot to say about what happens to us when we die.

However, the witness of scripture is that death is not the end.  That God will welcome us home.  

We each love people in this life.  At their death, we grieve.  We hurt.  We are in pain.  I saw that this week from people whose wounds are fresh and from people who lost someone years ago.  Grief fades, but many scars never go away.

This is because humans are made for relationship.  We are not made to easily detach from each other.  We are made to love. 

So we continue to love them even after they die.   It is important to reflect on the fact that love does not end with death.

If our scriptures tell us anything it is that God is love.  John makes that point over and over.   God is love. 

If God is love, and love doesn’t end with death, than God’s relationship with us won’t either.

When Paul wrote about God’s faithful, lasting, loving relationship with us in our lesson he wrote as someone for whom God could have turned God’s back.   Paul used to put Christians to death.  Yet, God loved him still.   If God would not let Paul go, God will not let us go either.  Paul knew that.  So he wrote, “Nothing separates us from the love of God.”

Love is about relationships.  Heaven is about relationships too.  If you think about the Bible, all four Gospels tell us that Jesus did not die alone.  Two criminals were crucified with him, one on either side.  Jesus said “today you will be with me in paradise.”

Nothing separates us from the love of God.

A few months ago I sat with a man who had lived a full life.  He made great contributions to his church.   He loved his children.  He had a successful career.

Above all he loved his wife.    He bought flowers for her even until late in their lives, until the week she died.  At the end I could talk with him about death.  He was ready to die.   He looked forward.   He said he looked forward to seeing her at the end.

All of us have someone who’s hoped for presence makes the other side of death a little easier to take.  Whether it’s a spouse, a child, a sibling, a friend, or whether it’s Jesus.  The one who goes before us, who prepares a dwelling place for you and for me.

Nothing separates us from the love of God.

I can recall standing around a hospital bed not too long ago.  The heart attack was taking the body, as well as breaking the heart of the family who was faced with difficult choices.  When the machines were turned off, he breathed his last.  We gathered on either side of the bed, held hands and prayed. 

Nothing separates us from the love of God,

I remember a friend saying not too long ago of a child, “I love her too much to let death remove her from us.”    All we could share in that moment is what we hold onto on All Saints Sunday, that God will not let death take us from the love of God.

Through God’s love in Jesus, death has lost its ultimate power over us.   We are not lost — because nothing separates us from the love of God.

I think of relatives in my own family.   They met later in life.  But they treasured each other and their time together.  One took care of the other at the end. Their grief remains strong.  But so does their love.  Death has not ended it. 

In Rob Bell’s recent book Love Wins he argues that God’s love is bigger than anything we can do to separate ourselves from God. 

If one looks at the universe, we see it’s too preordered for there not to be a God.  Why would an infinite being make us if something we do for a short time on earth ruins our being with that infinite God forever?  No love wins.   

For our personal destiny is wrapped up in what we believe about Jesus’ destiny.    Jesus makes a path for us to walk to God in eternity.  Nothing separates us from God’s love.

Reinhold Niebuhr once joked that there are some Christians who, “seem to know everything there is to know about the furniture of heaven, the temperature of hell, and the guest list of both places.”

But our Bible doesn’t tell us much about what happens on the other side.  God has not revealed much of it in the scripture.  Maybe the great joy and meaning of it is a surprise and its good that we will be able to celebrate more because we don’t know exactly what was coming?  The purpose of the Bible is not to tell us what happens next in Heaven.  Its purpose is to tell us how to live in the meantime in response.  The answer is to live with love. 

We need to live into love. 

I know several of you have read Atul Gawande’s   excellent book, “Being Mortal.”  

Gawande, a surgeon as well as a writer for The New Yorker, writes a personal meditation on how we can better live within the reality of our inevitable death.

Gawande writes that members of the medical profession, himself included, have been wrong about what their job is.   Rather than only being about survival, it is “to enable well-being.” 

Gawande tells the power story of his own father’s death to share the idea that caregivers should help their patients determine their priorities and achieve them.   And rather than just being about survival, those goals can include having a good death. 

As Marilyn McEntyre writes in her book, A Faithful Farewell, “Healing is bigger than cure.”

Gawande’s book and others have started a deep conversation in health care about caregiving to create better options with the goal of a purposeful life in mind.

Living a purposeful life in response to the realities of life and death can allow us to reach death more comfortably.    

Our faith is consistent with this.  For it teaches that we need not be afraid of death. 

 Because nothing will separate us from Gods love.

Marcus Borg put it this way, “Is there an afterlife, and if so, what will it be like? I don’t have a clue. But….we die into God….that is all I need to know.”

Jesus invites us to put our trust and our lives in his hands.  Into his outstretched hands. 

The great theologian Karl Barth used to go to a jail in Basil, Switzerland, on Sunday mornings, where he would often worship with the prisoners.   He would share with people who had received few passes in life, his thoughts about grace.  

On that Sunday there he preached, “We are (all) saved by grace. That means that we do not deserve to be saved. What we deserve would be quite different… Consequently, we shall never possess salvation as our property. We may only receive it as a gift over and over again with hands outstretched.”

As we gather around this table, in communion with all the Saints who have gone before us, and we think of someone in particular, we receive the gift of God’s grace.   We receive that grace in the body of Christ, the bread of heaven, as we participate in communion with hands outstretched.

For nothing can separate us from love of God.

I will never forget the first month of my first call as a full time pastor.   A phone call late at night to come to the nursing home.  The news that someone beloved would not make it.   Coming into the room, a large room with a small bed.  In bright lights inside and darkness outside, giving a final prayer.   In that moment, a dear friend kissing his wife on the forehead and saying, “I’ll see you up there, love.”    Nothing can separate us from the love of God.  

Do I believe we will see our loved ones again?   I do.  Because of the power of love.   Death does not defeat that power.   And it won’t keep us apart.   

God’s love is a gift.  God came into our messy, imperfect world to be in eternal relationship with us and give us hope for loving reunion.  And nothing in life or death will change that.  Amen.