What We Will Be

Scriptures:       Revelation 7:9-17, Psalm 34:1-10,22,

I John 3:1-3, Matthew 5:1-12

What We Will Be

Today we celebrate Tottenfest, or All Saints Day, when we remember our saints, our loved ones who died in the Lord and who, we believe, exist eternally in God’s presence, encircled by God’s love.

The question “what happens to us when we die?” is one of our most basic questions.  It’s not only a Christian question; it is perhaps the most basic human question that has haunted humankind from its earliest beginnings.

Pop culture, especially TV and movies, have given us many visions of what happens after death.  There’s the idea that, when we die, our life flashes before our eyes.   We’ve all read or heard of accounts of near-death experiences, in which there is a bright light and one is encouraged to walk toward the light.  In movies such as Ghost, there’s the idea that, if one has died because of injustice or otherwise has unresolved baggage or unfinished business, that the soul lingers on earth until the issue is resolved.  And, on a less benevolent note, we may remember movies like Poltergeist or the Amityville Horror in which the spirits of the evil dead live on to create havoc in the lives of the living.  I’m not going to speculate on the truth or falsehood of any of these ideas; I’ll leave that to the Hollywood screenwriters.

The information we get from Scripture is frustratingly vague and framed in symbolic language – white robes indicating purity, for example.  I think the writers of Scripture were equally frustrated in trying to use earthbound language to describe heavenly realities.  It might be a bit like living in a black-and-white world, as in old movies and television shows, and within that world trying to describe colors such as red or green or yellow or blue to another person who can likewise only see in black and white.   Or, imagine yourself as a stick figure on a flat piece of paper trying to describe three-dimensional concepts such as depth or thickness to another stick figure on the same piece of flat paper.  How do you describe something when your language just doesn’t contain words for it.?

We are explicitly told a number of things that won’t be there in God’s presence: from today’s reading “They will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat.” And elsewhere, “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”  And we are told that God will be there:  “See, the home of God is among mortals.   God will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.”  And from today’s reading: “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

But what about us?  In what way or in what form will we experience all this.  I’d like to revisit our brief reading from I John 3:1-3 – just three verses, but they pack a punch:  “See what love the Father has given us; that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.  The reason the world does not know us is that it does not know him.  Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.  What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.  And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”

“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God” – We might think of a child, a beggar on the streets, being rescued and adopted into a prosperous, stable, loving family.  And then if let’s say that the child’s adopted family had also been great benefactors of the community, so that the child wasn’t adopted by just anyone, but by this family beloved by the community.  Think of the satisfaction that child would feel pointing out his adopted parents and saying, “This woman is my mother.  This man is my father.”   That might give us some sense of what John is saying – he’s saying God is our father, not just as a flat statement of fact, but as something to celebrate and rejoice over.   *God* is *our Father*; we are *God’s children*.  And then John goes on to say, “and that is what we are.” – so this is not just a matter of pretty words, but of ultimate reality – so much so that because the world does not understand God, the world won’t know what to make of us either.  And then John goes on:  Beloved, we are God’s children now – NOW, not at some date, hopefully long in the future, after we die, but right now, in this moment, we are God’s own children.  John affirms that, though we do not know what we will be, but whatever it is, we will be like God.  So we are each of us works in progress – children of God now, but not fully what we will be, for we are over the course of our lives being shaped more and more into God’s likeness.   Like so much within God’s reign, we’re caught between the words “already” and “not yet” – the reign of God already in our midst, but not yet present in its fullness; we already children of God, but not yet what we will be or what God intends for us to be.

That glimpse of what we will be – what *we* will be, not just what I will be but what all of us will be – might change the way we treat one another now. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton was in the shopping district of Louisville, Kentucky, the day before his 17^th anniversary as a monk, when he famously had a moment of spiritual awakening.  Merton wrote: 

 In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers  it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.

Merton’s description reminded me of a quote from Anglican writer C. S. Lewis  “It is a serious thing to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

I’ll be the first person to admit that I find it hard to consider the eternal destiny of the person in the car in front of my car who’s dawdling and weaving left and right and making it hard for me to get where I’m going on time.  I’ll further admit that it’s usually at such times that I wish they were at their eternal destination so that they weren’t blocking the road in front of me.  Like all of us, I’m still a work in progress, and I’m sure God who created and redeemed the world will succeed in teaching me patience behind the wheel sometime before I die, but it hasn’t happened just yet.  God’s not done with me yet.  I’m sure we all have our own hot button moments – if not when stuck in traffic, then maybe in the supermarket checkout line when the person with 35 items is in front of you in the 15 items or less line, and after their many items are rung up, they realize they didn’t bring enough cash and left their credit cards at home.   Or when you’re on the bus or subway and one of the other passengers stinks to high heaven or is playing music so loud the entire car can hear it.  Or when the neighborhood kids throw eggs at your house.  But perhaps it’s at exactly those moments, when we’re tempted to dismiss the other person as a hopeless waste of perfectly good protoplasm, that we need to remember that they’re a person created in God’s image, just as we are, a child of God, a person with an eternal destiny.  And then as we consider those whom our government have told us are enemies – in years past, the godless Communists; nowadays, the crazed islamists - What if we could look past those labels to see them as human beings, like us.  As Thomas Merton wrote:  “If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…”

The reign of God is in our midst, not far off in the future, but now, today.  We are children of God, not far off in the future, but now, today.  May we live as children of God and treat one another as children of God, as immortal beings with eternal destinies. And may we at Emanuel Church always show love and care to our neighbors in Bridesburg, the little corner of God’s kingdom in which we have been planted.  Amen.