Scriptures: Matthew 28:1-10; 1Corinthians 15:35-58
Let me begin today by telling you about a recent experience I had, courtesy of Hilda Ward, who invited me to be part of a class that she helps to teach at UVA. I didn’t know exactly what the course was when she invited me, but I knew that Hilda regularly is part of a teaching team that does classes on diversity, and I didn’t have to think hard at all before saying “yes”. I wanted to be supportive of the effort and to experience first hand one of these classes that I knew Hilda was involved in.
I knew that I was to be one several guests that night, that there would be people from other religious traditions there, and because Hilda had mentioned to me that sometimes some students had a hard time matching up the messages of inclusiveness and appreciation and respect that the course was promoting with what they had been taught in church, especially in relation to sexual orientation and identity—because Hilda had said that sometimes students had problems in this area particularly, I assumed that I was going there to let it be known that there are some Christian voices who see inclusiveness and working for justice and respect for all God’s children as being central to Christianity, and that (to put it bluntly) being Christian does not mean being anti-gay. I assumed I was being asked to represent that point of view, and anytime I have the chance to represent that point of view, I say yes. So I did, thinking that this meant that my job would be to speak about issues of diversity and justice from a specifically Christian perspective—to say that this is what my Christian faith teaches me, that this is one of things it means for me to be a Christian.
What I found out later was that my assumption was not entirely wrong, but not entirely right either. It turned out that what we were asked to do was not so much to speak about diversity from our particular faith perspective but to give a brief introduction just to whatever faith perspective we were representing, so that the students in this first year class at the end of the evening would have been presented with a diversity of religious perspectives, a sort of mini-course in comparative religions. In other words we were asked to speak not specifically about what our faith has to say about diversity but more generally just what our faith is about, something like one of the questions we asked our confirmands from last week to write about in their statements of faith: What does it mean to me to be a Christian?
There were six of us on the panel. There was a Unitarian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Mormon, a Moslem, and me, a Christian. I was representing Christianity, which would be a pretty scary thought to some people, if they knew someone who thought the way I did was representing Christianity, and actually it was a bit scary to me to think that I was supposed to represent Christianity. Only on rare occasions do I try to speak for Sojourners, much less for all of Christianity. It was especially scary because we were each asked to spend no more than five minutes saying what it meant to each of us respectively to be Jewish or Muslim or Mormon or Hindu or Unitarian or Christian. In fact I confess to being a little put off by the prospect of trying to describe Christianity or speak of everything that being a Christian means to me in five minutes or less. But I tried to say a little something and we all in our own way managed to give a little flavor at least of who we were as a Hindu, Mormon, Christian, etc.
Then there was a question-answer period which turned out to be interesting and fun. One of the questions that was asked…and this is why I’ve been telling you all this…I’m sorry it’s taken me a few minutes to get around to talking about anything that sounds like it has to do with Easter…one of the questions one of the students asked everyone on the panel to respond to was: What about an after-life? What do you believe about the after-life? This is one of those questions for me where what immediately runs through my mind is something like: That’s a good one. I’ll be interested to hear what I have to say about that. Not, of course, that I’ve never been asked that question before. Not that I haven’t answered that question before. Not that I have no feelings or beliefs about an after-life, and not that I haven’t had to try to find words for those feelings and beliefs as I have spoken at funerals for people I loved and tried to wrap faith around grief. But I don’t have a canned answer for that question and so it’s going to come out at least a little different every time.
And not only that but we’re dealing here with things that none of us earthbound humans beings know anything about. “Lo, I tell you a mystery,” Paul says as he writes about the resurrection of Jesus and about resurrections in general. And indeed it is a mystery. Paul knows it is. You and I know it is. There are things about a life of faith that are not so mysterious really. The call to love one another as human beings is not very mysterious. We may not always understand so well why we don’t do it better than we do, why we are sometimes so clumsy at our loving, why we sometimes resist giving ourselves to it, what gets in the way of our loving, what exactly the most loving thing to do in some given situation might be.
There are all sorts of things about our human loving that we might have reason to think about. But it is not a huge mystery. We are not talking about something we know nothing about. Human loving is not a mystery, not in the way after-life is a mystery. Not in the way resurrection is a mystery. There, we are dealing with things we really don’t know about, and so our thoughts and feelings and beliefs are likely to be somewhat fluid and imprecise and somewhat changing as we grasp at ways to talk about the untalkable and try to enter with our words into regions that are not part of our human experience. That’s why Paul writes the way he does: “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ What foolishness! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed…What is sown is perishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness it is raised in power. It is sown in a physical body and raised in a spiritual body…Just as we have born the image of the man of dust, so we shall bear the image of the man of heaven.” If you think you know exactly what Paul is saying here, I think you may be mistaken. I don’t think Paul knows quite exactly what he is saying here. I think Paul knows that he doesn’t quite know what he is saying. In fact what I hear him saying is that anyone is mistaken, foolish he says, who thinks there is some kind of direct answer to how the dead are raised or what a life beyond the grave looks like. Paul is talking about something he believes very deeply and yet he knows that when he speaks it can’t be in any language other than language that is mystical and suggestive, as opposed to descriptive and clear. Speaking in this kind of hazy way is the only way Paul has, the only way any of us have of speaking of things that we mortals can only have slightest hints of. That’s how I have always read his words anyway. So, when a student asked us to talk about the afterlife, I was interested to hear what I was going to say.
Which turned out to be…I bet some of you thought I was going to try to get away with not telling you what I said… What I said when it was my turn was that this was not the Christian answer to that question, that I could only speak for one Christian but that what I believe is that we are all on a journey and that the end of that journey, our destination, is God, and that that is everyone’s destination, that we are all going to get there, though we may make decisions which make that journey longer or more difficult or more painful, and that we are on that journey in this life, and that I imagine us continuing on that journey after we die, and that I wouldn’t presume to be able to describe what that after-death journey looks like but that’s the way I imagine things, that there is this journey and that it ends with God, it ends with our being one with God, it ends with death being swallowed up in life.
Now, having said this, I have to hasten to add that this is not my “final answer”. Final answer? No, it’s not my final answer. It’s just one answer, and I’m ok with the fact that I said it. I don’t want to take it back. But it’s just one answer I might give. On another occasion I might have thought that that way of imaging things was too individualistic, that this journey we are on sounds like each of us is making it by ourselves and that the goal is for each of us to be individually, personally reunited with God. On other occasions I have described things differently. I have thought more that our destination was not only to be united with God but to be reunited with one another, all God’s people, all God’s creatures reunited with each other. And so I have imagined the afterlife, I have imagined heaven as one huge family reunion, where we all come streaming in from the east and the west, the north and south carrying the wounds and scars, which also means the loves and learnings of our living, but not more sorrow or sighing, no more mourning or crying or pain. It’s just a vision, I know, a fanciful one at that. It’s just a dream, but the reunion of God’s people is another way of imagining the journey we are on.
In all honesty, I don’t talk about such things very often, afterlife I mean, not even on Easter, certainly not much at other times. Partly just because it is beyond us, beyond our knowledge and experience. In my usual way of thinking, the afterlife is God’s realm and I don’t feel the need to intrude there too often. I am normally content to leave such things in the hands of God and to release people I love, when they die, into the hands and the heart of God, which is all I find I really need to believe, that when we die God’s hands will cradle us and God’s heart will receive us. Most of the time, I just don’t feel the need to be any more specific than that.
As so often at Easter I find my thoughts, my spirit, focusing not so much on the after life but more on this life and what kinds of resurrections are possible for us, what kinds of resurrections there are to pray for in this life among people I know and within myself. That after all is Easter too. Easter is about the new life you and I need. It is often not just about grand cosmic victories, but small human ones. God knows, most of us are in need of having some stone rolled away somewhere in our lives. And so often my thoughts and prayers are focused there, where I pray for God to come again and roll some stone away, for me, for people I care about, for this troubled world we are living in.
But at the same time I also know, at Easter and at other times as well, I also know that it is important for our spirits to be lifted beyond the things we are familiar with, sometimes all too familiar with, and to let our spirits look to the horizons, and beyond the horizons of our lives. If all our spirits ever looked at were the hard realities of our lives, the temptations to despair would be great and almost irresistible. When Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, the realm of God, he was directing our spirits toward a dream of…what, heaven, heaven on earth? It’s not so clear, but it’s a dream that though distant and dream-like is meant to pull us forward, inspire our living, give life and purpose to the passing of our days. We have from Jesus a vision of a dawning reality of a different world, that even though it may be somewhat mystical and though it lies beyond the horizon of the world we live in everyday, and even though it is delayed in its coming, nevertheless we have a dream of the dawning of a different world, and that dream may draw us forward, even when we are not quite aware it is doing so.
Likewise we look beyond the horizon of our mortal lives, giving ourselves permission to imagine what lies beyond, to dream of what lies beyond. It is not so much believing that we can create out of our ever so limited minds and spirits some accurate picture. I think faith is the exact opposite of that. It is to unbury the wonder of it, to get beyond either affirming or denying that this or that is or is not true and to unbury the wonder that is God, and to let that wonder infuse our living today and tomorrow and the next day.
We don’t understand very much about this life, much less any other life, but this need not keep us from embracing both this life and any other there is to come. I know there is a place for understanding and it is human to seek understanding and not to give up on that, but there is also a place for knowing the limits of our understanding and being able to embrace things we do not understand, like life and like the God of life. To claim too much in the way of understanding may be to reduce the wonder of our lives. What I hear God calling me to this Easter Sunday of 2007 is to embrace the wonder, the wonder of this life and of any journey that may await me beyond this life any journey God may have in store for me through stars and space and time and eternity and dimensions and realities I don’t begin to fathom or presume to speak of. May we embrace the wonder of it all. May we know ourselves to be embraced by God, our source, our end, our companion along the way. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 8, 2007