“What’s Next?”

First Congregational United Church of Christ

October 9, 2011

The Rev. Sharyl B. Peterson

 

Scripture Reading:  Job 14 (from The Message)

 

 

If you read your church newsletter for October, you’ll know that we’re going to be having a sermon-series this month on the afterlife.  On what comes next after we die.  And how our faith understandings about that might influence how we should live.

            And I’ll say up-front that if thinking about topics like death, or Heaven, or Hell, or anything related to them, makes you uncomfortable, you are part of a happy majority of millions.  In fact, probably of tens of millions.  Most people, whether or not they say they believe in God, whether or not they consider themselves to be people of faith, tend to avoid thinking about these things until they just don’t have any other choice.  So, you may be wondering, why are we having a sermon-series on this stuff?  Isn’t the occasional funeral homily, or the preaching on our annual church All Saints Memorial Sunday enough?

Well, apparently it isn’t, because last Fall, when I invited people to give me requests for sermon topics for 2011, the number one chosen topic by those of you who turned in ideas was:  would you please preach about what happens after we die?  And while I’ll admit that at first I wasn’t all that excited about the idea of preaching about something that I knew would be so uncomfortable for so many, this is clearly a faith-question that is on a lot of your minds.

            And it is a deeply important question, which joins us to the ranks of countless human beings who have gone before us.  One thing we know from research in every discipline that studies human behavior is that as long as there have been people (or at least, as long as there have been people who recorded in some way – either through oral stories or through written manuscripts – what they believed), those people – ordinary people like you and me, little kids, brilliant scholars, amazing artists have been asking:  why do we die?  ?  what happens when we die?  What, if anything, comes after this life?  And most recent historically, how (if at all) does what comes next have to do with how we live this life?

In some ways, these questions seem to have become even more pressing in the last couple of decades in which we are living.  Events like the massive loss of life from famine in Somalia, or from earthquakes, or tsunamis, or fires in Asia and elsewhere, events like those of 9/11 2011, looming threats of nuclear annihilation of all life on this planet, and our own encounters with the dyings of those we love – from old age and its attendant illnesses, from cancer, from accidents, from suicide, even from homicide – make these crucial questions for us all to wrestle with.

            The popular media reflect our cultural concerns about death, with movies like “What Dreams May Come” and “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” attempting to portray what the afterlife might be like.  Cartoonists of all sorts have tried to “lighten up” our views of death, the very most recent of which I’ve seen appeared the morning after Apple computer founder Steve Jobs’ death … the title of the cartoon is “Steve Jobs Goes to God,” and the picture shows a cartoon-style portrayal of Jobs’ head, and his hand holding an iPhone, and he is messaging “Sorry guys, I’ve been called to design the new iGod.”  A search of Amazon.com using the search-string “death” turns up 116,000 books on the subject (including both fiction and nonfiction), and a similar search of Music turns up 12,000 recent recordings.  Clearly, questions about “what’s next?” are very much in people’s consciousness these days.  So, we’re going to spend some time with these questions, specifically focusing on what our faith has said about these things over the past two to three thousand years, and what it has to say today.

            I’m aware that this particular sermon-series is likely to present some particular challenges for those of you who are grieving or frightened, either because you have recently lost someone to death, or because perhaps you are struggling with a life-threatening illness of your own.  I suspect that many of us who think we have this all figured out are going to be surprised to learn that some of the things we were absolutely sure we knew really aren’t quite as Biblical or as eternal as we thought they were.  Those who appreciate that one of the best things about our faith is the way it connects us to others across time and place may be refreshed to learn that some of the things we have come to believe about the afterlife – thoughts we may think are awfully radical,  perhaps even unchristian or unfaithful – have been shared by religious people across the millennia.  And finally, for those of us who prefer certainty, we may be challenged.  As just one example, if we always thought that the Bible offers clear and consistent descriptions of Heaven – like those famed pearly gates with St. Peter standing guard, and the streets of gold – and we discover that a lot of what we assumed was Biblical is in fact not so – we may have to do some re-thinking … some spiritual growing … and that’s not always something we’re terribly keen on either.  Hopefully, this series will help all of us find some comfort in the assurances of our faith, will help us deepen our faith, and will help us appreciate even more the abiding and loving care of our God.

            Today we’ll begin our reflections with the most basic question about the afterlife, the question that Job poses in today’s reading from Scripture.

            By way of background, if you’ve forgotten the story of Job, I remind you that he was a man (although perhaps a metaphorical rather than a historical man) who by the point where we hear his voice in today’s reading, has lost everything.  His story begins when some of the “gangbangers” of his day – thieves from another area of the country – steal all of Job’s herds of livestock – and kill his hired herdsmen.  Next, what today’s insurance underwriters call “an act of God” – a bolt of lightning – strikes and kills all of Job’s sheep, and all of the shepherds tending to them.  Then, another herd of ruffians and foreigners shows up and steal all of Job’s camels and kill all his camel-drivers… all of which leaves Job utterly destitute.  And then, when it seems like things can’t possibly get any worse, Job’s children are having a party together at the oldest brother’s house when a tornado sweeps in off the desert and levels the house, killing them all.  And then Job’s health deteriorates, and he is stricken with pain and sores, itching and oozing with pus.  And then Job’s three best friends – in an attempt to be “supportive” – get all pious and moralistic, and launch their best fleet of religious clichés at him – clichés which not only don’t help him (no surprise there), but lead Job to question the deepest tenets of his faith.

            In today’s passage, Job has hit bottom.  Basically, his lament is one that we see on bumper-stickers today:  “Life’s a b(ear), and then you die.”  It seems pretty obvious to Job that life is just a huge pile of suffering, with little or no meaning, and – just as his Jewish tradition has always taught – at the end, that’s it.  You die.  It’s all over.

            And yet… and this “and yet” is one of the reasons that Job’s story was placed in the canon, and is one of the reasons that it is so powerful for so many people still today … Job is not willing to accept that death is the end.  And he isn’t willing to accept that because of what he believes – in spite of everything that has happened – about God.  Everything in his Jewish faith tells him that God loves humankind.  That God cares about him, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  That God is good.  And so, we hear Job crying out, desperately, longingly, hopingly, “Don’t leave me (in death).  Set a date when you’ll see me again…  All through these difficult days I keep hoping, waiting for the final change – for resurrection!  Homesick with longing for the creature you made (me), you will call – and I will answer!” 

            This is a crucial proclamation.  Because at the heart of it, Job’s answer to the question:  is there anything after this life? comes back to the same pivot-point of faith that all of our questions like that – and all of our answers – come back to:  What is God like?  And his answer, that God is good and caring and compassionate, leads him to conclude that there must be something next, despite what his traditional Jewish faith tells him.

            Now, learning that fact – that faithful Jews, until about 200-300 years before Jesus – did not believe in life after death of any kind came as something of a surprise to me.  I knew something about the squabbles between the religious conservatives of Jesus’ day – the Sadducees – and their rivals the religious free-thinkers – the Pharisees – because the Sadducees, in keeping with traditional thinking, did not believe in an afterlife, and the Pharisees, who were more influenced by the “new age thought” of their times, did believe in an afterlife. 

            What I didn’t realize was that arguments over that question “afterlife – yes or no?” were so new (at the time of Jesus) in Judaism.  But in fact, if you look to the Old Testament to see what “the Bible says” about a life after this one, what you find is that for the first several millennia of Judaism, faithful people were a lot more focused on this life – and on how it should be lived – than they were on a life after this one.

In fact, according to the creation stories in Genesis, God created (designed) humankind with a built-in limitation – that of death.  Death was just part of the package of being human.  And the only possible “good things” related to death were that it would come at a ripe old age, and that you would have posterity to carry on in your place.  “Blessedness” in the ancient Biblical sense had nothing to do with what might happen next.

            While the Israelites did have a concept – Sheol – that referred generically to where everyone went after they died, it was neither a good place, nor a bad place, just the final place.  And so it carried neither a sense of dread (until it got translated into a much more modern concept of “hell,” to which we’ll return in a couple of weeks), nor a sense of hope, which we find in the New Testament concept of Heaven (to which we’ll return next week).

            And then, something of enormous historical import occurred.  There were two major turning-points in the wider culture, which became a major turning-point in Jewish faith history.

The first major event was that roughly 200-300 years BCE, a new wave of Greek leadership – three Seleucid kings – instigated a wave of terrible religious persecution against the Jews.  As the book of 2 Maccabees (one of those books in the “Apocrypha” or intertestamental books) puts it: “Harsh and utterly grievous was the onslaught of evil.  For the temple was filled with debauchery and reveling by the (Greeks) … the altar was covered with abominable offerings that were forbidden by the (Jewish) laws.  People could neither keep the Sabbath, nor observe the festivals of their ancestors, nor so much as confess themselves to be Jews” (2 Macc. 6:3-6).

            Some 80,000 or more people, men, women, infants, teenagers, were arrested, brutally tortured, and murdered, solely for the “crime” of observing their Jewish faith.  In fact, if

you want to read some of the goriest, grisliest stuff in the entire Bible, try just the seventh chapter of 2 Maccabees, in which some of those tortures are described in detail.  One of the kings, Antiochus Epiphanes, was so utterly vicious, barbarous, and evil in his treatment of the Jews that some of his contemporaries called him “Epimanes,” which meant “the mad one.”

            For the Jews, innocent victims of these horrible persecutions, struggling to stay faithful to God, they also had to struggle to figure out why this was happening.  Why were so many people being killed simply because they were faithful to Yahweh?

            And side by side with these demanding religious questions was a second enormous cultural shift.  Greek philosophy was having more and more influence on thinking across the ancient world, including the Jewish parts of the ancient world, and some of these philosophers had suggested a brand-new way of thinking about humankind:  They suggested that humans have a material, solid part (our body), and a non-material spiritual part (our soul).  At death, then, this soul could be separated from the body and in some thinkers’ view, live on forever.

            And the upshot of these deep religious and cultural and intellectual struggles was a new answer to the afterlife question:  and that answer was, that if people stayed faithful to God to the end of their lives, they would be rewarded by some kind of good afterlife.  In essence, the idea of Heaven for human beings (more about that next week) was conceived.

            By the time Jesus appeared, there were basically three different schools of thought in Judaism.  Some faithful Jews still held the traditional view of death as the ultimate limit, with no afterlife.  Some believed in the resurrection of the body.  And some believed in the immortality of the soul.  Jesus, as so often was His way, attempted to integrate two of these perspectives, and He added a whole new twist to the notion of what was becoming called “eternal life.”

            We’ll come back to this again in the next two weeks, but as most of you know, Jesus talked about “eternal life” both in the future sense, and in the present sense – the way we live today.  For example, in John 5:24, Jesus tells his followers:  “(the one) who hears my word … has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.”  Jesus’ emphasis, over and over, was not so much on what happens next, but on how we live this life, on how we help bring about God’s kingdom on earth right here and now.

            In the century after Jesus was executed, Paul, the Gospel-writers, and the other letter-writers, in sharing Jesus’ teachings, also each offered their own takes on what Jesus really believed and taught – as well as taking some editorial liberties to address the concerns of the audiences to which they wrote.  The outcome over the past 2,000 years is the afterlife theology that most of us know (or think we know) pretty well today.  In a nutshell, which we’ll unpack over the next couple of weeks, it is this.

            In virtue of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, the key belief that emerged for most faithful Christians is that death has lost its power, and that we, like our Christ, are offered the promise of life eternal with God when this life ends.  A second key belief is that one form of that life eternal – something we also call the kingdom of God – is not just something in the future, but also exists, or can exist, right here and now in this life.  And, we have a responsibility as faithful people to help make that happen.  And finally, drawing not so much on what Jesus taught, as on other needs and demands of their day, some Christian writers concluded that whether or not one enters into life eternal (or what that life is like) is contingent upon whether or not one has lived the way God calls us to live.  (And that presents both logical and theological problems, which we’ll come back to in next week.)

            In the meantime, it’s important for us to reflect for ourselves on what it means that faithful thinking about these deeply-important questions has changed so much over the history of our faith tradition.  It may be a little disconcerting to realize that over time, theology – and Scripture – were intentionally revised so that people could make sense of the events of their day.

            Today, some people would refer to that practice as “revisionist history” (or theology).  But I think the reality is that in every age, people’s thinking about God – which includes thinking about life and death – has had to intersect with their real experiences of life.  And it is in struggling to figure out how those two things fit together that theology emerged in the past, and continues to emerge today.  The idea that “God is still speaking” is not in fact something the UCC made up about seven years ago as a flashy marketing device, but is the theme of how God has acted – and how faithful people have responded – across time.

            “Martin Luther, the great Reformation pastor and theologian, once noted soberly that ‘in the midst of life, we are surrounded by death.’”[1]  We all know that.  And we know it all too well.  The good news is, in light of God’s presence in Jesus of Nazareth, we can also affirm, with Luther, that ‘in the midst of death, we are surrounded by life.’  May our faith in God, and our willingness to wrestle with the things of life, and of death, bring us to a place where our deaths will not seem so fearsome, and where our living will be richer and fuller, the kind of abundant life God yearns for us to have.  Amen.