A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

November 3, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

What Will Become of Me When I Die?

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9–17
1 John 3:1–3

“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.”
1 John 3:2 (NRSV)

We are secure this morning, O God, in your promise that neither life nor death nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from your love made known in Christ Jesus our Lord, and so we are relaxed in your presence. We humbly ask that we might serve you faithfully with our worship this morning, and that by your spirit we might be united with the living resurrected Christ and numbered among the communion of the saints, through him who has defeated death and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Several years ago, I participated in a spiritual retreat at an Episcopal convent, and ever since, the good sisters have kept me on their mailing list. I receive prayer calendars reminding me of the saints that ought to be prayed for. The November crowd includes Margaret of Scotland, Elizabeth of Hungary, and Clement of Rome. It is a wonderful lineup. While we Protestants are not in the habit of canonizing ordinary mortals, we do join our Episcopal and Catholic friends around the world in celebrating All Saints’ Day. Since the seventh century, a day has been set aside in the Christian church for “the great cloud of witnesses and martyrs and saints who ran their race with perseverance and who now rest from their labors” (Book of Common Worship, Presbyterian Church USA). Later in the service this morning, we shall remember by name those members of the Fourth Presbyterian Church congregation who have died during the past year. I want to encourage each of you, some time before the morning is over, to give thanks to God for the saints in your own life, those people who have touched your lives, nurtured you, and helped you to become a bigger and better person than you might have otherwise been. I thought when I was preaching earlier this morning of my grandfather John, for whom I am named (for him and for my grandmother Anna.) My grandfather, who died when my mother was a girl, was a minister in Georgia. Stories of his faithfulness to the gospel of Christ, to the communities that were his churches, and to his family have been perhaps the greatest inspiration in my own life. Certainly I think of him as one of the saints who has affected my ministry and my courage in accepting a call to ministry. I think of him as one of my balcony people. I imagine perhaps his spirit is somewhere here today, saying to his granddaughter, whom he never met in person, “God bless you, Joanna.”

Carlyle Marney coined the phrase “balcony people,” referring to those whom we have known, or perhaps have known only through stories about them or through their writing or philosophies, who have made us see and understand the presence of God. It was Paul Tillich who said that to be a saint is not to be a perfect person. A saint is not a saint because he or she is perfect, but because he or she is transparent. Through him or her, something bigger and better and more glorious shines. So thanks be to God for those whom we would call saints in our churches and in our lives.

This All Saints’ Sunday, I would like to talk with you not so much about who the saints are, but about where the saints are. I want you to think with me about what has happened to those whom we have loved and lost. Do they live anywhere besides our hearts and our memories, and what about ourselves? What do we have a right to look forward to when we ourselves come to the end? Christian theology has sometimes been accused of answering the questions that no one is asking, but I am confident that the question of what will happen to us when we die is one that will occur to us all before our days on earth are done.

I remember an ancient story set in the Middle Eastern city of Baghdad, about a master who sent his servant to the marketplace one day. The servant returned to the master’s house pale and stricken. “Master,” he said, “while I was at the market, I was jostled by a man, and when I turned and looked at him, I saw the face of death. Death stared at me and made a threatening gesture in my direction. May I borrow your horse so that I can ride far away to the distant city of Samara, so I might escape death?” So the master lent the servant his horse, and the servant galloped away frantically off into the night. The next day, the master himself went to the marketplace. He too encountered death among the crowd there.

“Why did you make such a threatening gesture toward my servant?” he asked.

Death answered, “That was no threatening gesture; it was simply an expression of surprise. You see, I was surprised to find your servant in Baghdad, because I have an appointment with him in Samara tonight.”

It is not humanly possible to avoid what poet Alan Seeger has called “our rendezvous with Death.” I remember the words of an expert on the Soviet Union: long before its collapse, he had predicted its downfall, saying, “Communism cannot endure, because it has no answer to death.” Faith has an answer to death, and all people live by some kind of faith.

What does the Christian faith have to say in answer to this most critical question?

I address this topic with some trepidation. It is one you rarely hear a preacher wrestle with except at a funeral or memorial service. We must be wary of doing what Reinhold Niebuhr warned against: describing “the furniture of heaven and the temperature of hell.” This will not be a literalist sermon. What I want to say to you today is that the Christian faith, if it is anything, is resurrection faith. It is based on the profound conviction that when God raised Christ from the dead, death was finally, ultimately, and completely defeated.

The New Testament offers maddeningly few details about the afterlife. Perhaps the longest and most specific conversation about the topic occurs in John’s Gospel, where Jesus, facing his own death, reassures his disciples that in his Father’s house are many mansions (John 14:1–7). “I am going there to prepare a place for you and I will come again and take you unto myself, that where I am there you may be also.” The Greek word for that unforgettable phrase “many mansions” means literally “abiding places.” In my Father’s house, there are many abiding places, which indicates to me, at least, that heaven is not so much a place in the spatial sense, but that it is a state of being, a state of being with God. By inference, of course, hell would be the state of being far away from God, a condition quite possible to attain right here on earth.

Later in John’s Gospel, the risen Christ appears to his disciples. He comes to them when they are locked in an upper room, filled with fear and uncertainty about the future. They are in a room and the door is locked, yet Jesus enters and says to them, “Peace be with you” (John 20:19–28). What did he look like? I do not know, but he was there. Was he spirit? Well, yes, but then he holds out his hand to Thomas and says, “Here. Touch this.” What we know is that he was there, and if he was there for them, risen and offering peace, then he will be there for us, and we will know him, and we will know one another.

What we have in the New Testament are not so much literal details as figurative imagery and sure and certain promises of a risen life in Christ. What we will look like, what those we have loved and lost will look like, we cannot say or know. We will have to wait and see. The main question is this: Who will be waiting for us when we cross to the other side?

The grandfather I referred to earlier was preaching a sermon on the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, a magnificent testimony to Christ’s resurrection and its significance, when he literally collapsed of a cerebral hemorrhage. He never regained consciousness. The words of Saint Paul have always been particularly important to me. “When the perishable body puts on imperishability,” Paul wrote, “and the mortal body puts on immortality, then that saying that has been written will be fulfilled, death has been swallowed up in victory.” How it actually happens, Paul did not know. But that it would happen, Paul knew through faith.

The risen Christ, according to the testimony of the Gospel writers, did not want his followers to adopt a kind of otherworldly obsession about what would happen to them when they died. He was interested in their life on earth, in their fulfilling his mission in the here and now. “Feed my lambs,” he told them. “Tell the others.” “Be my witnesses.” Trust that death has been defeated.

We heard a moving and triumphant passage from the book of Revelation, written by a Christian mystic named John on the island of Patmos. He was writing to encourage a beleaguered and persecuted church in a time of doubt. When I hear those magnificent words about the great multitude of the redeemed, full of joy, their sins washed by the blood of the Lamb, entering the presence of God with palm branches and white robes symbolizing the righteousness that God has given to them through the sacrifice of the Lamb, I think of the joy of a New Orleans funeral, as the brass band breaks loose and leads the mourners forth in joy and celebration.

In Revelation, there is a sentence I hope you pay attention to. It reads, “The one who is seated upon the throne will shelter them with his presence,” literally, “will spread his tabernacle (or tent) over them.” Imagine: God being the tent within which you and I will spend eternity.

Imagine it, if you can. Believe it if you will. I am always amazed at why the notion of eternal life is so problematic for modern Christian people. I can’t imagine that we would want to believe that life ends with the grave. I wonder why that is. Could it be perhaps we wonder if we deserve eternal life? No one does. It is the Lamb who makes it possible. Why is it that some of us are prone to believe that only that which is hopeless is what must be true and that which is hopeful cannot possibly be true?

Yesterday on an airplane I finished a book entitled Being Dead (Picador, 1999). It is an awarding-winning novel by the writer Jim Crace. He writes, “We live, we die, and then there is only ash and memory.” You may believe that, if you wish, but there is another possibility.

Among my own balcony people, there is another person whom I never knew in life but knew through his writings: the late Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen. In his book Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Death and Dying, he lays out the two choices that are before us. We can live either as if this life is all that we have and death is absurd and we had better not talk about it, or we can choose to claim our divine (this word will surprise you) childhood. As 1 John puts it so clearly, “See what love the Father has for us that we should be called children of God, and so we are. We are God’s children now.”

Let me ask this of your sophisticated mind. If you are a child of God, if you accept that premise, then why would the One who created you and made your earthly existence so rich and meaningful and creative, why would that God abandon you to the cold vault of death at the end of your earthly life? I simply cannot imagine that.

Let me close with a conversation that Nouwen creates between a set of twins not yet born, still living in their mother’s womb:

A sister and a brother are speaking. The sister says, “You know, brother, I believe there is going to be life after birth.”

The brother says, “Why, that’s the most ridiculous idea I have ever heard.”

The girl insists, “There must be something else—a place with light and freedom to move,” but she couldn’t convince her brother. Then she said hesitantly, “You are not going to believe what I am going to say now either. But I will tell you what else I believe. I believe there is a mother.”

“Well, you have never seen a mother, and neither have I,” the brother announces. “This is all we have.”

The sister says, “But don’t we feel squeezes and intimations of something else now and again? I think those are there to get us ready for another place. A place more beautiful than this. A place where we will see our mother face to face.”

Now we see through a glass dimly, but we trust that the day will come when you and I will see face to face. Now we know in part, but there is a day when we will know everything, even as we have been fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12).

The communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Build your life and hope on those cornerstones, and trust God in this life and for the life to come. Amen.