God called me into ministry almost a quarter century ago. My sense of call really centered on wanting to help people find significance in connecting faith to the rest of their lives. I certainly was not thinking at all about the role of pastors at the end of life. My focus was on the living.
And it still is, but I can tell you that the longer I serve as pastor, the more I appreciate the privilege of walking with people in the valley of the shadow of death. I am grateful that people invite me to be with them in these holy moments. I am humbled to get to speak about people and life and faith at funerals. To be honest with you, funerals are about the realest that ministry gets. A lot of the rest of the time, it’s so easy for us to hide behind our smiles, to say the right pleasant things to each other, but there’s no faking at a funeral.
So, when several of the questions we received this summer circled around death and life after death, I knew that I should devote a Sunday to them because death touches us all. Even when we experience hope at a funeral, time causes our memory to fade and our hope to recede.
Today I want to begin with the way the New Testament describes what happens to us after we die, which is actually not often what I hear when people talk about their loved one who has just passed. We have to keep in mind that these descriptions are merely signposts. They are signs pointing a deeper reality that goes way beyond the sign itself, so consider these things merely glimpses into the glory to come. These descriptions are inadequate, a foggy mist through which we’re trying to see future glory.
Our views of what happens after we die are often more influenced by our culture than they are by the Bible. I don’t say that as a criticism because culture is hugely influential, and, frankly, it’s not like we can turn to the “Book-on-what-happens-when-you-die” for a play-by-play on eternal life. I was going to say that there’s not one chapter of scripture that specifically deals with this, but that would have been wrong. What Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15 is that chapter. We read parts of it today, and sort of like Romans 9-11 last week, what Paul writes is compelling but also not simple to decipher.
So, let me run through the basics of how Paul writes about the resurrection. It’s predominantly in 1 Corinthians 15, but it also shows up in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 2 Corinthians 5, where Paul asserts, “We know that when these bodies of ours are taken down like tents and folded away, they will be replaced by resurrection bodies in heaven—God-made, not handmade—and we’ll never have to relocate our “tents” again….The Spirit of God whets our appetite by giving us a taste of what’s ahead. He puts a little of heaven in our hearts so that we’ll never settle for less.” Like I said, these are signposts pointing us to the greater thing beyond.
The Bible describes two stages regarding what happens after we die. There is life after death, and there is life after life after death, to borrow a phrase from one of my favorites, N. T. Wright, whose book Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church is one of the most formative books I’ve read since becoming a pastor.
Eternal life is not some disembodied existence forever. It’s about resurrection and resurrected bodies. Paul writes about how Jesus’ resurrection is the forerunner of ours. Because God has raised Jesus, God has sealed his victory over death. So, first God raised Jesus from the dead. It’s what we celebrate every Sunday but especially on Easter. We now exist between the time of resurrection and Christ’s coming again. Interestingly, Paul’s writing reveals his belief that Jesus was coming back soon, but we are reading his words almost 2000 years later, so we’re left wondering what we do with the “slowness” of Jesus coming back. Haven’t billions of people lived and died since Jesus lived, died, and rose again? Should we doubt his promise? To that my answer is this: One of the reasons that Jesus hasn’t returned yet is because he was waiting for you to join in to his party and promise. If he had already returned, none of us would have lived, and clearly you are part of God’s plan — thanks be to God!
To continue in Paul’s thinking, in the fullness of time, when Christ returns, God will raise those who have died first and then those who are still living will never experience death but will be changed into the future glory God has made for us. So, this is really the core of our faith when it comes to God’s eternal promises. God raised Jesus from the dead. We live now into that promise, orienting our lives around the promises of God we know in Christ. Presumably most, if not all, of us will die before Jesus returns, and so we will wait with billions of others for resurrection.
You heard this when I read it just a few minutes ago, but now that I’ve given you more context, listen to how Paul wraps up 1 Corinthians 15: “But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I’ll probably never fully understand. We’re not all going to die—but we are all going to be changed. You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes—it’s over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we’ll all be changed. In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelves and replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal. Then the saying will come true:
“Death swallowed by triumphant Life!
Who got the last word, oh, Death?
Oh, Death, who’s afraid of you now?”
Now, let me get to the questions you asked, because there are many of them. Two different folks asked a version of this: Do we go to heaven when we pass or at the second coming of Christ? Based on what Paul teaches, there appears to be an in-between state from our death to our resurrection in the new heavens and new earth. I’m not talking about purgatory here, a place that is neither heaven nor hell where our prayers help usher people into heaven. Rather, there is a time between the death of our current bodies and raising of the dead in their resurrected bodies. Paul calls this “sleeping,” although I don’t think that’s quite it.
In Luke 20, the Sadducees challenge Jesus with a question about marriage in eternity. It’s a test for Jesus. The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, but the Pharisees did. They wanted to see whose side Jesus was on. I’ll get to marriage in a little bit, but I want to point out that Jesus’ answer reveals that Jesus accepted as axiomatic — that is, self-evident or unquestionable — that the patriarchs and the prophets were still alive. Jesus points out how God proclaims, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” when meeting Moses at the burning bush. God isn’t the God of dead men, but of the living, Jesus is saying. To God, all are alive.
But, let me reframe this even a little bit more. When we think of heaven, we are usually thinking of a place. Where do we point for heaven? Up, right? Long before we could study the stars and the universe the way we now do, the ancients believed in the three-tiered universe. Earth was in the middle. The place of the dead was below. Heaven was above. Even today when we know that what is up is different for someone in Australia than it is for someone in Canada, we still treat heaven as up.
I think it’s helpful to think about heaven not solely as where but as when. When is heaven? It’s when God has made all things new, taken all the brokenness of this world and renewed and restored and resurrected it. Time is different for God, who is eternal. To God a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day, writes Peter. We experience time differently than God. But here’s what we know about those who have already died. They are awaiting the glories of resurrection, but they are also alive in a different form. And time is different for them than it is for us.
Next question: What’s the church’s position on cremation? I appreciate this question because it’s so practical. Growing up I can’t recall a single funeral service that didn’t have a casket at it, but the vast majority of the services I do these days involve cremation. I even met with members of our congregation about this question in the last month because some Christians teach that if there is no body in the ground, then what can God resurrect?
I actually found an answer to this straight from our denominational Constitution, The Book of Order, which says, “When a member of the community dies, the body of the deceased will be buried, cremated, donated for medical use, or otherwise disposed of in a responsible and reverent manner.” So, we believe the only wrong way to handle a body at death is to do so irreverently. During the pandemic, Jess and I established a trust with all of our wishes. It includes that we be cremated. I am zero-percent concerned that the God who made everything out of nothing cannot resurrect me from the dust.
Another question centered on this: What is appropriate to pray for when someone you love is suffering and dying? I love the compassion undergirding this question, which is think is part of the core of my answer here. When our prayers are centered on the love we have for another and when we are offering them in trust to God, then I think it’s hard to go wrong. Our prayers — even the most eloquent of them — are feeble attempts to put into words what our deepest desires are. God knows our hearts, and God loves us and those we’re praying for far more than we can ever imagine. Our prayers are an offering, and God takes them and does with them what needs to be done. And being with someone as they are dying is one of the holiest things we can do because it’s hard and because it shows the depths of our ability to love.
I’ll do the final set of questions rapid fire. Will I know those I love in heaven? I think so. If Jesus still refers to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as living and speaks of them as recognizable, then I believe the same about our parents, grandparents, friends, and so on. One thing I believe about heaven is that we will not be disappointed. It will both be like the good we’ve experienced in this life and better. Whenever we’re concerned that it won’t meet our expectations, to that I would say, buckle up. It’s going to exceed them.
Next, are there many mansions in heaven? In John 14, Jesus is preparing his disciples for his death, and he talks about going to prepare a place for them. The King James Version rendered the Greek word monai as mansions, but it really means rooms or dwelling places. Jesus is borrowing from a wedding image. In his day, an engaged couple would wait to get married until the future husband had finished building their rooms onto the family home. So, what Jesus is saying isn’t that we’re all going to get those beach houses we’ve always wanted. Rather, he’s saying, I’m getting things ready for you to join me and be a part of my heavenly family.
Next, what about earthly marriages and loves? What happens to those in eternity? Earlier I mentioned Jesus’ testing by the Sadducees on the resurrection, and their riddle involves marriage in eternity. I totally get what’s at the heart of this one. If we love someone for a lifetime, we’d hope that we continue in that. Jesus doesn’t answer this directly. Again, I’d say this is a signpost pointing to a greater reality. Here’s Jesus’ answer in Luke 20. “Marriage is a major preoccupation here, but not there. Those who are included in the resurrection of the dead will no longer be concerned with marriage nor, of course, with death. They will have better things to think about, if you can believe it. All ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God.”
To put it another way, “Like the apostle Paul, Jesus asserts that the eternal life is not a prolongation of earthly life, but life in an entirely new dimension.”
There is so much more I could say about all of this, but I think I’ve given us plenty to wrestle with on this topic.
Let me close with this. It’s an occupational hazard that pastors think about death a lot. A couple of years ago, our kids got sick of it. We’d be at dinner, and almost always we’d start talking about people in the church who had died or who were dying. One of the kids finally piped up, “Would you stop talking about death at the dinner table? That’s all you ever talk about!” They were right, of course. It was coming up all the time, but that’s because we love deeply and loving deeply opens all of us to loss. Still, we love all the same because we believe in God’s promises for eternal life, even when we can’t fully wrap our minds around the whole idea.
To use Eugene Peterson’s words from 1 Corinthians 15, “There are no diagrams for this kind of thing.”
Frederick Buechner once wrote these words about funerals, “Celebrate the life by all means but face up to the death of that life. Weep all the tears you have in you to weep because whatever may happen next, if anything does, this has happened. Something precious and irreplaceable has come to an end and something in you has come to an end with it. Funerals put a period after the sentence’s last word. They close a door. They let you get on with your life….
“Death is not any more permanent than sleep is permanent is what [Jesus] meant apparently. That isn’t to say he took death lightly. When he heard about Lazarus, he wept….But if death is the closing of one door, he seems to say, it is the opening of another one.”
That open door is one we will not fully experience until the time is right, but I fully trust God’s good plan of salvation and restoration for all of us, even in these thoughts that exceed our understanding and imagination.