What Happens When We Die?
Luke 15:1-32
Today is the fourth sermon in our Lenten sermon series on Questions You’ve Always Wanted to Ask God. But each week Jennie and I have tried to make it clear that we are under no illusion that we are God. We invite your questions, conversation and reflection and frequently what comes after the sermon in the way of more talk is the best part. Our question for today’s sermon comes from Jack Leger and he was very succinct. What happens when we die? Actually Jack asked a whole range of questions, including, How deep is the ocean? How far out does space go? Does anything live out there? Do you really hear my prayers? How will I know? These are all wonderful questions, but for the sake of one sermon, we are focusing on his first question: What happens when we die?
Please pray with me.
If I didn’t know better, I would think that being a Christian has little to do with this life. If I listened to those who speak the loudest and gather the most attention, I would think that Jesus’ life was primarily about offering human beings a golden ticket to a life beyond this one. “The afterlife- the promise of heaven and the threat of hell- has been at the center of popular Christianity for centuries. In the minds of many, this is what Christianity is all about. It tells us what we must do to be saved…what we must do in order to go to heaven (and avoid hell). Indeed, for many Christians, this is what the words “saved” and “salvation” mean; they refer to a post death state, to the next world and not this world.”[1] And in this way of thinking, the whole point of the Christian faith is to believe in Jesus now for the sake of heaven later.
But for a long time, I have wondered if this way of thinking discounts the fullness of Jesus’ life, I wonder if this kind of thinking lets us off of the hook for all that Jesus asks. How simple it would be to follow Christ if all we were asked to do is believe in him, but not for the glory God, for ourselves, to ensure our wellbeing in whatever awaits us beyond this life.
According to scholar Marcus Borg, this theological bent toward heaven comes from two familiar phrases in the gospels. The phrase, “Kingdom of heaven” is found in the Gospel of Matthew and the second phrase, “eternal life” is found in the Gospel of John. But Borg and others argue that when Jesus says, “Kingdom of heaven” he was referring to the “Kingdom of God,” which the Gospel of Matthew makes clear is for the Earth and for all of creation, and because of this, there is a sense in which this Kingdom is one that God is creating among us right here, right now; which is why Jesus also said again and again, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” For the Gospel of John, the Greek phrase translated as “eternal life’ should not simply be equated with an afterlife. Rather, it is better understood as the “life of an age to come,” and John affirms that this is already a present reality.[2]
So if Jesus spoke of heaven as a time or a place or an experience that is both here and yet to come, how are we to understand it as people who take following Christ seriously? If we were to survey Christians around the world, I bet we would be likely to hear something very different. Heaven, in most of our minds, is a place more like what we experience on vacation. I have heard clergy and lay people alike describing a heaven that includes golden gates and fruit trees. I have heard heaven described as a rowdy bar scene with countless stories being told and retold. I have heard heaven described as simply a better version of what we know as life. But given what Jesus said, I can’t help but wonder if these heavenly descriptions are simply a longing to know more than we can, a yearning that is at its core, about our fear of death.
What if all of this heaven talk is a way to avoid the truth that we really know very little about what happens next? Creating a paradise in our minds can be a way in which we allow ourselves to avoid facing the cold hard fact that not one of us is leaving this Earth alive. And further, at some point, we are forced to face the truth that no matter what we do, we will all get older and will be forced to deal with the annoying and often painful reality that our body will eventually fail us, that we won’t be able to do the things we have always done and that even in spite of our impending end, life will go on, even when we cannot.
So what if our idea of heaven, what if our focus on getting to that fabulous scene in the clouds, is distracting us from the abundant life we are offered in Jesus Christ right here and now? What if what Jesus wanted us to know, is that we are not to fear, we are not to worry, we are not to spend our time on things that we cannot know, but that there is simply no place we can go where God is not?
There is simply no darkness too dark, no place too hidden, no valley too deep, no place, not even death, where we can find ourselves, where God is not. While our scripture for this morning isn’t explicitly about heaven, I think it may say more about heaven than any image we could create.
It is a story familiar to many of us, whether we have heard it from the Gospel of Luke or not- a story about a son who wants to cash out of the family plot and take his share in cash, an act that would doom the future of his family, burn the bridges of generations of connection among the people in the community and challenge the foundation of the kinship created by an agrarian society. In the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, “A great deal depended on being and having good neighbors. When you needed help getting your crops in before the rain came, or raising a barn—or having a baby, or digging a grave—you counted on the neighbors, the same way they counted on you. You traded a dozen of your chickens for one of their lambs. You invited them to your parties and they invited you to theirs. If things worked out the way they were supposed to, then your children married their children, strengthening the kinship bonds between your clans and linking your farms in a patchwork family quilt. In this world, an individual had little meaning apart from his or her family. Identity was conferred in the plural, not the singular. When the younger son asks for his share of the family property, he deals his father a double blow. He not only means to break up the estate; he also means to leave his father, who counts on both of his sons to care for him in his old age. If there is a mother upstairs listening from behind her bedroom door, then she gets clobbered too. When her husband dies, everything she has goes straight to her sons. Losing one of them is like losing a kidney. She needs at least two to insure her survival. But the younger son is not thinking about his mother, his father, his family’s honor or his village. He is thinking about himself—what he needs, what he wants, who he hopes he may turn out to be. Staying in relationship is not high on his list of priorities. Being his own person is. Getting out of town to find himself is.”[3]
“The only way that boy of his is ever going to step foot back inside that town is to come back ten times richer than he left, with fabulous presents for every member of his family and enough left over to buy back the farm. Then he will have to throw a banquet and invite the whole community, honoring them as extravagantly as he shamed them when he left. But of course this is not what happens. Instead, the younger son loses everything…”[4] so when he finds his way back home, he is not just asking to be welcomed home fully, he is not just asking for his place back, he is asking for something that would force his family to lose their identity, force them to swallow their pride, lose it all and start over with very little on which to rebuild their lives. But it makes me think of how God works, how God holds a place for us, when we have put ourselves above everything else. God holds a place for us when have failed and faltered and floundered our way into a dead end. This story makes me think of something else that Jesus said, one of the only pieces of scripture that captures his thoughts on heaven, but I think it is also about who God is to all of us.
It is found in chapter fourteen in the Gospel of John where Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
If we are to live fully the calling bestowed upon each of us when we said we wanted to follow, if we are to be Christ’s hands in this world and to do what Jesus asks, what if being a Christian has little to do with what awaits us beyond this life? This is not to say that what we imagine of heaven is wrong, this is not to say that the stories we hear from those who are dying about what awaits them are wrong, but what if Jesus intentionally did not tell us more than we need to know? What Jesus’ life and message was about this life, about soaking up each day, each experience, about loving fully and living out loud? What if all we need to know is that God holds a place for each of us? Would anything be lost?
What if heaven is simply that place where God is found? What if heaven is the experience known by the prodigal son, who was welcomed home as he was, in spite of all that had gone before? What if Jesus told us about the Kingdom of Heaven, the already and the not yet, so we could taste it here, savor it now and remember for all time the dwelling place we have in God whether in life or in death? May it be so. Amen.
[1] Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary by Marcus Borg. HarperOne, 2006. pp. 19
[2] Borg 19-20.
[3] Barbara Brown Taylor “The Parable of the Dysfunctional Family”17-Apr-2006
The Fourth Sunday of Lent Luke 15:1-3a, 11b-32
[4] Ibid.