Like A Motherless Child

"Like A Motherless Child"
Ezekiel 34:11-17

Some times I feel like a motherless child
Some times I feel like a motherless child
Some times I feel like a motherless child
Long way from home
Long way from home

The words and the music of the spiritual describes well the scattering and shattering experiences of being in exile—of being lost in place that is not your own.  Maybe some of you saw the recent movie, Gravity staring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.  During a walk in space, she becomes untethered from the main ship and is floating away in space.  One moment she is OK, held on by the safety strap, the next she is flying away, tumbling in space, away from the ship.  One moment secure, the next she is helplessly floating away from that security.  Rescue improbable, if not impossible.

Imagine what that would feel like.  Imagine what it would be like to suddenly snap free from everything that at one time was your security.  Imagine what it would be like to be holding your end of the rope and suddenly feel the other end go slack.  Imagine the fit of panic, quickly pulling in the rope to see for yourself there is nothing on the other end.  Or like this deep sea diver:

If you can imagine that, you know what it means to be scattered.  You know what it means to be in exile.  You know what it means to be in ancient Israel.  The circumstances may be different, but the feelings are the same.  The Israelites had been taken over by the invading Babylonian army.  The Israel countryside totally sacked through a pillage and burn policy of the enemy.  Separated from family and friends, not knowing if they are dead or alive.  Anything of cultural or religious value stolen or destroyed.

On a more basic level, there is the loss of the familiar, such as a daily routine.  We can imagine, for example, that one person as they are being marched away in chains, must have wondered, “But who is going to take out the garbage—today is garbage day,” without realizing it doesn’t matter anymore.  It’s not that they are concerned with the garbage; it’s more the loss of the routine.

Add to all that the uncertainty that the enslaved Israelites faced, not knowing what their future held.  In freedom, in their past lives, they may not have known what the future held either, but at least they felt like they had some control, some say, as to what would happen the next day, the next week.

El Cordobes, the famous matador, who when asked if he was afraid of death in the ring with the bull, said, “No.  Only life scares me.”  That is what being in exile does to a person.  Life scares you.  The parts of life, like:  Dislocation.  Rootlessness.  Hopelessness.

Some times I feel like I’m almost gone
Some times I feel like I’m almost gone
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone
Long way from home
Long way from home

What about people like me and you who have never been routed by a conquering army, never been dragged kicking and screaming from everything and everybody who provided our stability?  Even though we have never gone through that particular devastation, I think, nonetheless, we do have experiences that throw us into emotional exile.  They are scattering experiences that hit us on two fronts, each of which is singly capable of pulling the rug out from under our stable lives.

One front on which we are attacked is our need for continuity.  We are a church and we are a community that highly prizes our historical continuity.  We are proud of our history.  We know from where we have come, and how we got to where we are.  We use that tide of historical forces to create the wave and the momentum to ride upon into the future.

But what happens when we thought the wave we were on was the big one, and we would ride it all the way to the shore of our destiny, but it turns out to be a little one that quickly blends itself back into the vast ocean and we sink, way short of our goal?  Something has happened.  Something has changed.

Change has a way of scattering us from our sense of continuity, and what is lost is the vision and the hope for this fulfillment of our dreams.  As one philosopher-humorist once pointed out, “We’re all in favor of progress provided we can have it without change.”

We base our lives on some kind of values, and assumptions.  With those values and assumptions, we create a role for ourselves.  What happens is that there are times in our lives that a change takes place, and those values and assumptions are challenged.  The crisis is so severe that it forces us to reevaluate and redefine our roles.  The humorist Sam Leveson once said, “I set out in life to find that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  Now I’m eighty and all I’ve got is this pot” (pointing to his stomach).

At some point comes the loss of youth, youthful dreams, and our “some day” aspirations.  All the magic hopes that all our dreams will come true must go through the scattering experience of change.  It has been said that if our dreams do not come true we can take consolation that neither do our nightmares.  But change can be a living nightmare, a process that must be lived through, and you don’t know if you are going to be able to escape from all the monsters along the way.

The book, Dear Deedee,is the published diary of Dori Schaffer.  She was a beauty queen, a prize-winning artist, a writer, a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, a Woodrow Wilson fellow, and a promising doctoral candidate.  She was riding an amazing wave to high aspirations.  Then, through a variety of bitter experiences, her wave played itself out beneath her feet.  At one point, she wrote:

I compare myself to Ivan (in Doestoevesky’s The Death of Ivan Ilych) where he is tormented by the feeling that his life was not worthwhile.  His mental sufferings were due to the fact that at night…the question suddenly occurred to him:  What if my whole life has really been wrong?

When that question is asked, imagine what happens.  The past that provided one’s sense of continuity is suddenly dislodged and made irrelevant.  With the past debunked, the future suddenly disappears into a fog of fear and meaningless.  Suddenly there is only the here and now.  Only the here and now is real, and what is here and now hurts with a distinct sharpness.  Life becomes a bow whose string is broken and from which no arrow can fly.

There was once a businessman who noticed one of his friends walking downtown wearing a band around his arm with the initials, “B-A-I-K.”  As they stopped at the same corner, waiting for the light, the businessman asked his friend what the letters stood for.
“Boy Am I Konfused,” replied the man.
“But, you don’t spell confused with a K,” protested the businessman.
“Hey,” the man replied.  “You don’t know how Konfused I am!”

When our lives have been fixed on some track of continuity, and something derails us, everything becomes fluid.  For a while, nothing stays the same or permanent.  With great change comes many aftershocks of change.  Life is now a collage with many different pieces, rather than a flowing unity of brush strokes.

God is searching for those kinds of people who have been scattered by change.  He is looking for people who have lost their dreams.  God wants to give them a place of rest where they can dream again.  God is delivering them to a place and a perspective where they can see that past and present have been meaningful, and thereby gaze again with anticipation into the future.

One of my seminary professors told me about the time he had gone through a deep depression.  For a couple of years his life was a sucking whirlpool.  The farther he was pulled in the faster it seemed to make him spin.  Dreams had been very important to him, and had kept a journal of his dreams.  One recurring dream was about a foundation being built.  Then a carpenter began putting up studding.  Now and then the man saw himself helping the carpenter who was doing most of the work.

When my seminary professor shared the dream with a therapist, the therapist asked him if he knew any carpenters.  The professor said he didn’t.  “Wasn’t Jesus a carpenter?” asked the therapist.  “Isn’t he rebuilding your life right now, piece by piece?”

In a way God knew he could get the professors attention, he was telling him, “I have found you; renew your hope.”  And in ways that God knows He can individually get our attention, He will find us and speak to us, and to our feelings of hopelessness brought on by some change.

Some times I feel like I been runnin’ too long
Some times I feel like I been runnin’ too long
Some times I feel like I been runnin’ too long
Long way from home,
Long way from home.

The other side of the coin to our need for continuity is a need for permanence.  There needs to be something or someone that we are sure will be with us no matter what.

Stopped by a policeman for driving with a tail light out, the driver became quite distressed.  “Don’t take it so hard,” consoled the policeman.  “It’s not a ticket.”
“That’s not the point,” replied the troubled driver.  “What worries me is what’s happened to my wife and my trailer!”

When we lose those things in our lives that give us a sense of permanence, we find ourselves suddenly scattered and exiled.  Psychologists have found that most people depend on some other person or on an external goal to constantly reassure themselves that they are of value.  When that significant other, or that dominant goal is lost, we ache, we feel empty, and abandoned.  The dark and fast moving clouds of meaninglessness and the feeling of being unnecessary begin to roll in and block our blue skies.  Self-esteem can be shattered.

Who we thought, or what we thought we would always have to hold on to—that which we thought would always be our lifeline—may be gone.

As he aged, James Moore, owner of Dinty Moore’s restaurant in New York City, badly missed two of his departed cronies.  One quiet afternoon, the absence got intolerable.  The old man fixed up two packages wrapped in butcher paper and tied them with string, climbed into his chauffeur driven Packard, and went to Woodlawn Cemetery.

At the mausoleum of his friend Sam Harris, the theatrical producer, Moore placed a beautiful hunk of corned beef and reminded him aloud how inconsiderate he had been to die young.  By the time Moore had marched over to the mausoleum of George M. Cohan, he was steaming mad.  The other parcel was a fish, which he beat against the mausoleum door.  “Cohan!” Moore shouted.  “In case you don’t know, today’s Friday, and I just wanted you to see what you’re missing!”  And with that, the old man slid to the floor and wept.

This is the work of grief, when it creates its aching distance between ourselves and that which we wanted to hold on to as solid ground.  How do we go on with life without the significant other?  How do we rebuild our lives without some external and captivating goal?

In Charles Dicken’s, A Tale of Two Cities, a prisoner in the Bastille lived in a cell for many years and cobbled shoes.  He became so used to the narrow walls, the darkness, and the monotony, that when finally liberated, he went straight home and built, in the center of his home, a cell.  On days when the skies were clear and birds were singing, the tap tap tap of the cobbler’s hammer could still be heard coming from his own dark cell.  Grief has a way of imprisoning us and keeping us that way.

God is looking for such grief-trapped people.  He is searching for them personally—those who have been scattered and exiled into cells of loneliness.  When God finds such people, He wants to lead them out of the cell by their hands and open up before them a wide and comfortable place where they can roam and grow and feed on all that God can provide.  God is coming with the message that even though all else may tumble down around you, He is permanent, and will always be so for those whom he loves.  God is searching for, and finding, and caring for, and delivering those who “were scattered on a cloudy and gloomy day.”

Some day the Lord’s gonna find this child
Some day the Lord’s gonna find this child
Some day the Lord’s gonna find this child
Lord, take me home
Lord, take me home

Never Give Up Praying

"Never Give Up Praying"
1 Thessalonians 5:15-24

When I was in seminary, there was a little room just off the sanctuary.  It was the room that was used the least of all the rooms on campus.  It was the room for private prayer.  It was just a little bare room with a chair, maybe two, and a small altar.  The door was always open.

I confess, of the three years I was on that seminary campus, I never went in that room.  Never used it.  Nor did I use other places of prayer, or opportunities for prayer.  When I prayed, I did like all of my seminary peers:  I opened a Book Of Common Worship, and read one out of there.  It was the only kind of praying I had modeled for me.  I did as I saw.

Like most Christians, I knew prayer was important.  I just didn't know what it was or how to do it.  I got a book about prayer now and then.  Mostly because I felt a nagging guilt that I should know how to pray.  I was like most of us in the way we approach a task:  I was convinced that if I learned the technique of praying, I would be able to pray.  It was just a matter of learning the technique, as if I were simply learning how to play the guitar.  But just because I have learned the technique of playing the guitar doesn't necessarily mean I understand music.  Or appreciate it.  That comes from a deeper quest, and I had not even begun to embark on that quest in respect to prayer.  That would come later, by crisis.

The crisis was my first church out of seminary.  I entered seminary clutching my Bible and ready to serve Christ.  I left seminary clutching my theology books and not exactly knowing who Jesus was.  I was at a church, unbeknownst to me, that was a tyrannosaurus that had a hunger for pastoral meat.  Several pastors in a row, who had served that church before me, had been chewed up and spit out.  The average stay of a pastor at that church, over it's 100 year history was 2 and a half years.  I was next.  I thought I was ready.  I was a fool.  I thought I had the truth.  I didn't know squat.  I thought I was strong.  I have never whined and whimpered more in my life.

I remember one Sunday.  I got up early, as has become my habit, and went next door to the church.  I practiced preaching my sermon to an empty sanctuary.  Suddenly I stopped in the middle of my rehearsing.  A pit opened up in my stomach.  I started breathing heavy.  I left the sanctuary and walked around the block.  Several times.  I was making myself sick.  It wasn't just because I was nervous about preaching.  It was because I was nervous about what I was preaching.  It was just a bunch of words.  Moralistic clap-trap about "we gotta be nice to each other."

Part of this was Floyd Hogg's fault.  Floyd was an 84 year old man in the congregation.  He was my first spiritual mentor.  But he had no idea that's what he was doing for me.  He taught Adult Sunday School.  He had for years.

When he started each class with prayer, or when he would help me lead worship and he would pray, or when I would go over to his house to play Chinese Checkers and drink root beer floats and he would pray at the end of my visit, I knew I had gotten way off track.  There was something about him that was so powerful in a quiet sort of way.  I knew I wanted what he had.  There's a verse in the book of Ecclesiastes that describes Floyd:  "The quiet words of the wise are more effective than the ranting of a king of fools" (Ecclesiastes 9:17).  That was Floyd.  Quiet wisdom and strength.  That flowed out of a relationship of prayer.

It wasn't soon after my anxiety attack about my preaching and pastoring that Floyd died.  While I was on study leave he had gotten sick and went into the hospital.  By the time I got back he was nearly gone.  His was one of the hardest funerals I've ever done.

After he died I got deeply depressed.  I felt like I was washing out of the ministry.  Floyd had modeled something for me that was deeply engaging, but I still didn't understand.  The life of prayer.  I wanted that with all my strength, but had no idea what direction to take, or how to take care of my nagging restlessness and depression.  All I knew was I had nothing to preach.

The more theological books I read the more confused I got.  The more people I talked to, most of whom were supposed to be the most looked-up-to pastors in the Presbytery, the more I realized their lives were just as empty as mine.  They had just learned how to pretend and become accomplished Sunday morning actors.  I was determined not to become one of them.  But how?

Answers did not come quickly, but they did come steadily.  The first thing that God did was open up a move for me to California.  I became an Associate Pastor in Saratoga, a suburb of San Jose.  I was in charge of the Christian Education programs, getting a new Christian Education wing built, Deacons ministries, and all youth activities.  Only rarely did I preach, which was OK by me.  If I never preached again, it wouldn't have bothered me.  Because, by then, preaching terrified me.

I thank God as I look back over those years.  I know God wasn't giving up on me, though I was ready to give up.  God put me in each place to help turn my head.  Turn my head toward prayer.  Turn my head in God's direction.  Sounds weird coming from a minister, doesn't it.  You have no idea how many ministers out there don't pray, don't know what prayer is.

At Saratoga, the people of the church in the programs and areas of ministry I was responsible for, were deeply spiritual people.  People who knew about prayer.  People who actually prayed.  Through knowing Floyd, and then those others in Saratoga, I learned my first lessons about prayer.  That probably sounds weird, too--that a minister learned about prayer from his parishioners.  If you don't know what it is, find people who do and who model the life of prayer.  I didn't know how to do that for myself, so God did it for me.  God intentionally forced me into places where there were people who could help me become a person of prayer.

I took a risk with those people.  I shared my pain and my sense of failure.  My pastoral self-esteem was at the bottom.  Instead of being judgmental or shocked, they prayed with me.  They guided me.  They gently asked me hard questions, and then entered my struggle to find answers to those questions.  Struggled before God in prayer in communion with me.  It was a tremendous time of healing and energizing for me.

At the same time, I picked up a book.  I was trying to find my way as a young Pastor.  Discover what it meant to be a Pastor.  What was my role?  What was my work?  The book I bought was titled, Five Smooth Stones For Pastoral Work, by Eugene Peterson (who did The Message Bible).  Peterson used the image of the five smooth stones David took out of the brook with which he killed Goliath, for the work of the ministry.

One of the longer chapters was about prayer.  One of the main roles of the pastor, Peterson described, is to spend a good amount of time in prayer.  If we are going to talk about God to our congregations, we better know God.  The only way to do that is by prayer.  We better be in prayer.

Peterson captured my attention, as I was growing in awareness about the life of prayer.  I read every one of his books.  I wrote him.  He was, at that time, a Presbyterian Pastor in Maryland.  I asked him if I could come back to stay with him for a week of my study leave to just talk with him.  He reluctantly agreed.  It was probably one of the best weeks of study leave I have ever spent.

Again, one of the points I'm trying to make about prayer for you was brought home to me:  If you don't know how to pray, get yourself together with someone who does.  Let them lead you.  Listen and pay attention.  My empty restlessness and sense of spiritual failure was slowly being transformed into a life made full and with peace through prayer.  Prayer that was modeled for me by people who were willing to be spiritual guides for me and lead me in God's direction.

Eugene Peterson gave me some basic, foundational, and important direction.  I want to share just a couple of those learnings.  They had to do with my expectations about prayer that were all wrong.

The first was that I thought I could learn prayer relatively quickly.  In most things I have been a quick learner.  I thought prayer would be the same.  What I found out was that prayer takes a lifetime.  It takes a lifetime because prayer is not a technique, it is a relationship.  When you learn to pray, you are not learning a technique, as if that's all prayer is.  You are learning how to be in relationship with the Most High God.  Developing that relationship will take you your whole lives.

I have a book, the title of which is The Little Notebook: The Journal of a Contemporary Woman's Encounters with Jesus.  It's an unusual book.  The author, Nicole Gausseron, records her daily conversations with Jesus.  Not just prayers that she prays.  Conversations.  Here's one of those:

The garden is full of sunlight, silence too.  The children will be arriving in a few minutes.
--Lord, are you here?
--Yes.
--It seems to me that it's been a few days since we've been together.  I feel a little dull in your presence.
--Nicole, I'd like to ask you something.  Would you like to give me a present?
--Yes.
--Take time for me.  Now and then you take time to call somebody, to listen to the voice of a friend.  Give me a call now and then.
--You want us to become gradually more intimate with each other?
--Yes.

How many of you have friends?  How did they get to be your friends?  Simply by saying, "You are my friend?"  No.  It took work and energy and time and effort.  You start by taking small steps in getting to know each other, and then you gradually risk more.  Your friendship deepens.  Gradually you become personally and intimately involved in their lives, and they in yours.  It is no different with God.  If we say we are God's friend, but we do nothing to encourage that friendship in prayer, we are living a lie, and our lives become spiritual frauds, just as I felt mine had become.

There was a time when philosophers were trying to prove that God existed.  One of the philosophers of that time, Blaise Pascal, in his proof, said he believed God existed because, "There is a God-shaped hollow in each in each of us that nothing else can fill."  I believe that's true.  Do you feel it?  Do you sense that deep hollow?  But most importantly, do you realize it can only be filled by a relationship with God?  I think we all feel it.  I think we all know where it is.  I think we also try and fill it with a bunch of other stuff that doesn't ever fit.  Only through a prayerful, ongoing, life-time relationship with God will that void be filled.

Your relationship with God is the easiest one to neglect.  It is the easiest relationship to let go by the wayside.  But it is the most important relationship you have.  When that God-shaped hollow goes unfilled, you will feel deeply hollow and unfulfilled.  You will know that something is missing in your life.  Something deep.  You will become restless.  You may even become depressed.  Realize what that restlessness and that emptiness is signaling for you.  It is beckoning you to a life of prayerful relationship with God.

In that way, prayer is not effortless or spontaneous.  Prayer is hard work, just like any important relationship is hard work.  Those were some of the other lessons I learned from Eugene Peterson.  Words don't come easily.  They are at times hard to find.  That's one of the reasons we have the Bible, and books like the Psalms, to give us the words, to prime the pump of our lips, so that conversation can start to flow.

Prayer is not just talking.  It is also learning how to listen.  God does talk back.  Believe me, God does know how to talk.  It becomes the pray-ers task to learn how to listen to God's voice.  How to pick out the divine Voice and distinguish it from all the other voices.  How to converse with God.

It's easy to give up.  Hearing God's Voice, and becoming conversational with God takes time.  It's easy to become frustrated, and by neglect, or time, or whatever, leave God totally alone.  And then the hollow starts aching again.  Don't give up praying.

"What Happens When We Die?"
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

OK.  So the lectionary reading for today out of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is about death.  So let’s look at it square in the eyes.  Let’s take on the “big fear” this morning, shall we.

There’s been an interesting cultural shift that’s taken place in the last 75 years or so.  It used to be that people were more personally acquainted with death and grief.  I don’t know if people were more comfortable with death in the past, but at least they were more in touch with it.  For the most part, especially in our rural areas, people had a hands on relationship with death.  People died at home rather than in an antiseptic hospital or nursing home.  Nursing homes were mostly non-existent 75 years ago.  When someone died, they were surrounded by friends and family, rather than being isolated and left alone.  Family didn’t wait to “get the call” from the hospital or nursing home.  They were there, in the person’s bedroom.

When death occurred, the family and community went right to work.  The men built the casket.  The women washed and prepared the body.  Food was brought in by the bushel load.  Whatever needed to get done, got done.  Everyone helped each other grieve.  Death and grieving was very visible, and most everyone participated.

But, and here’s the cultural shift, no one back then talked about sex.  Sex was was kept behind closed doors and kept under tight control through conversational taboos.  Couples didn’t know much about it, until they got married.  Parents never talked about it to or with their children.

Now, that has flip-flopped.  Sex, sex talk, and sexual imagery is everywhere.  You can’t escape it.  Junior high kids talk about it openly, without hesitation.  When I was in junior high I was scared to death to even think about holding a girls hand.  Kissing a girl was in the realm of the unthinkable, in the same league as flying to the moon.  Now, every imaginable part of the sexual is blatantly and without second thought, shoved in our faces.

Yet, in our day, death is taboo.  Our culture is one of death denial.  Every other commercial is about looking and staying young.  Even our current paranoia about killing 99.9% of all the germs in our homes has at the heart of it our fear of death, and our desire to eliminate every death threat.  Hardly anyone dies at home anymore.  Those in the throes of death are usually isolated and left alone, even by the doctors and nurses that are caring for them, because of an uncomfortableness with our own mortality.  We don’t want to be reminded of the fact that we are going to die.  Parents ask me if they should allow their children to go see a dying grandparent in the hospital, or if they should let their children go to the funeral.  Like, if we can keep kids away from this one, main reality, they won’t ever find out that they, too, are mortal, and that life ends.  But we don’t mind talking with them about their sexual awareness when they hit adolescence, nor mind when they are barraged with all the sexual imagery on television or the web.

Woody Allen, in his movies, explores this funny (not, ha ha funny) way we human beings are when it comes to death and sex.  In one movie he wrote, his character says, “I’m looking forward to death; because, unlike sex, I’m going to do it alone and no one will laugh at me.”

So, let’s bring death out of the shadows, at least for a few minutes here, and take a look at it in the context of Paul’s words in his letter to the Christians in Thessalonica.  Evidently the people had some questions about death, and what happens when we die.  No one seemed to have any good answers, so they wrote Paul a letter.  In that letter they must have asked him some questions about death, because he answers their questions in this part of his letter back to them.

The first question maybe had to do with grief.  “What are we supposed to feel when someone we love dies?” might have been their question.  As Christians, they may have been told that there should be joy that the loved one is going to heaven, but at the same time they are hurting deeply at their loss.  What are they supposed to do with the mixture of feelings in all that?  What are we supposed to do with the tangled mass of emotions that overwhelm us when either someone we love is dying, has died; or we, ourselves, are dying?

I’ve spent my whole ministry helping people deal with these kinds of grieving questions.  In the way our culture currently denies death and grief, people are mostly told to get over it as soon as possible (a year at the longest) and get on with life.  Isn’t it interesting that if you break your leg or hip, how you are cut all kinds of slack at work.  You’re allowed to heal in good time and do what you need to in order for that to happen.

But when there’s been a death, you’re supposed to buck up, and get on with it.  Broken bones are one thing.  Spirits broken by grief seem to be another.  After a certain amount of time, this conspiracy of silence is created by family, friends, and co-workers where our grief and loss are not to be brought up anymore, even though those struggling most with loss want dearly to talk about it.

As part of a trip to Israel, I also got to go to Cairo, Egypt.  One of the places we were to visit was the oldest Christian church in the world, a church that was started by the gospel writer Mark, and still going today.  When we got to the church we could hear this awful screaming and wailing coming from behind the church.  It literally sounded like someone was being tortured, and everyone around us in the streets was just going on about their business.

I asked our tour guide what on earth that awful screaming was about.  She told us that someone from the church had died, and had been buried in the cemetery behind the church.  In Egyptian culture, they are allowed 7 days to grieve.  They can cry, wail, scream, rip their clothes, throw dirt in the air, carry on however they need to to express their grief.  But after 7 days, the black clothes come off, and all the emoting is to stop, and they are expected to get on with their lives.

I tossed that around in my mind, recalling that I had told a whole lot of people I’ve dealt with that they may never get over their grief; that it may be a part of them the rest of their lives.  But in Cairo, Egypt, people were given 7 days to express their grief and get over it.  The Egyptian way called into question everything thing I’d come to believe through experience and reading.  I wondered if it was possible that how we handle grief is merely a cultural thing.  How are we to best and most faithfully handle death?

Paul’s advice to the Thessalonian Christians is somewhat unclear, and may contain a kind of both/and perspective.  He wrote, “First off, you must not carry on over them like people who have nothing to look forward to, as if the grave were the last word” (MES).  Paul doesn’t say we can’t grieve.  He doesn’t put a time limit on it (even though Jewish tradition is close to what I saw in Cairo).  Nor does he say we aren’t allowed to feel what we feel.

He mostly wants us to be people of hope.  He wants us to always remember that this life is not all there is.  He wants us to keep in mind that there is something more.

After an enjoyable meal has been served, and the dishes from the main course are being cleared, some of the best words I love to hear at that point are, “Keep your forks.”  I love to hear those words because that means there’s more to come.  And what is to come is substantial.  Not spoon food, like tapioca or some kind of flabby jello.  No; it’s fork food, like a thick piece of pie or carrot cake.  Something you get to sink those tines of the fork into and savor and enjoy.

That’s the kind of image I bring to mind when Paul says not to carry on like people who have nothing to look forward to.  What he’s saying is, “When someone dies, keep your forks.  There’s something substantial and real coming on the other side of death, and it will be worth savoring and enjoying like a great dessert.”

Paul goes on to explain what it is that we have to look forward to:  “...God will most certainly bring back to life those who died in Jesus.”  Those who believe in Jesus get to be brought back to life in some way, shape or form.  The hard part is that the main thing that has to happen in order for God to do that is that you have to die first.  That’s the unpleasant part of it all.

Do you remember the first time you realized you were going to die?  Maybe it was at a funeral of a family member or school friend that died at an early age.  Even when we lose someone to death when we are young, it still may not register in our minds that, Hey, that’s going to happen to me some day.  We still may not get it, because when we’re young we think we’re invincible.  Or that death and disaster will make an exception for me.

The stark acknowledgment of death’s reality hit me when I was in college.  I was a Sociology and Philosophy major.  I was sitting in a sociology class and we were talking about the various burial practices in other cultures.  All of a sudden this awful lightbulb went on above my head.  And these awful words were illuminated by the blinking light of that bulb: “I am going to die some day.  I am going to die.  I can’t get out of it.  I have to die.  There’s no way around it.  Some day I’m going to die and I’m going to be buried.  I’m not going to be alive anymore.”

I started hyperventilating, and thought I was going to pass out.  I quickly gathered up all my books and ran out the classroom door to get some fresh air.  I remember bending over taking in gasping breaths of air, trying to get those awful words out my head and think of something else.  In another Woody Allen movie, his character says, “I don’t mind dying; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”  That’s what I was feeling at that moment.

It all changed for me that day.  Paul wrote in another letter about how, in the blink of an eye, death changes us from this life to the next.  For me, in the blink of an eye, in a sociology class, life changed me when I realized I was going to die.  I began to pay much more attention to verses like these in 1 Thessalonians, and 1 Corinthians 15, and the end of Hebrews 2.

At first, I clung to the whole idea of heaven because I was so afraid of dying.  But slowly, as I spent more time pondering what Paul was saying, thinking about the Resurrection of Jesus, and what it means, I began to understand and have an appreciation that this has more to do with God and the way God is rather than my fear.  It has to do with God’s desire that we be with Him always:  in life, in death, and beyond death.  God wants us to be with Him forever, and He’s designed the world and life to make sure that happens.  That gave me great comfort.  And it pretty much took care of my fear.

Paul talks about heaven, here in 1 Thessalonians in terms of being taken into the clouds.  And that it will be like one huge family reunion.  I love those images as well, about what heaven is going to be, and what life is going to be like after we die.

Did any of you watch the Art Linkletter show on TV years ago.  I think it was on in the afternoon, because it seems like I’d come home from school and turn it on.  I may be wrong about that.  One of the segments of his show was called, “Kids say the darnedest things.”  Linkletter would interview kids who were about 6 to 10 years old and just ask them ordinary questions.

One time he asked them about heaven.  One little guy, Tommy, age seven, said, “I know what heaven is, but I don’t want to go there.  I want to go to North Carolina instead.”  Another seven year-old said, “Heaven is kind of big and they sit around playing harps.  I don’t know how to play a harp, but I suppose I should learn how to play that dumb thing.”

Most people believe heaven exists.  A recent poll revealed that 80% of Americans believe that heaven is a real place.  But only 67% believe there is a hell.  The same poll also revealed that 72% of us believe we are going to heaven.  But (judgmental as we are) we think only 40% of our friends, family and neighbors will qualify to enter the pearly gates.

I liked the thought that I was going to heaven, and that it was going to be like a big family reunion, with eating and laughter and celebration with Christ at the head of the table.  I began to ask myself some other questions though about the after life, that didn’t have anything to do with my death and what happened afterwards.  They were more questions about how I am living right now, before I die.  How does the fact that I’m going to die affect how I’m living right now?  Are there consequences to my actions that I need to pay attention to, because there is more than death?  How does my knowledge that I’m going to die, and that there is more after I die, change how I chose to live while I’m on this side of death?

In answer to such questions, I came across this statement in my reading, in a book by Paul Minear, who wrote:
Delete the thought of heaven from our vocabulary and we are soon reduced to a one-dimensional environment, living without any visible means of support.

To put his words in another picture, what he is saying is that living this life without any thought of an afterlife is like a suspension bridge without the suspension cables to hold it up.  Or it would be like wearing a very loose pair of pants without a belt or suspenders to hold them up.  That, like the two parts of the bridge, there are two parts to our world also.  There is the platform on which we go back and forth in our daily living, scurrying about, doing the things we have decided are so important.  And, holding up that platform are some powerful suspension wires--heaven, if you will.  Without those wires, without heaven, the world, the platform on which we live and move would fall into chaos.

In answer to their questions, Paul is trying to get the Thessalonians to similarly recognize that there is a connection between the support and the platform, between this world and the next, between this life and the next life.  Recognizing that seems to be the hardest part for most people.  Seeing the connection makes this life just as important as the next--that we don’t lose anything in death.

Without the connection, both this life and the heavenly life, our world is only one dimensional.  God and who God is, is about multi-dimensional living.  We have one foot in this life and another foot in the next.  We are moving both towards life right now, and a life to come.  We have to exist in the here-and-now, but we are also, at the same time residents of a heavenly life on the other side of death.  Knowing that makes life so rich--so much more livable.