Living and Dying, Earth and Heaven

Preached on Sunday, May 7, 2017

  

Scripture readings: Psalm 73:21-26; Philippians 1:19-30

“How many of you want to go to heaven?”

An old-time preacher asked the question, “How many of you want to go to heaven?” And everyone raised their hands, except one child. The preacher asked the child, “What about you? Don’t you want to go to heaven?” And the child said, “Yes I do; only I thought you were trying to get together a load to go right now.”

The Heavens
Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
March 2017

Paul wrote a strange, radical thing to his friends in Philippi, in the north of Greece:

“For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (1:21)

Paul was living the life of a prisoner. He was chained up in a stinking, underground dungeon. The remains of this dungeon can still be seen today. He was being held for trial before the emperor’s court, in Rome. He was on trial for his life. 

Being on trial for his life was a very familiar experience for Paul, except for the part about the emperor. That part was exciting. But Nero was the emperor now, and Nero had started to persecute Christians as dangerous conspirators, the enemies of humanity and enemies of the order of the empire.

There had been a great fire in the city of Rome. Some citizens blamed Nero who had been making plans to redevelop the city.

Nero needed someone else to blame, so he blamed the Christians, and he had many of them tortured and killed. And once he had painted them as the real enemy, if he didn’t want to look dishonest, he had to keep it up.

Things did not look good for Paul. It was a serious time to settle the mind, to keep focused on what was truly important. But the question was: was it time for Paul pray for inner peace and strength, or else should he prepare to let it all go, and focus on heaven?

Or else, should Paul pray for a dismissal, or an acquittal in court? 

And should he pray about his old missionary plans? Should his goal be traveling west to Spain; or back east again to visit the churches he had started in Greece, and beyond? What should he want?

Paul’s friends wanted him to live. They wanted him around.

But what did Paul want? Certainly he wanted to be around. But should he want this? Should he be ready to die, or ready to live? And what does it mean to die? And what does it mean to live?

Paul tells us what he believes, “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

Now this is sort of like saying, “To live is great, and to die is even greater.”  If we found ourselves in Paul’s situation, it would be understandable if we considered our life to be over and hopeless. But, for Paul, sitting in the stink of one of Rome’s worst jails, waiting to have his case heard by an emperor who was politically motivated to torture and kill him... for Paul, in that time and place (even there) to live was Christ. 

When he says that “to die is gain” he doesn’t mean “There is nothing left for me here.” There is more to it than meets the eye. Even here, in this prison, in the shadow of death, life is Christ.

I once heard a professional mountain climber being interviewed. This man was well on his way to his goal of climbing the fourteen highest mountains on the earth, and doing it without any bottled oxygen. We are talking about heights of twenty-eight thousand feet, and more. Up there, the air is so thin that the muscles and the brain begin to starve, for the lack of oxygen. The muscles are depleted. The brain loses judgment, and a clear sense of time and direction. Up there, the exhaustion and cold are torture.

Climbing each mountain takes months of training, and preparation, and attack. By the time of his interview, this climber had conquered nine of the fourteen mountains. He loved doing this! For him to live was mountain-climbing.

Paul was a spiritual mountain climber. And he was facing the tallest mountain of his life. And he said, “For me, to live is Christ.”

I want to list for you a few of the parts of Paul’s life that were NOT what he meant when he said “to live is Christ”. Here are some things that Paul, as a follower of Jesus, could point to and say, “To live is a great thing.” Yet these are not the same as saying, “To live is Christ.”

Here is the Christian life as a great thing. For a follower of Jesus, having sisters and brothers in Christ is one of the things that make living great. There are people you belong to, and they belong to you. But this sense of belonging doesn’t happen only because you share a common cause, or because you’ve spent time together, or even because they may be your very own flesh and blood. There is a sense of belonging that can include all that, but it’s much more than that.

There’s a sense of belonging that comes from knowing the fact that we don’t own each other. The greatest sense of belonging comes from knowing that we are given to each other by God. Actually, everyone we know, everyone we meet, is God’s gift.

The most normal thing in the world, when you think of your brothers and sisters in Christ… the most normal thing in the world is to give thanks. In every letter but one (Galatians), Paul starts out by giving thanks for the people to whom he is writing; even when they are driving him crazy with their backsliding, and their immaturity, and their conflicts.

When Paul says that he hopes to remain with them, and he says, “I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you,” the word translated as continue is really a side-by-side-continuing. “I will stay, and I will stay beside you, with all of you.” This staying side-by-side with people who are given to you by God, and made a part of you by God, is a part of following Jesus. It is something that makes following Jesus a great thing.

Other things that make following Jesus great are these: standing for the truth, being witnesses of good news in a world that is crying out for good news. There is having a God-given purpose in life. There is standing for compassion and mercy. There is being prayed for by others, and praying for them. There is being a servant. There is the help of the Holy Spirit, or the supply of the Spirit. This comes when the Lord renews your strength, or gives you insight into life and shows you the way. To live (following Jesus) is great.

But Paul says... “For me, to live is Christ...” This is something more.

Partly, this is a matter of what is important to you. For instance, you might say: “Farming is my life”, or “Education is my life”, “My work is my life”.

You might say: “Success is my life.” You might say, “Survival is my life”. Or you might say: “My family is my life”. Or you might say: “My happiness, my comfort, is my life”. These are answers to the question: What is the most important thing for you? And then you could say: “Christ is my life”. That brings us closer to what Paul is saying.

Now what if you are like me, and you have a lot of different things are important to you? What if there was a conflict between your work and your family, and both were in competition for the center of your life? What if your work was not good for your family life; or your spouse and children hated the work you did? That happens to people working in the ministry.

The Bible doesn’t really say that one kind of work is more holy than another. It just says to work, if you can, and to do honest work.

The Bible says to work so that you can eat. It says to work so that you can have something to give. Otherwise you’re free. You have lots of options; unless God gives you only one.

And then the Bible says to be a good husband or wife. Be a good parent. Sons and daughters: be good to your parents by obeying them. These are not options. Here we are not free. Surely your family life is more important than the work you do. And if they are more important than your work, then they will motivate how you relate to whatever work you do; so you do the right work, in the right way.

If Christ is your life, then Christ will win in any competition with any other part of your life. But Christ will also motivate you in every other part of your life. Christ will motivate you as a worker, and Christ will talk to you about the kind of work he calls you to do, and he will make your special calling become a way of following him in holiness; in the Lord’s unique purpose for you.

If Christ is your life, then the Lord will make your relationships with your family into ministries. Your spouse, your parents, your children will all be holy ground for you. If Christ is your life, then even your relationships with strangers will turn into ministries. Christ will give you your priorities, and he will show you where to sit tight, and when to hang loose.

But you can say “Christ is my life” and still not understand what it means to say, “For me, to live is Christ.”  You can say “Christ is my life” and be only a slave in the way you live for Christ. You can be a drudge for Christ.

To say, “For me, to live is Christ” is more like being in love, which is wonderful, and scary, and joyful, and challenging, and frustrating, and exciting, and confusing, and fulfilling, all at the same time.

The word atonement, in the Bible, which refers to something that brings people together with God, and brings peace with God, means the action of making them “at one”. Atonement means “at-one-ment”. There (in “at-one-ment”) to live is Christ.

It’s like marriage, where two become as one. In love, there is passion and the desire to be together all the time, and even if that seems to cool down, there are always thoughts like: “She would love to see this.” or “This is something he wouldn’t like.” To say, “For me, to live is Christ” means “He is my reason for living. And he is not only my reason for living; he is the very source of my life. He is the love of my life. He is my joy and my peace.”

“For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” I think this means something like, “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is to gain more of Christ.” Paul surely says this very thing when he writes: “I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far...” (Philippians 1:23)

But better than what? Better than being of use to his friends and family in Christ? Paul loved being useful.

Heaven will bring us the pure enjoyment of love and thanks in a way that is separate from usefulness. This is very strange. When Paul talks about staying, he talks about his presence with his people being necessary, and then he talks about leaving that behind.

Going on to be with the Lord will be something different from usefulness. It will be the end of being of use, and of being necessary. Or it will be a graduation to something better. Perhaps there is something more wonderful than being of use, and much better than being necessary.

I do believe that there may be some kind of joyful work or service to do in the everlasting life, after we depart to be with the Lord. It’s possible. But we will not do it because we are indispensable, or even merely useful. We will not be loved for what we do; we will do because we are loved, and because we love.

If we want to know anything about the Lord, we have to know that the whole message of the good news of Jesus Christ is that he did something for us that we could not do for ourselves. Until we get that, we don’t get anything. And here we fret and we think that our life has no purpose if we cannot do things for others, or even for ourselves. 

But that isn’t true. We have a purpose because God made us, because God loves us, even when we are helpless and useless. This is the truth. But it is very, very hard to grasp.

A new born baby has a purpose in life. An unborn baby has a purpose. A flower in a vase has a purpose. A hug and a kiss have a purpose. The clasp of a hand has a purpose. A song has a purpose.  A sunset has a purpose. None of these things are of any material, practical use to us at all. But they are priceless: absolutely priceless. 

Craig Barnes was a young pastor when he faced a long and difficult battle with cancer, and the treatments left him too sick to be of any use to his congregation, or his wife, or his children, and he didn’t know if he would ever recover. This made him feel completely helpless and hopeless. Then, one day, he felt that the Lord was telling him this: “You are too important to be necessary. You deserve to be loved.”

Part of heaven will be the experience of this love. “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” To die is to gain more of Christ.

Often the Bible compares death to sleep. The body stops, and takes a long, long rest.  Other times the Bible talks about death as moving away from our bodies and this world, into the presence of the Lord. “You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory.” 

“I desire to depart and be with Christ.”

The word that’s translated as “depart” tells us what it means to die. The word could be used a number of different ways. It literally means the loosening or the untying of something. It’s the word people said when they struck camp; when they loosened the ropes and the stakes on their tents, to pack them up and move on.

When I was a kid, we went camping every summer, and it was one of the great rituals, setting up the tent. And it was just as important a ritual to take it down exactly right, so it would go up exactly right, next time. And when we struck camp for the last time, then it was time to go home.

The word “depart” means loosening, and untying of the moorings of a boat, so that it can launch out.

In one of the churches I served, we went for an annual rafting and kayaking trip every summer. On these trips, we had this great ceremony in the mornings, when the rafts were packed and ready, and everyone was in their places, we said a prayer, the knots were untied, and we pushed off down the river.

The word we translate as depart also means, of all things, unraveling a problem, it means finding the solution. There’s a time and a place where all the hurts are healed and all the questions are answered. Those who wait till the end will understand.

There’s a phrase from an old prayer that goes like this: Help us to live as those who are prepared to die. And when our days here are ended, enable us to die as those who are ready to go forth and live, so that whether we live or die our LIFE may be in Jesus Christ our risen Lord.

Paul said, “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Earth is for life. Heaven is for life. Living is for life. Even dying is for life. In Christ, it is like being in love.

This is what Paul believed. This is what the Bible teaches. This is what we believe.

Heaven: The Promise and Power of God

Preached on April 18, 2010

Scripture readings: Psalm 16; Romans 8:28-39; Luke 20:27-40

The preacher began his sermon with this question: “Who’s ready to go to heaven?” The congregation was startled by this, and so just a few raised their hands. “Who’s ready to go to heaven?” He thundered the question. Everyone shot their hand straight up in the air, except for one little boy. The pastor looked the boy in the eye and said, “Tommy, aren’t you ready to go to heaven?” And Tommy said, “Sure, Pastor, only I thought you were getting set to take us there right now.”



I like jokes about heaven. They tell us a lot about our lives right now: how we think, and what things matter most to us. The jokes about heaven don’t tell us much about heaven though. And I am sort of glad they don’t.

I suspect there will be something like laughter in heaven. There will be an everlasting amazement that produces something like laughter. There will be an amazement that comes from wonder at the power of God, and the faithfulness of God to us.

We will feel something like laughter toward ourselves in everlasting amazement at ourselves. How on earth could we have gotten away with so much foolishness, and worry, and stubbornness in the face of God’s love? How on earth could we have gotten away with all those problems we manufactured in our heads about the future, and about what God wanted from us; our puzzling about how God would do what he promised and take care of us according to our needs?

The story of the woman and the seven brothers was a Sadducee joke about the resurrection. But it was about heaven too. The Sadducees joked about it all because they didn’t believe in either. The Pharisees believed in both; and both heaven and the resurrection went together in their faith, beginning with heaven after death, and leading to the resurrection of the body when God’s plans for the creation were ready to be made complete.

The story of the woman and the seven brothers was a joke about heaven and the resurrection; and the Sadducees told it to frustrate and annoy the Pharisees. They liked to push the Pharisees’ buttons, and it was so easy to do. They thought the story would push Jesus’ buttons too. The Sadducees saw Jesus as having much more in common with the Pharisees than with them.

Their joke seemed to present an unsolvable problem. But it was only unsolvable because it was inspired by those problems we create in our heads about what God really wants and what God really gives; and how God will arrange his plan to take care of us and share his strange glory with us.



What allowed the Sadducees to get away with telling their joke was that they only accepted the first five books of the Bible as the most important truth. These five books they called the Book of Moses. These were possibly the oldest of the Jewish scriptures. There is no mention in them of an afterlife in heaven.

Jesus told them that if they really wanted to learn about God, and the power of God, and the real message of those scriptures, then they would realize that, even though there seemed to be no account of an afterlife in heaven in those books, there was a reliable account of a God who could be counted on to provide his people with a life in heaven after they died.

When the Sadducees told their joke, Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus’ first answer to them was almost rude. “Is this not why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?” (Cf. Mark 12:24; Matthew 22:29) But their question was rude. They were toying with him.

Then Jesus quoted from the words that God spoke to Moses from the burning bush in the Book of Moses, the Book of Exodus. It was a statement that even the Sadducees would have to respect. (3:6) “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”

Those are the first three generations of the people of Israel. The Lord had spoken to Abraham to take his wife and servants and the orphaned nephew who lived with him, and go somewhere, through the wilderness, through the desert, to a land that the Lord would show him. It is that journey of faith, led step by step with God, led through times of hardship, and danger, and doubt, and back to faith again, that is the beginning of the story of the people of Israel and of our own story. Abraham’s journey of faith, and the journey of his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob, is our journey of faith, and hardship, and danger, and doubt, and back to faith again.

The journey of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was a long, long walk. It was an intense and personal journey. There were strong, intense conversations that went on between these ancestors and their God. The Lord often showed the most intense interest in what they were thinking and feeling, and in how to have the most impact on their lives.

It was all about love. One of the Biblical words for this love is covenant. Sometimes the concept of covenant has been compared to that of a contract. But modern contracts are legal instruments that are designed to be upheld and enforced by a court of law.

A covenant is a relationship. It is life altering. Marriage is a covenant. A covenant begins with a promise that is given in order to bind and pledge life to life. Covenants are not made to be broken. They are made for life. A covenant comes from a heart that is prepared to trust, and love, and commit. There is such a promise, such a covenant, deep in the heart of God for his people.



In the very meanness of the Sadducees’ joke, it was very nearly a dirty joke, because it joked about marriage, and sex, and death, and love. And it belittled them all.

In the Old Testament law (Deuteronomy 25:5-10), if a married man died without having a son, the brother of his who had the most seniority was supposed to take the man’s wife as his own and the first son born between him and that woman was to be named after the man who had died, providing him with a namesake; making sure that the name of the dead man would live on. We can understand the importance of this in a small town, at least when we have a sense of tradition and notice how families either disappear, or remain among us under the disguise of changing names. In Washtucna those who have long memories, or think about the heritage of their own families, realize there are missing names: like Bassett, and Gildersleeve, and Sutton, and Helmes, and Gillis, and others.

The law was designed by God to nurture a surprising instinct: that it was wrong for a name to be lost. The loss of a name meant the loss of a family, but also the loss of the person. The laws of God nurtured the instinct that families, and relationships, and individual persons should never end. They should never go away in the sense of ceasing to exist. They needed to be somewhere kept.

Somehow, in God’s scheme of things, it was possible for his law to lead to a leap of the imagination that was the same as a leap of faith. The leap would carry you from the importance of the immortality of a name to the immortality of the person. The leap would carry you to the place where you would understand that immortality and everlasting life were the right things to hope for. They are somehow the very things we are made for.

And so Jesus says it and makes it clear. He said this: “But in the account of the bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” (Luke 20:37-38)

We need to see how it is true that Jesus is not only talking about the resurrection, which is what the Sadducees were joking about, but also about a life after death, in heaven, for those who live in covenant with God. Jesus says that Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob were and are among the living.

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob died almost two thousand years before Jesus walked the earth. Jesus knew this perfectly well. And Jesus said, “To God all are alive.”
Some people will object and say that this is just a metaphor, just a way of talking, just a beautiful idea, that even when a person dies and passes into nothingness, the complete memory of them is preserved in the mind of a loving God. And that treasured memory will live on in the mind of God forever, and perhaps even be recreated at some future date which is called the resurrection. These people would say that, between death and the recreation of life in the resurrection, we do not really live any longer; at least not in any active or conscious way.

The problem with this is; how are you and I alive right now? How can we possibly be alive right now unless we are (like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) alive to God? If there were no version of us functioning in the mind of God at present, we would not be alive ourselves. But if we, and those who have passed away, are all alive to God, what difference would death make to the essential reason for our existence? “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”

If God so cares for the preservation of a name, if God designs his law for Israel in such a way to make sure that a person’s name does not disappear, will God not design his own sons and daughters in such a way that they, also, do not disappear; even when they seem to go to another place where we cannot see them or touch them?



You and I are alive because to God all are alive. My grandparents, and my father, and his brother, are alive because “to God all are alive”. “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

There will be a resurrection for us, some interval after our death. But we will not become alive as a result of our resurrection. We will be resurrected because we will already be alive to God. We will not live because we are resurrected, we will be resurrected because we live. And we will live because Jesus lives.

Resurrection is the gift of the living God to people who are really alive. Heaven is a place of life.

This is all about love. God values love. “God is love.” (1 John 4:8) The Sadducees did not know this because, as Jesus said, they did not know the scriptures or the power of God. They told their jokes about things they did not understand.

The Bible gives us few specifics about heaven. What we know comes to us under the cover of parables, and poetry, and symbols used by Jesus and the apostles. Heaven is like a wedding, like a city, like a garden, like the harvest, like a coronation feast, like singing, like something made from gold and jewels, like light, like open gates, like happy triumphant people at the end of a game or a fight: like seeing Jesus, and being with him, and becoming like him, and knowing it.

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are the first members of a big family that has lasted thousands of years. But they are like all families. Families are people who have a personal history that means something and makes them belong to each other.

There are parents, and spouses, and children. There are success stories and stories of failure. There are times of tragedy, and shame, and punishment, and reward. There are times of faith, and times of idolatry (the worship of this world instead of the worship of God).

Think of that wretched family in the Sadducees’ joke: the family of the seven boys who died, and the poor woman who tried to be a wife to each one. That is a sad story.

Jesus changes that story: that mean, cruel, nasty story that the Sadducees laughed at and used to taunt and torment people of faith. Jesus changes that story to say, with heaven, that God can take the confusion, griefs, sorrows, tragedies, hopes, loves, and relationships of our lives and transform them. God can take everything in our lives and make them worth lasting forever.

God uses the new life in heaven and in the resurrection to bring healing, and victory, and reconciliation, and justice, and grace. This is what Paul says, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:37-39)

I would say one more thing about trusting Jesus’ good intentions when he said that there is no marriage in heaven, or in the resurrection. He did say that, in place of being simply human, we will remain human and yet become something more. He said we will be like the angels. I would just say that we don’t know what that will be like.

Imagine real childhood sweethearts. Imagine a little girl and a little boy playing in the sandbox together. Imagine them playing house together. Imagine the boy being teased about this girl being his girlfriend, and so he avoids her and breaks both their hearts for a while.

Then imagine them, one day years later, falling in love again, and getting married. Would the two children of years ago be able to imagine the love and the relationship of marriage that would be theirs in the years to come? Would the newly weds ever yearn for the good old days when they played house together?

The future life will be as different from this life as happy marriage is from happy playing house. It will be more than we know, and not less. This is true both of married and single people. And there will be ways of being one, in our future life, which surpass our ways of being one in our present life.

God is the lover of life and the lover of love, and the Lord of both. Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.”



The proof of this is that Jesus joined us in life, and in death. Jesus took the criminal who hung on the cross beside his, and Jesus promised him to take him that day to be with him in paradise.

And Jesus conquered the power of our death in his resurrection. His life now is unimaginable. Our life to come is unimaginable, but it is promised to us by the scriptures and by the power of God in Christ.