"What Do You Know? We Made It!” Sermon Delivered By Rev. Dick Stetler – November 2, 2014 Centenary United
Psalm 34:1-10; Revelation 7:9-17
All Saints Day The sub-title for the New Testament lesson this morning is, The Enormous Crowd. Today, as we celebrate All Saints Day, we are going to consider what it takes to become a part of this cloud of witnesses. Not everyone thinks about their graduation from this life, but that moment will eventually come to each of us. I suspect that as people grow older and experience more of their
friends and members of their family leaving them, they are being
reminded that their day is coming. That should give us pause to thank
God for all our experiences that have contributed to our growth and to
the prospect of looking forward to something well-beyond our
imaginations. The most intriguing passage in our lesson is this one:
"The crowd was so enormous that no one could count all the
people! They were from
every race, tribe, nation, and language."
Think about that!
This vision of the writer is one of those passages that speaks of God's
universal love for all people.
This passage and others like it should remove all speculation
that there will only be a unique group of like-believers that survive
their physical death. One of the DVDs that Selina Meade secured for us for our monthly
movie night was called, The Five
People You Meet in Heaven, based on the book by Mitch Albom.
The five personalities that we encountered in that movie had
dramatically different lifestyles and yet there they were in
Heaven.
Life is experienced quite differently by every one of us.
All of us made adjustments to growing up in a particular family
and in a particular economic environment.
We enjoyed certain levels of education.
We were equipped with unique imaginations while navigating in
life with a large variety of values and beliefs.
What does it mean when people adjust to life's changes with a
vast array of unique responses?
How can anyone say to another person, "You have not performed
very well in your life. You
have missed the mark on every level of accountability. What do you have
to say for yourself?" Who has
the right to make such a judgment, particularly if the person making
such an observation never walked in the other person's shoes? Those of us that grew up in the church
have been trained by various Sunday school teachers and pastors to have
a distinct orientation toward God and guidance for how we can creatively
live our lives. This
learning process has often been confusing and more often than not found
in fear-based thinking. For example, we were taught what happens when the sheep and the goats are separated (Matthew 25:31f), or when the weeds were separated from the wheat (Matthew 13:3f), or when many people came to a feast in God's Kingdom with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but were thrown out into darkness where they cried and gnashed their teeth (Matthew 8:11f). Last
week we considered the two teachings that were the most important among
all that was written in the Laws of Moses and spoken by the prophets. We
were taught to love God with everything we have and to love our neighbor
as we love ourselves. (Matthew 22:37f)
How useful then, are these passages that separate people?
One
afternoon I was visiting my Mother who was 94 years old at the time.
My Mom lived in a wonderful Continuing Care Retirement Community
in During my visit, I discovered that she had very little memory of
my Dad who had died only two years earlier. I showed her a picture of
the two of them and she said, "Well, he must have been my husband
because I am standing with him.
Isn't it odd that I have no memory of him?"
Then she
said, "Are you really my son?"
I burst into laughter and said, "Absolutely!
And like it or not, we are kidnapping you at Thanksgiving so you
can be with the rest of your family."
She laughed and said, "Isn’t that awful that I can’t remember
anything? What must God
think of me?" I responded, Mom,
your memory loss can be a wonderful thing.
Just think, you can't remember the times when you made mistakes
in judgment, you can't remember the words you spoke in haste and
you can't remember all the wonderful deeds that somehow you never got
around to doing. None of
those things matter now.
Your spirit is just as kind and loving as when your memory was better
than it is now. The
truth
is that God’s grace does not debate the worth of any of us by our
attitudes and behavior.
Love causes God to embrace us just as we are.
All of us will join this
cloud of witnesses described
in the vision found in our lesson.
How can we be so sure of this understanding since we have been
taught so many different truths
about the importance of salvation.
Jesus knew there
were different levels of spiritual awareness in the next realm.
In Matthew, Jesus told his listeners that neglecting to love one
another would cause them to be
least in the Kingdom
of heaven. (Matthew
5:19) In a most
intriguing passage Jesus said, "John the Baptist is greater than anyone
who ever lived, but the one who is
least in the
Kingdom of heaven is greater
than he." (Matthew 11:11)
Jesus knew that everyone has a
place after this life. Here is a poem that is both funny while also expressing an
interesting perspective of heaven.
It is rare that we find wisdom couched in images that can make us
smile. Here are the poet's
words: I was shocked, confused and bewildered as I entered Heaven’s door, not
by the beauty of it all, nor the light of its décor. But it was
the folks in Heaven who made me sputter and gasp – the thieves, the
liars, the sinners, the alcoholics and the trash.
There stood the kid from seventh grade who swiped my lunch money twice.
Next to him was my old neighbor who never said anything nice. Herb, who
I always thought was rotting in Hell, was looking remarkably well.
I asked Jesus, 'What’s the deal? I would love to hear your take. How did
all these sinners get here? God must have made a mistake. And why
is everyone so quiet, so somber – give me a clue.' Jesus said,
'They, too, are in shock. No one thought they would be seeing
you.' This poem
talks about a reality that few clergy are willing to share with their
congregations. If
we grasp the reality that inspired this poem, we would see that
salvation is not up to what we do, what we preach, or to what we
believe. This understanding
may be very distant from what most Christians have been taught to
believe all our lives. God is in
charge of what happens to each of us and that process
has nothing to do with our learned theology
nor does it depend on what ancient authors wrote about our relationship
with God several thousand of years ago.
The moment we leave our bodies at death, we enter the next reality where
our understanding about all things becomes radically transformed.
We enter a realm where solid
forms do not exist. Our
purpose for incarnating in the world becomes crystal clear.
Jesus taught his listeners how to create the way God creates.
He taught them how to become
angels in the flesh by
learning to express all the forms of love that our imaginations will
allow, i.e., patience, understanding, forgiveness, generosity,
compassion, etc. Our spirits come to earth and inhabit the bodies of babies.
We become infants equipped with complete amnesia concerning where
we came from. This is the
only way we can test our ability to create without having our
motivations tainted by former memories.
Jesus taught
his listeners that very few people will ever arrive at this awareness of
their purpose for being born.
He said, "The way to understand the purpose of life is obscure
and the path to discovering such an understanding is hard and there are
very few people who will ever find it."
(Matthew 7:14) Since
beginning of civilization, even before the dawn of religious thinking,
billions of people have been all over
the landscape
of life's infinite possibilities as each has attempted to give form to
something that has value to them.
Some expressed themselves in art, music, poetry and writing.
Such spirits wanted to give form to their visions, hopes and
dreams through whatever medium was available to them.
Some expressed their creativity in developing ways to make life
easier for those living during their lifetime as well as for generations
not yet born. Some built
cathedrals, universities, medical facilities, low income housing or
streamlined various forms of government.
Others have surrendered their life's energies to their appetites
for power that hurt people, that destroy what others have made, that
manipulate how people live and that bring to themselves economic riches
in the process.
World history has been filled
with many cyclical themes, but the end result for each person is always
the same. All of us enter the next level of awareness, that many people
refer to as heaven, to
evaluate how we performed when our wills had access to power.
The results from our physical lives become obvious to us when we
understand the much bigger
picture of the created order.
Human life is like a
simulator for demonstrating to the universe the spirit behind all
our attitudes and activities.
This is why Jesus said,
"In my Father's House are
many rooms. . . " (John
14:2).
In spite of what clerics have preached to their listeners for
thousands of years, there would be no point to punishing spirit-beings
for their ignorance. While
living in our physical forms with amnesia of where we came from, we do
not know what we do not know.
Some of us have grown closer to the spirit in which God creates,
while others among us were unable to do.
Loving
the least of these, as Jesus
instructed, also defines who we have become.
(Matthew 25:40)
One day we will all say, "What do you know? We made it!"
Today, we celebrate the lives of those who did just that. |