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Advent 1 2015 ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.’ Advent, which we begin today, has a double focus. Advent looks back, in that it is about preparing to celebrate well the historical coming of Christ as a human being at the Christmas Feast. Advent also looks forward in that it is also about preparing ourselves to be able to properly welcome Christ when he comes again, in the future, to inaugurate the fullness of the Reign of God. It’s for this reason of being prepared for Christ’s future coming again that the Church has traditionally meditated in this season on four themes about the ‘end-times’: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. As I thought about these themes, and the focus in our Advent series of sermons on events that have changed our lives and affected our faith, I immediately though of the death of my own father. For me, the death of my dad is the single event that has had the most concentrated degree of impact on my life and faith. But it is a single event that relates to the whole of his own life and mine too. My dad died just over 13 years ago. He died by taking his own life. It was an act that was the culmination of his most recent 2 year period of severe clinically diagnosed depression. It was a period in which he had been mostly off work and very often hospitalised. It was also a period which echoed many other times throughout his life and my childhood. Indeed my first ever school bag, which I still have, he made in hospital occupational therapy when I was 4. My reflections on Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell - are ones that come distilled through thinking about my dad’s life and death. On returning to Ireland immediately after my dad’s death, the first question my mother asked me was would he be able to be buried in the graveyard. It was a question about the manner of my dad’s death, how it might be judged, and what that meant in terms of reward: heaven or hell. Since Augustine’s time the dominant Christian teaching on suicide has been that it constitutes self-murder and is the most potent example of the sin of pride. In Dante’s Inferno those who took their own lives languish in the worst parts of hell. This punishment in hell was reflected in how suicides could not be buried in consecrated ground here on earth. My mother’s question came out of this tradition. My responses to her question assured her that by father could be buried in the graveyard. God was a God of compassion and the modern church was much more compassionate to those who suffered the sort of mental anguish that typified large portions of my dad’s life. Thinking about my experience of my father’s life and death is, I have come to realise, one of the main personal sets of events that I bring to critically bear on Christian belief and practice as I have been taught and inherited it. Already you can see that, implicitly, in how I have told this story, I don’t set much truck by the dominant traditional strands of Christian thought on heaven and hell and how it relates to suicide. In a psychologically savvy age such teaching is revealed as utterly lacking in compassion. What’s more, remembering the depth of spiritual anguish with which my mum asked her initial question, I think that I have come to believe that virtually all talk of heaven and hell as places that individuals go to after death to receive eternal reward or punishment may be simply forms of spiritual terrorism. Such individualised views of heaven and hell find some limited echoes in the biblical literature. But the dominant biblical themes are rooted both in our reading from Jeremiah and Jesus’ words in today’s gospel. Jeremiah looks forward, in a time of exile and political weakness, to a restored Jerusalem and a politically strong nation. It’s a social and political vision of what heaven means. Jesus in the gospel says “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” His words are set in his vision of the violent ending of both the heavens and the earth. His is a cosmic vision of what heaven means. It’s a vision that is even more vividly portray in the book of Revelation. In that book we are told that God will recreate both the heavens and the earth and that there will be new heavens and a new earth. What the biblical literature tells us about Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell, is that it is not so much about ‘going to heaven, or indeed hell, after we die.’ Rather Christian hope is that God recreates all that God has made in the new heavens and a new earth. It is that vision which Jesus teaches in all that he says about the Kingdom of God. It is that vision which be embodied in the way in which he lived his life, in his death and in his resurrection. After my dad’s death I wrote a letter to all those who had sent me cards. These are the final two paragraphs: Another great source of consolation both for my family and I has been the wonderful memories that people have of daddy and their recollection in the cards and letters that we have received. Daddy – Billy was someone who touched many people’s lives with his infectious laughter, humour and sense of fun and it has been truly lovely that many of you have shared your own personal memories of occasions when he touched you all too. Daddy’s death has come as a real shock to us all. He had been suffering from his depression for nearly two years now and I know that he hated every minute of it and just wanted some hope or peace. We all hope that Daddy has now found the peace of mind and spirit that he so avidly craved and so justly deserved in this life. And although we miss him immensely we hope that he has found that place in which there is no suffering or pain, nor even depression, but only joy everlasting. I ended that letter with an oblique sense of heaven – much more diffident and less psychical and cosmic than the biblical literature. But in its own tentative way it shares with them a sense that after this body is gone, or when this heaven and earth end, that all of us will dwell in the full presence of God: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” Or as I take Jesus to mean here: “Death is simply a fact, but love is eternal.” This abiding presence of God, God’s embodied Word, God’s loving Christ, is a presence which we already feel in the love that we give and receive in this life with those around us. That love is God’s dimension of our present reality. That love is heaven itself. That’s why in that letter those last two paragraphs go together for even though it was hard, and still sometimes can be hard, to see beyond the manner of my dad’s death, the way in which he died in no sense cancels or annuls the love that he so freely gave. And that is precisely what the earliest followers of Jesus came to believe about the manner and nature of his death in relation to his life too. Love is stronger than death. That is our Christian hope. So in this advent season we pray that all may be recreated in God’s love and share in Christ’s resurrection. Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus, Come. And may God when he comes find us watching and waiting.