Download Advent 1 2015 `Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will

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.