Dimensions of Life

PROPERS: BURIAL OF THE DEAD, RITE I

TEXT:       JOHN 6:37-40

PREACHED AT RESURRECTION, STARKVILLE, ON FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2024 

 

ONE SENTENCE:        The mystery of eternal life is beyond our understanding of medical life.         

 

            I suspect many of us here would yearn for many years ago.

 

            I would, and I suspect you would too.  Not for an idealized time – because that time didn’t exist.  Not for a time absent problems, worries, and among some of us, aches and pains.

 

            I am talking about a yearning for people now gone to their reward.  Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, grandmothers, grandfathers, and other special people.

 

            I recall when I first came here in 1993, there was a remarkable group of what I would call Elder Saints. They were a group of folks that at that time didn’t even include Rae and Leonard Brandon.  Rae and Leonard then would be my contemporaries today!

 

            But they were a remarkable group. As time marched on, their numbers diminished – one by one. And others succeeded them as Elder Saints. They touched our lives in remarkable and transformative ways.

 

            We yearn for those folks today.

 

            I remember a conversation with one particular member of that group of octogenarians.  She had been alone for some time.  Her husband had died years ago. She wondered.

 

            “I just don’t understand why I am still here,” she said.  The conversation was quiet. Her words hung in the silence.

 

            My attempts to comfort her were awkward. “Because of what you mean to others… the way you touch lives… Remember your children.”  They were my best effort, but I am sure they fell short.

 

            We reach the point where we yearn for the other side.  That place where others have gone before us.  That place of promised divine mystery.  A place of rest. The place where there is neither suffering nor pain, neither sighing, but life everlasting. We get to the point where we thirst for that place which Jesus pointed toward.

 

            I have been asked about eternal life… life after death… many times.  It is, after all, a wondrous concept.  I had a theology professor who said that, despite our best efforts, we cannot have a theology of life after death because we have never experienced it.  And we can speak only about those things we have experienced.

 

            I have a good friend who formerly served at St. Paul’s Church in Corinth. He’s an English priest and his name is Tim Jones. He now serves the church in Wales. In discussing life after death, he told me that we define life too narrowly.

 

            God bless Leonard, Steven, and Emily and others who practice medicine, but Tim may be right.  We have a good understanding of medical life and death, but we have no idea of what transpires before or after our worldly existence.  It is a mystery.

 

            Jesus tells us in the gospel today that everything that the Father gives him will come to him. Being given to him comes with eternal life. That is a promise that we have.  It is a promise that Rae has realized in full. We are left with the mystery beyond the promise.

 

            I think the poignant point of faith takes us into that realm – the realm where our bodily life ends, and we enter into that sphere of being that brings us more fully into the divine presence. The added dimensions of reality are unfolded before us.

 

            We only have a vague sense of what awaits us and what Rae has come to know. Hymn 685 describes it so well. “When I rise to worlds unknown and behold thee on thy throne.”

 

            Our sister Rae now knows that mystery well.  We still see in a glass darkly, albeit with faith. She now sees face-to-face.