Sermon:  "They Live In Our Hearts"
Date:   November 6, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson: Revelation 7:9-17

“Do you believe in heaven?  Are you certain you are going there?”  Those were two questions posed in a USA Today newspaper survey (6/25/97).  Of those responding, sixty-seven percent of adults in the United States are certain there is a heaven.  Eighty-eight percent are certain THEY are going to heaven.  I trust that the latter eighty-eight percent are among those who are certain there is a heaven.  But why did the other twelve percent not believe they are going there?

There are many images of heaven in people’s minds, mostly from literature both ancient and contemporary.  Last week I read a new book, Heaven Is For Real (Todd Burpo, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2010).  It tells the true story of Colton Burpo, two months shy of four-years-old, who in 2003 underwent two surgeries for a burst appendix and the resulting abscesses, and spent 17 harrowing days in a Nebraska hospital.  Shortly after his fourth birthday, he told his parents astounding details about his out-of-body experience during his first surgery—how he could see his father angrily praying to God in a small office, and his mother crying while talking on her cell phone in the hospital.  In the most matter-of-fact way, he told them of sitting on Jesus’ lap in heaven, of meeting his long-dead grandfather, and meeting his other sister, whom his parents had never told him about.  His mother had miscarried at two months a year before Colton was born, and never knew the baby’s gender.  They asked Colton if he knew her name.  He said no, because they had never named her.  But she was waiting to meet them in heaven.

A few years ago, Don Piper in his book 90 Minutes in Heaven (Revell, 2007), described in great detail what happened to him while he was clinically dead after a horrific auto accident, and his experiences in heaven.  And in her novel Lovely Bones (Little, Brown and Company, 2002), author Anne Sebold tells of Susie Salmon, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by the freaky neighbor next door.  Susie narrates the entire novel from heaven, watching her parents and family as they cope with her death and how justice finally comes to her killer.  Susie tells her visions of heaven, in which everyone’s heaven is different, made up of their most favorite things.  She could move from one heaven to another to visit other residents.

The first century writer John also had a revelation of heaven, told in the last book of the Bible by the same name, Revelation.  We heard just a few verses of it this morning.  I have spoken many times of how easy and safe it is for us to declare ourselves Christians and gather here to worship each Sunday.  But life was very different for those in the first century of the Christian Era.  The area where those first and second generation believers lived was entirely ruled by Imperial Rome.  Roman rulers, even during Jesus’ lifetime, were threatened by this new religious movement.  Declaring yourself publicly a believer in Christ could easily result in your persecution and/or death.  John was exiled to the island of Patmos, where he wrote most of the last book of the Bible in the latter two decades of the first century. 

The book is a challenging book to comprehend, even after much biblical scholarship in the last century.  Much of it was written in code, using certain numbers and imagery to disguise its true meaning if it were discovered by the Roman powers-that-be.  The Emperor Domitian during the time that John wrote began to demand that his subjects address him as “Lord and God” and worship his image.  For refusing to do so, countless Christians were put to death.  John’s fanciful writing is regarded as a trumpet call to the persecuted, assuring them that despite the worst that the Roman Empire could do, God reigns supreme, and Christ, who died and was resurrected, has the power to overcome all evil. 

Jesus in the Gospels speaks very little of heaven, simply assuring his disciples “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.  If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”  (John 14:2-3)  In one of the only other places Jesus gives a vision of heaven, he is questioned by the Sadducees that if a man dies, and his brother takes in his widowed wife and marries her, and if he then dies and she ends up being married to each of the seven brothers in succession, in the resurrection whose wife will she be?

Jesus, always careful to answer in a manner that confused, confounded and astonished the Sadducees and Pharisees, replied, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place…in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor are given in marriage.  Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”  (Luke 20:27-36)

So if Jesus, even in his own resurrection appearances, does nothing to further describe heaven, how can we in our curious and inquisitive minds satisfy ourselves with what lies ahead for the faithful after death?  I take great comfort in Jesus’ promise that he goes ahead to prepare a place for us.  The memorial plaque of names in the new Columbarium in the other wing has that quotation from Jesus across the top.  And out in the narthex, the inscription over the names of those who left bequests to this church has these words from John’s writings in Revelation:  “They rest from their labors, and their works do follow them.” (14:13)  We can read all the books we wish about people’s very clear recollections of their near-death or return-from-death experiences, and maybe those might offer you some hope and assurance.  But I prefer to trust simply on faith in Jesus’ promises.

Each year on this first Sunday in November we honor those everyday and ordinary saints whom we have known and who died in the past year.  If we can no longer communicate with them in person, and they are not speaking to us from beyond the grave, we certainly remember them in our hearts.  That is why you listed their names on these memorial cards this day.

Friday night at a family dinner, I overhead my sister, who bought my parents’ home, tell of her husband discovering in the attic an extension cord our father had strung across the rafters so he could get power from the furnace room to a window air conditioner in a back bedroom.  My father died 33 years ago, yet we remember and still chuckle about such incidents.  We frequently speak of his love of cooking and having people for dinner, and how proud he would be that both my sisters have taken it up.

Even after I had selected this sermon theme and title, I read at the end of a long obituary in the newspaper last week these words:  “He will live on in our hearts.”  That is just one assurance that our loved ones continue to live on in our memories, in our hearts, in our actions after they have finished their life’s journey here on Earth and are at last laid to rest, we pray, in God’s eternal care.

ALL SAINTS’ MEMORIAL PRAYER

Eternal God, keeper of heaven and earth,

for all the saints we give you thanks this day—

for grandparents and godparents,

for doctors and teachers and professors,

for coaches and religious leaders.

God, for all the saints we give you thanks—

for authors of books that moved and educated us,

for musicians and composers whose works inspire us,

for friends whose advice has guided us,

for strangers who proved an example,

for our children and the children of others

who have given us courage and encouragement.

God, for all the saints we give you thanks—

for those nearest and farthest away,

for those who have died and are now at rest with you,

and those who are living,

for those who knew they made a difference,

and those who never will know they did.

God, who reigns on high with your Son and the Holy Spirit,

and yet is as close to us as our own breath,

for all the saints in heaven and on earth we give you thanks.

Amen.             (based on a prayer by Maren C. Tirabassi)