I’ve been remembering Easters as a child this week.  Boiling and dying brightly colored eggs marked the season.  A shopping trip, or at least a visit through my sister’s old dresses, yielded either a new, or slightly used special dress.  Bows, ribbons, and a measure of creativity meant new life for last year’s bonnet.  And then there were those white gloves!   Spring came a bit earlier in New Jersey than here in Michigan, so the front garden tulips and daffodils are part of my memories.  One year we even had live chicks, thanks to the farm down the road.  The most fun was Easter Sunday morning when my sister and I embarked on the treasure hunt, with clues written by my father in rhyme, at the end of which we would find our reward from the Easter Bunny, usually either on Daddy’s big green chair, or in the kitchen sink.

 

            I grew up too soon to enjoy one of those 8 ft. high inflatable Easter bunnies hopping on several yards around town.  Surrounding the cheerful ear-flopping beast are equally out of proportion flowers and eggs, and maybe a junior bunny or two.  As I was driving by one such display on my way to Calvin College Library, I found myself wondering -- at what age is childhood excitement about gifts from the Easter bunny transformed into gratitude for God’s Easter gift of eternal life?

 

The answer of course has something to do with psychological and spiritual development.  It has something to do with realizing that this thing we call a body, this thing we call life, will come to an end.  That’s reasonably terrifying!  If we are part of a church community, the terror will be lessoned by having memorized (if not internalized) the good news that God so love the world that God gave the only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life!  But even that lacks the tangibility of the mythical Easter bunny, and begs some theological reflection.  We can see and feel and taste the Easter candy and it gives immediate gratification to our anticipating, watering mouths.  But when we think about God’s gift of eternal life we are in the realm of mystery.  The temptation is either to fanciful speculation like we see in Tim Lahaye’s Left Behind series or to benign neglect, knowing that any attempt at explaining mystery risks folly.  There comes a time, however, when we face death -- of a pet, of a parent, of ourselves -- and the crisis initiates a quest for better understanding.  Or, perhaps it is the time when we face Easter, the very core of our faith and want it to mean something beyond the decorative frills of Easter and even the first awe-inspiring Alleluias.

 

            So what is eternal life?  What does it mean for you?  What might it mean?  In the book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris describes his day in a French class shortly after moving to Paris.  Students came to a section in their textbook about holidays.  In their bumbling French, students were attempting to respond to a non-Christian from Morocco who asked, “Excuse me, but what’s an Easter?”  “It is”, said one, “a party of the little boy of God who call his self Jesus.”  “He die one day and then he go above my head to live with your father”.  “He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the people.  He nice, the Jesus.”   We are even more limited in language when it comes to resurrection, salvation, and eternal things than those students attempting to explain in awkward vocabulary and grammar what Easter is.

 

            You may have guessed that we will not slip into the genre of best-selling spiritual fantasy regarding life eternal.  You also know me well enough and this church well enough to know that we don’t shy away from difficult subjects, so neither shall we neglect it.  We can make some affirmations from the little bit scripture says and from the reflections of saints of the church and from our experience.  I hope we can clarify this subject enough to augment your gratitude for God's priceless gift to you.

 

First:  Eternal life has its roots in our Creator’s divine love for humanity.

 

What are you willing to do for love?

 

            Imagine being in love with someone with whom you cannot communicate.  What extreme measures would you take to be able to express yourself, and to understand your beloved?  When David was 8000 miles away, and I hadn’t seen him for 3 months and my computer was down, and I was longing for him, it didn’t matter that phone calls were $4.50 per minute.  I dialed that number and paid the price when the phone bill came.  We do crazy things for love.  I have watched family members of a loved one who is paralyzed and unable to speak, spell her needs out by using an alphabet board and indicating each letter of each word with a blink of her eyes.  We do extraordinary things for love.  A story in Christian Century tells of a woman who fell madly in love with a man while traveling in South America.  One spoke only English, the other only Spanish.  While they are each learning the other’s language, they employed a software system called Babel Fish to translate their love letters.  Unfortunately the software is only 70 percent accurate resulting in a confession of love such as “I miss your presence; I miss your glances; becoming “I tell you that strange your presence, also strange your looks.”  We risk looking foolish for love.

 

For God so loved the world, the Gospel writer John tells us. God must be in communication with us.  God wants to be known, and wants us to know God.  It was when nothing else worked -- not the first attempt with Adam and Eve; not the formation of covenant people through Abraham and Sarah; not the Law given to Moses; not even the ranting and raving poetic prophets preaching repentance that got through our thick skulls and stubborn hearts.   Yet out of a long-suffering steadfast love, God released Jesus the Son and gave him flesh and blood so as to speak the language of humanity and thus make that communication possible.  God, in Jesus showed the world in something so risky, so foolish, so crazy, as a cross what living in love and dying for love is.  God showed the world that such love is more powerful than death.  Jesus was the 100 percent accurate translation of God’s love.

 

            I think of it like this:  Eternal life for each of us begins when we say yes to the resurrection, yes to new life in Christ, and we allow God’s love to become real inside of us.  It allows us to become that person the early church theologian Iraeneus was thinking of when he said, “The glory of God is a person fully alive”.

 

Second: Baptism, not death marks our entering into eternal life.

 

            Some time ago I came across a French baptismal liturgy which conveys this beautifully.  While holding the child, the minister says, “Little one, it was for you that Jesus came into this world.  It was for you that Jesus died.  Yes, little one it was for you that Jesus conquered death, and you know nothing of it yet.  Yes, little one, God first loved you.  At infant baptism we mark the promise of salvation, the promise of eternal life with God before we have barely begun to live.  Do you remember hearing in the Thanksgiving over the Water these powerful words? “We thank you for the waters of baptism.  In it we are buried with Christ in his death.  From it we are raised to share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Christ set us from sin and death and opened the way to eternal life.”

 

            Someone once said that our lives are as brief as the hyphen between the dates on the gravestone.  We are living the hyphen, and it is part of the whole.  Eternal life is too precious a gift to wait until death to begin to live in it.  It is NOT true that the only life that matters is life after death.  That is a fallacy religion has used to foster oppression, and to find an excuse for inaction.  The gift of God’s love and life for you and me should be affecting the choices we make, the words we speak, and the actions we perform.  God made us for life on earth first, and this life has value and worth now.

 

On the other hand, some people are so happy and so enamored by this life that they actually worry that eternal life after death will be no fun.  Some (it seems) are even worried about being bored in heaven.  They are worried that there will be nothing to do but sing with the choirs of cherubim and sit through never-ending church services.  A story is told of a little girl who was not so excited about the concept of heaven.  She asked her mother one day, “If I am really good in heaven, will they let me go down to hell to play on Saturday afternoon.”   How do you experience the goodness and love of God now?  What gives you a sense of joy, harmony, and love?  Those things will not be taken away from you when you die.  If we have trouble conceiving a joy-filled, even playful heaven where Saturday afternoon will be even better than any we have had on earth, the problem is not with heaven, it is with our image of heaven.

 

Third.   Eternal life is life in the presence of God -- NOW.

 

            Theologian Abraham Heschel writes that eternity is not so much perpetual future but perpetual presence.  God-with-us doesn’t wait until we die.  A child at the time of her grandfather’s death asked her mother, “Where did grandpa go?” and when her response came, “He has gone to be with God.” the little girl responded, “I never want to be with God, I want to stay here with you.”  God is already with us; we don’t need to make that impossible choice; we don’t need to die to be with God.  At death, the temporal physical life drops away.  What is left is our connection, our communication with God which started long, long before.  Paul Tillich writes, “We are kept in the eternal life before we live on earth, while we are living in time, and after our time has come to an end.”

 

            I know of two occasions, two “thin places” as Celtic spirituality calls it, when we see the continuity which is eternity -- in the delivery room, and around the bed of the dying.  These are times of waiting, times filled with awe, and fear, and anxiety.  These are holy times.  These are times rich with the Holy Spirit.  One moment, a fetus emerges from its nine-month incubation without breath, then with an inhalation and a wail, earthly life begins.  One moment, an aged loved one breathing sporadically, fails to inhale once more and then earthly life ceases.  I believe God holds the tiny hand of the unborn through the birthing and never let's go….and continues to hold the wrinkled hand of the dying and never lets go.  God’s presence sees us through the awe and anticipation of birth and through the reluctant adventure of dying.  This is eternal life -- perpetual presence; a love that will not let us go; Alleluia indeed!

 

            This week someone asked me “When do you feel eternal life?"  Before I realized what I was saying I heard the words come out of my mouth, “When I slow down, and get out of the way.”  I thought about that.  I sense I am in eternal life when the self-absorbed, self-centered parts of me pass away.  I was thinking of walking in the canyons of the Senora Mountains while on vacation in Tucson two weeks ago.  I was remembering the playful feeling of my bare feet in a chilly mountain stream which had flooded the hiking path.  I recalled the massiveness of the mountains, the relative smallness of human life.  I felt enveloped by those peaks, those peaks which had already existed for hundreds of thousands of years, and which would continue to exist for thousands more.  There I was, participating in eternity.  Eternal life is a continuum of which our life on earth is but a pause, that hyphen on the gravestone.  You are living in it.  Slow down.  And be thankful.

 

St. Augustine pondered death often, was afraid of it, and we have his writings to see how he worked out that angst.  Listen to his words:

 

Let us sing alleluia here on earth, while we still live in anxiety, so that we may sing it one day in heaven in full security.

We shall have no enemies in heaven, we shall never lose a friend.

God’s praises are sung both there and here,

but here they are sung in anxiety,

there in security;

here they are sung by those destined to die,

there by those destined to live forever,

here they are sung in hope,

there in hope’s fulfillment;

here they are sung by wayfarers,

there, by those living in their own country.

 

So then, let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten our labors.  You should sing as wayfarers do….sing, but continue your journey….sing then, but keep going.

 

Alleluia and Amen!