Memorial Service - 2012

It’s just like moving into the next room, they say.

Or like crossing an ocean to a different shore.

It’s like being born into a new world.

Or moving down a dark tunnel towards a benevolent light.

It’s like a party, where all of the people you’ve ever loved are there.

It’s a golf course where the greens are perfect and the pensioners fourball in front of you all play like Rory McIlroy!

It’s everything you hoped it would be, and far far more.

It’s heaven.

We run out of language pretty quickly when we try to talk about heaven, and on this particular Sunday when we gather to remember the people we’ve lost to death over this past year, I feel a little bit like a tourist trying to describe a country I’ve never visited.

I can tell you what the guide book says,, but I haven’t got any personal experience to draw on.

And even the images we have in the Bible aren’t especially helpful because they’re just that – images. Clouds and harps and pearly gates are part of the iconography of heaven now, but we’d be daft to read too much into that.

The only person able to fill us in on how things really are would have been Jesus, who the Bible tells us came from heaven to earth to live among us.

And interestingly enough, he seems to have little or no interest in furnishing us with details. He’s far more interested in telling us how to get to heaven, and how to make the earth a bit more like heaven, rather than what it’s going to be like when we finally get there.

So for a few moments I want to set those interesting questions aside, though I promise to pick them up again later!

And instead, I want us to think a little about the threshold to the afterlife – this thing we call death – and how we respond to it. Seems to me we can make two equal and opposite mistakes when we’re thinking about death. We can pretend it away and belittle it, or we can make too much of it.

So let’s take the first of those – the danger of belittling death.

Sometimes at funerals people like to have particular readings that have meant something to them, and one of the most popular ones is the piece on death by Henry Scott-Holland which says:

"Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged”.  and so on.

And there’s a lot in that piece that’s helpful, I think, particularly the idea that there’s continuity between this life and the next. And I know that can be of great comfort to people, and rightly so. But I never use that reading unless I’m asked to because I just don’t agree with the first few lines. “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. Nothing has happened”. Is that really the case?

Some of you will remember the actress and comedienne Joyce Grenfell from the St Trinian’s movies and her regular appearances on Face the Music. Well, when her brother died she volunteered to write a poem for his funeral service because she so disliked the Scott-Holland piece.

"We can't have that thing about 'I have only slipped away into the next room” she said. “I mean, why go through the whole bother of dying just to find yourself in the kitchen?"

Of course, she’s being sarcastic, but I think she has a point. Doesn’t it belittle death, and our grief, to say that nothing has happened when someone we love dies?

Humans are physical beings, as well as spiritual beings, and if I want to hug you, or dance with you, or have a meal with you, or hear you laugh, or stroke your hair, it’s really not much comfort to my senses to know that your spirit’s only next door. It’s you I want. You as you were. And that’s the very thing that death has taken away from me.

That’s not nothing.

And the Bible agrees with me. In Biblical terms, death’s an enemy we’ll only get rid of at the end of days when everything that stands in opposition to God will finally be destroyed.

But until then, death has power over each and every one of us. None of us know when it's going to come or how it's going to affect those we love. And we're powerless to stop it

That’s not nothing.

But nor, secondly, is it everything.

We shouldn’t belittle death, but we shouldn’t give it too much respect either, because death is a beaten enemy. It just doesn’t know that it’s beaten yet.

In our Old Testament reading today, Isaiah prophesies that one day God will deal the death blow to death: “The Sovereign Lord will destroy death for ever. He will wipe away the tears from everyone’s eyes”.

But by the time we get to the New Testament, seven hundred years later, the writers are saying that the power of death is already broken. 2 Timothy 1:10 “This has now been revealed to us through the coming of our Saviour, Christ Jesus. He has ended the power of death and through the gospel has revealed immortal life”.

Now how could Paul write that? How could he write that death's power was over when all around him people were continuing to die just as they'd always done?

Well what Paul’s referring to here, is the work that Christ did on the cross; because he didn’t just die to deal with the problem of our sin. He died to deal with the problem of death.

Before Jesus’ time, people believed that death was like a prison, or a resting place. Your soul went down to the grave and that was it.  And if you read the Old Testament you’ll quickly discover that people in those days didn’t speak about heaven or hell. They spoke about Sheol – the grave – the common destiny of all, both good and bad alike.

But when Christ entered death through his own death on the cross he kicked down its back door and changed it from a prison into a tunnel. Death now leads somewhere – it leads us back into the presence of God.

And there, before him, one day all of us will have to give an account for the lives we’ve led. And I believe that where we have made room for him in our hearts, he will make room for us in his.

And that brings me back to the question of what heaven will be like.

“Who knows? is the answer! I’m sorry to disappoint if you were hoping for more!

But I don’t think it’s insignificant that when the Bible tries to talk about heaven it draws heavily on images and ideas that we’re familiar with.

The book of Revelation describes the new heaven and earth, as a city with streets, trees, fields and rivers. It talks about relationships – person to person and person to God. It talks about parties and feasts and celebrations and overflowing thankfulness. It talks about grief and sadness and tears being wiped away. It’s an earthy vision – a very human vision – of the life to come.

Whatever heaven is like, I think it’s going to have a strong flavour of earth about it – all that’s best in our human experience made more, in and through Christ.

I think that’s a helpful idea to hold onto today. and I’m going to end with a poem that expresses that thinking far better than I ever could. It’s called “When I’m in Heaven” and it’s by Adrian Plass….

When I’m in heaven,

tell me there’ll be kites to fly.
The kind they say you can control,
although I never did for long.

The kind that spin and spin

and spin and spin.
Then sulk and dive and die
and rise again and spin again
and dive and die
and rise up yet again.

I love those kites.

When I’m in heaven,
tell me there’ll be friends to meet
in ancient, oak-beamed Sussex pubs,
enfolded by the wanton downs.
And summer evenings
lapping lazily against the shore
of sweet, familiar little lands
inhabited by silence,
or by nonsenses.
The things you cannot safely say
in any other place.

I love those times.

When I’m in heaven,

tell me there’ll be seasons
where the colours fly.
Poppies splashing flame
through dying yellow, living green,
and autumn’s burning sadness
that has always made me cry
for things that have to end; for winter fires that blaze like captive suns
but look so cold when the morning comes.

I do love the way the seasons change.

When I’m in heaven,
tell me there will be peace at last.
That in some meadow,
filled with sunshine
filled with buttercups
and filled with friends,
you will – chew a straw?
and fill us in on how things really are.

And if there is some harm

in laying earthly hope at heaven’s door,
or in this saying so,
well – have mercy on my foolishness,
dear Lord.

I love this world you made.

It’s all I know.

Christian Aid Sunday - Making It Real

“You did not choose me – I chose you and appointed you to go and bear much fruit, the kind of fruit that endures.”

Those are some of the words with which Jesus made ready to leave his disciples on the evening before his crucifixion. For three years, they’d been at his side, watching him work, eating with him, debating with him. But it was only with hindsight that they truly realised who he was. He was God with them; God in the flesh.

Perhaps more than any of the other gospels, John’s is the gospel of incarnation. Matthew and Luke give us the story of Jesus’ birth; Mark begins his gospel already running, with Jesus a grown man. But John takes us way back in time to the beginning, in a self-conscious echo of the opening words of Genesis He says:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the word was God”.

and just a few verses later he lets us into the immense secret that the new Christian community had been let into – that in Christ, the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

For the first time, the God of heaven had been earthed in a person; you could put your hand out and touch him if you wanted to. The unfathomable God had become tangible. And we needed that.

Like it or not, we can’t get away from the fact that human beings are creatures of sense. Unless we can see it, hear it, taste it, smell it or touch it, we’re generally not convinced.

God knows that. He remembers that we are dust as the Psalmist says. He knows it helps us believe if we’ve something tangible to hold on to. And so, John tells us, the word became flesh.

Without substance, all our talk about big truths or big ideas sounds like so much hot air.

I don’t mean to play party politics, but to give an example, what exactly is the Big Society? That was David Cameron’s rallying call two years ago at the last general election – great rhetoric, but what did it actually mean for you and me? Nothing tangible, as far as I can see. Which is probably why you’re hearing a lot less about it these days.

A big idea has to be anchored in something practical and tangible, if it’s going to make a real difference.

And that’s something Christian Aid have been so good at down the years.

Yes – they have the rhetoric. But they also have the practical solutions that make the rhetoric believable.

They want poverty to be over. There’s no denying that’s a big idea! But then they put hoes and seeds into the hands of women farmers in Sierra Leone so they can raise crops on vacant land.  They give them tools, not just aid, because these folk don’t want handouts for the rest of their lives – they want to be able to make their own way.

In time, the seeds start to grow, and the people start to grow too. With the right support and guidance from Christian Aid, folk are empowered to deal with the authorities and lobby for improvements in their conditions. And their arguments are stronger because they’re a community who are pulling together and going places. They get a new school. Their kids have a better chance of escaping poverty.

And all because someone, in Christ’s name, got alongside them with a few basic farm tools, and a little bit of strategising. That’s all it took for the big idea of an end to poverty to become a tangible reality, in that little corner of the world at least.

My friends, as Christians, we are invested in a big idea. The idea that there is a God who formed this world and who loves its peoples with an enduring love. A God who wants each and every individual to know that they matter to him, and invites them to know him in return.

We are charged with getting that message out, charged by Jesus himself. “You did not choose me – I chose you and appointed you to go and bear much fruit, the kind of fruit that endures.”

How will we do that? How do we bear that fruit? By matching our profession with action. By making God’s love tangible.

Profession without action, according the apostle James, is just hot air.

“What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

Our little church sits here, a landmark for miles around. What goes on here, people wonder. What do those folk stand for? What are they about?

How will they know, unless our faith bears fruit in actions?

This week, one of the ways we can act is by helping out with the Christian Aid collection in the parish. A couple of hours of your time given over to helping communities like Bap in Sierra Leone. You don’t need to have all the answers, you don’t need to know the GDP and principal exports of Sierra Leone. You just need to know that these folk want to help themselves and need a leg up to get started, and that this matters to the God you say you believe in!

“Go and bear fruit” Jesus says. “the kind of fruit that endures”. This week, Christian Aid’s the obvious focusm but who knows what Jesus’ words might mean the week after? What that 'fruit' might look like. Visiting someone, writing to someone, cooking for someone, forgiving someone. You alone know.

But what’s clear this morning, not only from our text, but from the whole sweep of Scripture, is that it’s far easier for people to believe in God when God’s love is made real for them through the actions of flesh and blood people like you and me.