Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; July 21, 2024
Readings: John 16:17-22 (children’s talk);
Luke 20:27-38; Divine Providence §73.6, 7; Secrets of Heaven §10409.3
Today’s sermon is about the idea that life is eternal. Death is not final; it’s merely a transition. We were not created to strive for a while and then wink out of existence. We are precious to God: He will not allow what we really are to perish. We were created to live to eternity in a blessed state (DP §324.6).
That there is an afterlife is one of the most basic tenets of the faith of the New Church. It’s right up there with “there is a God” and “we should be nice to people.” It’s an idea that most of us have heard before. So why spend a sermon talking about it? Well, the simplest truths are also, usually, the most powerful ones. We can learn these sorts of truths in a moment, but we’ll spend our lives learning how to really see them. It’s one thing to know that life is eternal; it’s another thing to live with eternity in our minds and in our hearts.
So today’s sermon is about what it really means to believe in eternal life. The readings from the Heavenly Doctrine that you’ll hear in a little while are about the effect that such a belief is able to have on our thinking and our worldview. But before we get to those readings, we’re going to consider the Sadducees.
The Sadducees were a Jewish sect that was active at the time of the Lord’s life on earth. One of the tenets of their faith was that there is no afterlife—no resurrection after death. They brought this belief to the Lord, and here’s how the conversation went: [read Luke 20:27-38].
So the Sadducees present the Lord with a somewhat unlikely scenario: a woman has seven husbands—all of them brothers—one after another; and after all seven brothers have died, the woman herself dies. The Sadducees ask, “In the resurrection, whose wife does she become?” (v. 33). If they had been sincerely asking this question, the Lord’s response might have been something along the lines of, “Well, whose wife does she want to be?” But the Sadducees weren’t really asking anything: they were arguing that there cannot be an afterlife. It’s a pretty weak argument too: people sometimes have complicated relationships, and if there were an afterlife, people would take those complicated relationships into the afterlife. And since that’s obviously just unacceptable, it’s clear that there can’t be an afterlife.
The Lord doesn’t really engage with this argument. The first part of his response to the Sadducees is more confusing than we might wish it to be: He says, “those who are counted worthy to attain that age, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage” (v. 35). It sounds a lot like He’s saying that marriage is an earthly thing, and that no one in the afterlife is married. But the teachings of the New Church make it overwhelmingly clear that this is not the case: there are marriages in heaven (ML §§27-41; HH §§366-386). We’re told that when the Lord says that no one after the resurrection is given in marriage, the only kind of marriage that He’s referring to is spiritual marriage, which is conjunction with the Lord (ML §41). If we don’t choose to conjoin ourselves with the Lord in this life, we won’t choose to do so in the life to come, either. That’s the point that the Lord is really making here. We might wish that the He’d been more direct with the Sadducees, because it’s important for married partners to believe that their marriages can last forever. True married love wants to last forever; we’re told that eternity is “inherent” in this love (ML §216). But we have to trust that what the Lord said to the Sadducees was what needed to be said at that time.
But it’s the next part of what the Lord says to the Sadducees that’s especially relevant to today’s topic: “But even Moses showed in the burning bush passage that the dead are raised, when he called the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ For He is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live to Him” (vv. 37, 38). He is not the God of the dead. It’s outrageous, even blasphemous, to conclude that the Lord—who is love—presides over death and decay, over a world that’s doing nothing but inexorably fall apart. God does better work than that. What He makes is made to last. It’s made to live. He is the God of the living. All live to Him: all human beings are alive in His sight. We were created to live.
In the Heavenly Doctrine we’re told that, “The Lord did not create the universe for His own sake, but for the sake of those with whom He would be in heaven” (DP §27.2; cf. TCR §§43, 46). And He wants us to be with Him in heaven so that He can make us happy. We read:
Divine love… has as its end a heaven consisting of people who have become or who are becoming angels, to whom it is possible for the Lord to impart all the blessings and happiness connected with love and wisdom, and to impart these from Himself in them. (ibid.)
That’s why we exist. That’s why we were made. It’s a bafflingly wonderful idea. The power that holds the universe together wants nothing more than to make us happy. How could love like that ever permit our lives—or any good thing—to be stolen from us forever?
As I’ve been saying, these ideas have the power to reshape the ways we look at the lives we’re leading right now, and the ways we look at the world. I’m going to read two passages from the Heavenly Doctrine—two passages that show us the impact of a real belief in eternal life. The first is from a section of the book Divine Providence that talks about different kinds of freedom. There is natural freedom—which is the freedom to think and will the evils that we naturally incline to (§73.3). And then there is spiritual freedom, which is the freedom to be a spiritual person, and do what is right in God’s eyes. We read: [§73.6].
If the seven or eight or nine decades that we spend on this earth are all that we have, why should we strive to change our hearts? Why should we delay gratification? If life in this world is all we have, we should grab every pleasure we can reach. We should all be hedonists. Why do anything that we don’t want to do?
But everything changes if life is eternal—if, as the reading says, the delight and blessedness that are within our reach right now are, “but as a fleeting shadow compared to the delight and blessedness of life in eternity, to eternity” (DP §73.6). If eternal life outshines the here and now so completely, then striving to become a better person is not a waste of time. Resisting evil will still be work, but it will be worth it. Every moment of spiritual struggle, every ounce of our labor, will be worthwhile, and a thousand times more than worthwhile—because our labor in this world is just a fleeting shadow before to what is to come. To truly believe in eternal life changes the way we look at the work that’s in front of us right now. It gives us a reason to do that work. It gives us the will to do that work, and the freedom to become spiritual people.
The second reading from the Heavenly Doctrine is from Secrets of Heaven. This context of this passage is a discussion of the idea that Divine providence can’t possibly be guiding the whole human race—because so often it’s the bad people who end up having good things, and good people who end up with bad things (§10409.2). Surely that wouldn’t happen if God were in charge! This perspective is easy enough to sympathize with. When we look at the world, it sure does seem that too often it’s the power-hungry people who end up in power, not the decent people. And we see good people falling on hard times—being handed burdens that they didn’t ask for and don’t deserve. Where is the Lord in all of that? Now we turn to what the Lord says in the heavenly Doctrine: [read SH §10409.3].
The point is simple enough: worldly blessings like wealth and status don’t contribute much to our eternal happiness. In fact, they sometimes push us towards eternal unhappiness: sometimes they aren’t blessings at all—they’re curses. So fair enough—the Lord wants us to lay up treasures in heaven, not treasures on earth (Matt. 6:19, 20). But sometimes when we accept these truths, we accept them kind of resentfully. What we actually hear is the Lord explaining to us why we can’t have nice things, and at the end of it all we’ll get a pat on the back for being good. If we aren’t really looking to eternal life, then worldly pleasures and comforts seem pretty important, and it’s pretty unfair that some people get them and others don’t.
The Lord does care about whether or not we’re happy right now. When we’re upset because our car got scratched, He cares. When we’re sad because we didn’t get the job we applied for, He cares. But He’s looking to eternity—and we generally struggle to recognize just how small these things are in the face of eternity. The reading says that what endures to eternity “is.” What comes to an end “relatively is not.” In other words, these earthly things, the things that belong to this life and this life alone, are so temporary, so inconsequential, that in the face of eternity they practically don’t even exist. They just aren’t what matters to the One who values our eternal happiness. He only cares about worldly things insofar as they lead us to or from heaven. The next life outshines this one completely. This perspective shift is hard to make: this world in front of us feels pretty big and important. But the more we can direct our minds and our hearts towards eternity, the more peace we’ll find—the more order we’ll see—when we look at the world. The things that truly matter always have been and always will be intact in the hands of God.
On that note, one more powerful consequence of believing in eternal life is that we can know that the ones we love who have died are not lost. They are safe in the hands of God; they are more alive than they ever were in this world. He did not create us to die, and disappear: He is the God of the living. To believe this, when we’re faced with the loss of one we love, is one of the greatest consolations that a human being can be given. Our hearts know that what is alive doesn’t die. In Secrets of Heaven we read, “who does not say of his children who have died that they are in heaven?” (§5078.5). Earlier I said that true married love looks to eternity, because eternity is inherent in that love. And we’re told:
When married partners … love each other tenderly, they think of eternity in regard to the marriage covenant, and not at all of its being terminated by death. Or if they do think about this, they grieve, until strengthened again with hope by the thought of its continuing in the life to come. (ML §216)
When our minds tell us that death has taken someone we love away from us forever, our hearts are left holding a belief that they just can’t accept. It’s such a painful thing to hold, and it isn’t true at all. Nothing so precious as a human life can ever be lost. And the time we spend apart from the ones we love is only a fleeting shadow, compared to the eternity that we will share with them.
When the Lord was about to die, He told His disciples, “I will see you again” (John 16:22). “I will see you again.” Those words matter so much. This world is only a doorstep: it takes us just a moment to cross it. So much of what we see and understand right now will be left behind. But everything good is eternal. “You now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you” (ibid.).
Amen.