The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
May 6, 2007
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: Psalm 23
The Lord is
my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
Yea, though
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff
they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine
enemies: thou anointest
my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in
the house of the Lord forever.
***
“So what do you actually believe about the afterlife?” the man asked a group sitting around a comfortable living room.
There was an awkward silence, as people politely sipped their coffee, a cough or two from around the room.
He tried again. “When I say ‘eternity’ what do you think of? Can you tell me your views on the afterlife?”
More silence, a bit of shuffling. Would anyone go first?
Determined to draw the group out, he continued. “I think it’s the big unspoken topic. When once people would have spoken to it easily, today people are more reluctant to talk about it. But you people, you have no excuse. I mean, you’re a bunch of ministers!”
And we were. We had gathered together for some study leave, in this case, a few days with a professor from Boston University who was to lead us in a close reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy, or as he referred to it, “The Poem,” as if there were no other.
For those of you who do not spend your time amusing yourself
in this way, Dante Alighieri wrote in
So here we were a bunch of clergy gathered to study the most famous piece of literature ever written on the afterlife, and this professor had the nerve to ask us our opinion. “Don’t you guys talk about this?” he asked.
Here I realized that, as a group of clergy with whom I have studied on a yearly basis for ten years, we never had. In this friendship group, made up of UCC senior ministers of some of our denominations vital churches, from Seattle to Boston, we have created a safe place where we gather each year, and truly share what this calling is. We know each other deeply and well. Together, we have gone through changes of churches, marriages ending and beginning, traumas, and triumphs, in a setting where the masks are off.
Almost everyone in this close-knit group had lost a parent. In the throes of grief, we had been there for one another, in prayer and fellowship. For what we actually believe happens after death, we had never discussed that as a group. To quote the professor who was visiting with us, “And you’re a bunch of ministers!”
So we tentatively ventured out, we who preside over funerals on a regular basis, we who make the proclamations to our congregations and to strangers, we finally stuttered to get the words out to one another. Would we discover differences of opinion, strange theological tangents, would some people have all the answers and some have none? Would we even be able to get the words out, in this setting where no one of us would consider the other to be an expert?
Well, let me finish this part of the story by saying that that professor’s question to our group, while it came as a surprise, ended up being a gift. As we talked to one another about how we viewed that ultimately mysterious world that comes later, we realized that while there were certainly a few differences, there were many more commonalities. And sitting in that room was one person for whom the loss of a beloved father was brand new. She sat and did nothing but listen, as we talked, and I remembered myself, now just over a year on the other side of losing my own father, how raw she must have felt.
And I realized that in testifying to a belief in something, in using clumsy words to describe what words really cannot describe, we were ministering to her in the oldest way of the gospel. We were remembering the resurrection, and reminding the grieving that as painful as it is to lose someone from this world, we do not lose one another forever. It was the best conversation we had ever had, and I challenge you to have it with those you are close to.
I think that in our willingness to talk about everything except the afterlife, we, as a clergy group, actually mirrored our culture. For Americans, who might have been historically more comfortable talking about heaven (remember those old sermons about the streets of heaven being paved with gold, or everyone getting a Mercedes, or angels sitting on clouds playing harps?) now we are more hesitant, particularly those of us in the more intellectual wings of Christianity. We are more hesitant, I think, because we are afraid of looking stupid. We have heard heaven described poorly, or outrageously, and we have heard hell described cruelly, in ways that damage, and given all those mine fields, we hold our tongues. But really, when we do that, we leave a vacuum, don’t we, for all the crazy talk to slip in instead? So let me take a moment this Sunday to describe the indescribable, to take that risk, not because I particularly want to, but because it’s our calling, as a community of faith, to do this work. And in doing so, I am going to rely upon a rock that people have relied on for many thousands of years. It is a psalm that is read at nearly every funeral you attend, for one simple reason. It works. It does the best job of describing two things, both the indescribable mystery of eternity, and the indescribable pain of loss.
Let me begin by saying, part of why we long to hear these words at times of death, is because they are ultimately words for the living, about living, and remind those of us left living that we do not need to grieve as others do who have no hope. The very psalm we hear at times of death is really about how to live.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I’ll not want,” may be the most revolutionary word of scripture out there, and this, my friends, is a word for the living. You won’t lack for anything, you won’t want for anything, if your guide is divine. Don’t believe the hype of the world. So live with that as your reality, and you will not lack.
The still waters and green pastures, those are what await us at the end of our days. So we can walk, in a time of grieving, through the valley of the shadow of death, because it is only a valley—and valleys are merely dips between mountaintops. So eternity, a pasture green, or a still water, or a generously-spread table; these are just hints at what lies ahead. The point is, something does, so the valley of the shadow of death never has the last word.
“Thou preparest a table in the presence of mine enemies.” When I was younger, and had not yet really experienced a deep grief, my losses were not so much losses of people from this world to the next, but of things that I wanted, or dreams that I had, or goals that were unmet, or hopes I had for people that were not realized. Often, I lay the blame for those losses at the feet of other people. Enemies if you will. So when I heard the words of that psalm, I thought, yes, the promise of this psalm is that if I do right, and do not see a reward for that, I can rest assured that one day, in eternity, my enemies will see me successful. I don’t know what exactly I had in mind, but if I’m honest, my view of heaven probably involved a certain “I told you so” moment, where all the people who had irritated me got to watch me sit down to this giant meal of cake and ice cream, prepared by my own personal, heavenly chef, i.e., God, while they sat there looking on, wanting just a little bite. That’s what “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies” meant to me.
Now, later, it means something very different, and you know what, twenty years from now it will mean something different, a year from now even. That’s the beauty of a great scripture like this. It keeps giving you gifts, new surprising gifts, year after year. It’s why we can listen to this one over and over again.
Let’s get back to that table set before mine enemies, where my cup overflows. My current interpretation is that their cup overflows, too. I think heaven is a place where the disagreements that separate us no longer matter. We don’t want to eat cake when others have none. There is enough love for all of our cups to overflow, and people we struggled with in this life, in that afterlife, we eat together. The table set before our enemies is not about humiliating them, but about God getting all of us to the same table.
There’s an Asian story about the difference between heaven and hell. It actually has some similarities to the Dante poem, in that it is about a mortal, still living, who has the opportunity to visit eternity and then gets to report back to us here on earth. So it's an allegory of the afterlife, from another culture and another time.
In the Asian story, a man visits hell, and it is an enormous banquet table, laden with every kind of delicacy you could ever want to eat. “This doesn’t look too bad to me,” he says. But the people are miserable. They are looking at the table, but they are unable to partake of it–because their chopsticks are eleven feet long. They grasp at the food, and try to get it to their mouths, but it is impossible. So hell is being surrounded with wonderful things but unable to enjoy them.
So then the man goes to heaven. Guess what. It’s exactly the same set up. Enormous banquet, plenty to eat, and here’s the surprise, the same eleven-foot long chopsticks. But the people in heaven are happy, and rejoicing, and delighting as they eat the food. Why? How? Because in heaven, they have learned to take those eleven-foot long chop sticks and feed each other.
In heaven, I think the table is set before our enemies, and based upon whether we choose the path of love or of hate, that determines whether or not we will drink from an overflowing cup, or just gaze upon it in envy and longing.
So that is why we seek to live well, and in godly ways, now. So we are ready for that meal.
The 23rd Psalm is the most mysterious book of the Bible and also the most practical. That’s what a great scripture is, and why we don’t just read it at funerals, but we read it here on Sunday morning, here in the house of the Lord.
At the end of the psalm it says, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Words about the mysterious afterlife? Absolutely.
Words about how to live in the here and now? Absolutely.
How can it be both? I don’t know now, but I trust that one day I will.
For now, on our communion table, I see glimpses of that heavenly meal when we will be reunited with every one we have ever loved—and even those we haven’t. I see it in the beautiful faces, the sad faces, the joyful and the nervous. It’s why serving communion is so meaningful for those of us who do it. We don’t just see you all in the here and now. We see, through the valley of the shadow of death, a green pasture, a full meal and a hint of eternity. So let this meal take you there and give you peace for the days ahead.