All Saints Day 2015-Is. 25:6-9, Rev. 21:1-6, John 11:32-44, Ps. 24-
A perfect day to talk about death, and heaven- All Christians talk a good game about death being defeated at Easter, but the old Halloween Grim Reaper scares us most of the time.. -Isaiah’s section here imagines an end to the power of death the shroud that lies on the earth. It imagines not a wake but a banquet of celebration closer to a wedding, with rich food, fat foods. Death was pictured as a ravening beast that swallowed up life. Now it s being pictured as a victim of being swallowed by life itself.. God will dwell/tent with us here. God says no more, enough is enough. CS Lewis wrote of a new Narnia, a deeper Narnia where no good thing is destroyed.Tears will be dried, and the cause for tears of lament will be gone. Martha’s tears turned to tears of joy at the resurrection of Lazarus.It seems that the God of life cannot let death be the end.Pictures a city as a banquet hall.
Koester-The first heaven and earth that pass away (21:1) constitute the world in which death was operative. To take death out of the picture is to bring about a new world.-Peterson-God will wipe away every tear . The promise is not only that God will wipe away any tears that might happen to linger on our cheeks after that Last Day, but that God will reach back through time to wipe away all the pained tears ever shed.
God will not just comfort us and help us to forget the bad things, but God will redeem the whole sorry story of human history. .. The tears that God must wipe away are not only the tears we shed, but also the tears we cause. Yet, "our eyes are fixed on a distant horizon" (Long Accompanying: 40).Our readings this morning look forward to that distant horizon when Death will be banished from the kingdom of God. As Moltmann said one day Death will die and Hell can go to hell." At long last, the last enemy will be cast into the outer darkness. The cause of so much pain and misery will be removed. In heaven, eternal life and worship life will be mingled together, in a seamless garment of life.
With God bringing us into a new world, our lives will count for something more than the discrete sum of events and experiences. they will be connected to the life of God and the countless other lives on this planet. In heaven the resurrected will live with the Living Resurrected One.God has all the time in the world for us.Revelation says that God's dwelling place will be with us.,in God, united in the peace and restoration of God. Those afflicted with dementia will have their memories and their best selves restored. those who wake up in the morning with pain could run and dance again. In heaven, we will have all the time in the world to come to know God and each other, face to face, I love the phrase I first heard in process theology, "in God nothing worth saving is ever lost.". I do believe in the life of the world to come. We yearn for a place where are dreams for peace, justice, fulfillment will meet in salvation's halls. In the end, heaven is all about life with God, so the images we draw of all the good we associate with God gets imagined in heaven. Heaven will be what we need, how we need it, as we live together in what our souls crave, for all the time in the world.
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