"...and the life everlasting. Amen."

Can you believe it?

‘Everlasting life’ is the answer to the question, ‘Christianity, why bother?’  There are countless other benefits to believing in some religion, even Christianity.  Love. Sacrifice. Equality. Justice. Mercy. Grace. Welcome.  Hospitality. Resurrection. I preach all of that. But, in the final analysis, Christianity fills the vacuum in my mind and heart which wants to know ‘what then?’  The corpse, the ashes, after they rise, what then? Die again, like Lazarus? Sit on a log and endlessly stare at bullfrogs? Float in some ether-like cloud of reality?

What ultimately and finally makes sense of Christianity for me is that all who die in Christ receive new bodies which actively reside, work, play, embrace, laugh,  praise God on a New Earth amidst New Heavens in an endless morning and evening, what is commonly referred to as ‘Heaven’.  I don’t know that it is a ‘place’ like we think of places. I don’t know that it is ‘next’ in the way we think of time because ‘time’, as we think of it, is no more for the saints in glory. It is an experience in which we know no anxiety, no shame, no guilt, no separation, no groans, no pain. No tears.

Our Resurrected Bodies will experience  what ‘no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no human heart has ever imagined…’ (I Corinthians 2:9)  No one can describe that experience for you. But, try this: imagine your most beautiful time on this earth. Where are you? Who is with you? What are you doing?  How are you feeling? Now, imagine that scene as a gazillion times more beautiful, everything about it just thrills every fiber of your being. And the feeling never stops.  “Heaven” is still better than that, because you cannot imagine it.

When we recite with believers the Creed’s final words, claiming our confidence in ‘the life everlasting’, we are ‘groaning with all creation’, the rocks, rivers, plants and parakeets, that all of it and us will be ‘liberated from its bondage and decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.’ (Romans 8:21)

We were created to dwell with God. God is from everlasting to everlasting. (Revelation 21:3) Forever. Dwelling. With. You. “Amen”: meaning, “this shall truly and surely be”. Believe it.

"...the resurrection of the body..."

When you are standing at the bedside of a young man, Kevin, who is in hospice care. Standing next to Kevin’s bed, holding his hand which clings to your own…for life.

When your presence there is meant to bring comfort to Kevin’s wife and children, grandpa and grandma, sisters.

When your words are, perhaps, among the final words Kevin’s mind will cling to for hope in his last breath.

At such a time, what can you say? What dare you say?

“I believe in…the resurrection of the body.”  It takes faith to offer such hope to Kevin, and even greater faith for believers, like Kevin and those surrounding him, to accept those ancient words of hope as ‘gospel’, as good news.  If there ever is a time to pray that the souls speaking the Creed with you understand it, accept it, believe it, it is when you are holding the hand of a dying man.

Christian hope is not just a pious bromide of optimistic blather.  Christian hope is accepting by faith that because God has done something in the past he is certain to do it again in the future. Our Future Hope is in a future event guaranteed by God, the belief in which moves the Creed’s faithful reciters from faith to hope to knowledge to sight to celebration.

So it is that believers confess, first, “On the third day he rose again.” And then, since we know by faith that Jesus arose and lives, we can say by faith that Kevin arises and lives, body and soul.

That, in his flesh, with real eyes, arms, legs, Kevin will see his wife, hold his children, run with the wind; that his new body possesses a promised place in the New Heavens and New Earth.  With you.