Pineridge Blog

Life is fragile. More fragile than we know until it is changed in an instant.

A couple of weeks ago I talked about heaven in my sermon. I don’t talk about heaven much. Not because I don’t believe in it, but mostly because heaven really doesn’t come up that often in the scriptures. Jesus had a lot more to say about how we treat people in this world than he does describing the next world.

I think we were looking at the passage in Luke where the Sad-ducees, who didn’t believe in heaven, made up this silly sce-nario where a serial widow died with seven late husbands. The Sadducees’ real purpose was to design a verbal trap to catch Jesus in his own words. So they ask, trying to keep a straight face, “Whose wife will she be in heaven?” Jesus’ answer was, “Marriage is for this world. Trust God to sort out the future.”

What I really think about the subject of heaven is: God is love.
Whatever we think heaven will be or won’t be, or whatever question we have that we think now that we are dying to ask God (pun intended), just won’t matter because heaven will be the eternal experience of God’s love. Eternal just means that even time won’t matter.

Of course, the day after I talked about heaven, someone in the church died. Spencer Proctor, who was only 19, died tragically and suddenly November 11th.

So it ended up that I thought way more about death and heav-en than I ever imagined I would when I gave that sermon a couple of weeks ago. But on this side of Spencer’s funeral I have to say I believe even more strongly what I did before. God is love and can be trusted in all things, including heaven.

Being here Friday night I saw members of the church so gra-ciously welcoming and providing hospitality to the family and the vast crowd who came to the visitation. And again Saturday morning when the church was filled with mourners. The whole thing had a kind of eternal quality to it. By that I am not trying to diminish the pain, the grief or the impossibly steep ques-tions of “Why?” But somehow those deep feelings and hard questions were simply and gently held as we were the church together, simply loving and being loved.