Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” -Luke 20:27-38
My Dear Ones,
The first time I flew in an airplane, I was four years old and on my way from Ohio to California because grandma and grandpa were taking Aunt Laura and me to Disneyland. My cat, Heathen, had just died, and so once the plane broke above the clouds, I pressed my nose against the glass of the window, convinced that I was about to see Heathen again, because wasn't heaven in the clouds?
In the sixth grade, I remember answering a classmate who inquired about my version of heaven that it would be me and my friends in a white, Greek temple (mythology phase, don't ask) with thick Oriental rugs (???) playing music and eating good food (OK, those last two sound pretty good).
And if you asked me about heaven now, I would say: I'm sorry, but I just don't know. I don't know what it will look like. I don't know what you'll wear, if you'll even need clothes, if you will be able to see people who are still alive. And if, as you are reading this, you have lost someone you love, believe me when I tell you how sorry I am that I don't know more. Because when someone we love dies, we can't talk with them anymore, and we desperately want to know, wherever they are, that they are ok. We think we'd be so much more at peace if we knew for sure.
I can't tell you if you'll be able to eat meatball sandwiches in heaven. But I can tell you what Jesus tells the Saduccees: God is the God of the living, not the God of the dead, "for to him all are alive." Human bodies are always moving towards bodily death. That is the way that they are made. But we- all of us, the important, deep-down parts of us- are always moving towards life. Whether you're in a good time of your life or a tough time of your life, something better is coming. This goes against almost everything we know about the natural world, which is always moving towards an ending. But this is at the very heart of what it means to believe in God: living in the hope that we are moving towards life, because we love a God who is bigger than even death itself.
Love,
Mom
