{"id":375,"date":"2009-03-22T11:04:08","date_gmt":"2009-03-22T16:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/?p=375"},"modified":"2009-03-22T11:04:08","modified_gmt":"2009-03-22T16:04:08","slug":"march-22-2009-dan-cabot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/2009\/03\/march-22-2009-dan-cabot\/","title":{"rendered":"March 22, 2009 – Dan Cabot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

HEAVEN<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The lectionary for this week includes John 3:16: \u201cFor God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.\u201d This is the reference you see held up on little yellow signs at football games. \u201cJohn 3:16\u201d is what University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, perhaps the best college player ever, had printed in the eye-black on his cheeks this season. John 3:16 is the most googled biblical reference. I want to talk a little about everlasting life.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The atheist\u2019s position is simple. There isn\u2019t an afterlife. When electrical activity in the brain permanently ceases, I (what I mean when I say \u201cI\u201d) will become as dead as a computer without electricity. Shortly the circuits themselves decay, and no new electrical power could make them function again. Memory, personality, intellect, imagination, sensation, integration \u2013 all gone. There is<\/em> no soul to survive death, says the atheist.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The agnostic position is almost as simple. There is no way to know, one way or the other, what happens after death.\u00a0 <\/span>This was Socrates\u2019 view. He said it might be nothing at all (like a dreamless sleep), or it might be the greatest adventure one could imagine.\u00a0 <\/span>However, this didn\u2019t stop Socrates from speculating about life after death. Why should it stop me?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The third position is based on the religious hypothesis. The soul is immortal and travels or is transformed to a new existence after the body dies.\u00a0 <\/span>Logically difficult, this is a much more attractive arena for imaginative speculation. It has given rise to some beautiful ideas:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>When we\u2019ve been there ten thousand years.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Bright shining as the sun,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>We\u2019ve no less days to sing God\u2019s praise<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Than when we first begun.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Or the old Gospel tune<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Will the circle be unbroken?
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>By and by, Lord, by and by,
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>There’s a better home a-waitin’
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>In the sky, Lord, in the sky.<\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>How about this song by June Carter Cash?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019ll be waiting on the far-side banks of Jordan,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019ll be sitting drawing pictures in the sand,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>And when I see you coming, I will rise up with a shout<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>And come runnin\u2019 through the shallow waters,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Reaching for your hand.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>What a lovely sentiment. Really.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>One would think that the religious hypothesis would find ammunition in the Bible, but the Bible is almost silent on the details of Heaven. It seems clear in the Bible that there is such a place, and that God is there on a throne, and Jesus is there, but beyond that, not much specific. The few descriptions of Heaven in the Bible, from Danie<\/em>l to Revelations, <\/em>talk about God\u2019s throne and about a collection of strange beasts there. The traditional views of heaven (wings and harps) don\u2019t come from the Bible. They come from the Apocrypha<\/em>, from commentaries, or just from ordinary speculation, like mine. Even Jesus\u2019 comment, \u201cIn my Father\u2019s house are many mansions,\u201d only widens the field of speculation without being particularly helpful. And why did Jesus add, \u201cIf it were not so, I would have told you\u201d? Does that mean there is nothing that is not<\/span> true about Heaven?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Greeks imagined a section of the underworld called the Elysian Fields, where heroes went to live a delightful afterlife, spent mostly in contests of strength and warfare \u2013 sort of a perpetual Olympic Games. While that doesn\u2019t do it for me, I have always been a competitive person, and the pastimes I enjoy on Earth have often involved testing myself against puzzles or others. I\u2019m not sure Heaven needs to be \u201cfun\u201d in the earthly sense, but if it is, I guess I\u2019d like to play games, solve puzzles \u2013 just as others imagine going fishing in Heaven. Will there be crossword puzzles in Heaven? Duplicate bridge? What would a heavenly golf game be? A hole-in-one every time?\u00a0 <\/span>Would a heavenly bridge game be one in which I won every hand? Something\u2019s wrong here with the idea of \u201cheavenly.\u201d Winning all the time would be not heavenly but boring. For winning at golf or bridge (or even fishing) to be \u201cperfect,\u201d there would paradoxically have to be at least the possibility of something less than perfect. We perhaps should conclude that non-perfect things must exist in Heaven because Jesus never told us that they don\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Well, Jesus said, \u201c With God, all things are possible.\u201d (Matthew19:25-27; Mark10:26-28). But this is a tautology. God is by definition supernatural. It\u2019s like saying, \u201cWith magic, all things are possible.\u201d Magic, by definition, is making something impossible happen.\u00a0 <\/span>If the thing wasn\u2019t impossible (or didn\u2019t seem to be impossible), it wouldn\u2019t be magic.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>But \u201canything is possible\u201d doesn\u2019t suit me any more than \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>It does seem that some ideas are far less likely than others, and so while I can\u2019t absolutely<\/em> rule anything out, I can speculatively rule many things out as just plain unlikely.\u00a0 <\/span>For example, when I once assigned an essay on Heaven to a senior English class, one 19-year-old star football player wrote that Heaven would be a continuous, never-ending, eternal ejaculation. (It would be nice to think that he meant it as a metaphor, but he did not.)\u00a0 <\/span>Now, Jesus never told us that this is not so. If\u00a0 <\/span>\u201canything is possible,\u201d then I can\u2019t say that that young man\u2019s view of Heaven is any better than my own, but to me, his seems even more unlikely than wings and harps.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Another student, reacting to the same assignment, speculated that Heaven will be whatever a person believes it will be. If you are an atheist, you have no soul, there is no Heaven \u2013 you\u2019re just worm food. If you\u2019re a follower of Islam, then Heaven is what the Koran says it is, houris and all. If you believe in reincarnation, then you will be reincarnated. And so on. If she is correct, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash are at this moment seeing paradise together.<\/span><\/p>\n

More important to me: if she is correct, I have a pressing responsibility to find a Heaven I can believe in. But I have two problems.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

My first problem is Memory. Even if I conclude that I have a soul which is immortal (immortality is not by itself an impossible idea), I have a hard time seeing how my soul could carry my memories with it. Memories, it seems clear, are contained in the brain. Even while people are still alive, if the brain is diseased or is injured, they can lose their memories. When electrical activity in the brain ceases at death, those circuits must be erased as surely as a computer memory is erased when the power is shut off. But so much of how I think about myself is connected with my memory. Who-I-am does not exist only in the present. Everything I\u2019ve ever done is trailing invisibly behind me. If I can\u2019t take memory with me, I wouldn\u2019t be the same soul I am now, nor would I recognize loved ones in Heaven. Without earthly memories, there would be no reunion, as Heaven is popularly represented in songs. If that circle is to be unbroken, qualities such as memory and recognition, if they exist in Heaven at all, must be completely different there.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The second problem is Time.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>My mother once said to me, \u201cOh, I don\u2019t believe in Heaven. It sounds boring.\u201d This was a surprise to me, because my mother did believe in God and in the divinity of Jesus. I surprised myself by answering, \u201cWell, if God\u2019s as smart as he\u2019s supposed to be, then he ought to make Heaven not boring.\u201d God could, because He\u2019s supernatural, make singing \u201cAmazing Grace\u201d for 10,000 years NOT be boring \u2014 even though on earth five minutes is my outside limit.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

However like my mother (and Huck Finn, you may remember), I\u2019ve always found the traditional view of Heaven boring in the extreme. Sitting on a cloud, strumming on a harp, and singing hymns would be fine for an hour or two, but for eternity . . . ? Assembling at the Throne would be exciting, but for eternity .\u00a0 <\/span>. . ?\u00a0 <\/span>Even the \u201ccloudless skies\u201d Willie Nelson sings about would shortly become tiresome, and the angels would yearn for a crackling good thunderstorm. Whether I imagine rainbows and elders wearing crowns, or whether I imagine racing across a beautiful spring meadow with my wife and the best dog I ever owned, all of us restored to the health and vigor we shared when he was alive, I keep stumbling on the specter of eternity. Nothing that has delighted me on earth is likely to delight me for eternity. <\/span><\/p>\n

Most organized Christian religions talk about the end of time, at least of historical time. Logically, it seems that one way for God to insure that Heaven isn\u2019t boring is to remove time as we know it. And if I imaginatively remove time as we know it from Heaven, it also solves some other troubling paradoxes, such as what happens to the widow who remarries and then meets both husbands in Heaven? But what would an afterlife be like outside<\/em> of Time? How could I be me in a place with no time? There, my imagination fails. Duration is an implied part of all my experience. If an object exists for me, it exists in a framework of time. How could you observe a rose if it had no duration? If it had infinite duration, how could you observe anything else? With no time, there could be no \u201cnext\u201d event, and so existence would be an unbroken whole. It might not be so very different from being reunited with all the atoms and molecules of all the earth, which will happen to my body literally, whether or not I have a soul. Time, like Memory, must also be very different in Heaven.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In conclusion, John 3:16 and hymns and gospel songs are to me only metaphors, indications of what Heaven might feel like, not what it will actually be. Metaphor, I understand. Heaven, if it exists at all, must be a place where Time and Memory, if they exist there, exist in ways that are beyond the scope of my imagination to conceptualize. And so I come back to Socrates\u2019 \u201cgreat adventure.\u201d If death is not, after all, the end of everything, I\u2019ll be going to an existence that is so very different that I can\u2019t even imagine it.\u00a0 <\/span>Now that<\/em> sounds interesting. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 HEAVEN \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The lectionary for this week includes John 3:16: \u201cFor God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.\u201d This is the reference you see held up on little yellow signs at football games. \u201cJohn 3:16\u201d is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-worship-and-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":377,"href":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions\/377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chilmarkchurch.org\/service\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}