Can We Still Believe in an Afterlife?

Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10-22:5

            I have pastored four churches.  You’re the best, by the way.  By far.  My apologies to my former parishioners if you’re watching on YouTube!  In each church, I’ve asked the Wednesday night Bible study crowd which books of the Bible they wanted to study.  Without exception, one book of the Bible has been requested by each church.  Want to guess which?  Yep, the book of Revelation.  We studied it here several years ago.  Why the fascination with the book of Revelation?  It could be that it’s simply the last book of the Bible, and people want to study it.  But probably not!  It could be that there have been so many fanciful interpretations written about it.  Possibly.  Or could it be that people want to study the book of Revelation because they think it holds the mystery of how the world is going to end?  I think so.  If we can match the symbols of Revelation with the appropriate characters today, if we can decode the numbers—the number of the beast, 666; the number of the elect, 144,000; the number of letters to the churches; the four horsemen—if we could unravel all that, then we could peer into that mystery of all mysteries.  Right?

            Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.  The book of Revelation is certainly worthy of critical scrutiny.  The operative word there is “critical.”  The book of Revelation falls into a specific literary category.  It is called apocalyptic literature, and it employs exaggeration, symbolism, and visions of creatures and demons and angels.  If we do not understand and honor its apocalyptic nature, we’re likely to come up with some wild, fascinating, and totally incorrect interpretations.  That was common back in the 1970s and 1980s with books like The Late Great Planet Earth, Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth, and 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon.  People couldn’t get enough.  There were sermons, study groups, even musicals written from these books.  Here’s the problem.  If those interpretations had been correct, we wouldn’t be here today.  The earth and all its inhabitants would have come to an end by now.  They were wild, fascinating, and totally incorrect. 

            We still use a form of apocalyptic literature today.  Most of us see it every day and do not recognize it as being like the literature of the book of Revelation.  It’s the political cartoon.  You’ve seen them in newspapers and online. They use exaggerated features and make embellished claims, but behind all the exaggeration lies a kernel of truth. I saw one recently that I thought was creative.  It was an animated picture of a bear with its head stuck in a honey pot.  Most of us immediately think of Winnie the Pooh, right?  He got a little too greedy for some more honey and got his head stuck in a honey pot.  Except this bear wasn’t Winnie the Pooh.  It was wearing a red sweater that said, “Russia.”  The honey pot was gold and blue with “Ukraine” written across it.  Without text, the political cartoon communicated how Russia has gotten itself into a quandary by invading neighboring Ukraine.

            That’s a kind of apocalyptic literature.  It’s not supposed to be read literally.  It’s not really about a bear.  It’s about a country that got greedy for more and more and more.  And maybe that’s not going to turn out so well.

            Imagine people 2000 years from now uncovering these political cartoons.  They don’t know the backstory.  They don’t know that a donkey represents Democrats, and an elephant represents Republicans.  We know that donkeys and elephants don’t really talk and aren’t at war with each other.  If people 2,000 years from now don’t know that, what are they going to think about us?  If they will read these cartoons literally, they will have wild, fascinating, and totally incorrect ideas of who we are. 

Now, consider this.  We’re the ones discovering the book of Revelation 2000 years later, and we don’t know its backstory.  We read these exaggerated stories, and we try to interpret them literally.  As a result, we read into the text things that were never intended.  The book of Revelation was not intended to be interpreted as literally true, but it points to a truth.  That’s the challenge we face when we read and interpret this last book of our Bible. 

If Revelation 21 and 22, our text for today, is not literally true, then what is the kernel of truth to which it points?  What does it say about the afterlife?  This passage falls in the third and final section of a great apocalyptic vision.  Each of the three sections contains seven visions.  Our text is the final vision in the final section of the final book of the Bible.  In other words, we’ve reached the end.  This is it.  This is the end.  So what’s there?  That’s what this text tries to tell us.  When the end comes, what happens?  What do we see?

I think we all would agree that answering those questions is a pretty tall order.  How would you do it?  What finite words and symbols would you use to describe the Afterlife, the Infinite, the Beyond?  We must first admit this: whatever you or I say is not literally true because our finite words and symbols cannot fully capture the Infinite.  What we say may not be literally true; however, it points to a kernel of truth.  What John records in chapters 21 and 22 may not be literally true, but I cannot imagine it being improved.  When John saw a vision of the end, this is how he described it:

And in the Spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.  It has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal.  It has a great, high wall with twelve gates….  The twelve gates are twelve pearls, each of the gates is a single pearl, and the street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass.

            Imagine the holy city of Jerusalem descending, enveloped by the glory of God, like a very rare jewel.  Gates made of pearl.  Streets paved with gold.  I don’t think I could improve that.

            He continued.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.  On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

            His vision ends with this.

They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.  And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

            That’s what John saw in his vision of the end.  Is it literally true? No, he was using the best language and symbols available to him.  It’s not literally true, but it points to what is true and beyond our ability to describe or fully conceive.  

            C. S. Lewis died in 1963, the same day John Kennedy was assassinated.  Nearly sixty years after his death, one of his sermons is still read. It is titled, “The Weight of Glory.”  It was preached in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, England, in 1942. It is about heaven.  He acknowledged that our hearts and minds are obsessed with the things of this world: things like food and drink and sex and ambition.  Those little, worldly concerns preoccupy our minds and attention.  He said we live like an ignorant child who grows content making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what it means to have a vacation at a beach resort.  Lewis argued that we are made for more than making mud pies in a slum.  We are made for heaven.  The desire for our “proper place” has been planted within us by God. Nothing in this world can satisfy that desire.  Not food or drink or sex or ambition.  Nothing.  We are conscious of a desire, he said, that no natural happiness can satisfy.  He said that when a person is hungry, that hunger proves that he or she comes from a race that restores its body by eating and that we live in a world where eatable substances exist.

           We have another hunger, he said.  God put it there.  It is a hunger for the Beyond, the Eternal—call it Heaven—which, he said, proves that such a thing exists and only it will satisfy that hunger.

If Revelation 21 and 22, our text for today, is not literally true, then what is the kernel of truth to which it points?  It points to the existence of an afterlife, that which satisfies a hunger that has never gone away, a hunger that is beyond our ability to describe or fully conceive. We can only use our best language and symbols, knowing that they fall far short.  Gates made of pearl.  Streets paved with gold.  The tree of life.  Seeing God.  God’s name written on our forehead.  No need for lights or the sun.  God will provide all the illumination.  And finally there will be peace.

Don’t we hunger for this?  We did not create that hunger.  God did.  And God created the only thing that can satisfy it.  That’s why we can still believe in an afterlife.  Here’s how Lewis put it: “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”

Closing Prayer 

Alpha and Omega, our beginning and our end, we yearn for completion.  Help us to be faithful until that day comes.  Amen.