Jesus Prays for Us

June 1, 2025, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y. 

We pray to Jesus. Of course we do. All the time.

We pray when we are scared. We pray when we are sad. We pray when we are lonely. We pray for loved ones.

The Book of Common Prayer lists 81 reasons to pray ranging from grace at meals to prayers for the harvest, from prayers for social justice to prayers for our enemies. And in the high church tradition, you don’t even have to make these prayers up. They’re all written out for you, in elegant prose.

Jesus is our brother, our Savior, and it’s comforting to know he’s always there to listen to our prayers.

So one of the great discoveries in today’s Gospel reading – a continuation of what scholars call “the long farewell” – is that Jesus is praying for us.

“Father,” he prays, “I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundations of the world …”

That’s us he’s praying about. He knows better than us the toils and snares of life, particularly a life of faith, and Jesus asks God to protect us. He knows he will not be with us physically when his earthly ministry is over, and he prays for our protection. 

As Professor Barbara Lundblad puts it,“ Jesus is praying like a mother who has adopted these children. They belonged to God, but God gave them to Jesus to care for, to teach, to nurture. Soon Jesus will go away and he prays for these children with the love of a motherly heart.

“Jesus’ prayer doesn’t stop with those seated at the table. ‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one.’ Jesus is praying also for you and for me. We are the ones who have come to believe because of the disciples’ words. Jesus’ prayer hangs in the space between earth and heaven, between time past and time present and time yet to come. Jesus is praying that we will remain faithful and trust in the presence of the Holy Spirit.”

That is a very motherly prayer, isn’t it? As our eldest daughter puts it, motherhood requires “nerves of steel.” Mothering – indeed, all parenting – requires full vigilance. We worry that as soon as our backs are turned, our toddlers will toddle too close to the street. When we send our kids to school we think of America’s infatuation with guns and worry about when – and whether – they will return home. African American parents worry what will happen if their sons mouth off to a cop. All parents worry about the dangers that swirl around their children including drugs, internet seductions, and bad people they will meet in and out of school. Parents of cops or military recruits who live in harm’s way will never stop worrying. 

Nerves of steel.

To be a parent is to be grateful Jesus is close by and hears our prayers. 

Perhaps you, like Martha and me, have joined the internet community “Threads,” the slightly more dignified and upright version of X, nee Twitter.

If do, I’d encourage you to look for an account called, “thisgrievinglife.” The author is Nelba L. Márquez-Greene, an evangelical Christian woman. Nelba’s daughter, Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, was six years old when she and 20 of her classmates and six teachers were killed in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.

“To breathe after losing a child to gun violence is to willingly agree to inhale tiny shards of glass into your lungs,” Nelba said at the time.

Just last week Nelba posted this on her page:

“It feels like an appropriate night to share this which I have not shared in a long time. But I hear it in my head every day. I really miss her. And I miss them. Lifting up your family after a loss like this feels daunting. All strength be to women holding up their families after loss. Loss matriarchs.

“Come, Thou Almighty King.

“It is all I can think to pray. May Memorial Day never be for sales + consumption- but reverent honor and remembrance. Goodnight everyone… and grievers especially.”

Out of her grief, Nelba has become a powerful advocate for gun control, justice, and a mothering figure for all who grieve.

Here are some of Nelba’s observations and prayers:

Quicken the pace of the arc of the moral universe, God. And quicken us to courage and action.

Listen when we’re outside the gates of heaven waiting to be let in, if you see a grieving mama- please let her to the front of that line because trust me she has been waiting. She has been waiting.

I know a lot of people hanging on by very little. They are on their last breaths of hope. God, strengthen your worn and tired people. That we might be reconnected with the wisdom to harness sustaining energy, the necessary courage to thwart evil and enduring love to hold space for each other’s suffering. Quicken the pace of the arc of the moral universe- in which I still believe. I want to live to see it.

I just want to say an extra prayer for the mothers of people being unjustly deported, arrested, dead or injured by gun violence, called the n word at a park or shown any other level of inhumanity. We are actually a nation that despises mothers/motherhood in any way that is not performative or beneficial to supremacy culture or capitalism.

What would a country that loved mothers look like?- women presidents and leaders - affordable child care - well funded public education - universal health care - pre school for all - fair wages - discretionary PTO - options. More options. Big sigh. I imagine a world different than this one. A world we must work for.

As Nelba the wounded healer declares: “Come Thou, Almighty King.”

It takes a mothering spirit to heal us and bring us closer to Jesus.

“Just when we think we know all about Jesus the Good Shepherd, he’s out looking for sheep beyond our fold,” Barbara Lundblad reminds us. “Just when we think the Word — capital W — is an abstract philosophical word, we’re reminded that Jesus is Wisdom/Sophia in earthly flesh. Just when we argue that God can only be called “Father” we hear Jesus praying as a mother worried for her children. “I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus said. You are my own and I will be with you forever.”

Turning to one of Jesus’ best known parables, the Good Samaritan, we can see another view of what the people of Jesus should be like.

 “Through this story,” says a noted Christian leader, “Jesus teaches us that eternal life is found through showing mercy. Just like the priest and the Levite who passed by on the other side, at times we fail to be true neighbors to those around us, caught up in our own interests and the busyness of life. The Good Samaritan surprises us by his compassion, and his example of generosity challenges us to lay aside our selfishness. We can also see ourselves in the man who fell into the hands of robbers, for we have all experienced the difficulties of life and the pain brought about by sin. In our frailty, we discover that Christ himself is the Good Samaritan who heals our wounds and restores our hope.”

Those are the words of Pope Leo XIV, made slightly more memorable because they were delivered last Wednesday in Chicago accented English.

Jesus will not leave us orphaned.

“This is the wondrous mystery revealed to Julian of Norwich in the 14th century, says Lundblad. “This well-educated Christian woman devoted her life to God through study and contemplation of scripture. She wrote a theological treatise entitled ‘Showings’ and her words have now become a hymn that we might rightly sing today: ‘Mothering God, you gave me birth. Mothering Christ, you took my form. Mothering Spirit, nurturing One.’ 

“God is always more than we imagined. God is always closer than we had dared to dream.”

Come Thou Almighty King.

Amen.

God's Peace on Memorial Day

 

May 25, 2025, St. Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid.” (Jn:27)

On this Sixth Sunday of Easter, in a farewell discourse with his disciples, Jesus tells them he will be leaving them and returning to the Father. But he assures them that at the lowest part of their lives, God’s unconditional l love will not desert them. 

“Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” [Jn:21]

On the eve of Memorial Day, these promises take on a special meaning. We can imagine these assurances of God’s love formed many a prayer in foxholes. And many veterans remembered these experiences each Memorial Day of their lives.

Some of my happiest memories of growing up in Morrisville, N.Y., are of Memorial Day. My heart swelled with pride when Dad dug out his legionnaire’s cap, as did other middle-aged men I knew and loved: Jack Irwin, my smart, gentle and nurturing pastor, or John Gourley, my high school history teacher, or Reg Dodge, my junior high history teacher, or DeForest Cramer, my Little League coach. I had little idea what they had done to earn their caps, but I was sure it was something heroic. And when I watched them marching in rout step in the Memorial Day parade, laughing and joking with each other, I figured whatever they did in war couldn’t have hurt them much. Night after night the vets would gather at Ted’s Town House. Night after night, the Vets would gather at Ted's Town House to reminisce about the war. Their stories made it sound like World War I| was an amusing experience not to be missed.

When I came of age, these good men inspired me to join the Air Force. Many of my contemporaries went to Vietnam that year. I spent three years in the rice paddies of England where the greatest threats to our base were agitated units of the Baader Meinhoff Complex.

Each Memorial Day when I was overseas, Legionnaires from Morrisville, mostly World War I vets, sent me a small U.S. flag and promised to “keep the fires of freedom burning at home while you keep it burning abroad.” Reading their note at my typewriter in the base chapel, it sounded like an invitation to arson. But I loved those guys. They made me feel a part of the Memorial Day tradition going all the way back to Bunker Hill.

I mustered out of the Air Force with an honorable discharge, an expert marksman’s badge, and a good conduct medal in August 1968. I enrolled at Eastern Baptist College the following month. Within weeks I became an active member of the peace movement in college, wearing peace badges on my fading military field jacket. I graduated in 1971 and began work as a writer at the American Baptist national offices across the ridge from Eastern.

During this time I met L. Stanley Manierre, who was Martha’s Area Minister (auxiliary bishop) when she served as a young pastor in Massachusetts. Stan was a genial man with a quick smile and a kind word for everyone.

What many of his friends didn’t know was that he was a radio operator and top turret gunner on a B-24 bomber that was shot down over Saipan on May 29, 1944. He was a prisoner in a Japanese prison camp in Yokohama for the duration of the war. After his release, his resentment toward his cruel Japanese captors endured for years – until he ended up a traveling salesman and a junior high Sunday School teacher in Hartford, Conn.

“I was teaching these young people about the love of God and love for our neighbor and I came to realize I was still harboring hatred for the Japanese two years after returning from the prison camp,” he wrote. “I confessed my sin, and through God’s amazing grace I was forgiven.”

Stan Manierre went on to become a missionary to Japan where he was reunited with one of the camp guards who had offered protection to the prisoners. “Kanoh Yukuta was a Buddhist,” Stan wrote. “He was just another illustration of the truth we already know: God will not leave himself without a witness.”

Stan returned from Japan and remained a great American Baptist leader in Massachusetts – one of the true heroes I will always remember on Memorial Day.

But I had known Stan for years before I realized the trauma that haunted his youth. His spontaneous grin made you think he never had a worry in his life.

It was about that time that I started thinking about others who took their broad smiles into Memorial Day parades back in Morrisville.

Toward the end of his life I discovered Dad’s canvas-covered GI diary. I suspect it was a sanitized record of his life in the South Pacific, especially his version of his R and R in Melbourne, Australia – a GI Bacchanalia portrayed on HBO’s Pacific – because he knew his mother might read it someday. But what he did record was horrifying.

In his familiar handwriting, in blue fountain pen ink, Dad – a second lieutenant – wrote about a night patrol he was leading through the jungle. (I have placed the full text of his journal on line at http://bunadiary.com.)  It was wet and dark and Dad ordered the patrol to dig in for the night.

According to the diary, Dad and a Papuan runner had concealed themselves in the roots of a tree when a Japanese patrol crept by. An armed Japanese soldier, naked except for a loin cloth, appeared in front of him. Dad pulled the trigger of his machine gun and the man dropped into the mud. As the sweat dripped down his face, Dad lay motionless in the dark. The Japanese soldier began to groan.

Dad wrote little about what it felt like to hear the man’s agonized whimpers all night long, not knowing if his enemy was still able to shoot his rifle or if he was losing consciousness.

Would Dad have put him out of his misery if he could see him? Did the thought cross Dad’s mind that this so-called “Jap” was actually another human being like him, perhaps with a wife and loved ones back home? Did Dad – always good with irony – think about how insane it was that this stranger had been trying only moments ago to kill him, and would have if Dad hadn’t shot first? And how badly wounded was the man? And why wouldn’t he just die?

I don’t know how often Dad dreamed about that night over his remaining six decades. And I will never know whether it was the worst of his combat experiences, or just one he thought his mother could tolerate if she happened to find the diary. The few words that are there are enough to answer the riddle why Dad spent the rest of his life battling the bottle. But the few words don’t explain why, each Memorial Day, he laughed and joked breezily with his fellow cap wearers.

When the sun same up on Papua New Guinea that morning, Dad could see that the gut-shot soldier had died in the night. He searched the nearly naked body for grenades and discovered the man’s chopsticks. I’m not sure why he needed them, but a souvenir is a souvenir and Dad kept them for the rest of the war. I still have the chop sticks on my book shelf at home.

In addition to my Dad, another World War II vet I loved was my pastor, Jack Irwin.

Jack was a great pastor. I remember spending an afternoon with him as he helped me prepare a sermon for youth Sunday. He discussed each point with me, wrote notes in his precise handwriting, and presented me with six green note cards which I held while I delivered my first sermon. 

Jack was also willing to offer advice to the teen-aged lovelorn, and at Halloween he was the best teller of ghost stories I had ever heard. I will not forget the All Hallows Eves we spent in the darkened Grange Hall while Jack terrified the Youth Group with stories that made Poe pale by comparison.

Then each Memorial Day Jack would appear with the other vets in his Legionnaire’s cap, smiling and waving and exchanging jokes. What, I would wonder, had he done in the war? Was he even old enough to serve in World War II? Had he been a typist or even a chaplain’s assistant?

No. Years later it was revealed that Jack Irwin had been a teen-age tank gunner in Europe after the Battle of The Bulge. After his retirement as a professor of philosophy at Lock Haven, Pa., University in 1990, he wrote an astonishing memoir, Another River, Another Town, a Teen Age Tank Gunner Comes of Age in Combat – 1945 (Random House).

Jack’s 90 mm guns were not only responsible for untold numbers of German deaths (he estimates in the hundreds), but his outfit was a liberator of the Nordhausen Concentration camp where he saw human depravity on a scale his parishioners would never imagine.

I wrote to Jack when the book came out, both to admire his writing style and to hint at my amazement of the stories he told. 

Jack replied that he had never told anyone those stories, not his wife, not his children. “But I was getting closer to the bone yard and I figured it was time.”

Dad died at 80 in 1999, and Jack died of Covid in his nineties. Today, almost all World War II veterans are gone.

But as another Memorial Day is upon us, I’m remembering many others who served. Dad and all the other father figures I loved are long gone, and so are millions like them.

All were caught up in cataclysmic human events that were contrary to the will of God, and all were damaged in ways they could never tell us. They all had experiences they clearly wanted to forget on Memorial Day.

Each year I experience Memorial Day with ambivalence, especially when the speeches and celebrations are used to celebrate the wars that make it necessary.

But I’m not ambivalent about the men and women who served. Dad, Jack, John, Reg, Dee, Stan, so many others.

I wish I had had a chance to tell them: Even if it was so bad you tried to hide it from us, and even if we will never fully understand what you went through, we will never forget you.

And we know that whatever you did in the war, and whether or not you were aware if it when you grew old, Jesus always held you close with loving arms and an understanding heart.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid.” (Jn:27)

Glory, Love, and Y'all Come

May 18, 2025, First Lutheran Church of Throggs Neck, the Bronx, N.Y. 

The lectionary readings for the fifth Sunday of Easter give us three things to contemplate.

In John Jesus talks about his glorification. He also gives them what he calls a “new commandment,” to love one another “just as I have loved you.”

In Acts, we see the apostle Peter struggling with what it means to love one another in times of rancor and division. Apart from “one another,” long time members of the old gang, is there anyone else we should love.

To begin with, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.” (Jn 13:31)

“Glorified” is an over-used term and we sometimes lose sight of its meaning. The Oxford dictionary defines it as something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people, something that elevates them or makes them seem more special. For example, “I did the paperwork and was basically a glorified secretary.”

In theological contexts, the dictionary refers to “the transformed and “glorified Jesus,” an acknowledgment of the majesty and splendor of God.

But this glorification is not just between God and Jesus. There is a clarifying footnote in our Lutheran Study Bibles:

“Jesus speaks of his followers doing even greater works than Jesus did himself. Lutherans believe that a person is not saved by doing good works but by having faith in Christ Jesus. Yet throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus understands his followers to be participants in his own work (9:4, 14:12). 

“How can Lutherans understand Jesus’ words here? Luther writes in his preface to the book of Romans, ‘It is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as impossible as it is to separate heat and light from fire.’”

Frank L. Crouch, Retired Dean and Professor of New Testament Emeritus Moravian Theological Seminary, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, places the awesome onus of glorification smack on our shoulders – on me and on you

“Our actions show God’s glory, too,” says Professor Crouch. “At least, we are charged that it be so. Jesus prays, ‘All mine are yours and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them (17:10)’ … Here the focus lies on promise and possibilities, looking at the fullness of God’s gifts: ‘The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one … so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me”’(17:22-23). As was true for Christ is true for us. We cannot fully show the glory until we have completed the work God has sent us to do. Or, more positively, we show the glory as we complete that work.”

We are called to be full partners, not just junior partners, with Jesus. And that’s not intended to be a burden. Jesus makes it clear to his disciples and to you and me that this is responsibility to be carried out in love.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this, everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (Jn 13:34-35)

|Scholars have wondered what Jesus means by “a new commandment.” Brian Peterson, Professor of New Testament at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, S.C., points out that the command to love one’s neighbor is as old as Jewish law.

“What is new,” he writes, “is not the content of the command but Jesus’ own role as the lover at the heart of this community’s life. Note that the command to love one another is repeated at the beginning and the end of verse 34. Sandwiched in the middle is a phrase that points to the new thing: “just as I have loved you.” Jesus is the one who has loved his own “to the end” (13:1). This love flows from the incarnation of the Word, and through it the disciples will enter into the love of the Father. This love not only models but will empower their love for one another.”

Even so, you and I both know that this kind of loving is not easy to carry out. Perhaps you’ve seen the meme, “Mr. Rogers did not adequately prepare me for the people in my neighborhood.” 

In Acts we find the first Christians arguing about who should be members of their merry band.

At issue is the practice of circumcision, a religious practice rooted in the story of Abraham and symbolizing the covenant between God and God’s people.

As more and more Gentiles convert to Christianity, Jewish Christians could not bring themselves to invite them to the table.

“It may strike us as odd that the ‘circumcised believers, including Peter (‘By no means, Lord!’), would invest so much importance in distancing themselves from Gentiles,” writes Karl Kuhn, professor of Religion at Lakeland University in Herman, Wisconsin. 

“But such purity norms reinforced for Israelites their identity as a people set apart to serve God, to honor God’s Torah, and to receive God’s deliverance … The concerns of the uncircumcised believers were not trivial legalisms. They reflected essential elements of their worldview that defined their role and place as the people of God.”

Of course the issues that separate us today seem very important to us. Two millennia after Jesus told us to love one another, Christians are irrevocably divided into divided camps. Catholics do not want Lutherans (or any non-Catholic) to receive the Eucharist at mass. Orthodox Christians do not share the Eucharist with anyone else. Evangelical Christians believe Catholics and Lutherans are going to hell. Catholics and Lutherans believe Evangelicals are taking Scripture too literally. Christian Nationalists believe Christians who believe in love, compassion, empathy, and welcoming migrants are “woke liberals.” The words of the old Tom Lehrer song echo in my brain: “I don’t like anybody very much!”

“So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, ‘why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them.”

This is a crucial moment for the young church. Will Jewish and Gentile Christians remain eternally estranged, causing the church to contract and fade away? Or will they find a way to build a bridge to unite them.

At this point, Peter rises to the occasion. He begins to explain his intermingling with Gentiles, as Luke puts it, “Step by Step.”

Peter describes a bizarre sheet being lowered from heaven, a strange table cloth laden with beasts. A voice said, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” (Acts 11:7)

Obviously this is not a favorite verse People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but we know Peter is no vegan.

But the beasts being foisted on Peter are not merely unkosher, it would disgust many of us to think of killing and eating them.

“Four footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air.” (Acts 11:6)

Snakes? Toads? Vultures? cats? Puppy dogs?

Please.

It makes sense that it would appall us to put any of these creatures in our stew pots because it prevents us from setting conditions about what we would eat, or who we should love and accept. “I will eat lambs, but not snakes.” “I will love Lutherans, but not Mormons.”

When God’s voice says, “Up Peter, kill and eat … What God has called clean, you must not call profane.” (Acts 11:9)

The purity barriers that prevented the circumcised from rejecting the uncircumcised are annulled when God calls the uncircumcised clean.

Decades earlier, the Apostle Paul, writing in Galatians, had already announced what Peter had affirmed.

“There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Gal 3:28-29)

“Both within and beyond the pages of Acts, the church will continue to struggle with the Spirit’s calling to reframe their sense of who belongs, and how Israelite and Gentile, male and female, rich and poor are to serve and share the table together,” writes Professor Kuhn. “These parts of our history call us to join our ancestors in the struggle to map our worlds, ourselves, and others in ways that lead us all more fully into God’s life-giving realm.”

Our calling as Christians is to live into Christ’s calling to participate in his glorification and to love one another as Jesus has loved us.

This was, is, and ever shall be work in process.

Because God is not finished with us, and God’s Holy Spirit walks with us every step of the way.

Amen.

What Does Heaven Look Like?

May 11, 2025, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y. 

Today’s scriptures raise questions in our minds about eternal life and the raising of the dead.

We read of Tabitha (or Dorcas), a wealthy disciple of Jesus, who falls ill, dies, and is miraculously brought back to life by Peter. 

Reading through Luke and Acts, we find three miraculous resurrections apart from the resurrection of Jesus. There is the raising of the widow’s son (Luke 7:11-17), and the raising of Jairus’ daughter (Luke 8:49-56). 

In Acts we find Paul preaching “on and on” until a bored young man named Eutychus falls asleep and dies falling out a window. In the Baptist college I attended we thought of Eutychus as the patron saint of mandatory chapel. Paul resurrected the poor lad, which was the least he could do.

In each of these resurrection stories – and let’s not forget the raising of Lazarus in John 11 – it’s tempting to ask: where did they go when they were dead? And what was it like, after crossing that mysterious portal between life and death, to come back again?

And why would these resurrectees even want to come back? We tend to spend our lower moments dreading death. Wouldn’t it have been a relief to finally get it over with, to leave the travails of earthly life behind in order to enjoy the eternal life Jesus promised to his children?

What do you imagine that eternal life to be? What is your idea of heaven?

Some time ago I tried my hand at cartooning heaven and it occurred to me that a place made entirely of gold and pearls, somewhat like the refurbished Oval Office, would be fiscally improbable. I drew our two little dogs into the panel and visualized them saying, “When everything is made of gold, gold is worth dog doodoo.” 

What is your concept of heaven?

Jesus talked of heaven as “many mansions,” a concrete enough image. And he promised to prepare a place for us.

C.S. Lewis, one of the great promoters of Christian faith, spent most of his life imagining heaven. He wrote a seven-volume series of children’s books called The Chronicles of Narnia, about a magical fantasy realm that includes a Lion named Aslan, a maned Jesus metaphor who sacrifices himself for others.

My concept of heaven, then and now, is that it will be the place where all our earthly dreams are fulfilled. There, as we bask in God’s glory and walk with Jesus, we will be reunited with loved ones. We will be young and good looking. And we will interact with our heavenly heroes.

This latter notion was inspired by the late, great historian Catherine Drinker Bowen, the author of Miracle at Philadelphia, a record of the first constitutional convention.

I interviewed Bowen in 1971 and asked her about Miracle, which is one of my favorite books.

She said she became obsessed with George Washington, who presided over the constitutional convention. Did he speak with an English accent? Did he speak with the aristocratic cadences of a Virginia planter? Did he ever raise his voice? Was he a baritone or tenor? 

“I was crazy to know how that man talked,” Bowen said.

When she died two years later, the first thought I had was, now she knows how that man talked.

I have clung to this rather improbable concept of heaven. I like to think that, on the other side, I will join a press conference with my idol John F. Kennedy and ask him penetrating questions: Did you feel misled by the CIA when you authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion? Do you commiserate with Lee Harvey Oswald in heaven or was your assassination a CIA plot? Do you still hang with Marilyn? How did your father get so rich? And how come we never see him up here?

In Paradiso, written in the early 14th century, Dante imagines heaven as nine spheres corresponding to the nine known planets. The first sphere is earthly paradise and the ninth is the Primum Mobile, the sphere of the angels.

But long before writers and poets put ideas of heaven on paper, humans faced their mortality by imagining the life to come.

Pueblo Indians saw the afterlife as traveling to a new village where they would join friends and relatives who died before them.

In commenting about Pueblo Indian resistance to Christianity, anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, in her book Pueblo Indian Religion, writes: “The Pueblo idea of life after death as merely a continuation of this life is incompatible with dogmas of hell and heaven. In this life the Spirits do not reward or punish; why should they after death?” 

Buddhists believe in reincarnation, a cycle of death and rebirth called samsara. Through karma and eventual enlightenment, they hope to escape samsara and achieve nirvana, an end to suffering. 

You may well remember Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the author of On Death and Dying, who described the five stages of reaction when we realize we are going to die: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

Wikipedia reports that In the late 1970s, Kübler-Ross, after interviewing thousands of patients who had died and been resuscitated, she became interested in out-of-body experiences, mediumship, spiritualism, and other ways of attempting to contact the dead. 

Kübler-Ross also dealt with the phenomenon of near-death experiences. She was also an advocate for spiritual guides and afterlife, serving on the Advisory Board of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) Kübler-Ross reported her interviews with the dying for the first time in her book, On Death and Dying: What the dying have to teach doctors, nurses, clergy, and their own families (1969.

Peter Panagore, who I know through gatherings of church communicators, has written two books about his near-death experiences, that is, times he has died, glimpsed heaven, and came back to write about it. 

In his first book, Heaven is Beautiful, How Dying Taught Me That Death is Just the Beginning, Peter describes his death from hypothermia while hiking along the Ice Fields Parkway of Alberta, Canada. As he lay dead he experienced heaven and he found it beautiful.

Peter has had a second near death experience and today he encourages people to calmly face their own death:

“Be prepared to be loved and to be welcomed: you are going Home. Death is only a doorway. When your time comes, as it must, walk through that doorway and love God. Trust God. Believe. That’s all you have to do—simply believe. You can believe in God, because God is Real. This life is simply one bridge in between.”

 But here’s the thing: near death experiences are very personal and you can’t take anyone else’s word for it. The heaven Peter Panagore saw may not be the same heaven you or I would see under similar circumstances.

Peter is a preacher, not a scientist, and most scientists are skeptical about near death experiences. They blame them on the brain’s synaptic defense mechanisms when the body begins to die.

So what is your concept of heaven?

John of Patmos had visions of a gleaming crystal city gilded with gold and garnished by living trees and flowing waters.

Jesus talks of a place with many mansions or dwellings.

I imagine a place in which I rejoin an interrupted feast with Jesus and departed loved ones and, if I so wish, interview John F. Kennedy.

As to what heaven actually looks like, I try to be at peace about it. My old boss Bob Edgar, a United Methodist clergyman, six-time congressman, and general secretary of the National Council of Churches, said many Methodists didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about heaven.

“We focus on doing God’s will on earth, proclaiming love, seeking justice, serving the poor,” Bob would say. “We’ll come to heaven soon enough.”

I remembered that when Bob died suddenly in April 2013, a month short of his 60th birthday.

What did he find when he crossed that portal that waits for us all?

We shall find out soon enough.

For now we remember this: God has sent Jesus to conquer death. 

God grant us the grace to accept God’s promises in faith, for the apocalyptic future is bright.

We will be going to the home Jesus has prepared for us.

And whatever it looks like, it will be the most beautiful place we have ever seen.

Come, Lord Jesus.