WWJD?

June 29, 2025, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

Luke 9:51-62

In His Steps is a religious novel written in 1896 by Charles Monroe Shelton. It has sold more than 50 million copies and is one of the bestselling books of all time. 

I read the novel in 1965 at the urging of some of my Southern Baptist Air Force friends. I was 19k, newly “Born Again,” and trying to live a Christian life despite powerful hormones surging in mybody. It was pointless to reason my way to appropriate Christian behavior because my frontal cortex would not be complete for another six years. This is why I found Charles Monroe Sheldon’s book so exciting, so helpful.

The full title of the book is, In His Steps, What Would Jesus Do? This is probably the origin of WWJD bracelets that proclaim one’s determination to ask what Jesus would do before making decisions. Would Jesus want me to patronize a restaurant that discriminates against LGBTQ+ persons? Would Jesus want one to stay in an abusive marriage? Would Jesus want me to pay Federal taxes that pay for weapons we give to countries that bomb civilians? Would Jesus want me to vote for a politician who believes in abortion? Would Jesus want me to invest in Tesla?

In our complicated era, the WWJD question is even more complicated. Would Jesus support war in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine? Would Jesus approve of the round-up of hundreds men, women, and children in the U.S., without due process, for immediate deportation to foreign lands? Millions on one side of the political divide shout, with certainty, “YES!” Millions more, including mainline religious leaders and Pope Leo XIV, shout, with equal certainty, “NO!”

Given this chasm of disagreement, it would probably be wise to hold back a little on deciding that we are absolutely sure Jesus would do. Sometimes Jesus surprises us and does what we don’t expect. It appears none of his disciples or followers expected Jesus to enter the Holy Temple and start throwing chairs, money boxes, and animal cages into the air.

In Luke 9:51-62, there is another dramatic turn in which the apostles expect Jesus to do one thing and he does another.

On his way to his final visit to Jerusalem, Jesus sends messengers ahead to a Samaritan village to “prepare for his arrival, but they did not receive him because his face was set toward Jerusalem.” (Lk 9:52-53)

Is this a surprise? Not according to the commentary in our Lutheran Study Bibles. 

“On their way to Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish world, Jesus enters a Samaritan village. Jews and Samaritans had a strained relationship, stretching back to the time when the Assyrians and then the Babylonians attacked and conquered the people of Israel (722 BCE – 587 BCE, respectively.) Because of this, it is no surprise when the villagers do not welcome Jesus.”

But it was a surprise to the disciples. They were indignant – and just a little vengeful.

James and John had a shock-and-awe proposal.

“Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Lk 9:54)

Where in earth did they get that stupid idea? Was there any time in their three years with Jesus that he said or did anything remotely close to calling down fire on his opponents? Granted, he’s not always gentle Jesus meek and mild. But a fire storm? Please.

If James and John really expected fire, then they must have been surprised that Jesus wouldn’t do it. What Would Jesus Do? Not that.

He turned and rebuked them.

Luke leaves the nature of that rebuke up to our imaginations.

Did Jesus shake his head and heave a heavy sigh? Did he glare at them so fiercely their blood ran cold? Did he growl – as he has been known to say – “get behind me, Satan?” Or did he simply turn and lead the way to another village in silence?

The Rev. Dr. Chelsea Brooke Yarborough, Associate Director of Leadership Programming at the Association of Theological Schools, suggests Jesus’ response to having gates closed against him offers a “beautiful insight” on the nature of love.

The Samaritan village has every right to refuse Jesus entry. They are doing nothing wrong. They are protecting their people from the unknown. They have ever right to close their gates, and Jesus protects them when they do it.

“Jesus reminds us that allowing agency and choice is a crucial practice of love,” Brooke Yarborough writes. “He wanted to go there, and yet their boundary was honored and respected. What was not celebrated and seen as a good choice? The choice to punish, to harm, to destroy in the name of Jesus because the disciples were inconvenienced or thought another choice should have been made. Jesus shows us that allowing space for another to have agency is crucial to a life of love.”

These are important observations to contemplate before we ask ourselves, “What Would Jesus Do?”

James and John asked the question and immediately concluded Jesus would bring a hell storm down on this unpretentious little village. We must try not to forget this the next time we ask WWJD? Left to our own human devices, the answer we think we discern may be catastrophically wrong. And, not to put a fine edge on it, calamitously evil.

In college I began to steer away from the potential pitfalls of WWJD and  use a different measure for living a Christ-like life.

Then at the very end of my senior year, I took my first course in philosophy under Dr. Peter Genco, a black-bearded mensch whose dissertation was rumored to have proven the existence of God. Among the text books we studied was Situation Ethics, The New Morality (1966, Westminster Press) by Joseph Fletcher. The book was, for me, an apotheosis of philosophical discovery because it offered an enticing formula to guide ethical behavior.

The greatest commandment of Fletcher’s domain was love. Ethical behavior was measured by the amount of love expended in the process. The more love you showed, the more ethical was your behavior.

The idea made ethics quantifiable and opened doors traditionally shut to nice Christians. I’m talking about sex.

Fletcher offered four situations in which ethical behavior might be contrary to conventional morality but would be okay depending on the amount of love you showed. The greater the amount of love, he said, the more ethical your behavior.

Given the hormones flushing through my 20-something arteries, the idea was most appealing.

One of the examples Fletcher cited involved Mrs. Bergmeier, a German woman sent to a prisoner of war camp in the Ukraine. Her husband, after rounding up the children, spent months in a desperate search for her. In the Ukraine, Mrs. Bergmeier learned that her family was looking for her but Soviet rules would not allow her to be released unless she was pregnant. A friendly camp officer graciously offered to help and before long the expectant Mrs. Bergmeier was released to her family.

That worked for me. Here was Mrs. Bergmeier and the generous camp officer, each loving their neighbor as themselves. And wasn’t this extra-marital coitus an expression of the purest kind of love?

But Professor Genco was having none of it. “Sex,” he said, “requires three magic words: ‘I take thee.’” Without a lifetime commitment to your partner, sex is a sin. So went the official line of the Eastern Baptist College faculty. But would it also be a sin for Mrs. Bergmeier to remain morally pure but separated from her children? Again, Fletcher doesn’t say. You tell me. It’s an ethical dilemma.

What Would Jesus Do?

It’s not easy to live a discerning life. For most of us, we try not to overthink our Christian behavior. Loving God, loving our neighbor, loving and forgiving our enemies, turning the other cheek – the life of faith is hard enough even when the rules are written down.

So we turn to the Holy Spirit to show us the way, to distil the rules of behavior to simple understandings. In The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, we learn we cannot do it without one another. “God hath thus ordered it, that we may learn to bear one another’s burdens; for no man is without fault, no man without his burden, no man sufficient of himself, no man wise enough of himself; but we ought to bear with one another, comfort one another, help, instruct, and admonish one another.”

WWJD?

I no longer trust my conclusions about what Jesus would do in any circumstance because I may be wrong, and because Jesus often does what I don’t expect.

But I will ever trust the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the words of the Prophet Micah:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good,
And what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness and to
walk humbly with your God? [Micah 6:8]

SooEEE!

June 22, 2025, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y. Reprised from an earlier post.

Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. Luke 8:32-33

We bible buffs have read this passage too often to grasp its full meaning or to realize how appalling it is.

I mean, we’re talking demons and pigs here – a legion of fiends and two thousand filthy, stinking, snorting, disgusting pigs. 

If you think about it, this dramatis personae has the making of a summer blockbuster similar to World War Z or Dawn of the Dead.  

But this is more than a repulsively thrilling story. It is a reminder that dark forces share our world with us, spirits and demons exist, and Jesus has power over the forces of evil.

Jesus is fairly casual in his response to the man whose soul has been displaced by hundreds of foul demons. 

Frankly, most of us are ambivalent about the notion of demon possession. In the 1973 thriller The Exorcist,  I was horrified by the vivid scenes of a little girl possessed by a hideous demon, but I stepped out of the darkened theater and reminded myself, “Of course demons don’t exist.”

These days, exorcisms are rare and most experts regard demonic behavior as the manifestation of schizophrenia, sociopathic personality, or bi-polar syndrome. 

But to most of us, it’s hard to dismiss the possibility that dangerously crazy people are controlled by demons. How else can we explain why fiends take guns into theaters, elementary school classrooms, or political rallies?

In 1970, a young German woman named Anneliese Michel began hearing voices that told her she was damned and going to hell. As her condition worsened, she saw Satan’s face leering at her several times a day. 

When anti-psychotic drugs had no effect, Anneliese and her parents concluded she was possessed by a demon. They dismissed the doctors and hired two priest exorcists. According to one account, 67 exorcism sessions lasting up to four hours, were performed for ten months. 

During the grueling process, Anneliese refused to eat and died at her home. The autopsy stated the cause of death as malnutrition and dehydration from almost a year of semi-starvation while exorcisms were performed. She weighed 68 pounds at death. Both Anneliese’s parents and the priest exorcists were charged with negligent homicide.

But the question won’t go away: was Anneliese possessed like the demoniac Jesus confronted? Or did she have a mental illness that could have been cured by psychopharmacology?

The incident with the demoniac on the Sea of Galilee also stimulates modern skepticism about miracle cures and faith healing. There are those who believe stories of Jesus’ miracles were made up by the evangelists for dramatic effect, or if people were really cured, it was accomplished by Jesus’ charismatic powers of suggestion.

In a bygone episode of  NPR’s Radio Lab,  hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich guided listeners through the Placebo Effect. This is a well-known phenomenon in which people are cured by the power of suggestion. Anecdotes included tales of witch doctors who knew they were using trickery in their trade but cured people of their illnesses anyway. The hosts interviewed a woman whose carpal tunnel syndrome was cured – temporarily – by an evangelical faith healer.

But the program suggested the placebo effect also happens outside of faith settings. A physician reported his experience with the electrodes that are implanted in the brain to halt the hand tremors of Parkinson’s Disease. The doctor said he would tell the patient he was sending a mild current through the implants that would cause the tremors stop. And so it would. But when he failed to send the current and didn't tell the patients, their tremors also stopped.

All these accounts are enough to make one downright skeptical. Demons don’t exist. Miracle cures are a psychosomatic, mere figments of the mind. There no mysteries left in life. How boring is that?

Thank God for the pigs. These disgusting and certainly unwilling players are convincing evidence that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our feeble philosophies.

The story appears in all three synoptic gospels: Jesus converses coolly with a man full of demons.  The eerie scene forces us to face the possibility of eternal damnation, where unredeemed sinners darn socks that smell.

The man’s demons frankly terrify us mere mortals, but it is immediately clear that the demons are terrified of Jesus. Shouting out to him in a monstrous chorus, they beg him not to cast them back into hell.

Instead, they spy a herd of two thousand pigs – as if one could miss a herd of two thousand pigs in Israel – and beg Jesus to cast them into the belching, farting creatures.

Two thousand pigs.

I can’t even imagine a herd that big. Never in my life have I seen so many pigs in one place. 

Even one pig is too protuberant to ignore. In Cuba, many of our relatives and their friends keep a prize hog in a pen behind their tiny houses. The creatures are hard to miss. They serve as a convenient garbage disposal but mostly they are a hedge against starvation. A small family can eat for months on a single swine.

In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania I occasionally drove past roadside pits where a half dozen enormous porkers submerged themselves in fecal mud, luxuriating in orange rinds, potato peels, corncobs and other items of the compost du jour. You could smell them a mile away.

So cover your nose and try to imagine two thousand stinking pigs scattered across an acre of ground reeking with decaying dung and muck. 

The more I think about it, the more appalling the scene becomes.  

Now close your eyes and imagine two thousand pigs suddenly rousting themselves from their personal stys, shaking off chunks of half-chewed garbage from their sodden jaws. Listen the deafening roar as eight thousand cloven hooves assault the muck and the beasts violently jostle one another as they charge off the precipice into the lake.  Watch as the impact of the monstrous herd churns geysers of fetid water high into the air as pigs drown in the lake without so much as a “th- th- that’s all folks.”

Is there a more bizarre scene in all of scripture? Certainly no scene in the Marvel franchise is messier, louder, or more expensive to produce.

But bizarre or not, one has to ask: who could make up such a thing? The story of Jesus, the demoniac and the pigs captured the attention of thousands of people and it was passed down by oral tradition for dozens of years until it arrived intact in three separate gospels.

The reason the story remains unchallenged two thousand years later is that it has the ring of truth. The unmistakable message:

The dark side exists, and it is populated with atrocious demons and hideous fiends.

The thunderous massacre of two thousand pigs got everyone’s attention, then and now.

Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him. Luke 8:37-39.

Two thousand years later, the message is clear: 

God has given Jesus the ultimate authority over us all: the good, the righteous, the weak, the tempted, even the repugnant creatures of the nether regions.

And those who bask in the warmth of that authority will always have Jesus’ protection from the evil one. 

And they will safely reside forever in the presence of the God of infinite love. 

Sweet Tongues of Flame

 

May 24, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

June 8, 2025, First Lutheran Church of Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y. 

Acts 2:1-21, I Corinthians 12:4-11

There’s a sweet, sweet spirit in this place, and I know that it’s the spirit of the Lord.

There’s a sweet expression on each face, and I know they feel the presence of the Lord.

Sweet Holy Spirit, Sweet Heavenly Dove, stay right here with us, filling us with your love,

And for these blessings we lift our hearts in praise; 

without a doubt we’ll know that we have been revived when we shall leave this place.

This hymn is so familiar it seems like it has been around forever. In fact, Doris Akers, an American Gospel music composer, wrote the words and music in 1962.

This lovely melody stimulates our spiritual antennae to feel the presence of God’s Spirit in this place, and in every place. 

Granted, there are times when the Spirit seems far away, and there are times when the Spirit doesn’t feel sweet or placid.

I am indebted to my former World Council of Churches colleague Olivier Schopfer for posting, in French, a prayer that captures other dimensions of the Spirit. A rough translation:

You are in us, breath of life, so close that they almost forget you: come Holy Spirit, our breathing!

It is you who give meaning to the words, which do live the ancient words: come Holy Spirit, our inspiration!

Sometimes you're storm, you scream injustice and absurd suffering: come Holy Spirit, our protest!

Sometimes you have the sweetness, in a voice that sings the love and peace: come Holy Spirit, our consolation!

The Holy Spirit: our inspiration, sometimes stormy and screaming out against injustice and suffering, sometimes sweet, loving, peaceful, consoling. And always as close to us as the air in our lungs.

Today is Pentecost Sunday, the dramatic occasion when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’ disciples as tongues of flame. 

The tongues of flame weren’t the only concrete evidence that God’s Spirit was in the air. The disciples also began speaking in foreign languages, and – even more astonishing – the apostle Peter’s ordinarily bumbling syntax was transformed to evangelical eloquence.

All this was the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise that the Holy Spirit would come to his followers after he ascended to heaven and disappeared from their view.

The Spirit remains among us, of course, but for most of us it dwells in silence. There are no tongues of flame and, in most mainline churches, no linguistic wonders to remind us God is all around us.

Yet there are many reminders of the Spirit’s presence. 

According to the Apostle Paul, we know the Spirit is in us because of the Spirit’s abundant fruit.

“The fruit of the Spirit,” Paul writes in Galatians 5, “is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

I’d like to think the indwelling spirit enables me to exhibit these traits all the time, but I must confess they often elude me. 

Alas, I’m much more successful in flaunting the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. I often engage all seven of them every day, sometimes before lunch.

That’s the thing about sin: it blocks access to God’s loving spirit. Love is cancelled out by greed and envy. Joy is rendered miserable by wrath and pride. Self-control is derailed by lust and gluttony and envy.

The distractions of our sins are no small matter because it prevents us from noticing that God is incredibly close to us. 

Henry J.M. Nouwen wrote, “When we speak about the Holy Spirit, we speak about the breath of God, breathing in us.  The Greek word for ‘spirit’ is pneuma, which means ‘breath.’  We are seldom aware of our breathing.  It is so essential for life that we only think about it when something is wrong with it.

“The Spirit of God is like our breath,” Nouwen said. “God's spirit is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves.  We might not often be aware of it, but without it we cannot live a ‘spiritual life.’   It is the Holy Spirit of God who prays in us, who offers us the gifts of love, forgiveness, kindness, goodness, gentleness, peace, and joy.  It is the Holy Spirit who offers us the life that death cannot destroy.  Let us always pray: ‘Come, Holy Spirit, come.’”

We can pray, but will we know when the Spirit comes? 

Brother Thomas Merton warned us that we usually don’t allow the Spirit to penetrate the arbitrary obstacles we place in its way. It’s not only the seven deadly sins that block the spirit, although there’s no question that lust, envy, greed, and pride render it impossible to dwell in love with God and our sisters and brothers. But there are other distractions.

Our days and nights are crowded with harsh sounds that shatter our inner peace: traffic noises, trash pick-ups, shouting neighbors, barking dogs, screeching cats, pounding woodpeckers, chirping crickets, and twittering squirrels. In self-defense, we surround ourselves with droning radios and blaring televisions. We plug our ears with electronic nodes that shout harsh musical dissonance of music, and we hypnotize ourselves with computer games and social media. 

No wonder we can’t hear God’s voice. Merton said we will never hear God’s voice until we are able to shut ourselves away from the cacophony of daily life.  

It is only behind closed doors, in the silence, in the eerie stillness, we begin to hear the still, small voice that dwells inside. That voice, Merton cautioned us, might terrify us. It is the voice of God who dwells within us like the air in our lungs.

Silent prayer and mute meditation – if we have the time and patience to stick with it – will open our harried souls to the indwelling Spirit of God.

And that voice that dwells within us has remarkable and often mysterious faculties.

Years ago, during my erstwhile Baptist days, I sat on a picnic bench at a conference center in Wisconsin and sipped coffee with a learned seminary professor.

The professor, a native of Norway and an expert in Old Testament, was the main speaker at a bible study conference. I was there to supplement his lectures with a lay commentary on how the Hebrew Scriptures might pertain to modern life. I had no seminary training and little background in the Old Testament, but Baptists tend to wink and look the other way when laypersons unveil their implausible theology. Many Baptists believe that seminary education weakens your faith and erects barriers to the Holy Spirit, while ignorance opens the doors to divine inspiration.

Naturally the professor and I were initially suspicious of one another, but we soon found we had enough in common to compensate for the vast educational gulf between us. One of those commonalities was the abundance of mystery in our faith. 

“I left Norway when I was young to complete my theological education in the United States,” the professor said. “My family remained in the old country. I returned home for brief visits every two or three years, but ongoing communication (in the days before satellite technology) was difficult.

“I was in the midst of a lecture one morning when I felt a strong urge to step out of the classroom,” the professor continued. “It was such a compelling urge I felt I should respond to it immediately. I smiled at the students who were sitting sleepily in front of me and said, ‘Excuse me, I have a message.’ I dismissed the class and stepped out of the room. 

“In the hallway, a silent message formed inside my head – there was no sound, no voice, but the message was clear. ‘Your brother Lars has died in Oslo,’ the unspoken message said. ‘You must return home.’

“I went to my office where my secretary had just picked up the phone. My sister-in-law was calling with the message that my brother had died in his sleep. I said, ‘I know.’ And I began to prepare for the trip home.

“I often think about this incident when one of my students asks me to solve a theological controversy or interpret an ambiguous passage of Hebrew scripture. There are so few certainties in life. Only mysteries.”

Yet the professor had no doubt that the mysterious message came directly from God, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that dwelt within him as close as the air in his lungs.

If we only took time to shut ourselves away from the raucous commotions of life, if we only found the time to sit in silence and listen for God’s still small voice within us, we would become aware that the Holy Spirit walks with us every step of our lives: as a comforter, as an informer, as an advocate, as a window into the mysteries of God’s eternal realm, as a giver of the fruits of God’s love.

It is the Holy Spirit that equips each of us with unique and special gifts to serve God and one another. 

Paul describes these gifts in I Corinthians 12:4-11.

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

On Pentecost Sunday we hear the roaring winds of the Spirit, the hissing tongues of flame; we see the disciples dancing like drunkards in the street, we hear inexplicable sermons shouted in many languages.

But Pentecost Sunday also bids us to sit in silence, in quiet places where no roaring, hissing, or shouting will clog our ears. And God asks us to sit in the silence until our hearts are at ease and our minds are still. 

And if it is God’s will, the still small voice will speak to us, reminding us of our own special gifts from the Spirit, and urging us to use those gifts for the “common good.”

And that still small voice is the greatest gift we will ever receive.

Come, Sweet Spirit. Come.

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.