Once upon a time….in an earlier day….in a former church….my late mother sang occasional solos while they took the morning offering. One of which I can hear today, namely a musical adaptation of 1 Corinthians 2:9 (King James Version). In her rich contralto voice, she sang:
Eye hath not seen.
Ear hath not heard.
Neither have entered into the heart of man
The things which God hath prepared for them that love him.
“It’s a mystery,” says Paul, later in this same letter (1 Cor. 15:51). Today, we stand on the shoreline of history. One day we shall stand on the shoreline of eternity. But is the distance between those shorelines a short step or a long sail? Who knows? All Paul says is: “Don’t limit God’s imagination to anything you’ve seen, heard or thought. Because it won’t be enough.” When it comes to the future, God is going to think outside your box….color outside your lines….and push way beyond the edges of your envelope.
Life after death. It’s all right to desire it, says Paul. But don’t try to define it. Because it’s going to be beyond sensory knowledge, head knowledge, even heart knowledge. But nobody heeds Paul’s advice. Not even Paul. After admitting that nobody knows….and after terming eternity a mystery….Paul says: “But we’re going to have a body.” Not the old body, mind you. We’re going to have a different body….a spiritual body. Paul can’t really explain it. But he is certain we’re going to have it.
Meanwhile, Jesus says that love is going to prevail, though not necessarily love’s earthly institution known as marriage. Unless Jesus is wrong and the Mormons are right. Depending on the circumstances of the wedding, the Mormons believe that some of us are going to be married for eternity.
And the letter to the Hebrews (in one of the more winsome passages of the New Testament) pictures those living in heaven mightily cheering us on as we run life’s earthly race….an image I adore. While John of Patmos (in one of the more gruesome passages of the New Testament) pictures those living in heaven lusting for the blood of those running life’s earthly race….an image I abhor. But nobody knows.
Then there’s all that “great heavenly banquet” imagery, which makes my stomach (along with my spirit) salivate. While the Lord’s Prayer says that whatever else happens in heaven, God’s will will be done there. Even as the 21st chapter of Revelation says (concerning heaven) that there will be no more pain there….sorrow there….suffering there….and that every tear shall be wiped from our eyes there. But nobody knows.
Celtic theology says: “We don’t know what heaven is like. But we know that there are times in this life….especially when we’re on the brink of dying….when there’s only a thin (and perhaps, permeable) membrane that separates history from eternity. While African American hymnology (southern style) says that heaven is no further away than the crossing of a river (which, if they mean the Jordan, is only a stone’s throw, if that). As concerns timing, half of Christendom says that the transition from earth to heaven is immediate (“Today thou shalt be with me in paradise”)….suggesting that those of us who die in the morning will get a taste of heaven by early afternoon. While the other half says: “No, not immediately….but at the last trumpet…. following the last judgment” (implying that we will all go together when we go). But nobody knows.
C. S. Lewis (arguably the greatest Christian apologist of our era) is famous for his treatise on whether we will have sex in the afterlife. He thinks we will. And if not, he thinks we will have something even better. While Garrison Keillor, whose remarks have been widely circulated under the title “My People are Not Paradise People,” is certain that Lutheran church women will make it, but not necessarily enjoy it. Unless heaven has a kitchen (preferably in the basement) where they can make sauerkraut and weiner schnitzel….presumably on the days when the Cornish church ladies aren’t down there making pasties. But nobody knows.
The people who collect and chronicle near-death experiences (those reports by people who almost died, appear to have died, but didn’t die) suggest that an out-of-body experience is followed by an almost vacuum-like sucking movement toward a very bright light, generally including a non-threatening review of how you lived your life (“It seemed as if my whole life passed before my very eyes”), and a welcome reunion with those who previously shared your life….some of whom may have tried to send you messages (says John Edwards) before you left your life. But nobody knows.
And there are the amateur theologians I listen to several times a year. They stand right over there at the lectern (where they have come from the congregation to share words of remembrance at memorial services for friends and loved ones). Given the fact that I have already done eleven such services in the last fifty days, I have heard a goodly number of such presenters. Their remembrances are joyful, tearful, and occasionally painful. But for secular theologians (and, in some cases, blatant non-believers), their words are surprisingly hopeful. Virtually every one of them expresses the belief that their beloved is already in heaven….that heaven will never be the same now that their beloved has arrived….and that they can already picture heaven’s closets being cleaned, choirs being formed, casseroles being assembled and golf tournaments being organized, now that the dearly departed have unpacked their bags and begun doing there what they best loved doing here. In fact, judging from such descriptions of heavenly delights, I am convinced there are at least fifty-nine golf courses in heaven for every church sanctuary….given that nobody at that lectern has ever pictured the heaven-bound listening to a sermon. But hundreds of the heaven-bound have been pictured lofting a seven iron. But nobody knows.
I don’t know why golf courses figure so prominently in the topography of eternity. But every second joke I know about the venerable Scottish game has death or heaven in it. One has only to recall the two friends, Frank and Fred, who golfed regularly here and wondered if they’d be able to golf regularly there. So they made a pact. Whoever died first would find some way to get a message back from the other side. Which Fred did. From heaven. To Frank. On earth. About golf. “I’ve got good news and bad news, Frank” (he said). “The good news is that the golf courses in heaven are plentiful, beautiful and forgiving. The bad news is that you have a tee time on Tuesday.” But nobody knows.
Including Mitch Albom. Which puts him in good company. And which gives him as much right as anybody to call his best-selling fable theology.
Do I know Mitch? Barely.
Do I read Mitch? Daily.
Do I like Mitch? Fondly.
Do I agree with Mitch? Surprisingly.
The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a good book. Tuesdays With Morrie was a moving book. But this is a better book. Morrie was about one man’s truth. The Five People is about everybody’s truth.
On the surface, it’s a story. About a man named Eddie. Who repaired rides for a carny. On a pier in New Jersey. And died three years past eighty. On the day of his birthday. When an amusement ride turned deadly. The name of which was “Freddy’s Freefall.” Which it did. Straight down. Thankfully empty. But with a malfunctioning safety. Toward a little girl named Amy. Or maybe it was Annie. Whose only hope was Eddie. So she screamed. He lunged. And when next we turn the page, Eddie is on his way to heaven (and the first of five people he will meet there).
At this point, it is important to remember that this is a story. Albom is not saying that everybody will meet five….that there are only five….or that Eddie’s five will be everybody’s five. In fact, who they are is not important. It is what they have to say that is important. They come into Eddie’s heaven in order to teach Eddie something about his life….something he didn’t know while he was living it….didn’t understand while he was living it….didn’t “get” while he was living it.
The first to meet Eddie was the Blue Man, whose years were also spent in ocean-side carnivals as a part of freak shows. (“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see the world’s fattest lady, the world’s skinniest man, two sisters joined at the hip from birth, two brothers raised by wolves from birth, along with a man from India whose skin is rubber and a man from Poland whose skin is blue.”)
From his childhood, Eddie vaguely remembered the Blue Man, but for the last seventy years of his life, couldn’t recall having seen him. Yet in answer to Eddie’s question, “How did you die?”, the Blue Man answered: “You killed me.”
“But I didn’t even know you,” Eddie protested. Which, technically speaking, was true. But one day, when Eddie was just a little boy, he and his friends were tossing a baseball in the street. Which Eddie missed….then chased….down the rain-soaked pavement…in front of a Model A Ford. Which screeched, veered, and fortunately just missed Eddie. The Ford was driven by a man who had borrowed it that Sunday from a friend in order to practice his driving. But his narrow miss of the little boy caused his adrenaline to pump furiously….his heart to beat erratically….and his head to spin dizzily. He skidded….veered down an alley….lost complete control of his vehicle….collided with a parked truck….hit his head on the steering wheel…. collapsed while trying to vacate his vehicle….and was still lying in the alley (one hour later) when a policeman found him and took him to the morgue. Where one worker shouted to another: “Hey, c’mon over and look at this guy on the slab. His skin is blue.”
Eddie’s first lesson in heaven (voiced by the Blue Man) is that “we are all connected.”
You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind. Birth and death are a part of the whole. Did you ever wonder, Eddie, why people go to the funerals of someone they barely knew? It is because the human spirit knows, down deep, that all lives intersect. That death just doesn’t take someone, but narrowly misses someone else. And in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.
We are all connected. Mortals are not islands. John Donne wrote it. Simon and Garfunkel sang it. And all of us need to learn it.
Genealogy certainly suggests it. My wife’s charts get broader as they go deeper. Strangers in the twentieth century suddenly turn up as kin in the sixteenth century. Said someone the other day: “Are you any relation to the New Jersey Ritters?” “No,” I said, “there are only three of us left. Wife, daughter and me. After October, when one of us trades the name Ritter for Hopkins, there will only be two.” But then I added: “Maybe if you go back far enough, you’ll connect me to the Ritters in New Jersey. Heck, if you go back far enough, I may even be related to John, Tex and Thelma.”
Connections fascinate us. Put us in a room with total strangers and, within fifteen minutes, we’ll be trying to discover who we know in common. Plus, as the saying goes, we really are only six introductions removed from everybody in the world. Last week, Joan Topping (our staff member who works with Chris and Doris in the music office), went to Senegal to see her daughter, Kristen. Given that I know Joan….that Joan knows her daughter….and that Joan’s daughter is networked all over Senegal….I am only six handshakes removed from all the Senegalese. But until Kristen went there, I had a hard time locating Senegal in the right continent.
Just the other night, I was driving with WJR as background noise when James Dobson (of Focus on the Family fame) suddenly said:
Take a deep breath. Draw it in. Hold it. Then let it out. And know that were someone to measure that breath down to its most miniscule components, it would contain at least three nitrogen atoms that had (at one time or another) been inhaled by every man, woman and child on the face of the earth. Then consider the additional possibility that two of those nitrogen atoms might have been breathed by every man, woman and child who ever lived on the face of this earth.
Which, when I heard it, sounded rather yucky. But when I checked it out with a couple of scientists who regularly worship here, they said: “Sure.”
We are all connected. But so what? I’ll tell you “so what.” The lesson of the Blue Man is not simply that our lives occasionally intersect each other, but that our actions regularly impact each other. Our connections are not merely associational, so much as influential.
I was thinking about all this while driving north on the Lodge the other day. Suddenly, at a time of the day when traffic tie-ups are generally non-existent, I found myself in one. “An accident,” I thought. “Maybe a lane closure.” But it was neither. It was one person in the middle lane, driving thirty-five miles per hour. And for a good two miles, hundreds of cars (including mine) were making haphazard and careless lane changes, trying to pre-adjust to a problem they couldn’t see, while still at a distance they couldn’t calculate.
It was a disaster waiting to happen. Luckily, it didn’t. I don’t know who the slow driver was. Nor do I know whether the issue was car trouble, caution or a cell phone. A quick glance through his window (in passing) suggested that he didn’t have a clue.
But that’s why the lesson of the Blue Man is so important. Things happen not because we are careless….not because we are conscience-less….but because we are clueless. More to the point, we are clueless about the fact that every word we say, every thing we do, and every choice we make is one more rock that we throw into life’s pond (for good or for ill). And while we can see the first and second ripple, and (if our glasses are clean and our eyesight is good) maybe even the third, fourth and fifth ripples, we can’t see how fast they go….how far they go….and what lovely and terrible things they do when they finally wash up on someone else’s shore. Speaking personally, had I known (at the beginning of my ministry) the far-ranging repercussions of my ministry, I might have been more careful. But I also might have quit for lack of courage equal to the responsibility. Over the course of thirty-nine years, I may have done a world of good I know not of. But I have probably have done my share of harm I know not of, either.
We are connected in life, says the Blue Man. We are connected in church, says Paul. Like a body, says Paul….a crazy pastiche of eyes, ears, noses, livers, glamorous parts, onerous parts, publicly displayed parts and discreetly covered parts. Paul’s message is threefold.
Don’t denigrate the strange parts.
Don’t isolate yourself with the familiar parts.
And remember that the life and death of all the parts is, to some degree, dependent on your part.
* * * * *
“But I didn’t know,” cried Eddie to the Blue Man. “God help me, I didn’t know.”
Let me ask you something, friends. Is ignorance an excuse, or merely an explanation? I don’t know that it matters.
If ignorance is your explanation, then somebody’s got to correct it. And if ignorance is your excuse, then somebody’s got to forgive it. Which is why the words “I didn’t know” are coupled with the words “God help me.”
Note: This is the first of a five-part series of sermons which draws inspiration from Mitch Albom’s best-selling book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. For those who live in places other than Michigan, Mitch is an award-winning sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press who has, in recent years, branched into many aspects of the entertainment world. But his reputation has been greatly enhanced by the publication of Tuesdays With Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Ever passionate about life, Mitch has now become wonderfully philosophical about death.
