Immortal

Propers: The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 23), A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

What would you do with forever? What would you do if you would never die?

See the world, maybe. Go to all the places you’ve always dreamed of seeing. Read all the books you could never have fit into a single lifetime. Learn a language—learn a thousand languages! Climb Everest! Build a city, build a world! Or maybe you would just rest beneath the shade of a maple tree, and watch the clouds billow and twist across the sky, trace the sun and the moon in their courses, never once worrying about things you ought to be doing, never once afraid of wasting your time.

All of which sounds rather lovely to me. But soon enough, you would’ve seen the world, read the books, learned the tongues of every clan and race and tribe. You would’ve experienced all that the universe has to offer—ten thousand-thousand lifetimes of men!—yet still you would be left wanting. Still one day you would find yourself asking, “Is this everything? Is this all?”

See, we were built to be immortal. But not immortal as we imagine it in this world, in this life. We were built to be one with God, to live in perfect harmony with our Creator and all of his Creation. We were made to love and be loved by God. And so we are born with a craving, with a hole in our hearts, that God alone can satisfy, for God alone is infinite and eternal. And no amount of time, no number of experiences however great, can ever replace that, can ever fill that hole. We hunger for the infinite. Nothing else will do. We were meant to live with God, and we were meant to live forever.

And so to this day, the passage of time surprises us. The coming of death frightens us. It doesn’t frighten any other creature, at least not in the same way. Sure, we all avoid pain and predators, but no dog sits out on the lawn and thinks, “What am I going to do with my life? What is my purpose in the time allotted to me? How will I be remembered after I die?” No, when it’s the dog’s time, he just lies down and passes in peace.

Not so for us. We’re always surprised by how old the reflection in the mirror has grown. We live our lives ever with the endpoint of life in mind. Death becomes real for us the first time we lose someone we love. For me that was first grade. If we were built to exist, and then one day simply to cease existing, then time and death would not shock us. That would be like a fish surprised by water. But we are built for more than this. We are built to live forever, to live beyond the grave.

Every culture in history has known this. And the Resurrection of Jesus affirms this.

So what will we do with forever? As we have seen, an eternity without God is hell. You don’t need to imagine devils or pitchforks; just living forever without God would be torture, would be boredom, would be an infinite hunger that could never be assuaged. No wonder the Buddhists talk about hungry ghosts.

But an eternity with God is bliss. And I don’t mean bliss like sitting on a cloud with harp in hand for a few billion years. I mean the only way that a finite creature can know and love and interact with an infinite Creator is if we are forever learning, forever growing, forever flourishing, world without end! Always becoming more than we were yesterday, for eternity! God is the inexhaustible source of life, of Goodness and Truth and Beauty, who has no endpoint, who will never be boring, who will bring us to a fullness that is never full and to an eternal liberation that is beyond all time and all reckoning.

And that’s what God wants for everyone, and for all that He has made. He promised us as much through the prophet Ezekiel this morning: “I have no pleasure in death,” sayeth the Lord, “but that the wicked turn from their ways and live!” Turn back to God, He begs us. Turn back to what is real! Turn back to the One who has made each and every one of us for his own, to love and be loved without limit and without end. Turn to your Father who created you, to your Redeemer who died for you, to the Spirit who raises each and every mother’s son from the loamy earth of the grave!

See, every human being you will ever meet—no matter how rich or poor, how wicked or sick—every single one of us has an eternal destiny. We are becoming, every day, what we will be forever: either a creature of ceaseless glory and bliss and life and joy; or a fallen, broken thing of insatiable emptiness and hunger. Now we know it is the will of God that not even one of his children be lost; and that Christ himself, God in the flesh, descended into hell to liberate the spirits imprisoned by their own disobedience and damnation. And so it is the right of every Christian to hope and pray that in the end all might be saved.

But in the meantime, we are to live and conduct ourselves in the sure knowledge that every human being is an immortal—is a god or a goddess, in the small “g” sense of the word. You have never met an ordinary person! Every one of us has an infinite destiny, and you or I have no idea what sort of pure and glorious creature any one of us might one day become. We are each an infinite potentiality, a seed of immortality sown within the earth.

The elderly and forgotten in the nursing home; the child, neglected and ignored; the person saddled with disorders or diseases all throughout her life; every one of them will rise at the last, purified and whole and unleashed upon the world! Then we shall see them as God sees them, as they were meant to be all along: creatures fitted for Heaven.

And so, when we read this morning’s Gospel—about how to deal systematically with a Christian who has wronged us in the Church—we cannot reduce this Word of God to a plan for congregational conflict resolution. It’s not a checklist. It is a reminder that even in the nitty-gritty of daily life together, even amidst silly disagreements and vile spats, we are dealing with immortals. We are living side-by-side with people who will not only live forever but who will grow and shine and create forever. We possess an infinite destiny; we possess the Image of God.

“And if the offender refuses to listen even to the Church,” sayeth the Lord, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” This, in the Gospel recorded by Matthew, the tax collector. This, in the Gospel proclaimed to the Gentiles, like us.

So let us be humbled, brothers and sisters, by our enemies, by our families and our neighbors, by humanity as a whole. They may drive us crazy; we are all too human. But they are also sons and daughters of God Most High. And someday we shall all inherit our crowns.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.