Afterlife? Where is Abraham’s Bosom?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, May 22nd, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 21 May, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Luke 16:19-31, Psalm 146, Daniel 12:1-3

he Bible doesn’t just talk about the afterlife in one way. There are all kinds of ways in which it is described. In some texts it is found in a place called Sheol, but then there are other places that talk about Heaven and Hell. There are references to Hades, Paradise and also to the Pit and the Lake of Fire. And this is not just a matter of using different words to describe the same thing. The various places and states are described in such different ways that they are very hard to reconcile with each other. But it is fun to watch people try.

Theologians and experts in religion seem to have this deep need to systematize and organize everything including what the Bible says about the afterlife so there are people w

ho have attempted to reconcile everything that the Bible says about it. The solution, in Christian theology, has usually been to describe an afterlife that changes over time. The theory is that the dead have been sent (and will be sent) to different places at different times in history. In Old Testament times they were sent to one place which had various departments but that system was changed when Jesus came and was raised from the dead and it will be changed again at the end of the world. It is a fascinating study, but, when I look at it, I can’t help but wonder if the people who make their careers sorting all of that sort of stuff out, have been missing the point entirely.

One of the things that especially makes me think that is the passage that we read this morning from the Gospel of Luke. In this passage Jesus tells his followers a parable in which all of the characters die and Jesus says interesting things about what happens to them in the afterlife. In particular, Jesus speaks about them going to places that are not really spoken about anywhere else in the Bible. The poor man, Lazarus, dies and is taken to a place called “Abraham’s Bosom.” The awkwardness of this is somewhat covered over in the translation that we read this morning where it is rendered that he “was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.” But the literal translation of the original text actually says that the man is taken to a place called “Abraham’s bosom” or “Abraham’s breast.”

The rich man, who is not named, but to whom tradition has given the name Dives, is taken to another place called Hades, which is of course the ancient Greek land of the dead. What’s more, there appears to be a great impassable chasm that separates the two men in death.

All of these are places and features that are a little bit hard to reconcile with the descriptions of the afterlife elsewhere in the Bible. And so theologians grappling with this parable often have a hard time fitting places like “Abraham’s bosom,” into their maps of heaven or hell or whatever. But they are missing, I think, the point of the parable that Jesus told.

To understand what Jesus is saying, you need to visualize the opening scene that he describes. “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.” Jesus says, “And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table.” Now how would you draw a picture of that scene? We would probably imagine this rich man (who I’m going to follow the tradition and call Dives) sitting at a well-appointed table dining on expensive foods, but you need to know that that picture is actually wrong.

Rich people in Jesus’ day did not sit down to eat. Anyone know how they ate? They laid down on couches to eat. Everyone agreed that it was the proper and civilized way to eat. And there were a number of reasons why they thought so. First of all, you will note, lying down on your side makes you kind of helpless. You can’t really reach any food that is not placed within a couple of feet from where you lie. This is by design. It means you have to be waited on hand and foot by an army of slaves and rich people in Jesus’ day loved to show off how many slaves they had.

It kind of makes you clumsy too, of course, and more likely to drop your food on the floor. But they kind of liked that too because there was no better way to show off how rich you were than to not care about the food you wasted by dropping it on the floor.

One other thing about the couches, though, they were actually much bigger than this one – big enough, in fact, that two or three people could share one comfortably. In a formal dining room, where we must imagine Dives dining, there would be a number of these couches where he would welcome his honoured guests. Every position in the room had its relative importance and honour but the most honoured position you could occupy was if you actually shared the couch at the head of the room with your host. The guest of honour would lie right here with his head resting against his host’s breast. Another way to put that would be to say that the guest of honour was in his host’s bosom. Now, remember that expression: in the bosom of the host.

So that is how you must imagine Dives. But what about Lazarus? Where is he? He interestingly enough is lying down too, but not in such a nice place. Lazarus is lying just outside the gate of the house. And where is that? It is directly opposite the couch where Dives lies on his dining couch – directly opposite. How do I know that for sure? Because every single rich person’s house in the first century was built in the same way. Every house that has been dug up had the same floor plan. The dining room was always directly opposite the front gate. This also was by design.

You see, when a rich man entertained important people for dinner, the whole point was so that everyone would know about it. So the house was laid out so that anyone who walked by the front gate could look in and see exactly who was lying in the place of honour at his host’s breast. For this purpose, the entire centre of the house was left as an open courtyard, open to the sky and planted with a lovely garden. Nothing would be allowed to obstruct the view of the people dining on the couches.

So don’t just imagine Lazarus lying at the gate of the house, imagine him lying right here, right outside the gate and watching every morsel of food that Dives eats, seeing all of the food wasted as it falls to the floor and dreaming, just dreaming, about being able to eat a few bites of that wasted food.

Of course, Dives can see Lazarus too and maybe it even crosses his mind that the poor man might appreciate having the food that he is wasting. But Dives knows that he could never share it with him. Even though there is only a pleasant garden the separates the two men, Dives knows that it is actually a yawning chasm, an impassable social barrier. For if ever Dives got up from his couch and crossed it to go to Lazarus, it would totally destroy his standing and reputation among other rich men.

That is the situation at the opening of the story and you need to see it because otherwise you cannot understand what happens next. What happens next is that Lazarus dies. Presumably he dies of his wounds and extreme malnutrition. “The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to the bosom of Abraham.” And if you see the situation at the opening of the story, you can understand now what that means. “Abraham’s Bosom” isn’t a place or a region of the underworld, it is a picture of Lazarus’ new situation. What it means is that Lazarus now finds himself lying on a couch with his head resting against Abraham’s breast.

The picture you are supposed to see is that Abraham is holding a feast and Lazarus is his guest of honour, sharing the great patriarch’s couch. It’s kind of an amazing image when you think of it. All his life Lazarus has watched these amazing feasts from a distance, knowing he will never belong on one of those couches. Now he feasts in more honour than Dives could ever imagine.

Meanwhile, Dives has also died. I am almost certain that he died choking on a pretzel or something like that. And where is he taken? We are told only that he (not needing the ministrations of angels) was buried but then somehow finds himself in a place called Hades which is clearly a place of great torment and suffering. And, yet, curiously enough, he can still clearly see Lazarus where his lies feasting on Abraham’s lap. Where then is Dives? Is he in some special department of the underworld where the flames burn alongside a bottomless cavern? Is that how we’re supposed to read the story?

Or is the point that Dives ends the story in the very place where Lazarus began, lying in agony watching the other fellow dining sumptuously on a couch? Is not the point of the story that both at the beginning and at the end the two men are separated by a divide that is so close that they can see and hear each other and yet, in both cases, the separation is inexplicably uncrossable. After all, Jesus, the guy telling this story used to say, “The first shall be last and the last first” and he also told a whole lot of other stories where everything at the beginning is totally turned upside down by the end. So I actually feel pretty comfortable saying that Jesus’ main interest in telling this story wasn’t to give us some sort of map of the afterlife. It was about demonstrating how the ways of this world could indeed be turned upside down.

In fact, the thing that I find absolutely fascinating about what Jesus says about the afterlife in this story is that it is so clearly a metaphor of everything he saw wrong about how things worked in his world. Note particularly the great chasm that Abraham talks about. “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed,” he says to Dives, “so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.” And, of course, the mention of such a major feature as a great chasm in the afterlife has sent Christian theologians scrambling to identify this chasm and its meaning in the underworld or wherever it is supposed to be located. But I note that, while Abraham says that it has been fixed or established, he doesn’t say who fixed it there. Of course, people have just assumed that it’s supposed to mean that God fixed it (which would mean that God has locked Dives into his torment), but Abraham doesn’t say that.

What if Jesus is saying that the one who fixed that chasm was Dives himself? All his life, Dives was over there on his couch feasting while Lazarus was over there lying at his gate. It was only a few meters! At any moment Dives could have gotten up and walked across his garden and given Lazarus bread from his table, but he did not do that because that garden was an uncrossable social divide. Indeed he could not be seen crossing without it causing him a loss in his social standing.

In a way, Jesus is saying that Dives created his own hell and is the author of his own torment because of the choices he made during life. He was the one who decided that there could be no contact between himself and Lazarus. That merely continued in the afterlife. He was the one who decided the chasm between them could not be crossed. That merely continued in the afterlife.

Somehow it seems, if you attend to this parable of Jesus (the only one he told that was set in the afterlife) – if you really attend to what it is saying, you will come away learning more about this life and its priorities than you will about what the afterlife is actually like. Somehow, I think, that was exactly what Jesus intended.

And it makes you think, doesn’t it? What are the chasms and divides that still exist in this world? Is God placing someone – some Lazarus – at your gate? Is there someone you could help, or give comfort to or speak a word of life to but you don’t? Maybe you don’t even see this person – at least you don’t notice them because, though they are nearby, somewhere on the path of your week, they seem to be on the other side of some chasm that has been erected by race, by prejudice, by economics or religion. The chasm may seem uncrossable, but what if it is only so in your own mind?

#140CharacterSermon Some think Parable of Lazarus & Dives is about the afterlife but it ends up teaching more about this life & what matters

Sermon video:

This Sunday, May 21

Posted by StAndrewsHespeler on Thursday, May 18th, 2017 in News

When you enter the sanctuary this Sunday (and there will definitely be things going on that you won't want to miss so you will want to enter) the first thing that you may notice is that something is out of place. Something is there that shouldn't be -- that usually isn't. First of all, fear not! This is a temporary addition but there is a very good reason why we have added this very special thing this Sunday but you really kind of have to be there to understand why -- so be there!

Here are some other things to look forward to this Sunday, May 21:

The Adult Choir will sing Rock Me, Lord by Andy Beck
Amy Lightfoot will sing a solo: Spirit, Open My Heart by Ruth Duck
We will tell a new chapter in the story of our piano which is given and played in memory of people from the congregation.
Another of our young folk will bring in the mystery box which the minister will open and have to tell a story based on what he finds inside.
The Minister, Rev. W, Scott McAndless, will continue his series of sermons on the Afterlife looking specifically at the Parable of Lazarus and the rich man, which raises the question, what in Hell is Abraham's Bosom?

Here is a short video introduction to the question posed in the sermon:

What’s on today! (Thursday)

Posted by StAndrewsHespeler on Thursday, May 18th, 2017 in News

It's Food Bank day today and Hope Clothing is open, too! Lunch will be ready around 12 noon.

Sounds like it is going to be a perfect summer lunch.

Mission Sunday is coming soon!

Posted by StAndrewsHespeler on Tuesday, May 16th, 2017 in News

Please plan to join us on Sunday, May 28th for Mission Sunday.

We have a special guest speaker coming to worship with us.

Following worship we will have a potluck lunch together while we check out the mission and outreach that our church family and church have done and are doing.

If possible please bring a finger food type of potluck to share with others, please no peanuts or shellfish.

Afterlife? Reunification?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, May 14th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 14 May, 2017 © Scott McAndless – Christian Family Sunday

2 Samuel 12:15b-23, Mark 12:18-27, Responsive: Selected

ou all know that today is Mother’s Day. But do you know why? You might think that this day came into existence because of the efforts of the greeting card industry or the florists or the chocolatiers who banded together and came up with the day to make lots of sales during what would otherwise be the very slow month of May, but that is not the case. The existence of Mother’s Day as we know it today is largely due to the efforts of one woman named Anna Jarvis.

Anna Jarvis was not a mother herself, but she (like everyone I guess) had a mother – a very extraordinary mother named Ann Reeves Jarvis who had done amazing things in working for peace during the American Civil War and for reconciliation afterwards. But Ann Reeves Jarvis, as is the way of all flesh, did eventually die and more than anything her daughter created Mother’s Day and lobbied to have it recognized out of a desire to keep the memory of her mother alive – a way to make sure that the woman she had lost never really went away.

And that was it, by the way. Anna Jarvis didn’t want it to be about anything else and she absolutely deplored everything that Mother’s Day became once she got it established. She deplored the commercialization of it and spent most of the rest of her life feuding with card companies and florists and chocolatiers. Though she never became a mother herself, people from all over the United States would send her presents every year for Mother’s Day and she refused every single one of them.

She became bitter and angry and, in the end, died in poverty and obscurity. It is hard when something that you created according to your o wn vision goes in a direction that you never intend, but that is the risk you always take when you create something new. It is too bad that this was something that distressed her so, but I want to remember this woman’s vision and her desire, in her own way, to keep her beloved mother alive even after death.

We have been talking about the afterlife here at St Andrew’s, and today I would like to ask a very important question that always arises when we think about the afterlife in the church. It is a question that I think would have been very much on the heart of Anna Jarvis. What about the people that we have lost and that we have loved, what about our mothers if we have lost them in this life? Will we get to see those people in the afterlife? And, if so, what will the reunion be like? I think that, in many ways, the question of what happens to our loved ones and whether we will see them again is actually more important to many of us that is the question of what will happen to ourselves. After all, we figure, what is the point of an afterlife if you don’t get to share it with the people that you love?

Interestingly enough, the Bible doesn’t really have a whole lot to say about this whole idea of being united with our loved ones after death. There are plenty of passages that offer various pictures and metaphors of what the afterlife might look like, but none of them describe that grand reunion. In the Biblical images, the redeemed people are much more focussed on offering their praise and worship up to God and there is no talk about them interacting with each other. But, of course, just because the Bible doesn’t talk about something happening in the afterlife doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen.

The closest that the Bible comes to talking about seeing the people who are important to us in this life again is in the rather strange passage we read in the gospel this morning where there is this odd exchange between Jesus and a group of people called Sadducees. Now, we don’t actually know a whole lot about what Sadducees were like in the time of Jesus. They were a religious group who were closely associated with the Jewish temple and priesthood and both of those things came to an end shortly after the time of Jesus when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. Records and memories of the Sadducees were mostly lost.

But one thing we do know about the Sadducees is that they took the Jewish Bible – especially the first five books which were called the Books of Moses – very seriously. If the Bible, as they honoured it, didn’t explicitly say something, they didn’t believe it. Well, one of the things that the first five books of the Bible doesn’t talk about is any concept of the afterlife. So the Sadducees didn’t believe in the afterlife.

So the Sadducees come up to Jesus with a question about the afterlife. But they are not asking because they are actually puzzled about something and want Jesus help them with it. Their question is actually about trying to demonstrate to everyone how much more clever they are than Jesus – that they are right to not believe in the afterlife and Jesus is wrong.

So, in their question, they set up a situation in the afterlife that is frankly ridiculous. You see, there was this law in one of the Books of Moses regarding marriage. Marriage in ancient Israel wasn’t really about love; it was about property and keeping property and inheritance in the family. For that reason it was considered a catastrophe if a man failed to have a son to pass his property down to. So this law was created to make sure, if a man died before having a son, there would be a male heir. His younger brother had to marry his widow and get a son on her and that child would grow up to inherit the big brother’s name and property. I know it sounds pretty crazy to us (it is) but this was how they took care of their priorities in these matters.

So these Sadducees come up to Jesus with a ridiculous application of this law. There are seven brothers who, because of this law, are all required to marry the same woman – the widow of the oldest brother. It is, of course, something that would never actually happen, but they don’t care about that. It is enough for them that the law means that it is possible. And if it is possible, they are trying to prove, that means that the very idea of an afterlife is impossible because, in their minds, a woman cannot have an independent existence. She must be under the authority of some man. She must be married to someone and since one woman cannot be married to several men at once (even though, of course, the opposite was allowed) their conclusion is that the afterlife itself must be impossible.

And I realize that the case that these Sadducees present is so absurd in many ways and is, even worse, steeped in patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes that we would find unacceptable, but I would like you to give their argument some consideration because there is something to it. They are pointing out that there is a bit of a problem with that idea of reunification in the afterlife as we usually think of it. The problem is that our relationships in this world are not static. They are in fact, constantly changing. In some cases the changes may be quite extreme like when someone (as a result of death or divorce) is married to completely different people at different times in their life.

But even when it is not as extreme as that, there are still constant and more subtle changes. Consider, for example, your relationship with someone like your mother. You have one relationship with her when you are an infant and are totally dependent on her, another when you an adolescent and trying to establish your independence and then you relate to her quite differently when you are an adult and maybe a parent yourself. There is not just one relationship but a constantly changing story that includes many ups and downs and various emotions. The relationship is so conditioned by where you are in your life and where she is in hers. So when you see her in the afterlife – in a place where time and phase of life don’t mean anything, how exactly are you supposed to reconnect with your mother maybe especially if you have gone through a lot since she passed on and you are no longer the person you were then.

So, as much as I hate to say it, I think that the Sadducees do have a bit of a point. It doesn’t make sense that the relationships we have here – relationships that are so defined by time and changeable circumstance and stage of life could just continue on in a place where none of those things exist. I can’t have, all in the same eternal moment, the same relationship that I had with my mother at all the different phases in my life. So maybe we do need to ask Jesus, together with the Sadducees, whether a reunion in the afterlife is really possible.

But, of course, Jesus has an answer for them, and what an answer it is! “Is not this the reason you are wrong,” he says, “that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” He tells us a number of important things about the afterlife here. He tells us first of all, the most important truth about it: that the afterlife is an existence completely unlike our present lives. There is really nothing in this life that can relate to it and we don’t really have the minds to grasp it or the words to describe it. The Sadducees have misunderstood because they have tried to define something that cannot be defined in human terms. That is their first mistake but it won’t be their last.

Secondly, Jesus makes it clear that we will not relate to people there in the same way that we do here. There will be no marriage, he says, not because he has anything against marriage but because that kind of earthly relationship has no meaning there. But it is not just marriage that he rules out, but also other human forms of relation. Note how he says it, “they neither marry nor are given in marriage.” He is speaking in terms of how marriage took place in that world where one party (the man) married while the other (the woman) was given in marriage. This practice marked the fundamental difference between the genders, that men were free but that women were pieces of property that were to be given, taken and traded. But Jesus says, thankfully, that such distinctions (which were fundamental to everything in their world) have no meaning in heaven.

How then is this an answer to the Sadducees’ question? Jesus is arguing that it is possible for there to be a grand reunion in heaven with our lost ones, that such a thing doesn’t have to end up creating endless difficulties because relationship is not limited there in the ways that it is limited here. I guess it’s not quite something we can understand here and now, but it is, I hope a great comfort.

But Jesus doesn’t just leave it there. He gives the Sadducees and us the ultimate proof of the truth of the afterlife. “Have you not read in the book of Moses,”he says, “how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the living.” Here Jesus anchors the proof of the afterlife not in our desires to be reunited but in the nature of Godself. The thing, Jesus says, that proves that the great patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, have entered into the afterlife is not found in their relationship with each other, not in their relationship to us, but only in their relationship with God. God is their God and God is, by nature, the God of the living. This makes it possible for them to have life even though they have died.

It is heartbreakingly sad to lose the people we love. We mourn for them, we miss them, and we know that we will never be fully complete without them. We can know that we will see them again, despite whatever complications that might cause, because we know the power of God, who has demonstrated he is able to raise the dead, will overcome any obstacle ever to be raised in all the universe. The God of the living is our God and theirs, and so we know we can have hope.

140CharacterSermon Will we see our loved ones again in the #afterlife? Yes. Will it be like anything we have ever experienced before? No!

Sermon Video:

Mother’s Day and More

Posted by StAndrewsHespeler on Thursday, May 11th, 2017 in News

May 14, 2017 is, of course, Mother's Day and Christian Family Sunday. That alone makes the day a very special celebration at St. Andrew's Hespeler but there are a number of other things that will make this coming Sunday a great day to share together as one Christian Family.

Our amazing Youth Band will be honouring God's presence and the people they love with Supermarket Flowers (by Ed Sheeran, John McDaid, and Benjamin Levin) and In You There is a Refuge (by Keri K. Wehlander)
We will celebrate all the women among us with a special surprise gift

After worship we will be planting potatoes outside as we kick off our campaign to do two fun and worthwhile things:

See who can grow the biggest potato
Grow food for this fall's Thursday Night Supper and Social

Last Sunday, the minister gave a mystery box to one of the children in our congregation. That child has been challenged to find something (almost anything - there are only a few rules) to put in the box and bring back to church this Sunday. During the children's time, the minister will open the box and will be required to make a lesson out of whatever he finds inside. Can you bear the tension? What will be in the box? What will the minister do with it? Come Sunday morning and all will be revealed!
And last (but certainly not least) our Minister, Scott McAndless, will take us back to the origins of our North American celebration of Mother's Day and lead us to ask the question, will we be reunited with the ones we love (such as our mothers) in the afterlife?

Afterlife? What about that other place?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, May 7th, 2017 in Minister

Quick Introduction Video:

Hespeler, 7 May, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Revelation 20:4-10, Psalm 6, Mark 9:42-49

decided that this year, in this season after Easter, I wanted to focus on the whole idea of an afterlife. For many people the promise of heaven is what the Christian faith is all about. In fact there are Christians who will look you straight in the eye and tell you that Christian faith and practice is something that you just have to put up with now for the sake of a tremendous reward later.

I mean, they may not say it in so many words, but the message seems to be: “I don’t really like all of this churchy stuff and I hardly want to be good and moral all the time. In fact I’m kind of miserable, but it is only because someday, after I die I’m going to be able to go to heaven and that will make it all worthwhile. Heaven, in other words, is supposed to be the carrot that entices us to be good and that there really is no other good reason to be good.

I have met many Christians over the years that seem to take that approach and I’ve got to say that I have never found it compelling. For me, we shouldn’t have to wait until someday and after we have died in order for this to be worthwhile. I’m not saying, of course, that our faith should never challenge us by making us uncomfortable or lead us to do what, in the moment, we don’t feel like doing, but the blessings that Christ promises us must be for this world, not just for the next. For that reason, I have often not wanted to dwell on the afterlife and have not preached on it often. This is not because I don’t believe in it – I do – but merely because I feel that we have been inclined to put too much emphasis on it.

But now, I wanted to counterbalance that tendency by spending some time focussing on the meaning of the afterlife. But, of course, when you talk about the afterlife, you can’t just focus on the carrot – the reward that is supposed to be waiting for us in heaven. There is also, in the Christian tradition, a stick. Again and again Christians have used the fear of another place – a place called hell – not to entice people to be good but rather to scare them out of being bad.

Now, hell, fire and brimstone have not generally been the major themes of the churches that I have attended over the years. But I do remember one time when I was in the United States and went, with a group of friends, to visit a Church on a Sunday morning and I had to sit through about an hour long sermon that was essentially an exhaustive description of all the pain, terror and suffering that was surely waiting in Hell for all of those evil people in the world who did not believe the same thing as the good fellow who was preaching the sermon that morning.

So I’m not naive. I know that hell has been a major theme in Christian preaching for a very long time. For centuries preachers have used imagery of Hell to frighten people into behaving in certain ways. But not all of that imagery comes from the Bible. Traditions of and descriptions of Hell have grown and changed dramatically through the centuries. For example, much of our idea of what Hell is like comes not from the Bible but from a fourteenth century book called Inferno written by a man named Dante. Why the word hell itself is not even a biblical word, it is an Old English word. It was the name for the place that pagan Anglo-Saxons believed people went after they died. So the question is what does the Bible actually teach about the place that we affectionately call hell?

So, as I say, hell is not a Biblical word. So what is the Biblical word? There are a few. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word that is used to describe the place of the dead is Sheol. It is not entirely clear what Sheol is because no literal descriptions are offered. One thing that is clear is that they saw it as a real place underneath the earth. They imagined the universe in very simplistic and primitive terms. The universe was like a triple layer cake. The top layer was Heaven above, the middle layer was the earth and the bottom layer was this place called Sheol. This description of the universe is taken for granted in many places in the Old Testament, and we should not read it as some kind of divine revelation of the actual shape of the universe but rather as the Bible speaking in terms that the people of that time could relate to.

But, in addition to being a literal place, ancient Hebrews also believed that Sheol was the place where people went after they died – all people apparently. Sheol for them was not a place of punishment or torment, but neither was it a place of reward, it was just kind of a place where you went. We read about their attitude towards the place in our Psalm this morning: “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?” It hardly sounds like much of an existence, does it? No remembrance, no ability to speak, you are just there. So Sheol doesn’t really have much connection with our modern concept of hell, for that we need to turn to the New Testament.

Jesus, in the New Testament, does indeed talk about a place called hell. Or, at least, he uses a word that got translated into that Old English word hell in our Bibles. So, in our reading this morning, Jesus says, “It is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.” So what kind of a place is Jesus talking about when he says that?

Well the word that Jesus actually uses there is the word Gehenna. Even though the gospels were written in Greek, Gehenna is not a Greek word, it is an Aramaic word. Aramaic was the language that Jesus actually spoke so that means that the gospel writers did not translate the word into Greek but retained the actual word that Jesus probably said. That does not happen often in the New Testament and it is always important when it does.

So what did the word Gehenna mean to first century Aramaic speakers like Jesus? Well, that is the puzzling thing because we know exactly what it meant. Gehenna was an actual place – I mean a real earthly geographical location that you could actually visit and can still visit to this very day. Gehenna literally means “the Valley of the Son of Hinnom” and was an actual piece of land, a valley that had once belonged to the family of a man named Hinnom. The valley can still be found to this very day in the City of Jerusalem. It is the valley that is found on the southern and western side of Mount Zion where the temple of the Lord once stood and where the Dome of the Rock stands today.

Yet clearly, when Jesus refers to this place called Gehenna, he had more than just an ordinary valley outside of Jerusalem in mind. He speaks of it, in fact, as the very last place you would ever want to go – a place that you would be willing to pay an arm or a leg (or an eye) not to have to go there. I mean, I have heard of cities that have bad neighbourhoods but that sounds a little bit extreme!

What’s more, Jesus describes Gehenna as a place of “unquenchable fire” and a place “where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.” What would that have to do with what is today a fairly ordinary looking valley in the heart of Jerusalem? Clearly Jesus is using this valley as a metaphor for something. Somehow this valley carried a meaning that gave people a picture of some truly horrible fate that awaited some people after they died.

The most likely explanation seems to be that, in Jesus’ time, this particular valley just happened to be the place in Jerusalem where people left their garbage. It was the Jerusalem municipal landfill, the garbage dump. That would certainly explain why Jesus would speak of it as a place that people would certainly not want to go – the kind of place that you would give your right arm to not end up in. People did up living on the local trash heaps, you know. In fact, in some places people still do. They somehow manage to eke out an existence living off other people’s garbage but it is not the kind of life that anyone would choose.

It also explains the imagery of ever burning fires and worms continually feasting on rotting organic matter. That is exactly the kind of description that you might take away from your average ancient city dump.

Obviously when Jesus talks about people ending up in Gehenna, the Jerusalem city dump, he doesn’t mean that people were going to end up in that literal location. He is using that place – and it does indeed appear to have been a pretty awful place – as a metaphor for something that might happen to some people after death. But what, exactly, is that metaphor supposed to be? Of course, traditionally, the interpretation of that passage has been that Jesus was saying that, after some people died, they would be sent to a place where they spend the rest of the eternity in continual fully conscious torment. I suppose that is possible. But is that really the only thing that Jesus could have meant by referring to such a place?

If I were to say to you, “You’re going to wind up in the dump,” and you knew very well that you had no business there and that I was not literally sending you on an errand to the Waterloo Regional Landfill, how would you understand me? Would it seem that I was consigning you to an eternity of conscious suffering, especially if I happened to mention that there had been a tire fire burning in the dump non-stop since last week and the place was full of worms feasting on the garbage? Well, perhaps. But isn’t it equally possible that I might be rejecting you in some other way – essentially calling you a piece of garbage or suggesting that you were useless. Without more information and some context, how could you be sure what I meant?

And that is the problem with symbolic language; you can’t quite pin it down and know what exactly a speaker means. For two thousand years Christians have been thinking about and adorning the idea of hell with their own imaginations of the worst kind of torment in this never ending quest to create a stick that they can use to goad people into behaving in certain ways. But when you go back and try and load all of that onto a few brief references that Jesus made to a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem, I can’t help but wonder whether we might be pushing it a little bit.

Is there a hell awaiting the wicked of this earth after they die? Well, I can tell you one thing, I don’t believe that anyone is going to be thrown into Dante’s Inferno or that horrible place of eternal conscious torment that was once described to me in a sermon. Those are simply examples of people trying to nail down the description of something that cannot be described in human terms.

I also do not doubt that Jesus warned us against going astray in this life – that there are actions you can take that you should avoid at any cost. I also believe that he warned that one of the consequences of such actions would be that you were thrown upon a garbage heap that I suspect represented rejection and alienation from God, but I am not certain he intended to mean to include eternal conscious torment. In other words, I would say that I believe in hell, I am just not entirely certain that hell means exactly what Christian tradition has said that it means.

But more important than that, I do not believe that the God I have come to know through Jesus Christ is one who is all that interested in motivating us to be good through a carrot and stick approach. Yes, he is looking for certain things from us and rejoices when we trust him, act in faith and work for the kingdom of God in this world. But God, like any good parent, knows that the threat of punishment can only do so much to shape a child’s behaviours and is not actually all that helpful at teaching the child to internalize the values of the parent. God doesn’t just want to control our actions, he wants to transform us. That is why he sent Jesus, that is why he raised him from the dead and promised that we would be raised too. It is all about grace and love and God believing in us, not about him scaring us into behaving in certain ways with the threat of hell.

That is why I would say that, whatever exactly it means, hell or Gehenna should not be at the centre of our thinking about the afterlife. The Christian life is not about avoiding punishment. It is not even really about a heavenly reward. It is about meeting a God whose love for us (made real in Jesus Christ) is so powerful that it can transform our here and now.

140WordSermon Jesus spoke of Gehenna (translated: hell) but what did he mean by it & and how do we respond to it? That is another question.

Sermon Video:

May 7, another extraordinary day in the presence of God

Posted by StAndrewsHespeler on Thursday, May 4th, 2017 in News

Sunday May 7, the fourth Sunday of Easter will see us gather for a celebration of God's presence among us at 10 am in the morning at St. Andrew's Hespeler Presbyterian Church. There are so many aspects of the service that will make it very special.

First of all, the music at this service will be a wonderful celebration of God's presence among us will include the following:

A prelude and a postlude by the very gifted organist Martin Bohl
The adult choir will sing Jubilate, everybody – By F Dunn. They will be accompanied by Zoé McAndless on the violin.
A congregational favourite trio made up of David Kruger, Randy Vermaas and Corey Cotter-Linforth will sing Your Grace Amazes Me – By Christy Nokels, Daniel Carson, and Jason Ingram. Here's a picture of the trio:

We have been focusing on the question what comes after life in this post-Easter season. This week we will turn to the dark side of the afterlife by asking the question, "What about that other place?"

Here is a short video to get you curiosity piqued:

Afterlife? Will there be many mansions?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, April 23rd, 2017 in Minister

Introduction Video:

John 14:1-7, 2 Corinthians 5:1-10, Psalm 16

ver five hundred years ago, an English king by the name of James commissioned the translation of the greatest book ever written, the Bible, into English. The result was a translation that was so good, so poetic and so beautiful that, for hundreds of years, it was essentially the only English Bible that mattered. But five centuries is a very long time and in all of that time the text of the King James Version never changed but other things did and that may have caused a few issues.

For example, in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John – in the King James Version of the passage that we read this morning – Jesus makes this rather stunning promise to his disciples. “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” It is the kind of promise that has a way of capturing people’s attention. What an afterlife to anticipate – a mansion for me in heaven after I die? Why, I’ll be just like the Beverley Hillbillies!

But when, eventually, newer and more modern English translations of the Bible finally began to appear, some people got extremely upset. You see, when they opened up their new Bibles and turned to the Gospel of John, they read this: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”

“What? Dwelling places? Is God planning to put me up in a Motel 6 or something? The King James promised me a mansion and now these fancy new translations say I can only have a dwelling place? This is a raw deal. I want my mansion!” So said many critics; so some still say to this day. Of all the complaints against the newer translations (and there have been many) the complete lack of mansions has got to be one that comes up most often.

But is it a valid complaint? Did the more recent scholars really set out to shortchange us all in heaven with their new translations. Is it some great conspiracy to cool off some sort of heavenly real estate bubble? Is the Wynne government involved? Well, I can explain what happened for you if you like. As it turns out, both the King James Version and the modern translations were absolutely correct translations. What? How can that be? How can both be correct when they make quite different promises?

Well, the key word in what I just said was the word were. You see, in the original text of the Gospel, what Jesus promises is that there are many monh,in his Father’s house. And that Greek word, monh,, means rooms or dwelling places. And when the King James Version was translated, a common English word for a dwelling place was, in fact, the word mansion. That’s right, when the King James was first translated, the word mansion didn’t have the same meaning that it has today.

Five hundred years ago, rich people didn’t live in mansions. They lived in manor houses or estates or villas, but not in mansions. So the word didn’t have any of the meaning of luxury or size that we attach to it. It was only over time that the word became attached to a particular kind of dwelling. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the King James translation of this particular passage (and its suggestion that a mansion was a heavenly kind of abode) that prompted people over time to call big and fancy houses mansions.

But the mere fact that people get so worked up over the question of whether Jesus was promising us rooms or mansions after we die is rather telling. It seems as if the way that people think of or imagine the life that comes after this life is really important to us. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that people often are willing to fight over – even kill over.

In some ways, I suppose, that is not very surprising. For many of us, when we get discouraged by the ups and downs of this life or when we lose somebody that we love and miss them terribly, we take great comfort in the promise of an afterlife. But somehow it is not enough for us just to be reassured that there is another existence beyond this one. We need to be able to visualize something whether it be mansions or pearly gates or streets paved with gold or whatever.

But there is a problem with that. I believe in an afterlife. I think that there is good reason to believe that the identity that I call me will still persist even after I die. I base that belief on many things including and especially my Christian faith. But I do not believe that I or anyone else has the language to actually describe what that new life is like.

Whatever it is, the afterlife is an existence that is completely unlike life as we experience it right now. I mean if anyone has come close to being able to give a literal description of the kind of existence that I suspect we are talking about here, it is the theoretical physicists who can talk about things like multidimensional universes or quantum nonlocality and can produce some pretty remarkable mathematical equations, but they can’t draw a picture of any of it.

If you want a picture of the afterlife, therefore, you are limited to what is called metaphorical language. In other words, you cannot say what it is, but you can say what it is like. A metaphor is a way of describing something that is not literally true, but that is true in profoundly more important ways.

For example, when I say, “God is my Father,” that is a metaphor. I do not mean by that that God is my biological father or that he is the man who raised me and lives in Toronto. It is not literally true but it is true in far more important ways. The phrase, God is my Father, tells me very important and very true things about my relationship with God, about God’s care for me and about so much more. A good metaphor is like that, it’s not literally true, but it is able to speak truths that you cannot normally put into words.

And that is why I would suggest that all of our language, everything we ever say about the afterlife, is metaphorical. And when I say that, I don’t mean that the afterlife isn’t real or that what we say about it isn’t true. I only mean that metaphors are the only way that we have to get at the deeper truth of the afterlife.

But one thing that means is that it is probably meaningless to fight over the particular metaphors that are used when talking about the afterlife. Does it matter, ultimately, whether I imagine that Jesus has prepared for me a room or a mansion in his Father’s house? After all, I hardly expect that things like architecture or interior design or, for that matter, space or time or dimensions have the same meaning in the afterlife that they do here. So, when Jesus calls it a dwelling place, how can we have even a clue what he is trying to describe? It is actually a little bit frustrating trying to understand what he means once you start to break it down.

And I think that some of the disciples (or at least one of them) felt that frustration because he spoke up right after Jesus said this. Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” In other words, Thomas is saying, we can’t really grasp the concepts you talking about here, how are we supposed to join you in this place where you say you are going. I think that there are many who struggle with that very issue. If they cannot have a description of what the afterlife looks like that corresponds to the physical realities of this world, how are they to take comfort in it?

But I think that Jesus’ response to Thomas shows a remarkable understanding of his frustration. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” Jesus says. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus is telling him that it is not about the place or about what it looks like. “Iam the way,” he is saying. If you trust me, I will get you to the destination. You don’t need to know what it looks like when you get there or how you’ll know when you have arrived. The afterlife is about trust more than it is about place.

All you really need to know is that, after you die, you will be in the hands of a gracious and loving God – the God revealed to us in and through Jesus. (That’s what he means when he says, “If you know me, you will know my Father also.”) When you know that you have a heavenly Father that you can trust, you really don’t need to worry about details like how many theoretical square feet you will have to live in. This, above all, is the message we need to keep in mind in all our thinking about the afterlife; it will help immensely when it comes to dealing with any worries or fears about death.

And, keeping that in mind, let us look a little closer at the promise Jesus gives his disciples (and us) at the Last Supper in the Gospel of John. If we can assume that he is not actually describing the heavenly housing market and that he is using a metaphor to get some idea of the afterlife over to his disciples, what is he really saying?

The image he is using is actually would have been pretty clear to anyone listening to him in the first century. The first clue is when he uses the words “Father’s house.” I think that it is important to note that the phrase “Father’s house” or “God’s house” is never used anywhere else in the Bible as a term for heaven. In fact, the phrase “God’s house” always and only means one thing everywhere else in the Bible – it is another name for a very earthly temple in Jerusalem. And Jesus clearly wasn’t talking about that temple when he said this, so I think that people would have understood that he was using a different and very human metaphor to describe what the afterlife with God was really about.

Everyone would have had a picture in their mind of what a father’s house with many rooms would have looked like because, in that world, it was very common for large extended families to live together in a house under the leadership of one patriarch or father figure. The centre of these households was an open courtyard where much of the common family life was lived out. Around this courtyard various buildings and rooms would be built including a kitchen and dining room but also rooms for the various smaller units of the families.

When a young son of the family would get married, for example, he would go out into the world and find his bride in her father’s household. He would seek the permission of her father to marry her (given that this was, after all, a very patriarchal society) and then he would leave her there for a time while he returned to his father’s house. There he would build another room onto the courtyard of his family home and when it was finished he would return to his bride and take her home to live in that room in his father’s house. This was, in fact, the normal pattern in marriage in that world.

So when Jesus describes his Father’s house with many rooms (or dwelling places or what they called mansions back in the sixteenth century) that is the kind of image that everyone would have had in their minds. For that matter, when he says, “I go to prepare a place for you? And… I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” They also had a clear image in mind. Jesus is speaking as if he is a groom who is telling his bride that he is going to his father’s house to build a room onto it for her before he returns to take her home as his wife. It is a metaphor for marriage and that is actually the primary thing that we need to understand in this passage.

You see, it turns out that when, in this passage, Jesus is trying to comfort his disciples by talking about the afterlife, he is not talking about a place (at least not in the way that we usually talk about places in terms of space or dimension), he is talking about a marriagebetween himself and the believers. He is talking about relationship more than place which is why he can also say that he himself is the way to get there. So maybe, if we are going to try and imagine what the afterlife is like, that is where we should start too.

The promise of life beyond this present one is real. Even if our limited minds cannot comprehend it, we can still have a sense of the comfort that the promise gives us because of our relationship with the promiser. That is where it all starts. That is what it is all about.

#140CharacterSermon Jesus promised his Father’s house had many rooms. This is not about a place in heaven so much as a relationship with God

Sermon Video:

May 2017 Meat Pie description and timeline

Posted by Nonsequitor on Tuesday, April 11th, 2017 in Clerk of Session

· The Roasted Beef and Roasted Turkey are swimming in delicious gravy with potatoes, peas, corn and carrots.

· The Lean ground beef with mushroom and onion is encased in delectable gravy.

· The Shepherd’s Pie (no pastry) made with lean ground beef & vegetables is blanketed with creamy seasoned potatoes.

· Crust-less Quiche- delightful and filling with a choice of ham or veggie, both include -onions, broccoli, cheese.

· Turkey Tapa- 10” wood oven thin crust topped with a hearty mixture of caramelized onion, roasted turkey and tangy sauce - delicious on its own or top it with you favorite additions.

· Meat pies are available @ 5” size for $5.25 each

· Meat pies are available @ 9” size for $14.00 each save $2

· A selection of Home-style Soups will warm the soul with the choice of six varieties: Broccoli Supreme, Chicken Noodle, Spud’s and Bacon, Creamy Cauliflower, Tomato Tortellini and Vegetable Beef and Barley.

· Soups are available in 360 ml. sizes for $5.25 each. or 6 for $30.

· All Fruit Pies are made the old fashioned way- with the freshest fruits and delicately sweetened to perfection. (apple, cherry, blueberry, raspberry & pumpkin)

· Fruit pies are available 9” size for $14.00 each

5" size for $5.25 each or 6 for $30

Last possible date for order April 26.

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