A Fresh Perspective

Sometimes deaths in communities come like waves. I am ready for the tide to turn. I have conducted too many funerals in too few days. The following is a story I love to share with families. I’m not sure where it originated. I got it from a minister who got it from a minister who got it from a minister. Once there lived a colony of grubs at the bottom of a swamp. Ever so often a member of the community would feel the urge to swim to the surface of the water and then disappear, never to be seen again. This confused and bewildered the others, and so one day they agreed that the next time one of them felt compelled to leave the colony, that one would return and share with the others what it was like above the surface of the water. It wasn’t long before one felt the urge to depart. She swam to the surface and crawled out onto a lily pad and in the warmth of the sun went to sleep. As she slept the carapace of the little creature broke open, and out emerged this beautiful rainbow...

The only time in the Gospels where Jesus talks about life after death is in a response to a question by the Sadducees. They did not believe in life after death, so the question posed to Jesus is a loaded question. A woman had married seven brothers successively in obedience to the law of levirate marriage. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? The Jews who believed in life after death, like the Pharisees, believed in resurrection, not immortality. Many of the Greeks believed in immortality. They believed in a sharp distinction between soul and body. Some Greeks called the body the prison house of the soul. They believed that in death the soul doesn’t die, it simply departs the body. In the Hebrew tradition, there is no separation of soul and body; soul and body are one. The immaterial is inseparably connected to the material in Hebrew thought. Therefore, they believed that when the body dies so does the soul, and then it takes an act of God to raise the total person....