Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text: (John 14:1)
Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?
Prayer: Lord God, our heavenly Father, enlighten our darkness with the light of your Holy Spirit, so that I may preach well and we all may hear well, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
In the book of Genesis, the first book of the bible, we read the following words:
The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
Most of the time if we were ever in a situation where two people were buried at the same time, even a husband and a wife, usually it would happen because of some sort of accident, like they were both in a car accident together, or something like that.
But for Oskar and Helga, it is a different situation. Oskar died on Thursday, and Helga died on Saturday. It reminds me of the love poetry in the bible, the Song of Songs, where the woman says to the man she loves: “Draw me after you; let us run.” And also when the woman says: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, and jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord.”
And we might say, Why did it have to happen like this? If Oskar died, couldn’t we have held on to Helga a little longer?
Well, the reason for we don’t know. We don’t the answer to the question why. But we do know the answer to the question, “who”. The book of Job says: The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: Blessed be the name of the Lord.
And in Genesis again: Enoch walked with God, and he was not found, for God took him.
We don’t say that Oskar and Helga simply gave themselves up to death, but that God took them. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. And this message, that God took him, that God took Oskar and Helga, is a very significant thing, and it is a very comforting thing. It is a word that gives a lot of strength, not just mental strength or spiritual strength, but physical strength. Because when we come to look in a grave, we don’t say, “It’s bad luck”, “it’s bad fortune”, “it’s bad chance”, “it’s bad destiny”, or something like that. We say, “It’s the hand of God at work.” Not that God likes to see people die, and likes to see people suffer, and wants take our friends away and wants to see us lonely. In the prophet Ezekiel, God says: “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone.” – but we believe in the one true God who became a human person in the flesh of Jesus, a God who entered into our world through a virgin birth, and who says: “In my Father’s house are many rooms, and I am going to prepare a place for you.”
You see, death is not a sad time for a Christian. It is not the end. It’s sad for us who grieve – but why should we be sad when all the desires of the person who has died have reached their fulfilment? Why should we shed tears when we know that all of their tears are not only being dried up, but are being wiped away by the living God himself?
Jesus says: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”
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But I want to think back again to the creation of the woman which I read just before.
In every relationship and friendship, but especially in a marriage, God gives us as a gift to the other person. We read: And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
He didn’t just stick them out there in the garden to wander around and find each other eventually, but God actually brought them together.
And then we read those great words: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
And with Oskar and Helga too, we can say that God actually brought them together. It wasn’t simply chance or fate, that a couple of Estonians who escaped their homeland and ended up on the other side of the world just found each other.
I actually came across a newspaper article online about Oskar and Helga from the Latrobe express, where Oskar describes this. He said: “I asked at the Heidelberg hospital if there were other Estonians working at the hospital and the man showed me the register and I picked an Estonian name out of the book and took a chance in contacting her. That’s how I met my wife, Helga.”
Can’t you hear the words there: “God brought the woman to the man.”
Then he says: “I took her to Luna Park that day and her friend’s parents let me stay that night in their bungalow. After that, we tried to meet as often as our jobs would allow and in August 1948 we got married.”
Can’t you hear the words there: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
You can hear that natural desire for them to pledge their loyalty to each other “until death us do part”, as it says in the old wedding vows.
But that brings us to something else. Because in the Christian religion, when a person is married, they aren’t married for eternity, but only for life. If one person dies in the marriage, the other person is free to marry someone else if they want to. Jesus says: “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.”
That’s not to say that the angels are some kind of asexual beings with no enjoyment. Marriage is for this life only, but there simply is no need for it in eternity, in the next life, because the joy of marriage, the joy of companionship and sexuality and friendship as we know it here, is superceded by something better.
Here we might live in our homes, in the houses which our own hands have built, but in eternity, Jesus says: “In my Father’s house are many rooms, and I am going to prepare a place for you.” I am going to prepare something better than what you can imagine. I am going to prepare something, not with the bricks and with mortar. That sort of physical labour isn’t necessary for Jesus – he grew up as a carpenter and he knows how all that stuff works. Instead he labours under the sin of the world, takes it to a lonely cross and dies on Good Friday. And when he gave up his last breath and poured out his holy and precious blood upon the earth, we read that he said: “It is finished.” In other words: The house is finished. The place is prepared for you. The room in my father’s house is ready and waiting, furnished, warm, and comfortable.
We think that we enter that house when we die. But that’s not true. We enter that house when are baptised, we only see it with our own eyes when we die. When we are baptised, we enter the gates of heaven, because our sin is washed away with the blood of Jesus Christ himself. Baptism is not a washing with water, but it is a washing with the water and the Holy Spirit.
We sometimes look back at history and say, “Well, baptism once upon a time was the done thing.” But a culture should be respected that wants to bestow all the gifts of Christianity, of life and salvation on all its people. Nothing like that should be treated as insignificant. Holy baptism is God’s work, not ours. Baptised people do not belong to death, they belong to God. We should never forget that the church – not as an empty shell of an historical institution, but as the sanctuary of the living eternal God – is just as much a part of Estonian culture as its language, its traditions, and its food.
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But one last thing: It’s not uncommon that when there’s an elderly couple who have been married for well over half a century that when one of them dies that the other one follows reasonably quickly, sometimes within a year, or a few months. Here it’s particularly sad for us, because they have both died only within a couple of days of each other.
In Genesis we read: “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh…. Therefore a man will leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife and the two will become one flesh.”
It doesn’t say, This is at last is mind of my mind, or that the two will become one mind, or one soul. Each person is only responsible for their own mind and their own soul. But in marriage, we become one flesh. So it’s a natural thing, that if we lose our husband or wife to death, that there is something which doesn’t just stir us in our mind or in our thinking, but that something stirs us profoundly in our bodies, in our flesh. People say: “I feel like I lost a part of me.” And there can be a desire even to want to die too.
But nobody wants to die. Death is the great unknown for all us. Anyone who doesn’t fear death is a fool. But when someone dies that we love, it’s only natural that the desire for eternity is aroused in us. Because the desire to be with someone who has died is not the desire for death, but it is the desire for eternity. We read in the book of Ecclesiastes in the bible: “God has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into a person’s heart.”
Sometimes people say at the time of death, “He or she has gone to be with grandma”. Or something like that. That’s not the way a Christian talks. That might be the way a Buddhist talks, or someone who belongs to a religion that worships ancestors. Christians say: “He’s gone to be with Jesus.” And there’s a great difference here, because if we say the people are reunited simply by dying, it can only be a bit of poetry, or something nice and sentimental. Death is impersonal. It just takes one person after the other.
But if we say the person has gone to be with Jesus, then we know they are in the hands of something that is not just personal, but living, a living God who loves, and who gives. And out of love, he reunites our loved ones in heaven who have died in the faith, he awakens and resurrects each one and gives them back to each other in him, he brings them back together, he gives us to each other. But more importantly, God gives us to Jesus.
And then Jesus says: “This at last is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones.”
Jesus rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. And this awakens in us a desire to want to follow, a desire to say: “Draw me after you, my husband. Draw me after you, my Saviour. Let us run.”
We started today’s sermon at the beginning of the bible. It’s no wonder that at the end of the bible, the angel says to the church: “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”
Heaven itself is a marriage supper, a wedding reception. Lord Jesus Christ, draw me after you. Let us run.
Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms and I am going to prepare a place for you.
Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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