And My Eyes Shall Behold

I remember that as my father got older and began to decline, he would sometimes ask me that I thought happened to us after death.  While he was not a church-going person, he had grown up in the cradle of what we now know as the Disciples of Christ denomination.  Originally known as the Christian Church, and before that, named after their founder Thomas Campbell, as the Campbellites. 

This is a rather austere form of the Jesus Movement.  Baptism is valid only by full immersion.  There is little to no use in speculative theology or the creeds.  Their stance?  “Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, we are silent.”

Our family farm, outside of Bethany, is just down the street from where Thomas’ son began enlarging the family home to accommodate those coming to study.  The first meeting house still stands, right across the highway from the Forney house in Bethany, West Virginia.

While my father had since rejected his mother’s austere, literal approach to the Bible and their pious keeping of the Sabbath, the roots of that background lurked deep in his soul.  His mother, Grandma Bertha’s version of the religion was very, very strict – though not so much when it came to charity; she hoarded everything.   I remember as a fifth grader, when she was living with us in Long Beach, she offered me a dollar to read the Bible.  It was so boring, all the begats and begats – one generation leading to another, that after a while, I offered to give her back her dollar.  Her version of the faith was all works righteousness.  Her God was a punishing scorekeeper.  One had to earn their way past the pearly gates and St. Peter’s scrutiny.   Grandma Bertha’s personality did not commend the faith either.  She was a complaining, embittered, rigid person with nothing much good to say about anyone.

She was convinced that no woman was good enough for her son, my father.  All the time she lived with us she only referred to my mom as “That Woman.”

Even as a young person, I knew that her version of the faith wouldn’t get me anywhere worth going.  Especially, after death.

Jesus, in our scripture lesson today, is confronted by a group of lawyers who set out to ridicule him, show he’s a fraud.  Some lawyers will do that, you know.  This group does not believe in any afterlife.  So, they pose a most perplexing problem to ridicule Jesus and his after-life ideas about a Kingdom.

I can hear his detractors now – the same scoffers of religion today.

So, how high up is heaven?  The Russian Youri Gegarian went up there in a spaceship, looked around and didn’t see anything, certainly not God.  Yucka yucka, yuck.

And, wise teacher, what are people going to eat up there?  Who’s gonna to be the bracero to pick the veggies?  Who will brew the beer?  You know, Fr. John’s not going if there’s no beer, or rhubarb.

Will there be sex?  Is it the 70 virgins we’re promised?

Is there homework?  No more homework, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks.  Yea!  And what about baseball?  Will St. Peter umpire?

Who’s going to clear the tables after this feast in the sky?  And do the dishes?  Now they’re rolling around the ground in fts of laughter.  Can’t catch their breath.

What will people do?  Just sing Alleluia every day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday singing Alleluia?  Forever and ever, world without end?  They’ll be bored out of their skulls.

The cynics, who have everything and know the value of nothing will be having a field day at Jesus expense.

For the “cultured despisers,” the skeptical in this modern era, much of religion is considered fluff, of no account.  At worst, a delusion and laughing matter. And face it, some claims of the faith are highly dubious and utterly laughable at worst.  Did the sun really stand still so Joshua could finish a slaughter on the battlefield?[1]  And if same sex relations are an abomination punishable by death, so is eating shellfish.  Should everyone eating clams be also stoned to death?  Oh, yeah, then there was that relationship between David and Jonathan, which might have been problematical.

And when one considers how the Christian faith has been misused to promote toxic masculinity, promote wars, promote the worst sexist, racist and rightwing nationalist ideologies – not only is it risible, it’s downright dangerous.  (As an aside, I say thanks be to God for our first woman Archbishop of Canterbury!).

Just as pernicious, ideas of heaven and hell are used to excuse and make us overlook the injustices of this world.  The political realist would say that all that pious heaven-and-hell talk is a sedative, an opioid answer to the criminal avarice right under our eyes – the grift of do-nothing political hacks raking in billions.

As Dr. King said that all that talk about golden slippers, long white robes and such is fine, but I’m more interested in God’s people having a decent pair of shoes and a shirt on their back down here.  Golden streets are fine, but what folks need down here is some change in their pockets, something to get a square meal and pay the rent.

Dr. King had no use for preachers who just focused on the afterlife and “pie in the sky” in the face of the poverty and misery of Jim Crow brutality.  A lifetime of suffering endured by Black Americans would not be compensated by such rationalizations and pablum.  What God demanded was folks actively working in this world to promote justice, dignity and community.

So here come these religious know-it-alls out to ridicule what they don’t understand, the Torah faith of inclusive community and right relations.

If a man is married and dies without children, according to the law his brother is to take the widow as wife so his brother would have, in a fashion, an inheritance.  And just suppose, just suppose that that man dies, and she has to marry the next brother, and he dies…so on and so forth until at the end she has been married to seven of those brothers?

By this time the crowd is amused and many laughing up their sleeves.

So, then she dies, maybe of exhaustion.  In the afterlife whose wife would she be?  What is she going to do if there’s in fact a resurrection?

People edged closer, eager to hear how he’s going to handle this one.  They winked at one another and shoved an elbow into a neighbor’s ribs.  “This is gonna be good.  What’s he going to say to this?”

Jesus will have none of this foolishness.  God is not to be mocked.

Jesus turns the tables on them.  Whatever the afterlife might be, it won’t be like here on earth.  People won’t be married there.  Whatever happens after death will be nothing at all, absolutely nothing at all like here.  And as no one has returned to tell us about it, anything else is speculation.  A distraction from what we’re to be about down here.

We use metaphor and poetry to express such yearning for eternal fulfillment.  As to such final things, Jesus says, “You know neither the day nor the hour” when you will see your last sunset, dream your last dream.  But, that Kingdom, that Kin-dom of God?  It’s already here among you.  Don’t you catch a smidgen, a brief glimpse of it from time to time?  I do.

Jesus made it clear that the door to eternity is through the life we live in this world.  It’s signs, wonders and markers are all about.  NOW!

I have a cherished memory of a cold, cold night on the balcony of our home in Petersburg, Alaska.  It was clear and frigid as I lay on the chaise lounge outside, bundled up in a heavy duty Kelty sleeping bag, looking up at the flickering of the northern lights. Pink, white, shades of blue and green they began to dance across the velvet black sky.  Just as I was about to head back indoors —  even in a heavy-duty sleeping bag I was freezing my butt off – just then it seemed as if all the lights of heaven gathered themselves over my head.  In one burst of glorious energy, they exploded over my head.  “Take me now, Lord,” I thought.  “It doesn’t get any better than this.”  Moments later I headed back inside suffused with a radiant glow.  A little bit of heaven.

Yes, the wonders of nature, the beauty of the hills inspired more than one Psalm, inspired more than one poem, more than one quiet sigh of contentment.

Yes, in this life we get small glimpses of eternal joy and bliss.  Glimpses of “undaunted courage.” To enter the life of another human being is such a door.  Especially a life filled with unbearable pain.  This week I began reading Elizabeth Guiffre’s book of the torment she endured at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislain Maxwell.  The courage she displays in telling her story with all its horrific and dehumanizing detail – that courage is a smidgen of eternity.  A door that opens the reader to her, his full humanity.[2]  The Glory of God, a woman fully alive despite all the worst life had dished out.

Even her collaborator, Amy Wallace, had to take breaks from this sordid tale, over four years in the making.  Her courage in being willing to immerse herself in the muck that was Epstein and Maxwell lifts my courage to stand for what is right.  Amy’s listening and helping Elizabeth clarify her story is an overwhelming gift to other girls who have been assaulted and abused – you are not alone.  There is help.

After hours of working on her book in Paris, Elizabeth needed some fresh air.  Her lawyers had been grilling her for hours, wanting to maximize, to focus her testimony.  She thought the Louvre might be the distraction she needed.  Wandering through the galleries, looking for the Mona Lisa, she turned a corner and everything fell apart.  Another flashback – fearsome flashbacks of shame that came unannounced at her most vulnerable moments.  Flashbacks she could never banish from her waking days or nightly dreams of terror.

“I climbed a flight of stairs, turned a corner, and froze.  I know this room, screamed a voice inside my head.  I’d been in this precise spot before – two decades ago, when I was just seventeen.”

“The room I am in is painted bloodred and dominated by a large tapestry: a depiction of Louis XIV’s garish bed chamber.  In 2001, when Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell took the teenage me into this room for the first time, they had been sexually abusing and trafficking me for months.  Now I am a thirty-seven-year-old wife and mother…Still I can practically see him standing next to me, admiring the tapestry, whose dark palette he was determined to mimic in the décor of his opulent Manhattan townhouse.  In my mind’s eye, I imagine Maxwell beside him, as always.  A molester with posh manners and an aristocratic pedigree…played den mother to Epstein’s dysfunctional family of underage girls.  I was one of those girls, and I spent more than twenty-five months in their house of shame.”[3]

Though Elizabeth exhibited great courage, resolve in the face of death threats to keep quiet, the devastation finally overwhelmed her, unable to escape the domestic violence in her own marriage, she took her own life at her remote farm in Australia.

In an email sent three weeks before her death, Elizabeth wrote, “In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that “Nobody’s Girl” is still released.  I believe it has the potential to impact many lives and foster necessary discussions about these grave injustices.” 

Elizabeth’s gift to the numerous and unknown victims of sexual predation is priceless.  Inspired courage.  A priceless moment of eternity.

How do put the whole matter that Jesus was confronted by that day as scoffers ridiculed him?  First, there are some questions that can’t be directly answered by any living person with an absolute, literal answer.  To the scoffers, any answer comes as one lives into the question, picks up their cross and put’s their shoulder to the wheel.  In all finality, what I can say is, “We came as a gift from God and we return to God.  Thanks be to God.”  It’s all Grace – “What a Wonderful World” indeed!  And as my friend John Cobb remarked when nearing death, “I waiting to be surprised.”  Amen

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[1] Joshua 10:12-14.

[2] Elizabeth Roberts Giuffre, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1925).

[3] Op. cit., xx-xxi.

November 9, 2025

Pentecost 22, Proper 27

Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9;
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

“And My Eyes Shall Behold”