An atheist was blasting a preacher: "Eternal life? Pie in the sky! When I die that'll be it! Kaput! Gone! Dead! That will be the end of me!"
"Well thank God for that," said the preacher.
"An atheist is a man who believes himself to be an accident." Francis Thompson.
And Woody Allen said, "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon."
This week I want to focus on what it is we truly know and that will give us the greatest consolation. And a good place to begin is at the beginning. God appeared to Moses and proclaimed his name: "The Lord" (Exodus 34:4).
Then God proclaimed something of the nature of God: "The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness." God loves us and God is faithful.
"God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that all who believe in him may not perish but may have eternal life" (John 3:16).
From the beginning God just wanted to share this marvellous gift of existence with us. Add to existence wisdom and knowledge and we have something worth striving for and living for. What gratitude we must have as creatures for the gift of creation and life.
Imagine the warmest and best human love relationship! It is a gift from God! But it is only a shadow of the love relationship for which God created us. This knowledge indeed makes us restless for the ultimate love.
Thank you, Lord, for our restless Spirits and for our insatiable appetites. And thank you for the patience to endure these as they drive us to our greatest achievements.
Looking at the face of a new-born child is a Trinity experience. At once we see new life and we see ourselves in that son or daughter. With little stretch of our imaginations we know that Christ lives in us.
We have the gift of church community where we gather to be filled with Jesus in the Word and in the Body and Blood of Christ. This we must seek. This is our guarantee of the eternal.
"May they all be one. Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you, so that the world may believe it was you who sent me" (John 17:21).
In his song "Something Which Is Known" Gregory Norbert invites us to share with others "what we see with our own eyes and what we hear with our own ears". God became flesh and in Him we find the light of truth, the song which you can hear on You Tube tells us.
In Jesus we find the abiding gift of God's love. "Through that love we pass and are born in life unending: Jesus, our Lord, the fullness of our joy. Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia"
