Creekside Church Sermon of May 16, 2004 "The Case Against Immortality" John 10:22-30	Rev. David Bibbee
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Captain Hanson Gregory saved the lives of a shipwrecked Spanish crew off the coast of Maine in the late 1800's. For his heroism, Spain's Queen Isabella decorated him. The rescue was remarkable in its own right. What made it even more so was that at the time, Captain Gregory was only nineteen years old! It is not bravery, however, for which Hanson Gregory is most remembered. It is an invention. He invented NOTHING.

In 1941, over two decades after his death, an organization sponsored a debate. A distinguished panel of judges was selected. Crack-shot attorneys represented each side. The debate centered upon whether Captain Hanson Gregory had in fact, invented nothing. Those who said he had not, claimed that an American Indian who lived during the seventeenth century had created nothing. It was hard to substantiate the claim, though. How could something that happened three hundred years earlier be proven? The pro-Gregory side showed letters and documents lending credence to their claim that Gregory had invented nothing in 1847.

The Gregory attorney acknowledged that time had blurred the distinction between truth and folklore. According to legend, Captain Gregory had created nothing in an accident during a storm at sea, when in fact, it happened in his mother's kitchen when he was fifteen. The evidence was persuasive, and the panel voted for Captain Gregory. The Smithsonian confirms that he was, in fact, the inventor of nothing. Since 1847, the little business that began on a stovetop grosses almost eight hundred million dollars each year.

One day, Hanson noticed that his mother's fried cakes suffered from soggy centers. He picked up a fork, stuck it in the middle of a cake, and created the nothing something that today we call, the doughnut hole.

This morning I want you to think with me about a nothing something. Unlike the doughnut hole, the nothing something I am thinking about is hard to grasp. It cannot be seen and cannot be proven, but it can be hoped for and believed in.

I had barely begun my ministry when I got a call from Allison. She was crying so hard it was difficult to understand her. I made out the word, died. As she struggled to compose herself, I thought of whom it could be-her husband, a parent, perhaps? "Rex just died," she sobbed. Rex? Who's Rex? I didn't know a relative named Rex." Allison and her husband had just spent $2,500 for Rex's surgery, but the day they brought Rex, the Irish Setter home, he had a stoke and died.

Allison asked the first tough theological question of my young pastorate: "Do dogs go to heaven?" I thought of asking, "Was Rex an obedient dog?" but didn't. "Are there Bible passages that suggest that animals have souls?" she asked. She was serious. I had to be sensitive.

I can't recall what I said, but if she called today, I would be more empathetic. I'm a dog owner, now. I am sure I've projected human emotions on to my lab Libbee-but she has a unique personality. This is a dog that knows what I'm feeling. She knows what I'm going to do before I do it. We have a connection.

Last Saturday was our neighborhood garage sale. I hate neighborhood garage sales. The streets were packed with cars and people, and you can't get out of your own driveway. Libbee got out of the house and ran up to a lady, who knelt and hugged her. I thanked the woman for holding Libbee, and noticed tears in the woman's eyes. "They change your life," she said. "I had a female chocolate lab that looked just like your. She died last week." Can anyone tell me--does Libbee have a soul? Will she become a nothing something after she dies? I don't lay awake thinking about it, and I won't search for biblical support. I do know that I want Libbee's life to go on. I do know that I want my wife's and the chidren's lives and the lives of all I love… I want their lives to go on. But why?

Nothing is as intolerable as the thought of nothingness. Nature abhors a vacuum. How can something become nothing? How can a life be no life? How can a vital, vibrant, overflowing with life person in a single moment become a no one? I've stood with a number of families by the bedside of their loved ones at the moment of death. There is an awesome finality to it, but never have I heard anyone say, "Well, that's that. It's all over. When you're dead, you're dead." Instead, there are questions. "Will I see my father again?" "Will I be reunited with my wife?" "Will my loved one who wasted away to an unresponsive bag of skin and bones be himself again?" Nothing is as intolerable as the thought of nothingness.

We all took our turn being born. We shall all take turn dying. But then what? Some deal with the finality by saying the deceased live on in our memory. Some famous lives have been burned into society's collective memory. But all it takes to forget John and Jane Doe is two or three generations.

Some people say the deceased live on when others continue their deeds. Some people speak of the indomitable, irrepressible human spirit that rises above all limitations. But given what I've seen in the news the past three weeks, I'm not impressed at all by the "human spirit." There is nothing we possess that outlasts death.

I listened to an interview with a woman who quit a lucrative law practice in mid-life to become a Lutheran pastor. She said that as a lawyer, she presided over endings… the end of marriages, the end of life and settling the estates of the deceased whose families fight tooth and claw over what is entitled to them. She said, "I needed more than endings. As a pastor I know I'll preside over many endings, but the Christian faith promises new beginnings and new birth. I want to be present when life is created," she said.

This is not an idle hope. Throughout the New Testament Jesus is the giver of eternal life. In this season of Easter we have many ways of expressing the belief that nothing can conquer of the love of God. As Paul says in his soaring promise in Romans 8: "Nothing and no thing shall separate us from the love of God that is ours in Jesus Christ." There is no explanation for the explosive growth of the first church shy of Jesus' resurrection and appearance to his disciples. Yet, taken as a whole, the Bible doesn't offer much in a detailed manner about life after death.

It's important to understand why. Let's look at the concept of immortality. Someone said, "Immortality means death-proof." To believe in immortality is to believe that our being is split into a body and a soul. The body goes through ages and stages. Crow's feet. Gray hair. Mid-life bulge. The body wears out. It is fragile and susceptible to sickness and injury. It can be ended with relatively little effort human effort.

Belief in the immortality of the soul regards our bodies as little prisons. The body is feeble and flawed. It enslaves us to its needs. It is material, and therefore, inferior. The soul, however, is the essence of who we are. It is whole, superior, and eternal. When the body gives out, the soul takes flight for realms of glory. Years ago, supposedly scientific tests were done to prove the existence of the soul. A person was weighed moments before death, and immediately after death. A decrease in weight could be explained as the soul leaving the body.

The Patrick Swayzee-- Demi Moore film, "Ghosts," gives an example of immortality. When people in the movie died, a carbon copy, but invisible version of themselves left their bodies, either to be ushered into heaven, or drug screaming by the demons into eternal damnation. Crossing over the realm of matter into the realm of spirit was as easy as taking off a coat.

Immortality is not a Judaeo-Christian teaching. Immortality is not biblical. It came from Greek culture. The pagan religions that existed when Christianity began were absorbed with issues concerning the afterlife. They saw no reason for concern about the material world. But belief in immortality renders God unnecessary. You don't need God to provide a wake up call to get you up and going once you are dead-- not if you have an immortal spirit already within you.

Christians do not believe in immortality. Jesus died. His broken, shredded body had the last once of life beaten out of it. Jesus wasn't acting dead. He wasn't drugged, as some have suggested, to make it appear that he was dead. Jesus did not wait patiently for the disciples to open the tomb and let him out early Sunday. Jesus was dead as dead gets, and he could do nothing to change his state.

Resurrection, on the other hand, is completely unnatural. When God resurrected Jesus, God gave his life back again. It was a thing of God's doing. I like this distinction that someone drew: "The idea of immortality of the soul is based on the experience of man's irrepressible spirit. The idea of the resurrection of the body is based on the experience of God's unspeakable love." When the emphasis is upon immortality, the motivation for being a Christian becomes distorted. Some people think of becoming a Christian as an insurance policy. All I have to do is join up and my future will be sealed. This is different from following Jesus because of who he is and what he has done.

In John 10 Jesus talks about his sheep. "My sheep hear my voice. I know them. They follow me; I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand." The Bible doesn't describe the afterlife except in the most fragmentary, mysterious, poetic ways. Instead, we have a promise. We will die. Every one of us will die. But Jesus was raised; we have the great hope that our lives, which death will render to nothing will be given back again because God loves us. When this happens nothing becomes something.

A remarkable thing about the resurrection is not just that it prepares us for what is to come. It has the power to change the way we live now. Jesus told us that we do not have to wait till death to know what heaven is like. He said, "The kingdom of God is among you."

Many of you saw the World War II movie, The Bridge Over the River Kwai. Did you know that one of our members, Eugene Loth, was a Japanese prisoner of war who worked on that bridge? A more recent film, To End All Wars, goes into greater depth and tells the remarkable story of a British Army officer named Ernest Gordon. Phillip Yancey tells the story in his new book, Rumors.

Gordon's plane was shot down over the Pacific. He was captured and sent to work on the Burma-Siam rail line. He joined thousands of prisoners building a track bed through miles jungle and swamps. They wore nothing but loincloths. They worked in 120-degree heat. Their bodies were insect pincushions. Death was an everyday occurrence. If a prisoner were lagging behind, a Japanese guard would either beat him to death or decapitate him in view of the prisoners. An estimated 80,000 men died building the railroad.

Gordon's life was wasting away with beriberi, worms, malaria, dysentery, and typhoid. Then he was stricken with diphtheria. His mouth so ravaged with sores he could not eat or drink without it gushing through his nose. He lost all leg sensation. He was in such misery he asked to be put in the death house, a rat and disease-infested building where prisoners were laid in rows until they died. But Gordon's friends moved him into a bamboo hut they had made specifically for him, away from the swamp where they could care for him.

Until then, the camp rule was the survival of the fittest. The prisoners fought for food scraps like animals. Stealing was rampant. Sharing was nonexistent. Then something happened that changed the prisoners. After a work detail, a guard announced that a shovel was missing. He demanded to know who stole it. He screamed that everyone would die if the guilty prisoner didn't step forward. Finally, someone did. "I took it," he said. The guard then beat him to death in front of the others. They carried his corpse back to camp where the tools were inventoried again. The number had been miscounted the first time. No shovel was missing.

This selfless act caused someone to remember the Bible verse: "Greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Slowly, hatred gave way to caring. Slowly, Gordon's friends nursed him back to a semblance of health. He wrote: "Death was still with us, but we were being freed from its destructive grip." It was learned that Gordon had studied philosophy, so he was asked to lead discussions about ethics. The most urgent issue in the camp, however, was preparation for death, so even though he had given little thought to God over the years, he became the camp chaplain. A little church was built where the men prayed for other's needs.

From the discussion groups, a "jungle university" formed. Prisoners with areas of expertise taught their comrades. Courses were offered in history, economics, mathematics, science, and nine languages. Professors wrote textbooks on scraps of paper. Artists created exhibitions. Two botanists tended a garden that grew medical plants. String instruments were smuggled in and woodwinds were carved. A man with a photographic memory wrote out complete scores of Beethoven and Schubert symphonies.

The prisoners who received such inhumane treatment were so transformed by the end of the war that when they were released they didn't treat the guards with revenge, but with kindness. Ernest Gordon enrolled seminary, became a Presbyterian pastor and was Dean of the Chapel at Princeton University until he died in 2002.

It was more than a vague hope of immortality that enabled the prisoners to transcend their situation. Nearly all vestiges of humanity were gone, yet out of this deprivation-out of this state of nothingness, there was a resurrection. Because of faith in God, nothing became something.

The second law of thermo-dynamics states that all matter in the universe is in a state of winding down. Everything is subject to change, death, and decay-a movement toward nothing. Yet the cosmologists have discovered that the universe, which they thought was slowing down since the big bang, is in fact, speeding up. While there is one force in life that moves toward nothing, there is another heading toward something.

We will always be reckoning with death. The day will come when death will reckon with us. But we have a shepherd. He gives us eternal life. He says we will never perish. He ought to know. He was dead, but God did an unnatural and loving thing. God gave back his life. He has assured us that we should hope for nothing less.

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