Presby-Musings

This week the inspiration for our Daily Devotions will be drawn from the sermon that I preached this past Sunday for All Saints' Day--a sermon on grief, loss, hope, life, heaven, Heaven and resurrection. If you would like to read the transcript of that sermon, you can click HERE .  The Scripture that we used as our guide was John chapter 11--the story of Jesus raising of Lazarus from the dead.   When I was a kid, I remember hearing a preacher give a sermon on the horrors of hell as opposed to the wonders of heaven.  His graphic description of hell included visions of eternal fire, souls in torment, the smell of sulphur in the air--descriptions straight out of Dante's Inferno.    Then he described what heaven was going to be like.  He painted a portrait of a place with streets of gold, precious gems embedded everywhere, a crystal sea, trees filled with every fruit imaginable...  It was pretty spectacular.   His question, at the end of ever...

I have been in his brightest shining heaven and seen such things that no man, once returned from there, has wit or skill to tell about.           - Dante from  Paradiso "Peter," said Lucy, "where is this, do you suppose?" "I don't know," said the High King.  "It reminds me of somewhere, but I can't give it a name.  Could it be somewhere we once stayed for a holiday when we were very, very small?"          - C.S. Lewis from The Last Battle What is Heaven like?  What can we learn from visions of Heaven that will give us a renewed sense of purpose here on earth?  How can we defy that old saying, Christians are so heavenly minded, "they are no earthly good?" A Spirit-filled vision of Heaven should give us hope for the future, and a purpose for the present.  When we go to the Bible we find some interesting visions of Heaven... In Isaiah 2:2-4 we have this description of Heaven from the prop...

The following list of books with accompanying reviews represents some of the more challenging books on Heaven that I read in preparation for the sermons I have been preaching on the Afterlife.  By challenging I mean that they challenge the status quo, the traditional views of Heaven.  Some of them were written by non-Christians, and each of them contains conclusions (and speculations) that push the reader to reassess his/her preconceived notions about Heaven. Heaven:  Our Enduring Fascination With The Afterlife by Lisa Miller [Harper Collins, 2010] Lisa Miller is an award winning journalist in the field of religion.  She regularly has columns in Newsweek , and was formerly on staff at the Wall Street Journal  and The New Yorker .  Miller, who is Jewish, felt her fascination with the afterlife grow after the events of 9/11 and the subsequent work that she did in the new religious culture that emerged after that great tragedy.   Heaven  is the ...

So this week I am preaching on hell. I've never done this.  I'm Presbyterian.  We don't talk about hell a whole lot. It's not polite. Or decent and in order. But I've heard my fair share of sermons on hell because I grew up in fundamentalist Baptist churches where it seemed to creep into most of them. Hell, as it was described to me was a place of eternal torment.  There was fire in hell as well as brimstone, agony, anguish, eternal regret and the Devil and his minions, who added to the horror by dreaming up even worse ways of torturing lost souls. And as if that wasn't bad enough---after spending years in hell, lost souls had the Lake of Fire to look forward to after Jesus' Second Coming.  There they would do laps in a burning "lake" for all eternity alongside the eternally doomed Lucifer and his band of fallen angels. I was a rather frightened child. In fact, at a "Watch Night" service for New Year's Eve I watched ...