I hope so

http://usccb.org/bible/readings/110216.cfm

WIS 3:1-9
ROM 5:5-11
ROM 6:3-9
JN 6:37-40

I had a full awake daydream the other day. It began when I stood staring at the fire I’d just built to take off the edge of the cold creeping upon us here in the middle of fall in Colorado. 

“Hope does not disappoint.” That’s what it said in Romans, Chapter 5. We had a first and second reading today, because this is the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. All Souls day. Romans, the second reading, popped out at me for this holy day.

I crammed the fireplace with logs and sealed the door shut. The first reading from Wisdom, Chapter 3, had primed me for Romans. 

“The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them.” And then, “Yet is their hope full of immortality.” And further, “As gold in the furnace, he proved them.”

My thoughts were focused on what hope held up for me, and I settled right away upon being saved from the “wrath” of God, which is what Paul spoke about in Romans 5:9.

“How much more then, since we are now justified by his Blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath.” 

I reran a conversation I’d had some time ago with a fellow, a friend, who sincerely doubted that God exhibited wrath. “Nonsense,” he said. “That would be no God to believe in.” 

I poorly argued, shown by his disagreeable response, that God’s wrath is as perfect as his love. It’s not like our wrath. I tried to explain that his wrath was similar to my wife, Joanne, raking up leaves and putting them in the flower beds; or when my dad removed the dandruff from his dark brown sweater; or like the long times we spent on our vacations sanding the grime and chipped paint off of Joanne’s mom’s house. 

We resemble our heavenly Father when we do these things. He repairs, recycles and restores us with an appropriate disdain for dead leaves, dandruff, and dried up paint, and a steady attention to detail in removing dead skin from a precious woven sweater, moving compost material where it will do it’s best work, and preparing a shoddy surface for a renewed luster for all to see. 

On a larger scale his necessary work looks like furious anger, as he takes summer into fall, or fall into winter. The winds change, and the skies darken. The frost kills the pine beetles. These are painful repairs and adjustments. The collateral damage in inevitable. Yet, there is purpose even there, shown by his careful and loving hands. 

Anyone who insists that decay and sin and destruction of creation are good things don’t understand that the precise cycles of repair and the faithful restoration of everything is necessary to reveal the permanence of heaven. These temporary mends and renovations are not our hope. Our hope is to no longer be a unwilling participant in necessitating God’s healing work, which looks only like wrath to us.

Those who do not believe that decay and sin and destruction are temporary, and not the eternal design, will be forcefully corrected, says Paul. Whether they like God’s stewardship of creation, a constant repair to the way things should be as a mirror of what is to come, which actually makes a lot of sense, these unbelieving folks will not successfully change God. God will do the right things, whether we grasp it or not.

Romans begins, back in Chapter 1, verse 18-19, very clearly talking about God’s wrath.

“The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness. For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them.”

God’s wrath was not evident to my friend. The wicked had successfully suppressed the truth to him. He couldn’t grasp what I wanted him to understand. God is heaven-bent, so to speak, on fixing everything that gets broken. He cannot be stopped. The cycle of our sin, like the cycle of the seasons, will not wear him down. “Nonsense,” he said.

I pondered the situation, and in a few moments, contrary to the flaming picture of lit up logs in front of me, as the fire grew into a violent whirling of ignited red and yellow gas, I found myself daydreaming about what the book of Wisdom talks about. I began walking through an imagination of my hopeful entrance into heaven. Yes, my fireplace seemed to be taking me to heaven. 

There I was, in a dark, but warm place, a rushing of hot wind which felt like flames surrounding me. I wanted to curl up and squeeze my eyes shut, afraid that I would bump into something. But I remembered that verse. “Hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” 

I stood there in my heavenly dream, and stretched out my arms and let the fire cover me. A blaze of light peeked through my eyelids, and I opened them. 

Crowds of people milled around in a large field, a valley between tall snow-capped mountains. A few were standing like me, but many were bent over, crouching, and afraid. Still more were lying on the grassy ground. My eyes finally adjusted to the light. I had been blinking and squinting for quite some time. 

The next verse read out to me. “For Christ, while we were still helpless, died at the appointed time for the ungodly.” 

I know that I am one of those, even as I spend time trying to know God. I struggle with my own sin. How does Jesus Christ dying make any sense as a repair of my sin?

We sinful folk are like dead skin on a finely woven earth. Our sins like dead leaves on the sidewalk. Our rueful behavior like a house that needs to be stripped and repainted.

And then the next verse.

“Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

I had remembered that the burning from the light in heaven is God’s cleansing. I’m constantly running that thought over in my head, even practicing the acceptance of a pain that’s good for me when I take my insulin shots, and check my blood. A better practice would be a long hike, uphill, breathing hard, pushing through the soreness, I suggested to myself. Daydreams are like that, drifting and drowsing into adjacent thoughts, poorly focused upon the event; in my case, crossing over into heaven.

I read on in Romans, “Indeed, if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, once reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”

I go back to my dream, and I imagine that I am not one of the frightened people who don’t know the Holy Spirit when I crossover. I am the director of my dream story, and I imagine that I don’t succumb to the fright, but I battle through my cleansing by simply standing, holding my arms outward and opening my eyes. 

I hope that would be me at my entrance into heaven, allowing God the purging of the evil genes in my DNA, the erasing of the log files full of painful memories, and the repairing of my dulled senses. I aspire to walk through the inferno of God’s appropriate wrath.

The fireplace reappears. Already it needs more logs. That’s about as far as my daydream gets. I don’t know what happens next, really. I’m not sure that it matters for me to know until I stand with arms outstretched and willing to be cleansed by fire, like bubbling up the gold in a furnace.

Looking back to Romans, I read on, searching for more information about the point of God’s wrath.

“Not only will we be saved by his life, but we also boast of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”

Ah, that’s why my dream doesn’t go any further. I can’t live as though fully reconciled. The cycle of seasons still churns. 

Dreaming of being in heaven cannot be real without that reality of being fully reconciled to him, in all my waking minutes and hours and days. Who can imagine a valley between the mountains where the seasons are permanent fixtures of creation, perfect as heaven is perfect.

The fireplace and daydreaming are good reminders that my cleansing will be continued. There will be more logs, every winter that I have left. 

My feet and my mouth make my hope real right now when I am ready to boast of God, and will be fully reconciled. Will I stretch out my arms for that cleansing, to be proven as gold in the furnace? I hope so.