Sermon for August 11, 2024
Pentecost 12 B
John 6:35, 41-51
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
What is eternity? How long is it? These are the questions you start thinking about when you’re in the kind of places I was recently visiting, along with my son Liam and his Scout troop on their 50-mile trek last week to northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
As we hiked up and down the hills and ridges and valleys left by the glacier, onward through dense hardwood forest on the North Country National Scenic Trail in Wisconsin, we came across a spot called Swedish Settlement. 150 years ago, a few Swedish immigrant families carved out small parcels of land there in the forest wilderness, to live and farm. All that’s left now is the foundation of an old barn, as the forest reclaims the land into wilderness. 150 years is a long time, but nowhere near eternity.
Up on the Keweenaw Peninsula, which is the northernmost point in the state of Michigan, jutting into Lake Superior, we hiked through a 500-acre section of old-growth forest—home to 500-year-old white pine trees, scraping the sky 100 feet above us. We found one old pine that was dead but still standing. The wood was smooth because all the bark had long ago fallen off, and the bottom of the tree trunk had a cavity so tall and wide that I could squeeze my way in and stand up—inside the tree! When I got in, the first thing I noticed was how quiet it was (like a sound-proof room). Then I looked up, and found the entire tree was hollow. I could see the blue sky, and the green leaves of taller trees through a hole 100 feet above me! How long did it take that tree to grow so tall, die, and then become completely hollow? Many hundreds of years. But nowhere near eternity.
We skipped smooth stones with hues of purple, rust, white, and brown into Copper Harbor, a quiet bay on Lake Superior. 180 years ago a storm whipped up and smashed a tall-masted cargo ship named the “John Jacob Astor” to pieces on the rocky point in front of us, but last week those waters were smooth as glass. The shoreline we walked on was formed from basalt and rhyolite rocks that once flowed as lava and then hardened into their present state more than 1 billion years ago. Now that’s old, but it pales in comparison to when we looked up into the cloudless sky later that night to see the 13-billion-year-old Milky Way splashed across outer space, lit up in all its glory. Looking at the galaxy with all those stars is looking into the beginning of time itself. And even that is nowhere near eternity.
That’s when it occurred to me that eternity simply cannot be measured. Sure, you can compare it to hundreds or even billions of years, but whatever number you try to put on it, it’s still beyond our comprehension.
Jesus said in John 6:47, “Very truly I tell you, anyone who believes has eternal life.” A little earlier, in verse 40, Jesus talks about his purpose for living among us when he said, “This indeed is the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”
What is eternal life? We can’t measure it with a number, even if we picked a number so big that we couldn’t possibly wrap our minds around how big it is. Yet through our faith in Jesus, we can gain a shift in mindset: eternal life cannot be measured, it can only be experienced. Eternal life is not a number, it’s a relationship with God. Eternal life is not a quantity of years, it’s a quality of life that is given to us by God through the presence of Jesus.
That quality of life grows the more we rely on Christ’s love and live by it, in the way we treat others. St. Paul describes it in Ephesians 4. “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you…live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.” That’s what the quality of life, found in Christ, looks like and it grows within us the more we open our hearts and minds to the Holy Spirit who transforms us by God’s grace.
The more we trust Jesus to be who he says he is, the closer his Father in heaven will draw us into God’s own life. Through our relationship with God we can find, as St. Paul writes in Philippians, “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” [Philippians 3:8], and of learning “to be content with whatever I have…in any and all circumstances…of having plenty or of being in need…[I can be content because of] Christ who strengthens me” [Philippians 4:11-13].
Eternal life is not about having unlimited time to get more stuff or do more things. It’s about a God of unlimited love sharing the life of Jesus with us. So, what is eternity? What is eternal life? A good place to start is by contemplating the trees and lakes, and rocks and stars, and how long they’ve been around—and finding awe and wonder in them. And then you can place that same awe and wonder in the promise Jesus makes, in John 6:35—when he says “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
As you come to the Lord’s Supper and behold the bread that is placed in your hands, and the bread that is shared among your brothers and sisters in Christ here and all around the world, in every time and place, in heaven and on earth—know that Christ is right there, with you, giving you his life. And the quality of life found in him, which lasts for eternity, is available to you and to the world, even today. Amen.