Last week Dianna and I were channel surfing and stopped to watch Star Trek Generations, a movie that I have seen about five times, maybe more.  Now I know what you are thinking; I was the one channel surfing as it is a documented fact that channel surfing is a genetically transmitted and exclusively male trait, like male patterned baldness or being skilled at taking out the trash.  I know, I know, there may be some woman out there somewhere who channel surfs with a remote control– it is after all a big world.  But I am thinking if that particular woman exists, she has boldly gone where no woman has ever gone before.  OK, I will stop with the sexist talk before I lose my remote control privileges! 

So back to Star Trek.  I have been a Star Trek fan since college, although I am not a full-blown Trekkie like that woman who used to work at McDonald’s on Rodney Parham. She walked to work with her space suit on everyday before changing into the Golden Arches shirt, which oddly enough looked more alien than her Star Trek gear.  I think she may have been beamed up by Scotty, but her body was inadvertently left behind.

            Kirk can beat up a Klingon bare-handed – Picard was buddy buddy with the Klingons; Picard is a French man with an English accent—go figure; Kirk can beat a Vulcan at Chess; Kirk had more dates than his first officer, Kirk was the original number 1; Kirk once fought a Greek god– and won; and finally, one word: Hair.

            The movie we saw the other night actually tied the two series together, it was called Star Trek Generations.  It involved the miracle of time travel and that was the mechanism for getting Kirk and Picard in the same movie.  It was sort of the best of both worlds (or in this case, the best of both new and strange worlds where no one has gone before).   In the movie Generations, Picard confronts a villain willing to destroy highly populated planets to experience euphoria in a region of space called the Nexus.  The Nexus was a place of unspeakable joy where time stood still.  It was a heaven-like place where all your happiest moments lived on forever.  This Nexus was so enticing that it led to irrational and desperate acts (such as destroying whole planets) by the one who was trying to enter into its joys.  The Nexus was a high more addictive than crack or Best Buy on Black Friday.  The Nexus was a place that gave relief from the suffering that the main characters had experienced in life, and was a cosmic do-over where you could get an everlasting second chance at happiness.  You see, Kirk and Picard had made mistakes and had regrets.  And once you made it to this temporal flux, you never wanted to return to mere mortal existence with all its limitations.

            Knowing that Star Trek always had a moral parable somewhere in the subplot, it was an easy jump to view the Nexus as some kind of archetype of heaven.  After all, heaven is seen by some as a carefree place of great peace and joy, a place where time stands still, an eternal place of unspeakable bliss.  Heaven for many is a place of do-overs, where our human limitations and frailties are eliminated and we always, always get it right.  It is a place where time stands still. It is the ultimate escape for us who are victimized by the human predicament, and in case you haven’t noticed– that is all of us. 

            I wonder about this place where time stands still.  In the movie, Kirk and Picard decided that despite the obvious joys of such a place, that it wasn’t real.  That the very things that make human existence worthwhile were missing.  That the so-called negative emotions and their corresponding risks were somehow desirable if one is to have any chance at a meaningful life.  With no chance of misery and failure, the wonderful was not so great.  One appreciates harmony after discord is resolved into such.   So in the end they gave up life in the Nexus to return to their mortal existence where they took risks, knew fear and faced death.  And maybe the most important thing for them both was that it was a place where time did matter – and that somehow factored into the meaningfulness of life here and now.

            In our lectionary text on this second Sunday of Advent, I have forgone the gospel text and selected the Second epistle of Peter text, and I would like to read it again beginning with verse 8:  But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

            This is an interesting passage, and most of the commentators I read this week seem to indicate that it was written to give hope to the believers who began to doubt that Christ was coming again soon.  They were suffering some persecution and struggling to survive as a people, and the long promised reward of divine intervention had not occurred.  It was obvious to them that it might not ever happen.  So the author of this epistle explains the delay in terms of “our time is not like God’s time,” he is on a different clock, and also that he was dragging his feet so all would have the chance to come to him so that they might be spared the day of  judgment.  You see, to come back prematurely would slam the door of opportunity on many who had not yet discovered the love of God.  So if nothing else, those who just can’t wait for the second coming, who can’t wait for heaven, those who can’t wait for the great big cosmic “I told you so” are those who may be the ultimate egocentrists who have given up on all the others who need to know the love and forgiveness of God.  In effect they are saying , “to hell with them, just rescue me from this life here and now.”  We should all be thankful that Christ has not returned in such fashion already for no other reason than many (perhaps including us) would not have been here or been in a position to experience God’s grace.

            I tend to not believe in a literal second coming, at least in the sense where a divine cosmic rescuer intervenes in time and accomplishes what his followers could not do.  Now I have no problem with such theories of human ineptitude, but I do have a problem that such an appearance is so out of character with anything we know about the Nazarene who walked the earth for 33 years.  He was about peace, he was about love, and he was about acceptance.  Yes, true, he was also about judgment.  But he was never about might, or force or about power.  For so many people the second coming is inseparable from motifs of power and coercion, from metaphors of force and destruction.  I fail to see that in the life of one who turned the other cheek, who walked the second mile, who did not speak in his own behalf when unfairly arrested, who promoted a countercultural way of love that would transform history, a person of violence and coercion.  The view of the second coming is often portrayed as one of a blitzkrieg where the opposition is efficiently exterminated in the mother of all wars.  Jesus, the Prince of Peace becomes the ultimate military dictator, a general, a god of war. 

            But that is only half the problem for me.  The other half is the view of heaven or what will happen after such a coming.  If the second coming is uncharacteristically militaristic, then heaven is also uncharacteristically materialistic.  It is often seen as a la-la land where we all will be rewarded with great wealth—streets of pure gold, and each of us will have a big mansion.  We will feast until excess, and we will live a life more luxurious than a sheik in Dubai, or say a CEO of a carmaker.  And I am sorry; I am not so sure that we all deserve a great big paycheck for reciting a formula while others who are equally moral will be exterminated and sentence to torment forever and ever amen for not doing so.  Do I believe in heaven and hell?  Yes I do.  But I am not so sure our prevailing models are based on the Jesus of the gospels as much as our own human ideas and paradigms of success and failure.  We have a capitalistic view of eternity.  If Jesus has to come back and kick butt for God’s purposes to be accomplished, then his first coming was totally unnecessary and wasted.  It was an ineffectual effort to save the world that he so loved.  Think about it. One day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day with the Lord. Time on a clock means nothing to the Alpha and Omega, the one who is the beginning and the end.  This passage instead indicates that what does matter to Him is what we do with our time.

            So what are we to think about the Day of Judgment, of heaven and the afterlife? It is a big topic, but I think one key in this whole deal is in this passage of scripture this morning, and it is a great passage for advent, as this is the Sunday of hope.  And the whole heaven as the ultimate escape or denial mechanism is on my mind today because of events that occurred in my life last week.  On this past Monday morning I received a text message on my phone that simply said, “Eve has passed away.” The message was sent from the phone of my friend Eve, the 29 year old former student of mine who has battled cancer for three years (note to the reader: you can read two other sermons on Eve, suffering & grief at my blog http://www.providencecyberchurch.wordpress.com , and search for “All About Eve” and “The Drawer”).  I knew from the daily email updates that I had received from her sister/caregiver that she would not likely make it until Christmas, but the news was still shocking.  She had been very low before and had always rallied.  After the initial blow, all I could do was say “thank God it is over.”  In all my years of seeing thousands of people who were dying or who had died, I have not seen many suffer like Eve.  She had intractable pain all up and down the many tumors in her spine from her tailbone to her skull.  She went through a period of time where she threw-up every couple of hours around the clock, and this lasted for months.  I will spare you more details, you get the point.  It was often times painful to read the daily updates, in part because I was able to read between the lines having seen it hundreds of times before play out in the lives of others.  But her sister always included the note that Eve was still Eve, that cancer did not define her, and that her patented smile always shown through.  Eve is at peace now, that I am sure of, and if ever the old cliché was appropriate it is with her:  she no longer has to suffer or be sick.

            I decided to drive to Memphis Thursday night for the visitation and grab a bite at Central Barbeque, a place Eve introduced me to.  It was closed due to a fire. So I made it to the church, and I didn’t know a soul there; I had never met her family.  I first met her dad after waiting with hundreds in a long line to greet the family.  Her family immediately knew who I was upon introduction, and they were amazed that I would drive two hours for the visitation.  I knew down deep that I did it for me, not for them.  They had pictures everywhere, videos playing on several walls in the mega-church where she was a member. Many people there were laughing and telling stories, sharing fond memories of her.  Everyone seemed so upbeat– except me.  I think I was the only one who was holding back the tears.  You see, they were all celebrating Eve’s homecoming in heaven, and spoke with glee about her new life, all well and happy.  I was not able to do that, I was in a different place.  I found myself wishing I had seen her at least one more time as it was always in my plans to do so. 

            Her dad walked past a long line of people to meet me.  Maybe it was because he didn’t know me, or maybe it was because I stood out like a sore thumb with my starched white shirt, my best navy suit and wool topcoat in a room full of jeans and t-shirts.  Or maybe it was the angst on my face in a room full of jovial people.  He thanked me profusely for coming, and then he let his guard down from the almost cold chat we were having about how better off she was in heaven, singing and rejoicing on streets of gold and all that.  He then said to me, “I will never understand why she had to suffer and die.  She never once complained about all she had to go through.  Her 30^th birthday would have been on the 15^th of this month. I don’t know how to understand this or get my mind around it.”  Don is a minister, a father, and about my own age. And we connected in a brief moment, father to father, which is out point of intersection.  Even in all my experience, I didn’t know the answer to his question either, but I left convinced that death is an enemy that has a harsh sting to it.  It is a thief that robs us. And all the talk of heaven in the world can’t take that pain away.  It just doesn’t bring her back to that dad and that devoted family.  Eve’s life ended way too quickly, her life was too short, time was her enemy.  But isn’t that always the case, whether you are nine or 99?  Death always strikes quickly, like a thief in the night.

            So where is the hope in this story, where is the hope on this Advent Sunday of hope?  It is for me is a tenuous hope, but hope nonetheless, and it is in verse 8:  “One day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”  The text then speaks of the Lord being slow to execute judgment as he desperately wants all to have the chance to come to him.  And speaking of time, it then suggests that we should make our time count and live life like it should be lived. 

            You see, the truth is it is not about the amount of time that any of us have on earth.  It is not about a pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by Nexus type heaven where time is meaningless and doesn’t count, it is about the quality of time that we have and what we do with our time that counts.  That is what these verses tell us.  Time is never about “when” but about “what” and “how” and especially about “who.”  It is about quality, not quantity, about “Kairos” not “Chronos.”  It is about making today count. It is about living like there is no tomorrow, and whatever that means it means getting it right, getting your priorities right, living your life right and paying attention to who and what are really important.

            I attended the Baptist Health’s annual corporation lunch this past week and every year they have a devotional.  This year’s devotional was not from one of the many preachers in the room as usual, but from a former patient, a 40ish year old man who had received not one but two heart transplants at our hospital.  He had three young children at home, and he spoke of the medical miracles in his life.  He too had been at death’s door, but had been given the hope of a second chance at life, he had been given more time, and he let us know that he was making it count.  He said that it had been a year since his last transplant that saved his fading life.  He then told us what he has done with his extra year that he has so been blessed with—he celebrated the 7, 8, & 9 birthdays of his children.  He celebrated the 27th anniversary of his marriage.  He attended many of his kids sporting and school events; he celebrated another Thanksgiving and Christmas with his loved ones.  He worshipped with his church family every single Sunday.  He attended the NCAA basketball playoffs with his father and sons at Alltel arena.  And the list went on and on.  He learned to make today count, for you see, time waits for no one (Tempus neminem manet).  He quoted St. Augustine, “Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.”

            So you see our hope is not in heaven, who understands that anyway?  It will be consolation for the family of Eve, but it will not bring her back and since grief is about them and not about Eve. It takes a while for it to soak in, as a highly cognitive concept like heaven cannot be adequately pondered when our thinking is disrupted by our emotions of loss.

            Pure and simple, our hope is right here, right now.  Our hope is in today, and it is in this day that we make a difference and make life count.  It is true in our personal lives and in our church life.  It is true at work and at home.  It is true in our relationships and true in our prayers.  Maybe Jean-Luc Picard said it best in his last line to the movie Star Trek Generations as he was reflecting on his experience in the Nexus: “Someone once told me that ‘time’ is a predator that stalks us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment because it will never come again.“

            And on the second Sunday of Advent of Hope, year B, our time is laced with the hope that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us not ever from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Not ever. 

Even so, I will miss you Eve. Amen.