The World to Come
Illustration
Stories
Contents
“The World to Come” by John Sumwalt
“We Are There” by Frank Ramirez
The World to Come
by John Sumwalt
Revelation 21:10, 22--22:5
“And in the spirit, he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. It has the glory of God and radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal.” Revelation 21:10-11
John Wesley taught his Methodist followers to enquire regularly about each other’s spiritual health. They were to ask one another, at least weekly in their class meetings, “How is it with your soul?” The question assumes that not everyone who frequents Christian worship is willing to make—that there is such an entity as a soul, that I am a soul and you are a soul, a spiritual being as well as a physical being.
The French theologian Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings on a spiritual path, we are spiritual beings on a human path.” In his book, Denial of Soul, M. Scott Peck defines soul as “…a God-created, God nurtured, unique, developable, immortal human spirit.” Peck declares a soul is a person’s “essential spirit” and because it is spirit it cannot be codified or measured. The soul is a mystery as the Creator of souls is a mystery. Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul…”
Most of us don’t live as if we believe we are eternal souls. We live as if we are a body with a life span of seventy to a hundred years. We prepare carefully for retirement. We have pension plans, carefully selected investments, IRAs, mutual funds, stocks, and bonds.
We have long, sober conversations about the best way to make ourselves secure in old age, to ensure our present standard of living right up to the moment that the hearse comes. We laugh when we see the bumper sticker, “The One With The Most Toys Wins,” but it is not too far from the way we live. Many of us who live in the western world have so many possessions that we cannot, or will not, allow ourselves to see beyond this world and what we have in it. There is so much more to see and know.
In his book, Carpe Diem, Tony Campolo talks about a Franciscan monk he met at conference where he was to be the featured speaker. The monk was there to lead meditation and worship, some of which was to occur outside on the grassy hills and in the woods surrounding the conference center. Tony was trying get into the meditating, but nothing was happening for him. So one day he took the monk aside and told him about his frustration. He received quite a surprising response. His Franciscan friend told him he “…did not know how to experience nature as a sacrament.” He said when you are trying to meditate in a natural setting, “…listen to God. Ask God to speak to you through creation… Look closely at something long enough and you will find that it begins to look back at you. That night Tony went outside, found a place to meditate and followed the monk’s instructions. He fell fast asleep and awoke to a glorious sight:
…everything around me was ablaze with God… I felt myself bombarded by the Holy Spirit. Holiness was coming from under and over and around everything… the glory of the Lord was burning in the bushes around me… I was already raptured, and I was already tasting the world that is to come.
* * *
We Are There
by Frank Ramirez
Acts 16:9-15, Psalm 67
…we…us…(Acts 16:10)
Sometimes the further we are from an event the more clearly we see it. My memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis are those of an eight-year-old whose father was stationed at the Navy Base in Norfolk, Virginia, a certain target for those missiles, and of the words of comfort and warning our mother gave us before we went to school one day, uncertain if we would return or what we would return to.
Those thirteen days in October of 1962 have been chronicled many times by participants on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to deploy nuclear-armed missiles and Soviet troops in Cuba was a complex one, sparked in part by the resolve of President Kennedy to draw a line in West Berlin. The world came to the brink of what would have been a catastrophic nuclear war – but how close we are still discovering.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Martin J. Sherwin describes himself as “the air intelligence officer of his antisubmarine warfare training squadron” during that time. He wrote the book Gambling with Armageddon in response to a statement by then Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in response to Robert F. Kennedy’s memoir of that period, Thirteen Days. Acheson said “plain dumb luck” was what saved the United States and the Soviet Union from launching nuclear missiles at each other. Sherwin wrote that when he began the book, he knew that statement was wrong. Afterwards he changed his mind. “Now that I am finished, I know he was right.” (4)
Not long before that crisis John F. Kennedy had read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which chronicled how “war can begin simply because no one knows how to stop it.” (9) Two incidents from Sherwin’s book demonstrate how war can start and how important putting yourself in the picture can changes things.
Fifteen months before the crisis, Captain Vasily Alexandrovich Arkhipov was serving on a nuclear-powered submarine whose poor design rendered the control rods in the nuclear reactor useless. He was present for and approved of the submarine commander’s decision to rotate teams of volunteers wearing protective gear in shifts of ten to fifteen minutes to weld in new coolant pipes. It worked, but twenty-two sailors died of radiation poisoning, some within days, and all with two years. It was horrible to witness the effects of nuclear power, but when, during the crisis, Arkhipov was the political officer aboard one of the submarines deployed to protect Cuba during the missile crisis, his experience led him to intervene at a crucial moment. The submarine was designed to sail in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. Its cooling systems failed in the warm waters of the Caribbean. The “coolest” rooms in the sub were 110 degrees, while others were 140 degrees and more. The plumbing was not up to its task either.
American forces had been ordered to leave the Soviet submarines alone. Instead, they forced the Soviet sub to the surface with depth charges and fired on it from helicopters. The Soviet submarines were under orders not to fire their nuclear armed missiles, but the sub’s captain, stressed from the heat and the horrible conditions, ordered the weapons armed and prepared to fire them. However, because Arkhipov had witnessed the horrors of death by radiation, he prevented the captain from firing the missiles. If he had not been present, and he could have easily been stationed on one of three other subs, a nuclear war would have begun.
Meanwhile, at the executive level, nearly all of Kennedy’s advisors were insisting he order a ground and air attack to remove the missiles from Cuba. At first Kennedy leaned that way himself, but the thought of mutual nuclear destruction haunted him. More important, he tried over and over to put himself in his counterpart’s shoes. “Why does (Khrushchev) put these (missiles) in there, though?” he asked. (254) As Sherwin put it, “Kennedy needed to understand Khrushchev’s thinking.” (256) He was certain Khrushchev knew the United States had far more missiles that the Soviet Union, that many of them were airborne flying at or near Russia, and that they would all die if war began. He knew Khrushchev had seen the ravages of the Second World War. Assuming he was not a madman, Kennedy put himself in his opponent’s shoes, and thought in terms of “we” and “us.” By so doing, he gradually developed a way for both sides to back away from the crisis. Berlin and Cuba would become safe from an opponent’s invasion, and Kennedy would quietly remove missiles from Turkey (they were outdated anyway) while Khrushchev would remove his from Cuba.
Something special happens in Acts 16:10 that is easy to miss. The historian and physician Luke uses the words “we” and “us.” For the first time Luke puts himself – and us – in the picture. He is no longer describing things he was told about. He is telling us he is there. Now Paul’s adventures are his adventures. His dangers because Luke’s dangers. The Acts of the Apostles truly becomes our story because we are there with him, an actual participant, while all this takes place. It makes a good deal of difference.
(Want to know more? Martin J. Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon (2020) Alfred A Knopf, is available for purchase and possibly at your local library.)
*****************************************
StoryShare, May 22, 2022 issue.
Copyright 2022 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“The World to Come” by John Sumwalt
“We Are There” by Frank Ramirez
The World to Come
by John Sumwalt
Revelation 21:10, 22--22:5
“And in the spirit, he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. It has the glory of God and radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal.” Revelation 21:10-11
John Wesley taught his Methodist followers to enquire regularly about each other’s spiritual health. They were to ask one another, at least weekly in their class meetings, “How is it with your soul?” The question assumes that not everyone who frequents Christian worship is willing to make—that there is such an entity as a soul, that I am a soul and you are a soul, a spiritual being as well as a physical being.
The French theologian Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings on a spiritual path, we are spiritual beings on a human path.” In his book, Denial of Soul, M. Scott Peck defines soul as “…a God-created, God nurtured, unique, developable, immortal human spirit.” Peck declares a soul is a person’s “essential spirit” and because it is spirit it cannot be codified or measured. The soul is a mystery as the Creator of souls is a mystery. Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul…”
Most of us don’t live as if we believe we are eternal souls. We live as if we are a body with a life span of seventy to a hundred years. We prepare carefully for retirement. We have pension plans, carefully selected investments, IRAs, mutual funds, stocks, and bonds.
We have long, sober conversations about the best way to make ourselves secure in old age, to ensure our present standard of living right up to the moment that the hearse comes. We laugh when we see the bumper sticker, “The One With The Most Toys Wins,” but it is not too far from the way we live. Many of us who live in the western world have so many possessions that we cannot, or will not, allow ourselves to see beyond this world and what we have in it. There is so much more to see and know.
In his book, Carpe Diem, Tony Campolo talks about a Franciscan monk he met at conference where he was to be the featured speaker. The monk was there to lead meditation and worship, some of which was to occur outside on the grassy hills and in the woods surrounding the conference center. Tony was trying get into the meditating, but nothing was happening for him. So one day he took the monk aside and told him about his frustration. He received quite a surprising response. His Franciscan friend told him he “…did not know how to experience nature as a sacrament.” He said when you are trying to meditate in a natural setting, “…listen to God. Ask God to speak to you through creation… Look closely at something long enough and you will find that it begins to look back at you. That night Tony went outside, found a place to meditate and followed the monk’s instructions. He fell fast asleep and awoke to a glorious sight:
…everything around me was ablaze with God… I felt myself bombarded by the Holy Spirit. Holiness was coming from under and over and around everything… the glory of the Lord was burning in the bushes around me… I was already raptured, and I was already tasting the world that is to come.
* * *
We Are There
by Frank Ramirez
Acts 16:9-15, Psalm 67
…we…us…(Acts 16:10)
Sometimes the further we are from an event the more clearly we see it. My memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis are those of an eight-year-old whose father was stationed at the Navy Base in Norfolk, Virginia, a certain target for those missiles, and of the words of comfort and warning our mother gave us before we went to school one day, uncertain if we would return or what we would return to.
Those thirteen days in October of 1962 have been chronicled many times by participants on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to deploy nuclear-armed missiles and Soviet troops in Cuba was a complex one, sparked in part by the resolve of President Kennedy to draw a line in West Berlin. The world came to the brink of what would have been a catastrophic nuclear war – but how close we are still discovering.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Martin J. Sherwin describes himself as “the air intelligence officer of his antisubmarine warfare training squadron” during that time. He wrote the book Gambling with Armageddon in response to a statement by then Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in response to Robert F. Kennedy’s memoir of that period, Thirteen Days. Acheson said “plain dumb luck” was what saved the United States and the Soviet Union from launching nuclear missiles at each other. Sherwin wrote that when he began the book, he knew that statement was wrong. Afterwards he changed his mind. “Now that I am finished, I know he was right.” (4)
Not long before that crisis John F. Kennedy had read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which chronicled how “war can begin simply because no one knows how to stop it.” (9) Two incidents from Sherwin’s book demonstrate how war can start and how important putting yourself in the picture can changes things.
Fifteen months before the crisis, Captain Vasily Alexandrovich Arkhipov was serving on a nuclear-powered submarine whose poor design rendered the control rods in the nuclear reactor useless. He was present for and approved of the submarine commander’s decision to rotate teams of volunteers wearing protective gear in shifts of ten to fifteen minutes to weld in new coolant pipes. It worked, but twenty-two sailors died of radiation poisoning, some within days, and all with two years. It was horrible to witness the effects of nuclear power, but when, during the crisis, Arkhipov was the political officer aboard one of the submarines deployed to protect Cuba during the missile crisis, his experience led him to intervene at a crucial moment. The submarine was designed to sail in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. Its cooling systems failed in the warm waters of the Caribbean. The “coolest” rooms in the sub were 110 degrees, while others were 140 degrees and more. The plumbing was not up to its task either.
American forces had been ordered to leave the Soviet submarines alone. Instead, they forced the Soviet sub to the surface with depth charges and fired on it from helicopters. The Soviet submarines were under orders not to fire their nuclear armed missiles, but the sub’s captain, stressed from the heat and the horrible conditions, ordered the weapons armed and prepared to fire them. However, because Arkhipov had witnessed the horrors of death by radiation, he prevented the captain from firing the missiles. If he had not been present, and he could have easily been stationed on one of three other subs, a nuclear war would have begun.
Meanwhile, at the executive level, nearly all of Kennedy’s advisors were insisting he order a ground and air attack to remove the missiles from Cuba. At first Kennedy leaned that way himself, but the thought of mutual nuclear destruction haunted him. More important, he tried over and over to put himself in his counterpart’s shoes. “Why does (Khrushchev) put these (missiles) in there, though?” he asked. (254) As Sherwin put it, “Kennedy needed to understand Khrushchev’s thinking.” (256) He was certain Khrushchev knew the United States had far more missiles that the Soviet Union, that many of them were airborne flying at or near Russia, and that they would all die if war began. He knew Khrushchev had seen the ravages of the Second World War. Assuming he was not a madman, Kennedy put himself in his opponent’s shoes, and thought in terms of “we” and “us.” By so doing, he gradually developed a way for both sides to back away from the crisis. Berlin and Cuba would become safe from an opponent’s invasion, and Kennedy would quietly remove missiles from Turkey (they were outdated anyway) while Khrushchev would remove his from Cuba.
Something special happens in Acts 16:10 that is easy to miss. The historian and physician Luke uses the words “we” and “us.” For the first time Luke puts himself – and us – in the picture. He is no longer describing things he was told about. He is telling us he is there. Now Paul’s adventures are his adventures. His dangers because Luke’s dangers. The Acts of the Apostles truly becomes our story because we are there with him, an actual participant, while all this takes place. It makes a good deal of difference.
(Want to know more? Martin J. Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon (2020) Alfred A Knopf, is available for purchase and possibly at your local library.)
*****************************************
StoryShare, May 22, 2022 issue.
Copyright 2022 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
