Will I See My Dog in Heaven? - Sermon Transcript

Well, good morning, friends.

It is good to see each and every one of you.

If you are a guest this morning, once again, welcome.

My name is Mitchell.

I serve as a senior minister here, and we are in the midst of a worship series, week two, a series we're calling Facts, Frequently Asked Questions.

And we put out a call because, like I said, this is a

 a sequel to a series we did last year.

We put out a call for questions, got almost 90 of them last year, and so we didn't do that again.

You all asked plenty of questions to work through.

And when I was reading through these questions in preparation for this series, I expected the theology stuff.

We're a deep-thinking church.

I expected questions around doubt, because I think we all carry it in some form or fashion.

I expected the hard stuff, and yeah,

 thank you you you submitted the hard stuff and we got all of that but more uh people asked about their pets than I thought uh I thought would happen and so here we are week two of uh more facts and the question uh for today is will I see my dog in heaven

 And so I want to start by telling you about my dog, Hava, and how she came into my life.

I was in my last semester of seminary, gathered together with my fellow students and dear friends.

We had a little group, probably about 10 of us, and we would get together every Sunday night in Denver to, well...

 to watch Game of Thrones.

We streamed Game of Thrones from a BitTorrent download because we were poor seminary students who strong ethical convictions did not extend to corporate profit.

Just being honest.

 And at some point during the evening, someone pulled up one of those old BuzzFeed quizzes.

I don't remember if it was like, what kind of dog are you or what kind of dog should you own?

I don't remember which one, but I took the quiz and I do remember the number one answer.

And that was a Spanish water dog.

And I had never heard of a Spanish water dog before.

 Now, like I said, we did have strong ethical convictions.

And every single person in the room said that I should adopt and not buy a dog.

And they're right.

And that's the right thing to do.

But I was curious about the Spanish water dog.

So I looked it up.

 And there were three Spanish water dog breeders in the United States, three breeders in the entire country, and one of them was 41 miles away from Lone Oak, Texas.

And I was moving to Lone Oak in three months.

And if you don't know Lone Oak, shame on you.

It's a town of about 500 people east of Dallas.

 One stop light.

And like I've said many times from this poll, but one of the best bacon cheeseburgers in the entire state at the grocery store.

And so I just accepted my first appointment in Lone Oak and I was moving from Denver, which is Denver's awesome.

I was moving to Lone Oak.

 in East Texas, I'd never been there, and I would be a solo pastor of a little United Methodist church there, but

 They had a parsonage and it had a three quarters of an acre yard.

And I was 26 and I didn't know anyone.

And I was both excited and terrified, probably in equal measure.

And so I called the breeder and I learned about Hava.

And she had been born actually in Spain.

Hava had been born in Spain and brought to the United States specifically to help introduce the breed to

 to Americans.

And she was brought over for that purpose, but her hips weren't perfect.

She had a little bit of hip dysplasia, nothing debilitating, but enough of it that they didn't want to enter it into the gene pool so early.

So here was this dog, already four years old, with a job she was supposed to do and a body that wouldn't cooperate, and she needed a home.

And so three weeks after moving to Lone Oak, I adopted Hava.

 And I want to tell you about her for just a minute because, well, she deserves it.

Spanish water dogs were bred specifically to work with fishermen off the coast of Spain.

These dogs would spend their entire day right next to one other person, a fisherman, in a small boat in the water.

And

 The owner would send the dog out into the ocean to help herd schools of fish into nets.

One person, one dog, all day in a tiny boat, which means they were bred over centuries for one thing, loyalty, proximity.

 the deep instinct to be near another person they belong to.

Hava was that dog.

She wanted to be close to me, not in sort of an anxious way or an annoying way, not in a way that made you feel like she was following you around everywhere.

She just wanted to be at your feet, so she would find you wherever you were in the house and settle in.

She slept on her back with her feet up against the wall.

It was very cute and a bit weird.

 She was obsessed with tennis balls, her one tennis ball.

She would adopt one tennis ball for a season, and I swear I could throw 20 tennis balls out in the backyard, but she'd find the one that she had adopted and she would carry it around with her everywhere she went.

She was smart and a bit silly, and honestly, she was exactly what I needed when I moved from Denver to Lone Oak.

 Because those early years in ministry were lonely in ways that are sometimes hard to explain, and the parsonage was big.

 four bedrooms.

The town was small, and I was building something from scratch within myself, really, relationally and vocationally.

And most days, most days, I was really not that busy.

Most days, it was just me, three quarters of an acre of land and a Spanish water dog who had no interest in being anywhere other than right next to me.

 She became my constant.

And Eli and I have talked about getting another dog, and the boys would love it.

And we have the space.

It's kind of a sin we don't have one with the yard we do have.

And every time we get close to that decision, we find a reason to wait.

The schedules are complicated.

It takes a lot of coordination and care, it turns out, to keep things alive in a house.

And there's already four of us.

 two hermit crabs, so we're busy.

But if I'm being honest, the deeper truth is we're still grieving.

We said goodbye to Hava at the City Vet on Gaston and Garland Road.

Some of you know that intersection.

And we knew it was time.

She had developed a brain tumor, and we could have extended her life, but that would have been for our benefit, not hers.

 So we made the harder, more loving decision and we let her go.

And the boys were young enough at the time that their world included her but didn't revolve around her.

Eli and I are the ones I think who felt it most and honestly, we still feel it.

I don't always know what to do with that grief because the culture that we live in doesn't leave a lot of room for it.

 You get a few days, maybe a week, you're not supposed to still be sitting with the loss of a dog years later.

You're supposed to just get another one.

But grief doesn't work that way.

Love doesn't work that way.

So here's what I wanna say before we get into the text.

I don't think that this question, will I see my dog in heaven, is an embarrassing one that we're asking.

 I think we're asking it because many of us have loved something deeply and lost it.

And we want to know whether or not our love survives.

So it may seem trivial, but it's really not a small question.

It's a question of depth and meeting and ultimately God's goodness.

So this morning to help us answer that question specifically, we're in the book of Revelation.

I'll be reading from chapter 21, verses 1 through 5.

 The author says, then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

I saw a holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, see, see the home of God is among mortals.

 He will dwell with them.

They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more.

Mourning and crying and pain will be no more.

For the first things have passed away.

And the one who is seated on the throne said, see, I am making all things new.

 Also, he said, write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.

For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

Will you pray with me?

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer.

 Help us to trust, to really trust that you are indeed making all things new.

Amen.

There's a lot going on in the book of Revelation.

We know that.

But one of the things that jumps out at us really quickly when we read this text in the 21st chapter is the orientation, the location of heaven.

Heaven is

 I hate to break it to you all, but heaven in this chapter does not go up.

It comes down.

And I know that runs against most of what we have absorbed our whole life.

We've been singing about going up to heaven our whole lives.

 We picture this upward motion leaving the earth behind, arriving somewhere else where the real permanent life finally, finally begins.

The theology most of us have inherited is somewhere along the way.

It goes something like this.

Earth is essentially temporary.

It's a temporary location.

Heaven is permanent.

The body is.

 doesn't really matter that much.

Animals, they don't matter.

The physical world is essentially just a waiting room.

And the goal, the ultimate goal is to get out, to leave earth behind, get to heaven.

And while we may not fully believe that or our logical self can't fully buy into that, it has no doubt become a part of our embedded eschatology, how we think about the end.

 But heaven as an escape, as a physical place somewhere else, is not what John sees in his vision.

John sees the holy city coming down.

The new Jerusalem descending from heaven towards earth.

And the voice from the throne does not say, I'm taking you away from all of this.

Sorry, unfortunately.

It says the home of God is among mortals.

 The direction of redemption in Revelation 21 then is not a direction of escape.

It is a return.

God is moving towards creation, not creation escaping from itself.

 And that reframe, that simple reframing of heaven's location, changes everything about the question we're asking today.

Because if we have the theology wrong, then we will have the answer wrong.

If we believe that God's ultimate plan is to scrap earth, to do away with it, to evacuate the human souls to some other realm, then maybe the animals don't make the cut.

 Maybe the physical world is just kindling.

Maybe grief over a dog is essentially a category error, right?

An attachment to something that was never meant to last.

 But John is not writing that kind of theology, and neither is the rest of Scripture, if we're honest, because if we go back all the way to Genesis 1, before anything else is said about who God is, before we know that God is righteous and holy and powerful, the first thing we learn about God is that God makes things.

That's the first thing we learn about God, that God is a creator, right?

 God creates.

And at the end of each day of God's creation, God looks at what has been made and God calls it good.

Not useful.

Not temporary.

Good.

The animals are called good, the wild creatures of the earth, the birds, the fish in the sea, every living thing.

God looks at it all, all of it, and says, it is good.

 The first thing God ever said about creation was that it was good.

The last thing John sees in his vision is God coming down to dwell amongst that good creation.

That is not a God who is indifferent to what God made.

And yet, for some reason...

 The creation we know is not the creation as God designed it to be.

Paul names this plainly in Romans 8.

He says a whole of creation, all of creation has been groaning.

 groaning together in pains of labor, waiting to be set free from its bondage and decay.

Not just people are suffering, all of creation is groaning.

The whole thing, the animals, the rivers, the mountains, the trees, the oceans, the beaches, the plains, all of it is groaning.

Paul says creation was subjected to futility, not by its own choice, but out of hope.

 and in hope that it would one day be liberated.

There is very real suffering in the world.

There is death in this world.

 There's a dog with a brain tumor and you have to make a decision at a vet's office and it breaks your heart.

And according to Paul, that grief, that particular weight you carry is not separate from the groaning then of all of creation.

It's a part of it.

Your pain is woven into something much larger.

The whole of creation is waiting exactly for what you are waiting for.

 Pain and grief and death and loss are not God's design.

Rather, it's an unfortunate byproduct, I believe, of God giving us the greatest gift.

Freedom.

The ability to choose.

The freedom to make decisions.

And free will comes with significant pain.

Having agency, having freedom comes with the pain associated with being free and living amongst the free creations.

 And so all of creation is waiting and yearning and groaning to no longer be connected to that kind of suffering, which brings us to the most important word in our text this morning.

The one seated on the throne says, see, I am making all things new.

 Chancel Choir did a wonderful job of helping us connect to this idea of making all things new.

Not all people, not all souls, not all humans who said the right prayer at the right time.

All things are being made new.

Now, if you were with us last summer, when we were in our band series and spent four weeks in the book of Revelation, lucky you,

 You may have remembered that we talked about how the church has spent decades turning that book into a manual of fear.

 Left behind theology, escape hatch theology, a God who's done with this world and ready to light it on fire.

And one of the things that we kept coming back to is that Revelation, though read carefully, tells a very different story entirely than the one we've been sort of sold.

And this word is part of the reason why.

The word new here in the Greek is not the word for replacement.

It's the word kenos, which means renewed.

 restored, refurbished, made what it was always meant to be.

God is not starting over from scratch.

God is redeeming what already exists, completing what is always lost.

 But it's always been intended to be.

Which I'll say is going to matter quite a bit when we, this summer, continue our band series and pick up the book of Joshua.

Because if you think Revelation is a difficult book, just wait until we spend three weeks with one of the most unsettling texts in all of Scripture.

A book full of conquest and violence.

 and divine commands that make us modern day readers deeply uncomfortable.

And the question we're going to ask is really the same question we asked about Revelation.

What happens when we stop avoiding the hard parts and actually wrestle with them?

What do we find about the character of God on the other side of that wrestling?

So I don't know if this has ever been said from this pulpit, but mark your calendars for July 19th when we start a series on Joshua.

 Don't miss it.

It's going to be amazing.

But for now, with the book of Revelation in its proper place, I want us to quickly look at the fifth chapter.

Because before the vision of the new creation, there is a scene that we talked about.

 Around the throne of God and every creature in heaven and on earth and under earth and in the sea, all of them are joining in song.

Every creature is worshiping God and singing.

That's very odd image, but the song of worship at the end of all things is not a human chorus.

It is the voice of all of creation.

Everything that breathes and moves and has been called good by God gathered together.

Singing.

 That is the image John gives us, and that is what the end looks like.

So will you see your dog in heaven?

I don't exactly know.

I don't know what the new creation looks like.

Nobody does, and anyone who tells you that they have a precise answer is being more confident than the text allows.

But I can tell you what the text says.

 I can tell you that God called the animals good from the very beginning.

I can tell you that Paul describes all of creation as waiting and groaning for liberation.

I can tell you that John's vision of the end includes every creature in heaven and on earth joining the song.

And I can tell you that the promise is not that God will wipe away some tears, but every tear.

That's what the text says.

God will wipe away every tear.

 God will not end just some of our mourning or grief, God will end it all, all of it.

There will be no mourning and grief when God's work is complete.

 So if God's promise is that wide, and I believe it is, then the love you shared with that animal is not a loose end, it's not a category error, it is not beneath the concern of the God who made it and called it good and promised to make all things new.

What I believe and what I put my hope in is that the God who bent down to form the creatures of the earth with the same hands that formed us is the God who declared them good, the God who promises a new creation

 where every tear, every single tear is wiped away.

That God has not forgotten what you lost.

That God is not indifferent to the grief you carry quietly because the world doesn't give you enough room to carry it out loud.

Hava was a Spanish water dog actually bred to spend her life beside one person in a very small boat.

 She didn't get to do the thing she was made for, and so instead she ended up beside me in a parsonage in East Texas in a season when I needed exactly that kind of company.

And maybe that is what I believe about the new creation, that everything and everyone who didn't quite get to do the thing they were made for, everything and everyone bent and broken by this world's long groaning gets to be made whole.

 gets to find their place in the course, gets to find their purpose and their joy, gets to be at last what they were always meant to be.

That is the promise.

That is what John saw coming down out of heaven.

God is making all things new.

All things.

And I will continue hoping that promise will

 is as exactly wide as it sounds.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.