The Door to Eternity
The sermon preached by Fr. Ernie on April 9, 2023.
The Door to Eternity
by Ernest Boyer
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Today is Easter, of course. Just three days earlier Jesus’ disciples had watched Jesus die a slow, agonizing death on the cross. And yet on the following Sunday — Easter Sunday— Jesus appeared to them again, and with that appearance he changed everything. He changed how we think about God. He changed how we think about reality. He changed how we think about ourselves. And how did he do that? Well, let me explain by telling you about a dream I once had.
I had this dream many years ago, and yet I never forgot it. It still haunts me. It still inspires me. As with Jesus’ Easter appearance, it’s changed how I think about everything, especially myself, but all others too. The dream was so vivid that I sometimes wonder whether it was actually a dream at all. Perhaps it was more of a daydream. At this point I’m no longer certain.
What happened was this. I dreamed I was in my house. Naturally, since this was a dream, it was like no house I had ever lived in, but still, in the dream, I knew it was “my house.” I was walking from room to room, and as I did I kept thinking to myself, “Oh, yes, here’s my living room…and here’s my bed room.… Oh, and this is my kitchen, of course … and the spare bedroom.” I went through the whole house this way. Everything was completely as I expected … until I suddenly noticed a door I had never seen before.
“What’s this?” I thought. “How long has this been here?”
Cautiously I turned the nob, afraid that it might be locked, but it was not. Slowly I opened the door and found myself looking into a room I had never seen before. I stepped inside. It was a large room and elegant in an old-fashioned sort of way. All the furniture looked like something from another era, the time of my great-grandparents perhaps. I couldn’t imagine how long it had been since anyone had used this room, and yet everything was spotless and clean. It wasn’t this that held my attention, though. Instead, I noticed at once that across the room was yet another door exactly like the one I had just entered. This too I opened only to find an even larger room. It was like a ballroom in an old mansion.
“How long has all this been here?” I wondered.
But this room too had another door, which also opened to an even older-looking room with a door to a fourth room, which led to a fifth. I went from room to room to room. Each one left me more and more astonished, more and more confused, but also strangely intrigued, and — in the manner of a dream — I soon accepted that all this was just how things were. What I had thought was a small, ordinary house was actually enormous. In fact, it seemed endless. All this time I had been inhabiting a place that was so much more than I had realized, a house filled with secrets. A house filled with mystery. A house I couldn’t find the end of.
Then abruptly I came to a door that was not like any of the others. It was made of heavy, rough wood, like something from a medieval castle. It seemed strangely forbidding, and for the first time I hesitated. I realized that I was afraid to open it. It was only a moment or two more before my curiosity got the better of me, though. I turned the knob. It opened up on to a stairway to what looked like it might be to a basement … or maybe even a dungeon. There were a series of stone steps going down, down, down into darkness.
Now this was scary! Still, I stepped inside and mysteriously a light went on. It was dim and flickering, like a candle flame, only I couldn’t see where it came from. Slowly I descended the steps until I came to a stone floor and found myself standing before what looked like the mouth of a cave. On the walls, I saw ancient paintings and I realized that this cave had been inhabited by some of our earliest human ancestors. There were drawings of horses and of woolly mammoths and little images of men with spears. As I followed the cave deeper and deeper into the earth the pictures eventually stopped. But then I came to yet one more door.
“A door in a cave?” I thought. “Where else could it go this far underground?” And yet I opened it, and suddenly I was dazzled with light. Before me, to my astonishment, I found the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. The door had opened onto a vast landscape, an endless vista of mountains and rivers and trees and meadows, sky and clouds all unbelievably lovely. As incredible as it seemed, this cave deep in the earth — and deep within my own house — actually opened out onto the whole world — maybe even the whole universe — but the world and universe in a form more beautiful than I had ever seen it. It was like you might imagine the Garden of Eden — a vast, wild parkland— and somehow I knew that what I was looking at was the world just at the edge of heaven.
“My house opens up to eternity,” I thought. “And all this time I never knew.”
The thing is, no sooner had I said this, then I realized that it had not really been my house that I had been exploring all this time in my dream. It had been myself. I myself had many rooms inside me, many parts of myself. We all do. Some rooms — some aspects of who we are — we know about. Other rooms we don’t know about. Some parts of who we are actually hide from ourselves because we don’t want to believe that they are actually there, and there are many, many rooms that are buried very deep because we got them from our ancestors. But at the base of it all is a door that opens to eternity, that opens to God. That door is what we call our soul. It’s this that Jesus showed us on that first Easter morning nearly 2000 years ago.
You see, at the heart of Christianity there are three great truths. The first great truth is what we celebrate at Christmas. This is the truth that God became human. This means not only that God became one of us. It also means that God became one with us. By becoming human God joined God’s divinity with our humanity. As the great theologian Athanasius said in the 4th century in his summary of the meaning of the Nicaean Creed: “God became human so that humans could become God.” That means that God is more than something we worship. God is a reality we actually carry God within us. We are so much more than we seem. We are children of God, heirs of God’s Kingdom. This means that, like the house in my dream, we have within us door after door of hidden rooms, rooms that we have shared with countless others going back for as long as there were human beings. We have within us things almost too astonishing to conceive, knowledge that we don’t even realize we know. And yet it’s all there. Each one of us is a great mystery, a walking miracle, if we only could appreciate it. This is the first great truth of Christianity
The second great truth is the one we celebrate throughout the year, the message of how to live with one another now that know that we all carry God within us. This what Jesus taught us to do, to love each other in the same way that God loves us and we love God. If we know that every person alive is a reflection of the God who made us, how can we do anything else but treat them with love? As John says in his first letter: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister who they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen.…Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters too.” In fact, so much are we a part of God, that as it says in Matthew 25, whatever we do to the least of bothers and sisters we do to Jesus. This is the second great truth of Christianity and it follows from the first.
But there is also one last truth. It is the one revealed at Easter. This is the one that tells us that who we are and who we will become is infinitely beyond anything we can imagine. This is the one that tells us that — within that great and mysterious house that is who we each are — we also have a door that opens up to God, a door that opens to eternity, a door that opens to life unending. In other words, we have a soul. God is not only part of us, God is the face of the reality of what we will be for all time. We have a door to that reality. That door is what we call our soul. And all we have to do is open that door to find ourselves face to face with God.
It was on Easter morning that Jesus showed us that door. He also showed us what it was like to open it and pass through to the other side. He showed us that we really have nothing to fear — nothing to fear in life, nothing to fear in death. That’s because, just as God is with us in life, we are with God in death. All that’s required to see this is trust. Whether facing life or death, we need only trust in God for all fear to evaporate. God will get us through. In life God will infuse us with the love we need to grow and prosper and carry on, and in death God will open to us to a life of such unending beauty and connection and love that it is literally beyond all comprehension. This is the third great truth of Christianity.
So, three truths. (1) We all carry God within us. (2) Because of this, we all need to treat everyone we meet with the love each deserves as a child of God. And (3), we each carry a door to eternity, a door to life, a door to God. In other words, we each have a soul.
These are the three great truths of Christianity. They show us who God is. They show us who we are. Most of all, they show us how deeply the two are intertwined. And so, it is not enough to say that Christ is risen. The fact is, now we are risen too. Alleluia!
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