Ever since I was a little child, I have held a deep reverence for the ocean. I grew up amidst the mountains in West Virginia. But my family spent a few sacred weeks on the Delaware shore each summer. As a child, hills were common place for me, but the ocean held a special power and mystery.

Swimming in the ocean was one of my favorite activities during my childhood. During the long nine months of the school year, I anxiously awaited the coming of July when we would go back to the beach.

I would spend hours floating and swimming on the swells beyond the waves. I would sometimes go out with my mother and my sister and my cousins, but I often liked to spend time out there alone.

It was the quiet of the water that drew me. I was awed by the ocean's seemingly endless ability to silence the noise of the world. The racket of children playing, and of couples flirting, and of gossip being spoken on the beach always seemed hushed out there beyond the waves.

My imagination would sometimes take over as I floated with the swells in that bright bright quiet. I liked to imagine the mysterious creatures that were swimming around in the dark colored water with me.

I had some ideas about what that cast of sea characters looked like. After all, I dedicated many hours examining the sketched pictures of ocean life that I had found back in my school library in West Virginia.

While I thought that I knew what was out there from having read all of my books, I sometimes would shudder when I thought of the deep, dark waters beneath my feet. This fear came when I least expected it while I was out there on the quiet waves. A sense of sudden panic would bubble up. I then dash back to the familiar and the noisy crowd on the beach.

Our Gospel lesson this morning sheds light upon the reality of the Resurrected Life while retaining every ounce of its mystery. There are promises of eternal life made in this text, but the details or the afterlife remain a true mystery for us to contemplate.

Jesus explained to a crowd of Sadducees that the rules of this life will not apply in the Resurrected Life. He explained that All earthly things and relationships will be changed in the resurrection.

Jesus compares the children of the resurrection to be “like angels”. They do not not marry. Nor can he children of the resurrection cannot die anymore.

Biblical texts such as this one that speak of the resurrection might fill us with awe and peace on one hand, while, on the other hand, be utterly unsettling for us at as well. These texts may make us realize that we are treading on unknown waters as we contemplate the resurrected life--a new reality where the rules and comforts of this world will not apply.

No wonder we can get fearful. The biblical resurrection texts such as this one from the Gospel of Luke do not provide a high definition picture of what heaven will look like. They lack the specific detail and certainty that we have come to expect in our modern culture. They often even use poetic language to describe an ineffable reality.

Because we cannot devise a detailed forecast for what we can expect from heaven, we have been tempted to create a view of heaven in our own image. I have often heard Christians describe heaven being a place where all of our human desires would be met.

Our heaven would, therefore, be a place that God would design for each of us individually in a accordance to our own earthly preferences. This would mean that my heaven could be quite different than your heaven. In this heaven, each of us would be able to eat only our favorite foods, feast only with our very favorite people, and be amidst our favorite earthly landscapes.

It is no real surprise that Americans have come to view heaven in this way. In our culture, we tend to operate out of a belief that we will attain happiness once our earthly desires satisfied. This begins a difficult cycle. We tend to buy lots of things to please ourselves. And yet, we have been trained to be insatiable. None of our purchases give us the rest for which we all long.

An individualistic view of heaven where our desires will be satiated may be a tempting view for us to have, but this image is one of our own making. Biblical texts that refer to the Resurrected life give us ideas and images, but Biblical ideas and images do no reduce the mystery of heaven into human fantasy. If we can shed our misconceptions about these biblical texts about the resurrection, we can gain fruitful ideas from the texts about the resurrection that pull us deeper into the mystery.

After years of going to the beach as a child, I first went snorkeling when I was in college. At the time, I was studying in Nicaragua in the capital city. My host family had convinced me that I must leave the city if I wanted to see the greatest treasures that Nicaragua had to offer. So I followed their advice and I traveled many hours on a tattered converted school bus to get to the Carribean Coast of the country.

When I arrived on the coast, I boarded a boat with a snorkeling guide who sailed us into deep crystal clear waters. I put on the awkward head gear and flippers as I was instructed. I then hopped off the side of the boat, feeling certain that I was headed for familiar territory.

What I found, however, was not what I had expected. The fish suddenly swarmed about me as though they were initiating me into a whole other world. As my eyes adjusted to the underwater scene, I saw that the fish were so bright that it looked as though they were being lit from within.

It was as though the undersea world that I had spent my whole young life imagining had been broken open just for me. I realized that all of the coral and seaweed and jelly fish that I had owned in my imagination were truly alive, and utterly free!

My experience snorkeling made me only more reverent of the mysteries that the sea holds. I was given a new lens with which I could see the mystery of the unknown depths. The embodied experience of swimming beneath the surface gave me a well of new images and feelings that brought new color to my childhood imagining and experiences.

The Resurrection is central to Christian Belief. Central to the heart of the Gospel is our proclamation that Jesus overcame the power of death and sin through dying and rising to new life.

Jesus invites us to share with him in his resurrection. While our biblical texts provide for us ideas and images of what the resurrected life will be like, scripture never reduces the mystery of the resurrection by giving us details. Rather, scripture brings the mystery of the resurrection it to life in a new way.

We are promised that the resurrected life will be far greater than we humans can even imagine. The splendor of the eternal kingdom will be far greater than our earthly kingdom. In the resurrection, will be freed from our insatiable appetites and desires. We will truly and completely unified to Christ and to one another.

While we cannot know in this life precisely what is in store for us in the resurrection, we can get a taste for the resurrected life through prayer. Through prayer, we together can find the strength to face our fears of uncertainty and our fears of the unknown depths. Through prayer, we can even get a taste of the joy and peace of the resurrected life.

Jesus proclaimed that the “God is the God of the living, and not of the dead” (John 20:38). All that live eternally live in God. It is in God that we all can find our rest.