Grace and peace to you from St. Louis, Missouri. We are up here for some days as we reconnect with family and see some sights. Just yesterday, my girls got to see Concordia Seminary, where I studied to be a pastor. They were sweet about it, but I don’t think they were terrifically impressed – even if we did get to go up in the big bell tower that looks out over campus. We’ve seen a few other things, but two of the places we have seen have stuck out in my mind.
In his retirement, my dad has amassed something of a small real estate empire. He purchases fixer-upper type properties, rehabs them, and then rents them out to people. Two of the houses right now are filled with the belongings of their former residents who have now passed away. This isn’t the first time I’ve walked in to a dead person’s house, but it is a striking moment anytime you do it – you look around and find what they collected, what they decorated with, the coffee maker that they used everyday, the landline phone on the wall that surely was fought over by the kids when they were teens, the clothes they bought and never got to wear.
Our possessions are funny things. In some ways, they live beyond our lives. I own things that were held by my grandparents, even their forebearers – but they are in the grave. As our family walked through Concordia Seminary, I even had the sense of all of the seminary students that “owned” that place, walking through its halls and classrooms – many have passed on to be with Jesus. There is something odd and haunting about that reality, and it caused me to reflect on how odd it is.
It is odd because we know that if we are in Christ, we will outlast even these things that now seem to outlast us. Our hope in the Resurrection flies in the face of the evidence of the belongings found in dead peoples’ houses. It declares those things to be ephemeral and transitory. It declares those things to be disposable and trivial. It declares our souls, even our bodies (in their Resurrected form) to be abiding and durable. Indeed, our bodies are dust and to dust they shall return, but if those bodies are baptized – they have eternity infused into them. They are claimed by God for all of eternity.
It takes courage and a little imagination to say this, but perhaps it is worthwhile to look around your house or apartment today. The things in your home may outlast your earthly body. It may be worth picking up one or two and letting that reality set in. But once you’re fully convinced of your mortality, do one last thing. Go to a mirror and look into it and if you dare, whisper to yourself, “Christ has claimed me, and because He has, I will outlast all of this stuff.” Then go out and treat people as if they were made for eternity and things as the temporary good that they really are.