On my way to the appointment I stopped at a diner to have a cup of coffee and to bolster my courage. I was oblivious to everything except the appointment that awaited me. Leaving the diner, I made my way to a large white house, located on a corner in Columbia, South Carolina. I followed the owner into a large room, where he soon left me alone.

I slowly made my way across a thick rug on the floor to a table on the far side of the room. Upon that table was a white box. I stood before that white box for endless eternities before I finally summoned enough courage to look over the top at the lifeless body of my son.

At that sight my world collapsed. I would have given up all of my academic and athletic awards. I would have given up the prestigious executive training program that I was engaged in with one of the largest international oil companies. I would have given anything. For the first time in my life, I had come to a hurdle I could not clear. My world collapsed.”

I wish that none of us were able to connect in even the most remote way to this father’s anguished words. But some of us can. I have never lost a child. I pray I never do. But I have lost people who were dear and close to me. What do we do with this?

The Bible portrays death as an enemy.

Yes, there are those rare times when the death of a loved one can come as a relief after an endless, agonizing illness. But death ends our plans. Death clutches both the evil and the good. Death separates a couple who have loved each other for most of a lifetime. Death devours the innocent and the children. Death takes people "before their time" like an unfinished portrait.

All of this is overwhelming testimony that death is the great adversary of us all. We can pretend it doesn't exist. We can fixate on it by morbid fascination. But one out of every one people still dies. Death is the great destroyer of life.

Tony Campolo writes: “The depressing concerns about death were made painfully clear to me during a classroom discussion I had with some graduate students while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. There was a middle﷓aged woman in the class who was trying to earn a graduate degree in an effort to pick up her life after having been dumped by her husband of twenty﷓five years. As we talked about death, she remained silent for almost an hour, and then she spoke.

“‘You have no understanding of death," she said to the younger students. ‘You don't know what it's like to feel the awareness of death overtake you. I do!’ She went on to say, 'Imagine yourself at an organ concert, and while the organist is playing, one of the keys gets stuck. At first, you can hardly notice its monotonous groaning. Only during the pauses are you aware of it at all. But as the concert progresses, the sound of the stuck note gets louder and louder, until you hear it even while other notes are being played. Finally, the stuck note becomes so loud that it overpowers everything and the music can no longer be enjoyed. So it is with death. You are hardly aware of it at first. But as the years have unfolded for me, I have become more conscious of its overpowering presence. It grows louder and louder, and at this point in my life, it seems to dominate and drown out whatever joy there might be left.’"

Is that what we do with death? Do we let it extinguish our joy? Or do we really believe what we proclaim in the Apostles’ Creed -- that we believe in the life everlasting? And if we take the expectation of eternity away, then how do we live in the here and now? As one writer put it, we find it hard to live without “an invisible means of support.”

Clarence Macartney was a brilliant Presbyterian preacher of two generations ago, For twenty-seven years he pastored the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Mccarrtney wrote: "In certain respects the great article of the Apostles' Creed is the last: 'I believe in. . . the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.' Without that article, the other great affirmations have no meaning. Suppose one were to say, "I believe in God the Father,' but not in life everlasting; or 'I believe in the Holy Spirit,' but not in the life everlasting; or, 'I believe in.. . the holy Catholic church, the communion of saints,' but not in the life everlasting. All those affirmations would be meaningless without the great chord struck in the final sentence of the Creed."

This is because it is nothing to have God and each other unless we are able to keep what we have. This is the theme of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes -- “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity.” It is meaningless to work unless, as Paul affirms in 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection tells us our work is not in vain in the Lord.

Each time we remember the final affirmation of the Apostles' Creed, "I believe in the life everlasting," we remind ourselves that our lives are not limited to a single dimension.

As Mccarrtney writes, “Without that affirmation the Apostles' Creed would be like a great cathedral wrapped in the gloom of night.” But with it, "the Creed is like a great cathedral illuminated by the sun and showing all the glory of the architect, sculptor, and painter."

The hope and the beauty come from the hope we have because of the promise of God in Jesus Christ. Everyone lives in hope. In fact, without hope for the future, life can be unbearable.

There's got to be hope. Yet nothing on earth seems able to provide it.

This is why the Christian proclamation of resurrection and eternal life is of crucial importance. It is not just true. It is also urgently relevant to human existence. It meets a vital human need to keep what we are and have. This is why Peter tells us: 'Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have".

The English word hope is very ambiguous. "I hope it won't rain" means "It would be very nice if it didn't rain but I have a sinking feeling it will" That is hope in its weak sense -- a faint wish.

But there is a strong sense of the word as well. Hope in its full﷓blooded sense means "a sure and confident expectation." The Christian hope is confident and assured because of where it is anchored.

To put our hope in the living God is to look to Him in confidence and trust, knowing and relying on his faithfulness and love. This is this hope that has inspired Christian endurance down the ages. And it is this same hope that can sustain you in times of joy and sorrow. It is the hope that our work here together has eternal meaning that shapes our giving -- and puts a sprig in our steps as we bring our pledge cards to the front after we share in the Lord’s Supper. For what we do here matters.

A Roman Catholic theologian, Hans Kung writes in his book Eternal Life, Life After Death As a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, "To believe in an eternal life means in reasonable trust, in enlightened faith, in tried and tested hope to rely on the fact that I shall one day be fully understood, freed from guilt and definitively accepted, and can be myself without fear; that my impenetrable and ambivalent existence, like the profoundly discordant history of humanity as a whole, will one day become finally transparent and the question of the meaning of history one day be finally answered."

That’s one way to say it. Puritan poet John Doone said it another way: “I shall rise from the dead... and never miss the sun, which shall be put out, for I shall see the Son of God, the Sun of Glory, and shine myself as that sun shines. I shall rise from the grave, and never miss this city, which shall be nowhere, for I shall see the city of God, the new Jerusalem. I shall look up and never wonder when it shall be day, for the angel will tell me that time shall be no more, and I shall see and see cheerfully that last day of judgment, which shall have no night, never end, and be united to the Ancient of Days, to God himself, who had no morning, never began."

The question is, we say we believe in the life everlasting -- but do we believe in the life everlasting when the need is there the most for us and our departed loved ones.

Mary did.

Mary’s pastor tells how Mary underwent serious surgery. Because she was elderly, her prospects of recovery were slim. She knew she probably wouldn’t make it. But she did.

As she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was the blurred image of her doctor dressed in the typical white doctor's jacket. She smiled and said, "Hello, God! My name is Mary!"

That's the kind of assurance of eternal life we can all have through coming to know God better and better. It is the assurance that the communion we share today is meant to endure forever. So let us confess our faith.