We are gathered here in the name of Jesus. We are servants of the Lord Jesus, who is the universal Lord. We are servants of Jesus Davidson, who was a particular man from the town of Nazareth. He had a particular lineage, a particular mother, a particular synagogue that He attended as a boy, and so on.

Because of this (and only because of this), Christians are able to celebrate both universals and particulars, general timeless truths and particular concrete facts, and we can celebrate them comfortably as realities that live in peace together. Because of this, we can honor all life generally, and we can assemble to honor a particular life—in this case, the life of our friend and fellow servant, Mike Rench.

Because of Jesus, all of these things are tied together. Without Jesus, we can be attached to particular things (and lives), but have no way of giving those lives any ultimate meaning. We have no way to bundle anything together—the universe is not a universe at all, but is rather chaos. The image of tons of confetti dumped into a super-tornado fails as an image because that would be too orderly and coherent. Without Jesus, we are without God and without hope in the world. Without Jesus, random rules, which means that nothing rules.

But without Jesus, we can err in the other direction as well. We can lose ourselves in abstractions, higher physics, and other arcana that brilliant men like to play with, but we have no way to bring it in for a landing. We can’t bring it down here. We can construct a grand scheme for all things, but because that grand scheme of ours is not seated at the right hand of God the Father, it staggers and falls. Our unified theories are a lame god, like Vulcan, and cannot come down here, where we live.

And so without Jesus, nothing ties together. Nothing fits. Nothing works. Nothing hangs together. Nothing tastes.

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Yesterday God was gracious to us in the burial of my father–in-law. Part of that grace was the eulogy that Nate gave. You can read it here.

After the Roman procurator Festus had arranged for the apostle Paul to give an account of himself before King Agrippa and Queen Bernice, the apostle explained what the Lord Jesus had done to him and for him. He did this in the context of describing how God had fulfilled HIs promises to Israel. In the course of his talk, he asked this question, “Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?” (Acts 26:10).

This is a wonderful question. Why should something like that be thought incredible? As Christian believers, we do not simply believe that the resurrection is an out-there possibility. We believe that it is another example of God’s idea of the ordinary.

It is no more remarkable that we should live before God in another life after this than it is that we should be alive before Him in this one. But here is the rub—this life is remarkable also. I mean, what are the odds?

We need to understand that the sin of unbelief is not committed when we think that a story of life beyond death is somehow incredible. The sin of unbelief is actually committed when we fail to understand that life before death is just as incredible. Lack of wonder about what we have already been given is the reason for our lack of faith in what we have been promised.

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Last night we received word that Nancy’s father, Larry Greensides, went to be with the Lord suddenly. Nancy’s brother was with him at the time, and while his passing was sudden, it was not entirely unexpected. He was 95, and active and fit to the end.

We are grateful for the fact that he loved the Lord, for his long and textured life, and for the fact that he went exactly as he desired to go, without a hospital or doctor or nursing facility in sight. Your prayers would be greatly appreciated — first and foremost, for his wife Margaret, who will obviously have trouble adjusting to life without her spouse of almost 70 years.

Larry was born in 1917 in Saskatchewan, and when he was young his family emigrated to California, where he grew up. He joined the Army Air Corps shortly before the United States entered the Second World War. He became a bomber pilot, and was seriously wounded in a Japanese bombing run on Henderson Field in the key battle for Guadalcanal. He served in the Army Air Corps until it became the Air Force, and continued to serve a total of 23 years. He saw combat in World War II, and all through Korea. When Vietnam was heating up, he decided that it was time to retire — three wars was pushing it, he thought.

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“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints” (Ps.  116:15).

Denise Sproul, the wife of R.C. Sproul, Jr., went to be with the Lord this morning. Please be praying for her family and her friends in their time of grief.

But as the apostle Paul said, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8). The grief and sadness is all on this side of that divide, and most certainly not on the other side.

Christians certainly grieve, but it is the kind of grief you see in airports, when someone you love is going to be separated from you . . . but only for a time. This is in stark contrast to what the apostle Paul describes as being “without God and without hope in the world” (Eph. 2:12). The phrase “without God” is rendered from just one word — atheoi. Godlessness is hopelessness.

So pray for the Sprouls, and thank God for the resurrection of the dead. It is no more unbelievable that we shall live again than that we were given the gift of life the first time. Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift.

Scripture says that it is better to go down to the house of mourning than to the house of laughter (Ecc. 7:2). The reason given in that passage is that this enables the living to “lay it to heart.” The death of Christopher Hitchens should in the first place remind us of our own mortality. We should lay it to heart. As Donne so memorably put it, “ask not for whom the bell tolls.” Every funeral is our own. These are issues that affect every last one of us.

Those who hold to the gospel of Jesus Christ must always remember that the good news of Christ is set against the backdrop of the bad news — we are all of us sinners, and we all need cleansing and forgiveness. Christopher Hitchens did not need to come to Christ to have his arguments refuted (although that would have happened). He needed to come to Christ to have his sins forgiven.

There will be a CanonWIRED clip out shortly, in which I caution Christians against two errors — and both of them are errors of speculation. The possibility of last minute conversions must never be turned into actual last minute conversions. No one is wished into Heaven. There have been too many unbelievers preached into Heaven at the funeral, and we ought not to give way to the false tenderness of that impulse. At the same time, the likelihood that Christopher never called on Christ should not be turned into a hard-line dogmatic statement, followed by “good riddance.” No one is wished into Hell either. We ought not to greet the news of Christopher’s death the way he greeted the death of Jerry Falwell’s, for example.

The bad news is that we are all under judgment. The good news is that the one who has faith in Jesus may be forgiven. We must unashamedly declare these terms to the whole world — but declaring the terms of judgment (which Scripture requires us to do) is not the same thing as playing the Judge ourselves. We leave the soul of Christopher Hitchens (and he did have a soul, despite all his arguments) in the hands of God, who will do nothing but right.

All of this is of course consistent with the affection I had for Christopher. Our prayers and condolences are with his family and friends.

Here are some further reflections on Christopher’s passing that I wrote for Christianity Today.

What Abraham Saw
When Abraham looked into the future, he saw the day of the Lord Jesus. When he saw it, he rejoiced and was glad (John 8:56). When Abraham looked into the future he saw a city, whose maker and builder is God (Heb. 11:8-10). When Abraham looked into the future, he saw countless multitudes, as displayed for him in the staggering figure of the whole host of heaven (Gen. 15:5). And although he would not have been able to pick us out, because of the greatness of the multitude, he nevertheless saw us standing here by this grave. He saw every believer in principle; he was shown all of his children, even if only in the aggregate.

And he saw us all because he saw the day of the Lord Jesus. He knew the true nature of the day that he was seeing—and the nature was that of a true day. It was therefore a resurrection day. He who had brought Isaac down off the mountain alive (Heb. 11:19) knew what was typified by that particular gift. He received Isaac back as a figure, it says, and Abraham clearly knew the nature of this figure. He was seeking a better city in a better country (Heb. 11:15-16).

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In Psalm 116, we see the deliverances of God in the midst of life, and we see the ultimate deliverance of God at the end of life. The psalmist is pressed by his troubles—the sorrows of death surrounded him (v. 3). He found trouble and sorrow, which everyone who is paying attention in this life also finds. His response was healthy—he called on the name of the Lord, asking Him to deliver his soul (v. 4). This is exactly what the Lord did, delivering his soul from death, his eyes from tears, and his feet from falling (v. 8). The psalmist resolved to walk before God in the land of the living, and this is exactly what Sharon Howell did. She walked with God in the land of the living, and did so for many fruitful years.

And what does this bring? It brings wisdom about the approach of death. That wisdom comes as we worship God as He deserves to be worshiped. We take the cup of salvation, the cup of the new covenant, and we call on His name (v. 13). We pay our vows in the presence of all His people (v. 14). So God delivers us from death, and He teaches us about death, so that we might grow up into an eternal perspective. And that perspective is this one—”precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” When God delivers us from death, as He has done for all of us, many times, He is teaching us wisdom. The capstone of that wisdom is that He looks forward to the time which He has ordained for our homecoming.

The apostle teaches us that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and we may comfort one another with these words. We may continue to live, which is Christ, or we may depart from this life, which is more Christ (Phil. 1:21). Paul tells us that to depart is “far better” (Phil. 1:23). Those saints who are well established in the ways of the Lord know how to long for that time when we are ushered into the presence of God. But what the psalmist tells us is that God looks forward to it as well. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.

The glory and grace of our God is found in this. He delights in us. He loves us. He looks forward to being with us in a more profound way than He is now. And He promises us great and manifold blessings. Note the progression. He delivers us from many earthly perils, and does so in order that we might learn His great title, the title of Savior. He delivers us so that He might teach us, and He teaches us that when death finally takes us it is not an instance of His faithfulness finally slipping. It is not an instance where we were caught by death because God looked away for a moment. No. He has shown us already that He is in complete control of all things for His glory and our good. All things work together for good for those who love God and who are called according to His purpose (Rom. 8:28). But as that same passage also teaches us, the blessing that we have with Christ in the intermediate state—where Sharon is now—is not the end of the story. God has settled the matter—we are destined to be conformed to the image of Christ in the final resurrection of the dead at the end of history.

God’s overarching purposes in this help us to understand all the stations along the way. As was mentioned in the eulogy, in her final years Sharon was given the hard providence of dementia. And this is where we can find comfort in the words of Psalm 92, and it is not a superficial comfort either (Ps. 92:5). God’s thoughts are very deep—far deeper than ours are. A brutish man and a fool cannot follow this (v. 6), while a delightful saint with dementia still can. Notice what we are told.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age. Did this promise fall to the ground in Sharon’s case? Did her affliction—and it was an affliction—prevent her from bearing fruit, right up to the end? Not a bit of it.

Our problem is that we tend to define fruit far too narrowly, and it is too often in terms of those things that we tend to be proud of, proud of in a false way. Some want to think of fruit as thinking proper doctrinal thoughts about God in a rarified intellectual way. Now Sharon did confess her faith biblically—more about that in a moment—but the image of God in us is not to be equated with the ability to reason, or the ability to put sentences together. In the larger story, that is certainly part of the story, but it is by no means the whole story.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age. How does the Bible define fruit? Here is one example—the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and peace (Gal. 5: 22). Sharon was a consistently joyful Christian, and her joy continued right to the end of her life, unabated. She was a fruitful Christian, a classy lady, right through to the point where she crossed over. Looking at the broad biblical description of the Christian life, the Bible defines fruitfulness in terms of hospitality and generosity as well. Sharon was a consistent hostess and giver. Many of you here received gifts from her in one way or another. When Dorcas went to be with the Lord, the saints who had been blessed by her life gathered around Peter and showed him all the things she had made (Acts 9:39). But the real fruit of her giving was not limited to the garments she had made that the women showed to Peter—the real fruit was found in the people who were doing the showing. In a similar way, hospitality is a fruit-laden tree. But when is the harvest? The end of hospitality is not the grocery bill, or the sink full of dishes. The harvest of hospitality is dimly foreshadowed by this—when all the people affected by that spirit of generosity gather just as we have gathered here. And the ultimate harvest of hospitality will be the day of resurrection, when everyone who has ever reflected God’s hospitality to us in Christ will all be gathered. On the day when no cold cup of water given in the name of Jesus will be forgotten, what a glorious assemblage of giving hearts that will be.

One other form of fruitfulness should be remembered. Sharon, like the rest of us here, was a sinner, and had been forgiven and remade through the grace of God in the gospel. There is an unfortunate tendency in this unbelieving age to confer on the deceased, whenever someone dies, the degree of “honorary nice person.” Sharon would have none of that. She was fruitful because she had been forgiven, cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ, and taught by the Spirit of the risen Christ. She knew and loved that gospel, and she understood it, right to the end. Even after her affliction took away from her the names of old friends (who nonetheless remained part of her fruitful harvest), it did not take this gospel from her. She loved the hymn Amazing Grace, and the words remained within her grasp throughout her pilgrimage. Even when her dementia was well advanced, she still had the words of the Doxology. And think about those words sung in the shadows of that dark valley. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. And one of the last times when she was able to attend church—which she loved to do—I looked over at her when we were reciting the words of the Apostles Creed, which she was confessing right along with the rest of us. The gospel was still in her heart, and still in her mouth. And in her life, it was still rightly placed—in the midst of the congregation. Sharon loved other Christians; she loved the body of Christ. That love is also fruit.

In the resurrection, when we all see Sharon again, everything she ever lost will have been restored to her, and it will all be glorified. And when we speak together about it, she will tell us that she served a God who does all things well, and that she wouldn’t change anything about it. Fruit is what God says it is, and not what we might want to say. And as our son once told my wife, baskets of fruit can be very heavy. But they are still filled with fruit for all that.

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