4-27-26 - Somewhere

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” says Jesus. “Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

In the musical version of Jesus’ last night with his disciples, maybe he’d break into song:
There’s a place for us; somewhere a place for us. Hold my hand and we’re halfway there;
Hold my hand, and I’ll take you there… Somewhere.*

He is trying to comfort his followers, as they begin to realize he is soon to be taken from them. “There’s a place for us… Hold my hand, and I’ll take you there.”

If only we could believe it when people say they’re coming back for us. If small children could trust that mom’s not disappearing for good, they’d need fewer blankets and bears. If young women could trust that boyfriends really do just “want some space,” there’d be fewer bad love songs. We cannot believe what we cannot conceive – and how could Jesus’ friends conceive a life beyond death, not to mention a place “out there” with him and lots of dwelling places and plenty of room for everyone?

How can we? This passage is often read at funerals. Perhaps it comforts the bereaved to know their loved one has a front-door key waiting on a hook somewhere – though I doubt anyone who’s enjoying Total Love has much use for a postal code. But we like to know where our people are, to imagine them in a place. Maybe we like to imagine ourselves in a place, so we've have taken the Bible's few symbolic hints about heaven and worked them into a city with golden streets and gem-encrusted gates.

I’m not overly concerned about arranging my pied-a-terre in the afterlife. I know I can start living that life where I am now. We can access the heavenly places in all kinds of ways – in worship, in prayer, in a walk on a fine day – anywhere and anytime we feel ourselves connected to Jesus, in the presence and light and love of God.

• What is your view of the afterlife – your afterlife? 
• Where and how do you best find yourself in touch with God in the here and now?
• Is that anything like the heaven you imagine? 

Maybe in prayer today you can ask the Spirit to make you aware of the Somewhere God intends for you to dwell in. We are invited to live already as though we know that place, that Somewhere, where Jesus is, where God is. When we live out of that conviction, we bring it into being in the here and now. Forgiveness and love and giving our stuff away to people who need it become a lot more natural – we’re living the life of heaven. Now.

Somewhere. We'll find a new way of living/
We'll find a way of forgiving …Somewhere …

Somewhere is here, my friends. Some time is already.

*I’m reminded of a lot of pop songs in this reading… stay tuneful this week!

© Kate Heichler, 2026. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.

11-19-25 - Paradise When?

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Popular culture tells us that, at the moment of our death, we will “cross over” to our eternal dwelling, where we are welcomed by those we have loved in this world. Bible interpreters might take a more sober view, citing many prophetic texts about the “Day of the Lord.” “Day of the Lord.” And then there are Jesus’ own references to the great sorting at the final judgment, and Paul’s eloquent depiction of the sleeping dead rising “in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” (I Cor. 15:52; No, it’s not the zombi-pocalypse... it's resurrection.)

This interpretation suggests that at death we go into rest like the “sleep mode” on our computers, to be reactivated when “the trumpet shall sound.” And here is Jesus, confusing us all with this promise to the repentant thief dying next to him on the cross: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

It is a bit surreal, this recorded conversation among three men dying a ghastly, torturous death:  One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong." Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom."

Some years ago I heard Charlie Grady, who runs anti-violence initiatives in inner cities, speak. He spent 27 years in law enforcement, during which he arrested some pretty dangerous criminals. One evening he was in a restaurant, and saw two men he’d sent to jail come in. Soon enough they spotted him and clearly recognized him. He began to sweat. Then the waiter approached and said, “Those guys would like to buy your table a round of drinks.” He accepted, and then raised his glass to them. At that point they came over and said, “We know you were just doing your job. We were the ones doing wrong – it was your job to catch us and put us away. We know that now; we’re not the same people.”

That’s pretty much where this thief is. Hanging there next to a man he knows to be good and holy gives him a true perspective on himself. And when we see ourselves clearly, we start to see a lot of things more clearly. That is the beginning of repentance – clear vision. It’s not everyone else’s fault, even if some have contributed. It’s us. And when we speak from that truth, we create space for grace.

Even on the cross, Jesus is able to extend that grace to a fellow-sufferer. “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” At the end of this day, all three of them will be dead. They will no longer dwell in this world. In the face of that, in brutal pain, Jesus promises not only paradise, but his own presence. What a promise.

Do you have a confession to make, or one to hear? Has anyone been trying to get your attention and let you know they have had a change of heart, they truly are sorry – and maybe you haven’t been able to give them a chance to show it? A risk, yes, but your forgiveness is a big gift to grant or withhold. As recipients of grace, can we extend it?

One day we will be with Jesus in whatever realm it is that we call Paradise. Whether that is at the moment of death, or at some other time in a realm that is timeless, we will know we are with him. As Gillian Welch sings, “I will know my savior when I come to him by the mark where the nails have been.”

© Kate Heichler, 2025. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.

11-7-25 - Is There Marriage After Death?

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Some wags might ask if there is life after marriage, but I wonder if there’s marriage after death. Finding myself with little more to say about this week’s Gospel passage, I’ll take the opportunity it opens to offer my own views of what “heaven” is and what our life in God will be like, aware that no one actually knows.

I find myself with little more to say about this week’s Gospel passage. But it does give me an opportunity to offer my own views of what “heaven” is and what our life in God will be like, aware that no one actually knows.

The question the Sadducees pose to Jesus about the legalities of marriage in heaven Jesus easily refutes by reminding them that “those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” This suggests that marriage will not be a feature of our heavenly lives – something the church affirms in its wedding liturgy, with vows that last only “until death do us part.” These are time-limited promises; I would assert that the relationships they protect are also in a sense time-limited.

But wait, you ask, what about all those greeting cards and funeral homilies and songs like “Far Side Banks of Jordan” about being greeted by our loved ones when we “cross over?” Aren’t we going to dash into the arms of our beloveds who have gone before? We might – or we might not, because if we believe that eternal life in God means we will dwell in the presence of pure love, we will have no more needs or wants, only joy. And if we have no needs or wants, we won’t love one person more than another – for all is love, and love is all. Maybe we’ll see the ones we’ve loved in this life, but I don’t think we’ll love them any more than the mail carriers or barristas we knew in this life. We will love, for we cannot but love, just as the God in whose image we are made cannot but love.

And we won’t need those promises, for we will love all. We will be awash in love, dwelling in the one eternal relationship we begin in this life, the one with Jesus our Lord; with God our source of being; with the Holy Spirit who carries us in love. There won’t be less love – but more for everyone.

© Kate Heichler, 2025. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.

11-6-25 - God of the Living

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

For the rest of the week, let’s turn to the Gospel passage appointed for next Sunday (the usual pattern for Water Daily…). This is an odd snippet of narrative, one which I’m usually quite happy to skip in deference to the All Saints readings. But if there is gold to be mined in any passage of Scripture, let’s go prospecting.

Jesus is approached by members of the sect of the Sadducees, who Luke tells us did not believe there would be any kind of resurrection after death. Since Jesus often spoke about an after-life, they decide to quiz him: "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."

Is this a first century logic puzzle or are they satirically pointing out the inanity of life after death? Or are they playing a game of “gotcha?” I cannot discern a theological question here. But Jesus responds on a logical level, asserting the reality of resurrection, citing references to the “God of Abraham, Isacc and Jacob” as proof that the ancients believed in life after death.

Then he goes further, asserting that the activities we engage in in this life are not necessarily what we will be concerned with in the next. Some things, like marriage, are a fact of life in this world, not in eternity (more on that tomorrow…) He reminds them that God “is God not of the dead, but of the living.” Preoccupation with what will be in the heavenly courts takes our attention away from the life God has given us here and now – which may be a preamble to eternal life, but is very much to be lived.

And, as God is concerned with the welfare of all those with whom we share this earthly life, that is where we are to put our attention. That means we focus on those with us now more than on those we have lost. It means churches spend more time and resources focused on ministry and mission than on caring for our buildings or cemeteries.

These are good questions for us to consider now, while we remain very much enmeshed in our lives in this world. By faith we claim that death is not the end for us, though physical death still awaits us. Knowing that life and more life await us, how might we live as though this life is not all there is, is not even a fraction of the rest of our future? Might we hold our worries more lightly, engage in love with more freedom? Might we take more risks and step out in faith more boldly?

We have a lifetime to figure this out, and then eternity to live it out in the fullness of love.

© Kate Heichler, 2025. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.

11-28-23 - On the Clouds

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here. 

Rolling dark clouds are a staple of sci-fi movies, and they don’t generally presage a good time. When clouds start moving rapidly in a glowering sky, you know Someone or Something is coming, with or without benign intentions.

This is what I envision when I read the words attributed to Jesus in the gospel passage with which we begin the season of Advent: “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.”

Jesus does not say when this event will take place, but he pictures a cataclysmic End that launches the great Beginning that will have no end. Anyone paying attention will have noticed that a return implies a departure; they thought he was going to finish his business then and there, but he sets up a later and much, much bigger event.

In Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar, intrepid scientists travel through space seeking a hospitable planet to colonize, since human behavior has rendered our earth toxic to human life. In Nolan’s vision, salvation comes from humankind cracking the cosmic secrets of space-time-gravity to access a new habitat. Our Christian vision of salvation has a similar theme – but its movement is from the cosmic to the earthly. For us it is God, the author of the mysteries of the universe, who transcended them to come into our dying world, to plant a seed of healing among us. Christ’s redemption includes the restoration of the universe – and what we might call a re-colonization, as the “elect” are gathered from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

These apocalyptic images remind us where our Christ story ultimately ends – not in the manger, not on the cross, not even with the empty tomb, but with the New Heavens and a New Earth. When we pray, “Thy Kingdom come,” that is what we are inviting into being, that eternal reality that we can occupy here and now, in glimpses and bursts.

Today pray very slowly through the Lord’s Prayer, and pause to reflect on that phrase, “Thy Kingdom come.” How does that petition open up the other phrases in the prayer Jesus taught his followers to pray? What does it open up in you?

The great Advent hymn Lo, he comes with clouds descending captures the cosmic grandeur of what lies before us. God’s future is both now and yet to come. We live in it, and we live into it.

SATURDAY - ADVENT RETREAT MORNING "SPA FOR THE SPIRIT" (online) December 2, 9-12:30. Register here; information and Zoom link will be sent prior to the event.

5-1-23 - Somewhere

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here. 

There’s a place for us; somewhere a place for us.
Hold my hand and we’re halfway there; Hold my hand, and I’ll take you there…

In the musical version of Jesus’ last night with his disciples, maybe he’d break into song. Somewhere. A place for us. (I’m reminded of a lot of pop songs in this reading… stay tuneful this week!). He is trying to comfort his followers, as they begin to realize he is soon to be taken from them.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

If only we could believe it when people say they’re coming back for us. If small children could trust that mom’s not disappearing for good, they’d need fewer blankets and bears. If young women could trust that men really do just “want some space,” there’d be fewer bad love songs. We cannot believe what we cannot conceive – and how could Jesus’ friends conceive a life beyond death, not to mention a place “out there” with him and lots of dwelling places and plenty of room for everyone?

How can we? This passage is often used at funerals. Perhaps it comforts the bereaved to know their loved one has a front-door key waiting on a hook somewhere – though I doubt anyone who’s enjoying Total Love has much use for a zip code. But we like to know where our people are, to imagine them in a place. Maybe we like to imagine ourselves in a place, so we've have taken the Bible's few symbolic hints about heaven and worked them into a city with golden streets and gem-encrusted gates.

I’m not overly concerned about arranging for my pied-a-terre in the afterlife. I know I can start living that life where I am now. We can access the heavenly places in all kinds of ways – in worship, in prayer, in a walk on a fine day – anywhere and anytime we feel ourselves connected to Jesus, in the presence and light and love of God.

What is your view of the afterlife – your afterlife?
Where and how do you best find yourself in touch with God in the here and how? 

Is that anything like the heaven you imagine?
Maybe in prayer today you can ask the Spirit to make you aware of the Somewhere God intends for you to dwell in.

We are invited to live already as though we know that place, that Somewhere, where Jesus is, where God is. When we live out of that conviction, we bring it into being in the here and now. Forgiveness and love and giving our stuff away to people who need it become a lot more natural – we’re living the life of heaven.

Somewhere. We'll find a new way of living/ We'll find a way of forgiving …Somewhere …
Somewhere is here, my friends. Some time is already.

To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.

11-14-13 - New Earth/New Heavens

For the rest of the week, I would like to look at one of the readings from the Hebrew Bible set for Sunday, a beautiful prophecy in Isaiah, in which God announces: “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.”

I spent yesterday on Capitol Hill, lobbying for passage of background check laws to reduce gun violence. And I thought, as I walked the halls and corridors of Congress, rushing from House to Senate office buildings and back, that most of the people who choose the political life do so because they want to participate in remaking the earth. Very few get rich doing it, and the stresses are unbelievable. You have to have a desire somewhere to help make life better, for at least some of the people some of the time.

This passage is a timely one for me, given what I’ve been doing this week at the Brady conference. Background checks work. It’s been proven – as it has been that the 40% of purchases that manage to sidestep background checks result in gun violence that makes us all less secure.This passage gives voice to the yearning for peace and security which should be the birthright of every man, woman and child – and animal – on this planet. It articulates beautifully the hope of a restored creation living in harmony:

I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime…
Reading that, I can’t help but think of the men and women I met this week who lost little children and spouses, brothers and uncles to gun violence. I think of the residents of Newtown facing the first anniversary of the loss of so many children; of people in Bridgeport and Chicago mourning their dead – the sound of weeping never quite dies away.

I think of the promise of security and work and rest envisioned in this prophecy:
They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.   They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat…

This is true peace, when each person can live in safety in their own home, bringing up their children to thrive in trust. This is the world God says he is bringing into being. This is the promise we are invited to participate in making real.

What do you long for when you think of God making a new heavens and a new earth?
What aspect of life in this world do you feel called to help renew? Where do you want to put your energies? Start by praying about that area, and imagining yourself making a difference, in the power of the Spirit. 
What do you see yourself doing or saying? Keep inviting God into it.

I know I will keep working and praying for peace on our streets.  
“They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD.”

I believe in the power of love to transform and convert the most evil heart. I have to, despite evidence to the contrary. The evidence is not more powerful than the power and the promise of God. God is creating the new heavens and the new earth – and we are here at the beginning. Every day.

11-8-13 - Does Heaven Matter?

Our reflections this week have been bouncing off a conversation recorded over 2,000 years ago, about heaven, resurrection, life after death. I explore such things as part of my ministry of preaching. But does anyone else care about these ancient debates – what kind of bodies, if any, will carry our souls; in what kind of community will we gather after death; when will the end times be? Are these just “first century problems,” or relevant now?

If thinking about these things leads to anxiety, it is of little value. If it leads to what Paul call’s God’s gift of “eternal comfort and good hope,” then it’s worth exploring. If dwelling on heaven can make us more peaceful and joyful and hopeful here and now, bring it on.

75 years ago tomorrow, the world witnessed Kristallnacht, that night in 1938 when the Nazis first unleashed across Germany and Austria the fury against Jews that would culminate in the horrors and devastations of the Holocaust. November 9-10, hundreds of synagogues were burned, shops looted, homes and people terrorized.

My father was a Jewish 13-year-old in Vienna at the time. He lived through it. I can’t even imagine the terror of a populace who knew the Nazi presence in Austria wasn’t a good thing, but still hoped their leaders would successfully avoid annexation by the German Reich. I can’t imagine the fear and rumors and degradations and deprivations my father and millions of others endured.

But then, I can’t imagine living in Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Congo or any number of other places where terror like that can and does strike at any moment, where everything that has been normal about life is torn away and survival becomes your only goal. What difference does heaven or resurrection make when you’re living in hell?

And I think: If I have the opportunity to reflect on that question, I am called to be part of the solution. I am called to look up from my “first world problems” and help intervene in situations before they turn deadly, or be present with survivors if the horror has already come. It means I can’t look away – I have to turn toward the frightful and the frightened. I don’t have to address every situation – only the ones the Spirit leads me to. But I do not have the leisure to look away.

Where in the world are you being called to intervene – through prayer, donation, advocacy, action?
Where in our cities are you being called to intervene? Where in your community are you called to intervene?
It might be with domestic violence organizations, or human rights groups – Amnesty International, The International Rescue Committee, United to End Genocide.
What will you do with the resurrection life running through you, in a world full of death?

A few weeks ago, I attended a statewide meeting on reducing violence, and was privileged to hear Emmanuel Jal speak. Jal is a young man from South Sudan, whose world was turned upside down by the savage conflict there. His mother was killed when he was seven, and he joined thousands of children fleeing to Ethiopia. He was conscripted into military service, inflicted and suffered atrocities. "I didn't have a life as a child,” he says. “In five years as a fighting boy, what was in my heart was to kill as many Muslims as possible.” Eventually he was rescued and taken to Kenya, began school and ultimately a hip-hop music career that has made him internationally known. He has launched the We Want Peace genocide-prevention campaign, among many other advocacy and aid projects.

He is an amazing young man, who has come through a living hell. He reminds me that resurrection life is real, very real.