John Hamer on Star Trek and the afterlife

Leandro Palacios from the Beyond the Walls ministry out of the Toronto Community of Christ congregation gave me a heads up yesterday that they would be using a clip from the most recent sermon I gave for them as part of today’s service. I forgot about this until well after the service, but I visited the recording later in the afternoon to see what clip they’d used and to see what else I could catch from the service. Before fast forwarding to my cameo, I actually ended up watching most of John’s homily, which I thought was excellent.

Back in May, I’d blogged about one of my favorite scenes in Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King, a cycle of Christian radio plays written and performed for the BBC. I really like Sayers’s take on the Sadducees’ confronting Jesus with the hypothetical of the woman who sequentially marries seven brothers who all die pretty quickly. Jesus responds by asking “do you think the resurrection will be just this world all over again?”, and the story is presented as the danger of imagining any next life (or the kingdom of God) as hewing too close to this life.

I don’t believe I’d ever heard that interpretation of the story before listening to The Man Born to Be King, but Sayers doesn’t seem to be an outlier here, because John picked up on the same interpretation in his homily. Here’s a link to the video, and the section I’m drawing from starts at 19:20.

I liked this so much that I’m actually going to write out the text of John’s homily in addition to linking to the video. He touches on some other themes that I also appreciated, not least the way that good science fiction asks us to imagine the world differently. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s fun to get Deep Space Nine references from the pulpit, and I also especially appreciated it in this context.

In the sermon that John excerpted from later in the service, I’d really wanted to reference Cory Doctorow’s recent book The Bezzle. I spent the first half of the sermon talking about visiting someone I knew in a Michigan prison several years ago and connecting that back to Jesus’s making the visiting of prisoners one of the criteria the Son of Man judges by in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. The Bezzle is a novel about many things, but one of the most prominent things is prison tech, and the way that (especially private) prisons have taken away the ability to fulfill our Christian duty to visit prisoners, replacing visiting hours with tablets that charge usurious rates and pad the prison’s bottom line. Even when Doctorow is writing true science fiction, the best thing about his stories are how similar to reality they are, and this novel’s take on prison tech is pretty firmly (and depressingly) grounded in reality, as reporting from my local paper demonstrates a few months ago.

Anyway, I loved a lot of what John had to say in the homily, and I recommend watching the video above or skimming the transcript I’m going to produce below. One last comment before I do so: I think that one of the reasons that I never heard this interpretation of this New Testament story is because in my Latter-day Saint upbringing, everyone is kind of uncomfortable with Jesus’s response in this story that challenges the idea of marriages existing in heaven. I wonder if we were all so busy dancing around that awkwardness that we never bothered to ask what other things the story could teach us. John definitely gestures in that direction in the homily, but I want to emphasize that in reproducing the homily here, I’m personally less interested in taking on the “families are forever” Latter-day Saint view of the afterlife (which has a lot going for it even if it’s not my personal view these days) and more interested in what I wrote about this story the last time: That in looking forward to any afterlife (or the advent of the kingdom of God), we ought to cast our imagination wide instead of trying to hold onto our assumptions about how (after)life works.

Anyway, here we go:

I am a life-long fan of science fiction, but my interest doesn’t stem from any desire to go into outer space or to visit other planets. I like science fiction fro the same reason I like history. I like to see how human societies could function under certain circumstances as a way to envision how we might make improvements to our own society. And while history lets us see different ways peoples actually operated in the past, science fiction is more like a “thought experiment” — how might society interact given certain circumstances.

So, for example, in Star Trek, the crew regularly visits planets which are examples of these thought experiments: what would society be like if it were designed according to a master plan, where every individual has an assigned purpose worked into their DNA? What if everyone was logical all the time? Or only cared about honor? Or money? Et cetera…

But there is one thought experiment that writers almost never get right in Star Trek or science fiction in general: what if a society was atemporal — what if they didn’t experience time in the same linear way we do? We experience only the moment of the present: the now which is forever moving forward. As quickly as we experience the now, it becomes the past. The moment I said, ‘greetings, one and all, and welcome to Beyond the Walls,’ was just a few minutes ago, but it’s already part of the past. We can remember it, but we can’t go back there. (You can watch the recording, but your experience will be different; it’s not the same as watching it for the first time when it’s live.)

There have been many times in Star Trek that the crew meets aliens that are timeless—that do not experience time the way we do in a linear fashion. An example is a species called “the Prophets” or “the wormhole aliens” in Deep Space Nine. When Captain Sisko encounters them, heh asks them if they are showing him a vision of the “past”—and they do not understand the term. Nothing is past or future for them, as they do not experience time the way we do.

Except the writing never really works. This is a television show that ran for seven years, and the writers in real life had no idea how it would end when they were filming the show’s pilot. And so, over the course of the different seasons, the Prophets end up reacting temporally to things that happen in the show.

I don’t blame the writers. It’s almost impossible for us humans to even try to squint and glimpse existence in anything other than linear time. And I think this is why there is such confusion when it comes to human ideas about afterlife. People inevitably envision afterlife as just like this life—except without any pain or troubles, and perhaps involving white, bright surroundings, robes, clouds, and maybe halos.

That simplistic view of heaven may have popped into your head when you heard our theme today: “Resemble the Angels.” This is certainly the view of heaven the Sadducees are satirizing in their challenge to Jesus in our reading today. The idea of afterlife is not present in the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, and so the Sadducees, who were the most conservative sect in Jesus’ day, did not believe in afterlife.

They present a scenario that is a problem for anyone who envisions afterlife as a temporal existence just like this life. We all want to be together with our families forever in heaven, but we tend to envision our families in the present. If you’re a parent with young children, you’re thinking of being together with them and with your spouse and with your parents in their role as grandparents. And if you’re a child, you’re thinking of being with your siblings, parents, and grandparents. And if you’re a grandparent, you’re thinking of being with those grandchildren—understanding that your own kids (their parents) will be there too.

The only problem is that this is a temporal perspective. You’re likely thinking about your family in the “now”— but of course, in our temporal lives, if we live a long, full life, we individually go through each of these phases. Which of these will we be locked into in heaven? This is the question that the Sadducees pose, taking the hypothetical of the widow and her many husbands to its logical, absurdist conclusion.

But Jesus’ answer here is telling: Afterlife is not going to be anything like this life. God created time, God transcends time, God exists outside of time. Eternal life involves being with God, and ultimately being one with God. In such a condition of divine unity, we are not divided from our loved ones. No earthly ritual is needed to connect us to them in the eternities.

But whatever we can say of afterlife, it is not lived temporally like this life. This is difficult to envision, but Jesus’s teaching gives us the assurance to trust in an experience beyond mortal comprehension, eternal life resembling the angels.

• macro
• Communities
• John Hamer
• Beyond the Walls
• Star Trek
• science fiction
• The Man Born to Be King
• Dorothy Sayers
• kingdom of God
• Mormonism
• Deep Space Nine
• The Bezzle
• Cory Doctorow
• Sheep and Goats