Monthly Message in the Birchwood Beacon
by Rev. Bruce Becker, Pastor

On July 16 we put down our thirteen and a half year old German shepherd, Gehrig.  She was 94 in dog years.  That’s old for a German shepherd.  She was infested with tumors, and though her forelegs were as strong as ever, her rear hips swayed on wobbly legs and numb feet like a drunken sailor on three day leave. 

Between 1997 and 2010 she greeted both four year old foster children and five year old grandkids.  She watched our family grow up.  She was there when our oldest left for college.   She was there as Pete’s sleeping partner while he endured months of near fatal encephalitis and Kleine-Levin Syndrome.  She was our security dog the last five years we resided in inner-city Philadelphia.  Then she chased away the rabbits from our backyard in the suburbs.  In 2007 she was Mary’s constant companion through chemotherapy.  In 2008 she played security dog in the back seat of our Chevy when Pete and I drove across the continent to Bellingham.  She was a big part of our lives for thirteen memorable years.

Years ago, long before Gehrig, I was a counselor at a summer camp full of junior highers.  There a student asked the camp speaker if pets went to heaven.  The junior high speaker answered a room full of kids, “No.  Pets don’t go to heaven.  Pets don’t have souls.”  I thought that speaker was an idiot.  I still think so.  Single-handedly he turned God into a graceless curmudgeon, and he ruined the gospel for a hundred, animal-loving adolescents.

Romans 8 tells us that all creation is kept in frustration because of sin and stands on tiptoe waiting for the day that the children of God will come into their own to rule the planet.  Heaven is not just redemption for people.  Does not God love all His creation?  Remember.  “God saw all that He had created and called it, ‘Very good!’” All He created!  Heaven is redemption for all creation led by the children of God.

What is heaven like?  Heaven is the best you can imagine and then some.  Heaven is all we have dreamed for, overwhelming joy drowning all our disappointments.  “No one who hopes in the Lord will ever be disappointed” says Isaiah.  Martin Luther could not imagine eternity without his pet dog, Topol. Heaven is as good as your finest imagination, and then some. As Elizabeth Barret Browning wrote, “For God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.”

So Isaiah says that the lion will lie down with the lamb and eat straw like the ox; and the child will play next to the serpent’s den and never be harmed.  Among heaven’s population snakes and children, oxen and lions and lambs are mentioned by name.  But the Bible has nothing at all to say about smarty-pants junior high teachers with a stingy theology smarter than the Bible.  I guess we ought to imagine that some of them will be there, too.  Grace covers the stingy.  Maybe, in heaven they will be put to work making dog biscuits.

“As it is written, ‘Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man the things God has prepared for those who love him.”  1 Corinthians 2.9