"When I Get to Heaven" - Sermon for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost, 11-8-26
† “I always will remember these words my daddy said: ‘Buddy when you’re dead, [knock] you’re a dead pecker-head.’ I hope to prove him wrong – that is, when I get to heaven.”
John Prine sang these words in his 2018 song “When I get to heaven”. It is a joyful, rollicking song about all the good things he expects in the afterlife: meeting God and shaking his hand, many happy family reunions, forgiving everyone who ever did him any wrong – including his critics, “those syphilitic parasiticis”, and this refrain:
“And I’m gonna get a cocktail,
vodka and ginger ale;
yeah I’m gonna smoke a cigarette
that’s nine miles long.
I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl
on the Tilt-a-Whirl,
‘cause this old man is going to town.”
Prine, whose health was poor when he wrote this song, died two years later – an early victim of the COVID-19 pandemic. As there are no dead pecker-heads in heaven, I expect John’s daddy was there to greet him, and to eat a little crow.
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We are in the season of death. We’ve celebrated the feasts of All Saints’ and All Souls’ and Dia de los Muertos. It’s harvest time in much of our hemisphere. Where I come from, in the Great Lakes region, the leaves have fallen and the trees are bare. Frost has killed the flowers. Rain becomes sleet becomes snow. Nighttime arrives ever earlier. Winter is coming.
Our November Sunday scriptures reflect this change, too. Jesus’s own words today, and in the coming weeks, are of swift and certain judgment, with the unfortunate and the unprepared left out in the cold and the dark to endure the eternal punishment of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
But then there’s Saint Paul, the stereotypically stern apostle, who gives us a lifeline of hope.
“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13).
Saint Paul is not saying that we should not grieve over the deaths of our loved-ones. Grief is a natural, loving human response to loss. In our funeral liturgy, The Book of Common Prayer reminds us that “the very love we have for each other in Christ brings deep sorrow when we are parted by death. Jesus himself wept at the grave of his friend” [Lazarus] (507). And it has been my experience, both personally and in my pastoral accompaniment with others, that the greater the love we have for another, the greater the grief we express when they die. This is no great revelation. You know this to be true as well.
What Saint Paul is teaching the church, and reminding us, is that our grief is accompanied by our hope in the promise of the resurrection. Those without this hope grieve differently. If “when you’re dead, [knock] you’re a dead pecker-head” is all you think that there is, then separation by death is the end. It seems rather abrupt. Cold and final. Like the fate of today’s five beleaguered bridesmaids.
But elsewhere in our funeral liturgy, we hear these comfortable words, hope-filled, and truthful, “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens” (382).
Saint Paul of Tarsus, and blessed John of Chicago, some two millennia later, were writing pastoral theology. The ailing John, no doubt, wrote to bring his surviving family members and his devoted friends and listeners some comfort and hope. Paul was doing the same thing for the Thessalonian church.
These church-members were worried because they expected the Second Coming of Christ that would collect the faithful would arrive any day now. Some of their beloved company had died. What would become of them? Would they miss out? Be left behind in their graves? Forgotten forever?
No, Paul wrote. The dead will rise first and the living will follow them to be with the Lord for eternity.
We must remember that there was little in the way of an established Christian theology at this point. It is thought that this letter of Paul’s was the first written word in the New Testament – at least that survived – penned and sent a mere dozen years or so after Jesus’s ascension and the day of Pentecost. The stories told and re-told about Jesus would not be written down as the gospels we know for at least another twenty-five years. Paul was, if you will, making up his pastoral theology as he went along. On the fly.
From the perspective of anthropology or sociology, Paul’s letter is a fascinating look at what the earliest members of the church were taught about death and the after-life.
But for we religious folk, the books of the Bible – both testaments, the old and the new – are the primary source for our theology, for how we talk about God, and how we try to understand how God talks to us. We have the benefit of nearly two-thousand years of this holy study. Whole libraries are filled with volumes, ancient and modern, devoted to the various theological disciplines.
But do we know much more about the after-life – about heaven – than Saint Paul did? Or John Prine?
Hope, and the comfort it brings, is every bit the essential piece of pastoral theology now as it was in Paul’s day. Hope in the resurrection with Christ. Hope in an eternity with God. Hope in a place at the heavenly table. Hope in a space where all is revealed, where the good is celebrated, and where the bad is repented of, and forgiven, and forgotten.
Now you may prefer Paul’s vision of being caught up in the clouds and meeting the Lord in the air. But this seems a bit whispy for my taste. More ethereal than earthy. More cosmic than concrete.
For my part, I lean toward blessed John’s take, which, I hope, is the same thing as Saint Paul’s, only different:
“And I’m gonna get a cocktail,
vodka and ginger ale;
yeah I’m gonna smoke a cigarette
that’s nine miles long.
I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl
on the Tilt-a-Whirl,
‘cause this old man is going to town.”
†
Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP
24th after Pentecost A, Proper 27: November 8, 2026
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco
“When I get to heaven”
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