As the movie Contact opens, the audience sees a precocious girl named Eleanor learning how to use a ham radio. Nicknamed "Sparks" by her father, she has reached a man in Florida, and is excited that her radio lets her speak with someone so far away. In a later scene she asks her father wistfully if she can call her deceased mother on the radio. He responds sadly that no antenna is big enough.

As the movie progresses, the audience learns that Sparks' beloved father died of a heart attack when she was nine years old. She lost the man who meant the world to her. In a poignant scene, while family and friends are still at the house following the funeral, Sparks sits before her radio desperately trying to reach her father. With tears in her eyes and agony in her voice, she calls his name into the microphone over and over, searching for her father the only way she knows how. Her receiver, of course, is coldly silent.

Many of us here this morning for All Saints' Day may know something of what Sparks was going through. We are here today to remember those we love who have been taken from us by death. This is an emotional day in the life of the church. Our loved ones may have died recently so that the grief we feel may be fresh. Perhaps we have some distance and the pain is not as sharp, but still the grief hurts. We are grateful for the comfort the church offers on this day. We have faith in God. We believe that death is not the end. Nevertheless, we share the anxiety, the longing that Sparks felt sitting at her radio. Where exactly are our loved ones? They are not anywhere we can reach them. No antenna is powerful enough to enable us to talk to them. What is their existence like? What happens after we die?

If we turn to this strange sounding passage in chapter 7 of Revelation, we get a vision of life in the resurrection, the hope of all Christians of what happens after death. This is not a precise, "just--the-facts" answer to our questions about what happens after death. This passage is part of a vision. It gives us the language of poetry, of liturgy. The book of Revelation uses the literary technique of a vision to convey its message. The author, John, about whom we know very little, may indeed have been a visionary. He tells us in chapter 4 that he has seen past a door into heaven. Perhaps that is his way of expressing his insights into the meaning of what he has experienced and learned about God. As powerful as it is, it is still the language of a vision, not a first-hand report. Even in this blurry, symbolic language, however, we can piece together some affirmations about life in the resurrection. We get not so much information as hope, not details, but assurance. John of Patmos gets a peek beyond the creation we live in. With the antenna of a vision, he sees things our senses cannot tell us.

Originally, John's vision was a call to courage and endurance in the face of persecution. At the time of his writing, some Christians had been killed outright, and others had suffered harassment or ostracism on account of their faith. In chapter 2, we learn that Antipas of the church in Pergamum had been martyred (2:13). John's vision reveals what's on the other side of the persecution. As John inspires a beleaguered church, he begins to speak to our concerns this day as well.

As John peers into his vision, he sees a great multitude standing before the throne. These are the Christians who have died and have been resurrected. This multitude is international, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual. The barriers that divide people on earth have been torn down in the resurrection. We will worship side-by-side and hand-in-hand with all people. Fear, distrust, and suspicion will melt away, so that we can embrace each other as brother and sister. The resurrection will be a time of true community and baggage-free fellowship.

The victorious, heartfelt worship of the multitude indicates a closeness to God that goes beyond even our deepest experiences of God's presence in this life. Later in the book of Revelation, John assures us of this closeness even more clearly: "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them" (Revelation 21:3). When we worship now, we often are distracted, or our responses are mechanical. We are not always into it. John assures us that in the resurrection, our worship will be spontaneous and genuine. We will be fully engaged in our praise and devotion to God.

The last verses hold the tenderest promises of all. These verses promise healing of body and soul. In the resurrection, our physical bodies will no longer be a burden. John expresses this by saying that we will no longer hunger and thirst. Our bodies are part of God's good creation, but our bodies are weak and needy. Part of our neediness is our hunger. We need food to survive, but very few of us have a good relationship with food. Our need for food and water is so great that we schedule much of our lives and many of our church functions around meals. Our need for food and water sometimes seems to control us. In the resurrection, we will be free from this control. Our resurrection bodies will not be weak and needy.

This redemption of the physical world will extend even to the realm of nature. The promise that the sun will not strike the multitude of the resurrected speaks of reconciliation between humanity and nature. Nature is one of God's greatest gifts, but nature can also be destructive and dangerous. According to one of the two accounts of creation in Genesis, the sun was part of God's good creation (Genesis 1:14-18). The sun is good and life giving, but it is also harsh and withering. Who of us has not at one time or another been oppressed by the sun's heat? It saps our strength, can make us ill, and can even kill us. In the resurrection, this ambiguity will be healed. In the resurrection, people and nature will live in harmony. We will experience God's creation as the gift it was meant to be.

Just as our material selves will be redeemed, so will our raging emotions, pain, and grief. Life is full of heartaches. The emotion we all share today is grief. Grief can be a devastating experience. Some of us feel the sting of the death of a loved one decades later, the pain hardly diminished by the passing of time. Sometimes anger and grief threaten to overwhelm us. Trying to keep our emotions under control takes enormous energy. John promises that God will reach out the divine finger and wipe the tears from our eyes. What peace that gives us to know that in the resurrection, our loved ones have been healed of their emotional hurts.

This passage was written to give courage to Christians undergoing persecution. John's message was that however bad the suffering was, the resurrection would be an experience of triumph, fellowship, genuine worship, and redemption of body and soul. "Hang in there," John was saying, "the Roman Empire may seem to control things now, but God is ultimately in control."

We, in the United States, do not experience persecution for our faith. Our concern this day is the situation of our loved ones who have died. Even though we don't endure persecution, we do experience life as difficult, painful, limiting, lonely. The Greek word translated as "ordeal" in verse 14 originally meant to squeeze or be under pressure. Pressure, being squeezed, being stressed are part of all of our lives. In a sense, life is a great ordeal. Certainly, we experience many joys in life, but life can be frustrating, painful, and even cruel. We are not given answers to our questions of why life is that way. We are assured, however, that beyond this life, God will restore, recreate, redeem, and rectify.

So, let us take heart. We have no antenna to contact those we have lost. Their absence affects us every day. We don't know exactly what their existence is like. Nevertheless, we can comfort ourselves with John's vision. The resurrection is an experience of true fellowship, of the joyous presence of God, of the healing of body and soul, and of reconciliation with the rest of God's creation. We may still be in grief this day; grief takes time. Yet we affirm a victory beyond grief. We place our loved ones in God's hands, and wrap John's promises around ourselves for comfort.