Occasionally someone will say to me, "How can there be an eternity. That's incomprehensible. Something going on forever and forever." I have the impulse to say, "Well, go out there tonight and take a look off into eternity, for there is space and time that goes on forever and forever." I don't understand it. I can't get my brain around it. It blows my mind. Yet there it is. And it never occurs to me to deny the existence of the universe because Gil Bowen can't comprehend it.

Like life. Life is a mystery. We know it exists, and yet we do not even begin to understand it. Astronomer Fred Hoyle and mathematician Chandra Wickramasinghe have concluded that the chances of life happening on this planet by accident are less than 1 in 10 to the 40,000 power. Now that is a string of zeros. Dean Kenyon says, "Matter when left to itself tends to go away from life. Life appeared on earth rather suddenly, fully developed from a source that really must be outside the system of nature."

Life is a mystery. Well, this is something like what this day is all about. The mystery of life beyond this one. If life in this world is a mystery, how much more life beyond. Life beyond? Where....and under what conditions? I haven't the foggiest notion. I can't even conceive of what it would be like to be imperishable. Sounds nice especially as the hair falls out and the joints begin to creak. But what that would be like and where and how? I can't begin to comprehend. Thank goodness, the old word doesn't even try. "We see in a mirror dimly," says Paul.

We are very much in the position of the little kid in the womb. Try telling him what life will be like after birth. The effort would be futile.

So why believe it? We don't go around believing wild tales just because they are wild. Did you know that it was three-legged Martians who left those tire tracks in your front lawn last night? Oh, it was? I'm so glad to know. No, this is not just some wild and wooly tale more appropriate to a Hollywood Halloween.

We believe the mystery first of all because we have some pretty good witnesses. One man who lived and loved and died, came back. Made himself known as very real, persuasively real. Over five hundred heard him and saw him on several occasions. So convincing was the experience that it turned them from cowardice and despair into tigers ready to take on an empire, ready to risk even death in the name of this experience. And, in fact, the earliest written account we have of all this, was set down less than twenty years after it happened. The man who wrote it had spoken with most of them. This is no idle fantasy spun in isolation.

And we believe because of what happens to us and our lives when we go with these witnesses, trust them. In the first place, faith in the mystery of this day undergirds meaning in life. If there is no reckoning or reward beyond, sooner or later life in this world begins to feel stupid, absurd and meaningless, especially when tragedy strikes and things go awry. Talk of justice or a loving God becomes laughable. Look around you.

Novelist Walker Percy died May 10, 1990, two weeks short of his 75th birthday. In his six novels and two collections of essays, Percy sounded the trumpet alarm he had blown from the beginning:

"Beware any science or philosophy, any art or religion, that denies the mystery of being human. All our works of discovery and creativity will avail little, he declared, unless they wrestle with the fundamental question: What does it mean to be a human being who lives and suffers and dies?"

Percy regards ours as the most horrible of centuries, in which more people have been killed for noble causes than in all previous ages. His fiction attempts to name the modern malaise that causes us to slaughter one another with unprecedented ferocity. "Scientific humanism" is what he called our sickness: the false assumption that human existence can be explained in natural terms.

In a self-interview a few years ago, Percy said: "This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and then to have to answer, 'Scientific humanism.' That won't do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than an infinite mystery and infinite delight. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less."

In any event, we who believe the mystery, that life does not end with a loud pop like a light bulb dropped on concrete; we who believe that we come from somewhere and go somewhere, that how we live here has eternal consequences, find a whole new intensity and direction in life. It took Simon the fisherman, made him Peter the rock and carried him all the way to Rome. It took Saul the Pharisee and made him Paul the Apostle and marched him 15,000 miles to shake the story of the world.

What shall we say to all these things: the violence, the storms, the diseases, the misfortunes, the rejections, the infirmities, hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. What shall we say? We shall say, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" You see, the mystery calls us to believe that, appearances to the contrary, even instincts and feelings to the contrary, nothing, not divorce, not disease, not disaster, not dumb luck, not death can separate us from God's loving purposes for us. If, in and through even a death like that of Jesus, God can work new life and future for the human story, then through all our sufferings and trials He can do the same, work some good purpose.

Listen to Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he sits in a prison cell in 1944 in Berlin, prisoner of the Nazis and soon to be martyr. He writes to his friend, "Please don't ever get anxious or worried about me, but don't forget to pray for me -- I'm sure that you don't! I am so sure of God's guiding hand that I hope I shall always be kept in that certainty. You must never doubt that I'm traveling with gratitude and cheerfulness along the road where I'm being led. My past life is brim-full of God's goodness, and my sins are covered by the forgiving love of Christ crucified."

Out of the mystery trusted, a great sense of meaning.

Out of the mystery trusted, a great sense of might. What shall we say then to all these things -- we are more than conquerors. We who embrace the mystery of this day, that God is present to us in even the darkest hours, bringing life out of death, we receive a new spirit of might with which to face tomorrow.

John Claypool writes, "I had occasion to remember this experience some years ago when a close friend asked me abruptly, 'Does God really help a person in time of trouble?' At that moment, I myself was coming out of one of the most trying experiences of my whole existence. Some nine months before, my little daughter had been diagnosed with acute leukemia, but very quickly she had been given a medicine that enabled her to go into a remission, and for some time she had been almost perfectly normal. Naturally this created many distant hopes in my mind.

"All of these hopes came to an abrupt end, ironically, on Easter Sunday morning, when the old pains reappeared and she went into a severe relapse that involved hospitalization for some two weeks. Part of the time both of her eyes were swollen shut, and pain racked every part of her body. Moving with her through those two weeks was an unspeakably draining experience. I found myself stretched in every way - physically exhausted, emotionally dissipated, my faith itself challenged as never before ...and it was just at this moment that my friend thrust his question before me. He was full of intensity as he looked me in the eye and said, 'Give it to me straight. I am not asking you this as a preacher. I am asking you as an honest human being. Was there Anybody or Anything down there at the bottom? When the chips were really down, does this 'thing' we call God really make any difference?'

"He was too good a friend, and the situation was far too serious for me to attempt to put up a front or to trot out a pat answer. The only thing appropriate for that moment was honest reporting. I thought for a long time, and then said quietly, 'Yes, I can honestly say there was Something down there in the darkness. The mystery of Godness was present. I was given help. No ecstasy. No great energy. Just the gift of endurance - that was all that met me in the depths of darkness. By the grace of God, somehow I stayed on my feet! I did not blow up in presumptive bitterness; neither did I give up in hopeless despair. I was given the gift just to stand and hold on.' "

So trust in the mystery of God and life does bring a certain kind of might. Out of the mystery, meaning. Out of the mystery, might. Out of the mystery, music. "For the trumpet will sound." I don't know how those who believe that death is the final word, I don't know how those who believe that life leads only to the grave, can really sing....ever. Music believes unqualifiedly in the mystery. Whenever I am afflicted by doubt or despair, as we all are at one time or another, I know no better antidote than Mahler. Hard not to believe in another world in the presence of the last movement of his Resurrection Symphony.

Eugene Smith was a minister who never sang much because he didn't have much of a voice and couldn't read music. But one year his daughter persuaded him to sing along with the choir when it came to the "Hallelujah Chorus." And he really got caught up in the last part when they were singing all of those "Hallelujah's" at the end. He said that as they were singing all of those Hallelujahs, he got carried away. He loved to sing those Hallelujahs and he was just about to sing a couple more when all of a sudden the choir stopped, the director stopped and the organ stopped. He said that they stopped too soon. He said, "Since that time I've been going around with a couple of Hallelujahs inside of me just waiting to get out." What a way to live and die.

So we embrace it one more time - the mystery. And with it we find meaning and might and music. More than conquerors we are. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Hallelujah!

Orley Herron: Gil, we go back a long time. In fact, we graduated together at Wheaton College in 1955. Then, we had deep roots spiritually on Easter and I ask you today, what would our Christianity be without the resurrection of Jesus Christ?

Gilbert Bowen: It wouldn't be anywhere. Without the resurrection of Jesus, without the encounter with Jesus on the other side of death on the part of the disciples, that early band, there is no Christianity. It was the resurrection that took them from a position of defeat and despair. Their Friend had died; He had been destroyed by all the powers of that time and there was no future for them. It was the resurrection experience that galvanized them into life again, that brought them to believe that His purposes, His way, all He had called them to had future, and life and would go on. It made all the difference in the world. I don't see that without it you have got a Christianity.

Herron: If we go back to 1955 and you retrace your life and your Christian walk, what would you do differently than you have done?

Bowen: Well, I suppose in root, nothing. I am very content that the way I have walked in general has been the way that God would have wanted me to walk. That is a hard question.

I suppose one thing I would do would be to give more time to reflection and quiet and availability to the Spirit of God which I, as a Type A among a lot of Type A's, tend not to do. I suppose that is one thing I would do differently. I think we tend to become so caught up in our activity and our energy that we don't really give an opportunity for the winds to blow through us from God. That is the first thing that comes to mind.

Herron: Thank you, Gil.

Bowen: I could probably come up with ten more.

Herron: In another time and another hour, we can continue that.