Will There Be Beer in Heaven?

When I was a young pastor, I got a call from an elderly woman in our church whose son had died.

He was seventy-two, so that tells you something about his mother.

I didn’t know her son, Ronny, at all. I was basically doing the funeral as a favor to his mother, whom I did know, and whom I wanted to love well. This is one of the things pastors do. We are occasionally asked to stand up and say something meaningful about the life of a person we have never met to a room full of people who knew him better than we ever will.

No pressure, right?

I was still pretty young and hadn’t done many funerals, so I did what young pastors do when confronted with death.

I prepared. I had my Bible. I had my notes. And I had John 11, where Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

You really can’t do much better than that.

So I drove to the funeral home prepared to talk about Jesus and Lazarus and resurrection and eternal life.

And then I pulled into the parking lot, and oddly there appeared to be a tailgate party going on behind the funeral home. People were standing around drinking beer and laughing. Not exactly the hushed tones and black suits I had imagined when preparing my sermon.

I asked somebody what was going on.

“Oh, those are Ronny’s friends.”

Of course they were.

For a moment I considered joining them, but I decided against it. I was, after all, the pastor.

So I went inside, got myself situated, checked my notes one more time, and prepared to do the dignified pastoral thing.

Then I walked up to the casket, and Ronny was lying there surrounded by…beer cans. Bud Light, as I remember it.

Apparently his friends had decided that if Ronny was going somewhere, he wasn’t going empty-handed. And just in case I had somehow missed the point, somebody had placed an empty beer can near his mouth with a straw running from the can into Ronny’s embalmed mouth.

There are moments in ministry when you realize there was a significant gap in your seminary education, and this was one of them. Nobody had covered this. Not in Pastoral Theology. Not in Homiletics. Not even in Church History, which had some pretty strange people in it.

But I was the pastor, so I gathered myself, and soon the service began.

I stood in front of Ronny, his Bud Light, his friends from the parking lot, his elderly mother, and his widow, opened my Bible, and began talking about Jesus.

“I am the resurrection and the life…”

It is one of the great claims in all of Scripture. Jesus standing outside the tomb of his friend Lazarus, with everybody grieving and confused, declaring that death would not get the final word.

I was just getting going when Ronny’s widow interrupted me from the front row.

“WILL THERE BE BEER IN HEAVEN?”

She was drunk. Very drunk.

And she wanted an answer. Now.

Again, seminary had failed me. I looked at her. I looked at Ronny. I looked at the beer.

And somewhere in that tiny space between panic and prayer, I heard myself say:

“If Ronny is in heaven, and Ronny wants a beer, I’m pretty sure he can get a beer.”

There was a long pause. His widow sat down, satisfied, but I wondered if my seminary professors would be.

I don’t remember much of the rest of the sermon, but I do remember that line. And oddly enough, after all these years, I think I still believe it.

Not the beer part exactly. I have no idea whether there will be Bud Light in heaven, but frankly, if there is, I’m hoping glorification improves the selection.

But I do believe we have a terrible habit of making heaven smaller than it is.

We imagine eternity as a very long church service. Clouds. Harps. Choirs. Everybody behaving themselves. No beer cans. And certainly no tailgating.

But the Bible’s picture is far more earthy than that. And apparently more fun.

It ends with a feast. A city. A river. Trees. Bodies raised from the dead. People from every tribe and tongue gathered around a table.

God making all things new.

Not throwing creation away.

Redeeming it.

Which means perhaps the widow’s question wasn’t as foolish as it sounded.

Will there be beer in heaven?

She wasn’t really asking about beer.

She was asking whether Ronny would still be Ronny. Whether the things that brought him joy would somehow survive death. Whether resurrection means becoming some wispy, religious version of ourselves or whether God actually intends to give us our lives back—healed, restored, purified, finally made whole.

“If Ronny is in heaven, and Ronny wants a beer, I’m pretty sure he can get a beer.”

Maybe that wasn’t such a bad answer after all.

Because Jesus didn’t stand outside Lazarus’s tomb and say, “I am the escape from life.” He said, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Life.

That stubborn, beautiful, ordinary thing. Eating and drinking. Laughing with friends. Sitting around tables. Telling stories. Knowing and being known. All the little things death seems to steal from us.

And I believe resurrection means that in the hands of God, none of the good ones are finally lost.

I’ve done a lot more funerals since then. I’ve stood beside graves with people I loved and buried people whose absence changed the shape of my own life. And I’ve learned that when people are grieving, their questions are rarely as theological as they sound.

What will she be like?

Will he know me?

Will we laugh again?

Will my mother still be my mother?

Will my husband still tell those terrible jokes?

Will Ronny still be Ronny?

Will there be beer in heaven?

And behind all of them is really one question:

Does love survive this?

John 11 says yes. Not sentimentally. Not easily. Jesus himself weeps before he answers.

But yes.

Death does not get to keep everything it takes.

The One who called Lazarus out of his grave is making all things new.

And whatever heaven finally turns out to be, I bet it will be far more alive, more physical, more joyful, and probably more surprising than most of us have imagined. Maybe even surprising enough for an old man, surrounded by his friends, to raise a can.

Although I still hope somebody talks Ronny into something better than Bud Light.