Dreams of Heaven

In the Name of the living God, the Alpha and the Omega, the One who was, who is, and who is to come. Amen.

After all of the questions about evil and sin in the world, the second most common questions on our parish survey of “the one thing that I would ask God, if I could ask just one thing,” have to do with heaven:

Am I going to heaven?

Please describe Heaven to me. I hope it’s as glorious as I imagine!

Is Heaven real?

Will my atheist friend go to heaven?

What is it like after death?

Will our pets be with us in heaven?

We all wonder about heaven at some point in our lives. As children, we are curious; later, after experiencing the heart-wrenching separation of death or the bone-breaking pain of terminal illness, we long to join those whom we have lost, or to find a place where death and pain and weeping will be no more. Thoughts of heaven can provide a consoling and compensatory contrast to suffering here on earth: Just think of the generations of American slaves yearning in song for freedom “over Jordan.”

Even our otherwise secular culture these days seems to hold on to an interest in heaven. Many of us have devoured at least one of those books written by someone who has died and been brought back to life through modern medicine, books that almost universally describe a tunnel of light, a sense of watching one’s own body in the hospital room from a perch in a ceiling corner, and an all-pervasive feeling of Love. If you are like me, such accounts provide some reassurance, at least about the experience of death itself. However, there have also been hosts of TV shows and movies about angels or about our longing for deceased loved ones. These shows have colored our modern American cultural understanding of what heaven is supposed to be, coloring it, perhaps, more than the Scriptures do. In the 1998 film “What Dreams May Come,” for example, Robin Williams and his wife and children roam around in a heaven and hell painted entirely by their own individual imaginations, a heaven and hell that perhaps make psychological sense, but—and this is what really got to me—a heaven and hell devoid of God! “Where is God?” asks Robin Williams’ character after looking around. “Oh, God is out there somewhere, watching,” answers another resurrected character with a shrug. And throughout the whole movie, all about the afterlife, God never appears. And not surprisingly, people are just as lost and full of longing in heaven as they are on earth.

While our dreams of heaven tend to be about a longing for changeless happiness, a safe haven from earthly pain, and the fulfillment of the individual soul, the Bible presents for us quite a different dream. Would you be surprised to learn, for example, that our Christian tradition does not include belief in the “immortality of the soul,” in which a spark of “selfhood” separates from the body after death to blend into the unchangeable Oneness of God? That is Greek philosophy, not orthodox Christianity. Are you ever tempted by the logic of reincarnation? That comes from Hinduism and is not part of our Christian belief. Moreover, would you be surprised to learn that our Scriptures do not say that individuals are immediately resurrected in their bodies as they die? Instead, the Bible talks about a common resurrection of the dead, everyone arising at once, a more general kind of validation of the creation of bodies and of the physical world in which we now live.

Let’s us turn to our reading from Revelation. First of all, our text describes God’s presence in a transformed Creation, not in a heavenly realm that is totally divorced from an incomplete, suffering world. Eugene Peterson, in Reversed Thunder, his excellent book on Revelation, points out that, while in English we distinguish between “sky,” the cloudy realm where airplanes fly, and “heaven,” the invisible realm of the afterlife, in both Greek and Hebrew, there is just one word for both sky and heaven. In Greek and Hebrew, “heaven” is ambiguous: it can refer to the skies above us or the place we go when we die.[1] When the author of Revelation sees a “new heaven” and a “new earth,” he is not just seeing sky and land, or even future heaven and present earth, he is seeing the totality of all things “seen and unseen,” God’s total creation. What God is making new is not just the material creation and not just the realm of the afterlife, but the totality of the universe is being transformed; the things that we know, and the things that are beyond us are all being changed. Unlike the God in the Robin Williams movie, our Christian God didn’t just make the world once upon a time and sit back to watch; God is continually making and remaking us and all that surrounds us, making all things new, pouring Himself out into the Creation that He loves, somehow creating life from death, over and over and over again. In this new Creation, the only difference is that the chaos of the sea is banished; the dark threat of non-being is removed.

Note also that God’s new creation comes in the form of a city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of the heavens. Now, we do joke about the “pearly gates,” but do you really think about heaven as a city? I love cities, and Jerusalem is a beautiful city and a very holy city, but my own metaphor for heaven, it is not. It is full of mosques and synagogues and churches, but it is also full of soldiers toting big guns. Jerusalem—or any of our human crime-filled, poverty-ridden, over-crowded cities—a pure, virgin bride adorned for her husband?! Jerusalem—or any of our polluted, concrete-covered cities—the eternal dwelling-place of God?! Shouldn’t heaven instead be a green pasture filled with flowers and white, gentle sheep? Shouldn’t it be like the Garden of Eden, with crystal clear streams bubbling over glistening stones, with shady glens, and the fresh scent of pine needles?

          Writes Peterson, “Many people want to go to heaven the way they want to go to Florida. They think the weather will be an improvement and the people decent.” By presenting us with a city, a conglomeration of human beings, a mix of all that is good and bad in human civilization, God shows us that “we enter heaven not by escaping what we don’t like, but by the sanctification of the place in which God has placed us.”[2] Let that sink in for a moment. Both the author of Revelation and the Old Testament writers find heaven in continuity with our history. We always look for an escape in God, an escape from humdrum daily life, an escape from the people who annoy us or ignore us, but God keeps showing us that we find God wherever we are, if we let ourselves be transformed. Kathleen Norris tells the true story of a woman who tries to comfort her dying mother by saying, “in heaven, everyone we love is there.” The wise mother, however, replies, “No, in heaven I will love everyone who’s there.”[3] It’s not about the place; it’s about the transformation.

          The theme of God dwelling with us in our passage from Revelation should sound very familiar to us Christians. In what other Bible passage, besides this one, do the heavens open up with a loud voice from God? At the baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan, of course.  Mark writes, “And just as [Jesus] was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”[4] Just as God announces God’s immanent presence among us in Jesus, God once again announces God’s immanent presence among us in the New Creation. The God who is with us in the human flesh of Jesus of Nazareth is the God who makes God’s home “among mortals.” The God who brings new life in Jesus Christ is the God who “makes all things new.” The God who conquers Death after being put to death on the Cross by the powers of the City is the God who gives us a new, divine City in which to dwell with one another.

          If we want to dream about heaven, then, it needs to be a dream rooted in our present lives, a dream rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and a dream rooted in this world that God is still making. When I indulge in trying to imagine heaven, I actually find comfort in the mysteries of modern physics. I think of parallel universes, of the relativity of time and space, of dead stars that still shine in the heavens and black holes that devour matter, and I add heaven, too, as  another dynamic and yet mysterious dimension of God’s ongoing creation: as God’s creative, generative presence with us “on earth, as it is in heaven,” but also, somehow, for eternity. Is heaven a real place? It’s certainly not something that I can locate on a map of the cosmos. Will my loved ones be there, my first puppy, a beloved cat? I think that all of our earthly reality will be there, because all of creation comes from God, rests in God, and is part of God’s memory. I don’t remember my life in the womb, but God does. I am the same person that I was then, with the same DNA, the same relatives, the same future. In God, there is continuity between my life now and my life before birth. In God, assures the Book of Revelation, we will live in that same faithful, loving continuity in the world to come.

---

[1] Eugene H. Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination  (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 169.

[2] Ibid., 174.

[3] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 367.

[4] Mark 1:10-11.

Caught In Between

Do you remember when I asked you on Palm Sunday for your “one question to God,” questions that I promised to preach on each week after Easter? I want to thank you for your wonderful participation, and I will print all of the questions in the May Words so that you can think about them along with me. Today’s readings invite me to address a set of questions that greatly moved me as I read them, deeply spiritual and painfully personal questions: “Why can’t I really know in my heart how much God loves me?” “How do I keep a loving heart?” “Why do I feel so incompetent?” In other words, “How can I live in the world of Easter and in the world of sin and death at the same time?” “How does Jesus’ resurrection affect my regular, everyday life?” Simon Peter and the disciples help us to understand that we are not alone in this struggle, and they provide us with a story that can become our guide.

Have you ever been away to summer camp perhaps, or to a far-away country, where life looks and feels so different, that it is almost impossible to remember what your home is like when you are there and almost impossible to remember that place when you are home? For me, my life in Europe fades to flat picture-postcards while I am in America, but when I go back to Europe for a vacation, that world pops back into reality, as if by magic, and it is my life in Louisville that seeps into shades of misty gray. It is as if both places cannot exist at the same time. My memory is just somehow insufficient to capture such different worlds at once.  I believe that is how Simon Peter and the disciples must have felt right after Jesus’ crucifixion—as if their lives with Jesus had never existed, as if they were back where they started, cut off from God and each other, as if both realities couldn’t exist at the same time.

In our Gospel reading, the disciples have been thrust from their world with Jesus back into the world of their former lives—fishing in Galilee. Their memories of their time with Jesus probably seem unreal. Their messiah has been crucified, defeated by the Roman powers, and the systems of meaning that they built while listening to Jesus’ teaching have suddenly come toppling down under the shadow of the cross. To top it off, Simon Peter now not only drifts aimlessly on the Sea in which he once found purpose and livelihood; he must be especially ravaged by guilt. Whenever he thinks fondly of Jesus--his friend, his Lord--he must remember his own betrayal of Jesus, the crowing of the rooster, and the acrid smell of the charcoal fire that was burning in the courtyard where he denied being a follower of Jesus, not once, but three times. Having rushed to shore to meet Jesus, Simon Peter encounters that dreaded fire once again. And he is no longer called “Simon Peter,” the Rock on whom Jesus will build his church. Jesus calls him, “Simon son of John,” the unknown, insignificant fisherman whom Jesus met at the beginning of his ministry. Jesus may be raised from the dead, but Simon Peter still wanders in that empty space in between our everyday world and our “world with God,” a space filled with regrets and failures.

But look at what Jesus does: He invites Simon to join him in his reality—in his new Easter reality—by feeding him and by giving Simon a chance to repent, to undo his cowardly act. Just as Simon denied Jesus three times--three times, Jesus asks Simon if he loves him. Three times, Simon says that he does. Then three times, Jesus offers Simon his new identity: as one who feeds and tends Jesus’ sheep, one who feeds and tends Jesus’ people, and thus feeds and tends Jesus. Resurrection, as Rowan Williams points out, is not only a raising of Jesus’ past identity but also a raising of the past identities of those who have been with him.[1] The Good News for us, we who suffer inadequacy and insecurity, is that Jesus, the victim who loves instead of condemning, invites us into a new world of meaning and forgiveness as he raises us up with him. Being raised with him, being brought into his new reality, we are no longer forced to choose between distant and opposite shores.

       So how exactly does this work? First, we recognize Jesus in a miraculous abundance of life around us. For the disciples, there is suddenly a huge catch of fish, yet their nets don’t break under the load. In that moment of abundance, the disciples know that Jesus is present with them. We, too, are invited to grasp the abundance of the risen Christ in fleeting yet powerful, singular moments: in a satisfying abundance of love that washes over us-- hugs and kisses, cards full of well-wishes, the company of friends. Or we grasp it in a sudden abundance of grace that carries us through a trial—forgiveness that we don’t deserve, meals brought to us when we are sick, debts forgiven. We even grasp it in the breath-taking abundance of beauty in nature—a sunset, a field of spring flowers, dogwood trees bent over with blossoms. God is always present in glorious abundance. “God’s love” in general is hard to grasp, but we can’t deny the momentary weight of it in our hands, like a net full of fish.

Secondly, like Simon Peter, we might need to jump in and swim before the two realities can be bridged. Commentators scratch their heads over Simon Peter being naked and then getting dressed to jump into the sea. But Raymond Brown points out that the Greek phrase can mean that Simon Peter just belted up his fisherman’s smock so that it would not impede his swimming as he rushed to get to Jesus.[2] Simon Peter leaves the nets full of fish; he leaves the boats—all he wants is to get back to Jesus’ world. When we see the risen Christ, we are compelled to tie up whatever gets in our way, and leap. Yes, there is always leaping involved, and we aren’t usually able to push some kind of magic pause button while we ponder the risks.

Thirdly, Peter and the disciples eat with this Jesus who appears to them. They allow him to feed them breakfast, just as he fed them before his death, all those many times. The meal on the beach is of course the Eucharist, the same meal that Jesus offers us today. Each time we share in the Eucharist, we, like Simon Peter, put one foot into the flat, shadowy world of guilt and inadequacy, as we partake of his body and blood that was given for us. Yet at the same time, we are restored by the forgiveness of the One whom we have condemned. The Easter community is both guilty and restored as it gathers in the name of the one who is both crucified and raised. The Eucharist is an activity that opens up the space between our world and the Easter world and holds them both together. As we share the bread and the cup, we enter a place in which that strange disjunction between two worlds is bridged, a place in which the old comes together with the new, in which the world that killed Jesus meets the world filled with Jesus.

Finally, once we have been fed, Jesus asks us, as he asks Simon Peter, to feed his sheep, to tend the people of God. They are not our sheep to do with as we would like; they are not somebody else’s sheep for us to ignore, but they are God’s sheep, and our purpose, our meaning in this post-Easter world, is to care for them. The way to keep a loving heart is to feed God’s sheep. Our new identity is to follow Jesus—to follow him in his self-giving love for others, no matter where it leads.

The young Barbara Brown Taylor, tortured by a sense of vocation that she didn’t understand, was caught once in a place of meaninglessness and lack of purpose. She kept asking and asking God what she was supposed to do with her life, and all that she heard back was silence. But then one night, she heard God’s voice:  “[Do] [a]nything that pleases you,” God said to her. “And belong to me.”[3] It doesn’t matter where our wanderings take us in this ordinary world—whether we are fishermen or priests or teachers or lawyers or moms or scientists, when we are raised with Christ into his post-Easter reality, then we belong to him. In Christ, our ordinary lives are not tossed aside but are sanctified; our memories are not erased but are cleared of guilt; and we are made whole to follow Christ wherever he may lead us. Just like Europe will exist across the Atlantic, whether I am feeling disconnected from it or whether it has been momentarily made present by a phone call from an old friend, our new life and wholeness in Christ exists beneath our doubts and lapses, reemerging as we feed and are fed.

---

[1] Rowan Williams, Resurrection (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002), 35.

[2] Raymond Brown, The  Gospel According to John, XIII-XXI, (The Anchor Yale Bible; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 1072.

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 110.