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
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment