"'What Then Are We to Say...?': Reflections on Heaven"
March 19, 2006: 3rd Sunday in Lent, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org

Scripture:
John 14, selected verses
[On the evening before his own death, Jesus said to his disciples:] "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going." Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life... I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you... Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid."

May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen.

Sermon:
At first glance, it may seem a bit odd that I'm preaching a sermon about heaven and what happens when we die on a Sunday when we've just baptized a bouncing baby boy. Odd, maybe, and perhaps even a bit morbid. But in fact, fear of just what might happen after death is what drove the church to take up the practice of infant baptism in the first place. For centuries, new parents were haunted by the image of limbo, a gray corner of the afterlife said to be reserved for babies who pass on without the benefit of baptism. So the holy sacrament became in practice an inoculation against that very unpleasant possibility, and babies were rushed to the font. Now, even though Pope Benedict XVI just last fall officially closed the door on what he called the "theological hypothesis" of limbo, the idea, and the mortal fear, unfortunately persist.

From our progressive Protestant perspective, of course, baptism is not about protecting our children from the wrath of an angry God. It's not a "Get-Out-of-Hell-Free" card—nor an all-access pass to heaven, for that matter. But as a sign of the all-encompassing grace of God which accompanies us from womb to tomb... and before... and beyond, baptism provides a safe and helpful vantage point from which to consider just what we do believe happens after we die. And since next Sunday the choir will be leading us in our annual Service of Remembrance, when we remember and give thanks for loved ones, family and friends, who have died, this morning is as good a time as any to reflect on heaven.

I will not take up the topic of hell this morning. I can say without equivocation that I do not believe in hell. Despite the numerous references to Hades, Sheol, Gehenna, Abaddon, the Pit, and the Lake of Fire throughout the Bible, despite the churches' millennia-long teaching on the subject, I just don't buy it. I reject the concept utterly, in favor of the minority report from the Christian margins that our God is determined to save all people, and what God wills, God accomplishes. I believe that nothing can stand in the way of God's infinite desire to redeem all things, least of all our finite sin, that in the love of Christ, death itself dies, the specter of hell is erased, and the gates of heaven are thrown open to all.

So when we get there—if "there" is the right word—will we find gates, pearly or otherwise? Will there be harps and halos and hallelujahs? Or will the whole thing be much more meta- than physical? Such questions are not peculiar to Christianity, of course. Heaven has occupied a central place in the human theological imagination since tribal shamans first buried their dead with carved beads and bears. Over the ages, however, Christian scholars certainly have taken up the challenge, elaborating any number of intricate spiritual geometries in answer to that same question, "What will heaven be like?" As a result, the storehouse of our Western Christian culture is cluttered with stories, images, maps, and philosophical abstracts on the subject.

But in the end, the question is neither abstract nor purely philosophical, but practical and pastoral. The real work of imagining heaven doesn't belong in the classroom but by the sickbed, in the hospital waiting room, at the funeral home, and in the pews of the church, the places where flesh and blood human beings come face to face with their own mortality, their fears, and their hopes for... more. In his 1996 musical Floyd Collins, composer and lyricist Adam Guettel gives these questions simple, visceral power by putting them in the mouth of a common man facing his own immanent death. In the song, "How Glory Goes," he ponders:

[singing]

Do we live? Is it like a little town?
  Do we get to look back down at who we love?
  Are we above?
Are we ev'rywhere? Are we anywhere at all?
  Do we hear a trumpet call us an' we're by your side?
Will I want, will I wish for all the things I should have done,
  Longing to finish what I only just begun?
Or has a shinin' truth been waitin' there
  For all the questions ev'rywhere?
In a world a'wond'rin', suddenly you know;
  An' you will always know...

How we answer these questions about what may happen to us in the life after death can have profound implications for how we understand our lives here and now. It can set the context for how we face the joys and sorrows of life. What follows is not meant to be an exhaustive exploration of the history, theology or psychology of heaven, but merely a few reflections.

Consider these words from the book of Revelation, in the twenty-first chapter:

And in the spirit [the angel] carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city, [the new] Jerusalem... [He] had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls. The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width; and he measured the city with his rod, fifteen hundred miles; its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall, one hundred forty-four cubits by human measurement, which the angel was using. The wall is built of jasper, while the city is pure gold, clear as glass... And the twelve gates are twelve pearls, each of the gates is a single pearl, and the street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass (Revelation 21:selected verses).

Sounds a bit over-the-top, doesn't it? Like an episode of "Lifestyles of the Righteous and Holy." But the early church gathered around John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, was a marginalized religious community experiencing violent persecution within the vast, swirling spiritual marketplace that was the ancient Roman Empire. Is it any wonder that they pictured paradise not as a garden, but a city—a fortified city, and their city—built around not the Lord Caesar but the Lord Christ? Their New Jerusalem was planned down to the last extravagant detail. It was a vision of safety, solidity, and power—none of which they knew in life—a gated community grounded in a fierce countercultural sense of holiness.

African slaves in the American South were given training in the Christian faith because their masters believed Bible verses like Ephesians 6:5, "Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ," would keep them docile. But those same slaves took the Bible from their masters' hands and made it their own. They identified with the people of Israel, themselves once slaves in Egypt, and their miraculous escape to freedom through the Red Sea and their triumphal entry into the Promised Land through the River Jordan. As they longed for, and fought for, their own freedom and dared to imagine what other world might be possible—if not here and now, then at least after death—those waters and that promised land of milk and honey, of golden streets, of rest and restoration, came to figure heavily in their heavenly geographies. Their visions became songs, like:

[singing]

Deep river, my home is over Jordan,
  Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground.
Oh, don't you want to go to that gospel feast,
  That promised land where all is peace?
Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground.

In our contemporary American context, the idea of heaven seems to have become more problematic. We haven't stopped dreaming about heaven—far from it. Images of the afterlife have only multiplied, but the older visions of paradise just don't seem to give the satisfaction they once did. A wispy realm of perpetual quiet contemplation of the divine presence, where all striving is over, all choice removed, and even the possibility of sin is gone forever seems, well... boring. Like an eternity in church with no hope of parole—perish the thought!

No wonder the idea of reincarnation fascinates us so. Sure, it's not exactly Biblical, but then most of our more common visions of heaven aren't either, but they answer particular pastoral needs. So maybe today what we want is more than rest from our labors is a sense of purpose in our work, and that's why in many contemporary movies, such as Heaven Can Wait, Made in Heaven, and What Dreams May Come, white, middle class Americans refuse to believe that heaven is really the end. An eternity of peace and quite cannot compare, it seems, to the possibility of more meaningful labor, challenge and perhaps even love. In fact, in Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life, there is no heaven at all, but only "Judgment City," a temporary weigh station between one existence and the next.

The most compelling contemporary vision of heaven I've encountered comes from playwright Tony Kushner. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, the blissful stasis of heaven is being threatened by the movement, the growth and change of human beings. Eternal, unchanging Paradise is being torn apart by heaven-quakes caused by the historic upheavals of the late second millennium. Those heavenly convulsions reflect the struggle of earthly institutions to accommodate the drastic changes begun in the civil rights movement, in feminism, and gay liberation. The gated communities of power and privilege are being rocked to their core, on earth as it is in heaven.

And Kushner, himself gay and Jewish and a socialist, clearly believes these changes are good—good and hard. To make his point, he writes a striking description of a new kind of heaven, one that deconstructs the eternal status quo and embraces change and difference, for the character of Belize, an African-American gay man and nurse to the infamous Roy Cohn, the living, breathing—and, in the play, dying- embodiment of the fiercely conformist old world order. In a fit of HIV-induced dementia, believing Belize to be the angel of death, Roy breaks down and asks:

"What's it like? After?"
"After...?"
"This misery ends.
"Hell or heaven?... Like San Francisco... Big city, overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty-corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens... Prophet birds... Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths... And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion... And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers...Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there."
"And Heaven?" Roy wonders.
"That was Heaven, Roy."

Good and hard, but also helpful. We have to remember that even if God will save all persons, not everyone shares our particular taste in the next world, because not everyone shares our perspective on this one. We have different situations here and now that shape what we hope for in the hereafter. I believe our Christian faith can, and should, offer us a wide variety of images of paradise, to match the wideness in God's mercy, "like the wideness of the sea," and suit the particular pastoral needs of God's people.

You see, neither abstract philosophical inquiry nor obsessive, literalist Bible study will reveal to us the secret blueprint of God's heaven or the Audubon guide to angels. And even if they could, what good what that do the wife mourning her husband, the parents who've lost a child, the woman dying alone of AIDS? Heaven—whatever, wherever, however it may be—is of a whole other order, like God's own self, and so beyond our rationalizations. Poetry is the proper language of heaven, song and story and imagination joined to the pastoral purpose of offering comfort and hope and healing to those who stand at the graveside, grieving, and contemplate what comes next for their loved ones, or even their enemies, and for themselves.

So, as the Apostle Paul was fond of saying when he arrived at a sticking point in his theology: "What then are we to say about these things?" Well, we make is personal. As for me, my personal hope of heaven is founded not in a vision of city, or a river, or another chance, but in a relationship my relationship with Jesus, whom I believe to be the face of God turned toward the world, and toward me, in love. I remember Jesus' words as he contemplated his own death. The night before he was handed over to die, he sat at table with the very friends who would soon desert him, and said, "I will not leave you orphaned." That is heaven for me. No matter who we are, no matter where we may end up on life's journey, the meaning of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection for me is that God will not leave us orphaned and alone—not me, not you, not the most pious of saints among us, nor the meanest of sinners, not even this little one we baptize today, who has only just set out on his life's journey—not anyone, not ever.

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39), that's how Paul put it, in one of his better moments. And what heavenly poetry! And it's my belief that this is true now, while I'm alive, even though I cannot comprehend it fully. But then, in heaven? How much more! Again, from Paul: "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love" (1Corinthians 13:12-13).

Faith, hope, and love abide, persist, keep on keeping on, for all persons, forever: that is the good news of heaven that empowers my living on this side of the veil. It gives me hope that, from the vantage point of eternity, I will see the completion of God's purposes of love, justice, and peace in myself and in the world, the work of redemption and reconciliation I know now only in part. Heaven is not a philosophical abstraction, and it's not just pie in the sky by and by. It's the vision that keeps us trusting and hoping and loving, striving and struggling, laughing and crying... and singing... day by day.

[singing]

My life flows on in endless song;
  Above earth's lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
  That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
  I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
  How can I keep from singing?