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[This sermon is also available in MS Word format]
Heaven
Rollins Chapel
May 20, 2004
Richard R. Crocker, College Chaplain
Ephesians 5:14-21
Last week I talked about hell. Today: heaven. It reminds us of Mark Twain’s adage about the weather in New England: if you don’t like it, wait a few minutes and it will change.
Today is a holiday in the Christian church year. It is Ascension Day, the occasion on which some people recall the story of Christ’s Ascension into heaven. It occurs forty days after Easter. Luke tells the story in Acts of how the disciples watched Jesus as he rose into the air and disappeared into the clouds. Since, however, the doctrine of the ascension is such a mystery, and since the holiday always occurs on a Thursday rather than a Sunday, it is a holiday notable for its neglect. Indeed I suspect that this is the first that some of you have heard of it.
Not that the doctrine of heaven is unimportant. Indeed, I would say, again, that, on a popular level, Christian faith seems to boil down to heaven and hell. Some people are going to heaven, some to hell. Heaven is a place of eternal bliss; hell is a place of eternal torment. Understandably, if those are the options, most people want to go to heaven. It reminds me of the story of the Sunday School teacher who asked the class, “ How many of you want to go to heaven?” Everyone raised their hands except one little boy. The teacher asked, “Johnny, don’t you want to go to heaven when you die?” “Oh,” he said, ”when I die. I thought you meant now.” And much of Christianity seems to be a list of instructions and requirements to make sure that they will go to heaven when they die, along with the smug reassurance that people who ignore the rules will go to hell.
Now I hope I hear grimaces from you now saying – “That isn’t my faith. That’s not how I understand things.” Well good. I hope it isn’t. But I am talking to you about how Christianity is understood on a popular level. I am talking to you on the basis of long experience listening to preachers. I certainly hope that is not how you understand things, because I believe this is a perverse understanding of Christian faith. But if that isn’t how you understand things, then how do you understand them?
I’ll tell you how I understand them – and I invite your response – either at lunch, or a time of your choosing.
First, I must say that I do not understand things at all. Being itself is such a mystery – sometimes such a wonderful mystery, sometimes such a painful one. I do not understand how anyone came to be – much less how I did, or how you did, or how it is that we are here right now. We live in a context of incomprehensible mystery, to which the best response is humility, awe, and reverence.
Second, my tradition has taught me, and I believe, that reverence for being translates into reverence for a Creator God, who is beyond all and through all and in all. This God has revealed himself to us in many ways, but especially in the scriptures that are holy to us, and supremely in Jesus Christ, who proclaimed the kingdom of God, and whose proclamation incited his crucifixion. The resurrection of Jesus gives us hope and assurance that the kingdom of God will not be finally defeated by our opposition to it - by our ignorance, hatred, greed and sin. God’s good purpose finally overcomes all that opposes it.
So what does this have to do with heaven? Just this: the kingdom of God is a state of being in which all of creation realizes the harmony of God. The kingdom of God is a future goal, but it is also a present reality. Heaven, which is another word for the perfect rule of God, is not only something yet to be experienced; it is also something we know now by anticipation. When we come to a moment of realization in which our soul rejoices, because, for the moment, we see the perfect will of God somehow at work in the world, we have glimpsed heaven. When, despite the selfishness that guides most of our life, we find ourselves loved and forgiven in a way that we simply do not deserve, we have glimpsed heaven. I say glimpsed. We never do and never can completely see heaven in this life – only glimpses. But through those glimpses, we learn to trust. We learn to believe that the same one who created us – in ways too marvelous to comprehend, can be trusted to preserve us and redeem us, so that death does not end whatever God intends for us. To claim too much knowledge about what lies beyond death is silly. But to possess a faith – a trust- that God will not abandon us even in death is a gift that enables us to live freely, hopefully, lovingly, and generously. And to the extent that all of us really can live freely, hopefully. lovingly, and generously, then we know that God’s will is being done one earth, as it is in heaven.
I don’t know how much you think about heaven. In a sense, if you think heaven is a place of bliss reserved for people who agree with you, I hope you don’t think about it much, because that view actually shuts us off from realizing the height and breadth and length and depth of God’s wonderful love. But if by heaven you mean your hope for the kingdom that is to come when all will be redeemed, and the earth will be full of he knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea, then I hope you think about it all the time.
The apostles’ creed, that very ancient Christian statement of belief, says, “He descended into hell. He ascended into heaven, where he sits on the right hand of God the father almighty. From thence he shall come to judge both the quick and the dead.” We can be forgiven for inferring from such teaching, and from Luke’s story of the Ascension. that heaven is a place beyond the clouds. But we know better. It is much more than that.
Now unto him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen. ……….
Sermon © 2004 Richard R. Crocker. All rights reserved.
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