Heaven

Luke 20:27-38
November 7, 2010 (32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. The genius American folk singer Woody Guthrie once wrote some extremely moving lyrics for a song called “Heaven.” Here are a few stanzas from that song:

It’s after my work tired and weary, I lay down to rest my eyes,

I see this world change in a whirlwind and heaven flies down from the skies;

I see rising up from the wreckage cities and mansions so bright

I see my friends’ eyes and their faces lit up with a bright shining light.

Every hand works in hand with the other and not for power nor greed;

Every hand works to its fullest ability and is paid in its deepest of need;

No cancer, no tuberculosis, no paralysis or asylums are here

No bowery nor skid row of homeless, no eye that is blinded by tears.

I know as you hear such a dream, friend, you will not pass it along;

I do not expect you to sing it as I do, nor to sing such a curious song;

I wrote down this song for my own self, and sing it now to my own soul.

But if you’ll sing songs of your dreamings, then you will reap treasures untold.

Guthrie captured a vision of heaven that was meaningful to him. It was a sort of workers’ paradise without disease or madness. But Guthrie realized that his vision may not be the best for everyone—his heaven may not be your heaven—but he encourages us all to reap the benefits of dreaming of a better future.
Is that what heaven is for us in the Christian Church? Is it just an imagined perfect place to comfort us through the misfortunes and sadness of this life? Is it somewhere that we actually go? Is it real? Do we fly around on angels’ wings strumming little harps?

2. These have been questions for Jews and Christians for thousands of years. Our gospel reading this morning shows Jesus in a tricky discussion with a group of economically powerful Jews known as the Sadducees. By Jesus’ day, most Jews believed in some sort of resurrection of the body and reunion with God in something like heaven after death, but the Sadducees stubbornly maintained a more ancient skepticism in Judaism about the reality of the resurrection. So they try to trip up Jesus, who had become famous for his preaching about the coming kingdom of God where all would be resurrected for eternal life. They try to trick him with a question about Jewish marriage customs in which a widow could marry her deceased husband’s brothers to try to conceive a child to carry on the deceased’s name. In the resurrection (that is to say, in heaven), to whom would the widow be married: the original husband or one of the later husbands? It’s a disingenuous questions since the Sadducees do not believe in the resurrection at all, and Jesus customarily reframes the question and reminds us all that God is the God of the living and that the resurrection is about living in God rather than about our human relationships in this life. But, the passage in some ways raises more questions about heaven than it answers.

3. If you even believe in heaven as a place, or a state of being, or whatever, what do you think it will be like? Through most of Christian history, Christians stuck pretty closely to Jesus’ words in this passage. They did not imagine heaven to be a place where human families or relationships really mattered all that much. They did not expect a reunion with deceased loved ones to be a highlight of the afterlife. Scholars refer to this view of heaven as “theocentric,” meaning that it was centered in every regard on God. The author of a book on heaven, Lisa Miller, has explained that this kind of heaven can be imagined like a giant crowded stadium or arena where everyone is facing the center. In the center sits God on God’s throne and all present praise God continuously having no desire to look either to the right or the left at those around them. God is their one focus. St. Augustine, writing in the early 5th century, said, “The praise of God should be the object of our meditation in this life, because in the life to come it will be for ever the object of our rejoicing.” Almost a thousand years later, St. Thomas Aquinas said that even if heaven had only one person living in it, this sole inhabitant “would be happy, though having no neighbor to love.” The idea, I gather, is that if you are focused on praising God eternally in heaven, you have no need of other people.

4. I won’t lie to you—I don’t find this classical Christian idea of heaven to be all that appealing. I affirm that praising God is our highest calling, but if I praise God better with my friends and loved ones now, why would that change in heaven? And moreover, we want to be consoled by the idea of heaven. We want it to be a place where our grief and loss is done away with because we are reunited with those we love. But, in the last few hundred years, Christians have embroidered more and more into our visions of heaven. As a result, our heaven can sometimes come to feel more like a perfect earth rather than a whole new experience of life. What would your perfect heaven be like? According to some passages in the book of Revelation, its streets will be made of gold and all things will be bedecked with jewels. And popular jokes have St. Peter at the pearly gates acting as heavenly bouncer. One thing I sometimes imagine is a great banquet, a feast, where the conversation is lovely, the food is delicious, the wine is fine, and it just goes on and on. Or I imagine a heaven of mountain meadows with cool breezes, snow-capped mountains, completely fresh air, and I am with my family. And when I am missing her, my mother is there with me. Perhaps your visions of heaven are similar. You are reunited with your dead, you are doing things you enjoy in places that are supernaturally beautiful. How radically different are these visions of heaven from those of the early and medieval Christians! In our modern heaven, where is God? Where is Jesus? Speaking for myself, I sometimes imagine Jesus as the host at the feast, or he is with me in the mountain meadow, or my mother introduces me to him. And God is little more than light or a feeling of well-being that permeates this heaven of mine. Despite this, I still like my heaven because it is so comforting to me now. Our modern visions of heaven encourage us, and console us in grief, and they remind us that things will get better when we are feeling down or scared or lonely or overwhelmed.

5. Of course, despite their ability to console, these visions of heaven, these modern visions that foreground reunions with loved ones and pleasant activities, run the danger of trivializing eternal life with God. They can problematically lessen our focus on resurrection to new life with Christ. Perhaps we have gone too far from Jesus’ own words about heaven wherein we will not be worried about to whom we are married but rather will be like angels and children of God. Perhaps we have lost our focus when, as author Lucy Bregman worries, our heaven resembles “a Florida retirement community, minus ill health and mortality.”
And then, of course, is the very real issue that in this modern scientific world, it has become utterly possible to be a faithful Christian who yet wonders if there even is a place called heaven. It can be hard to believe that Jesus will descend on a cloud and resurrect all the dead, bodies and all, from their resting places to move them to some kind of paradise in the sky. Never mind family reunions or beautiful sunsets over the ocean, can we really believe in the resurrection of the dead at all? Does it even help us to live with this kind of comforting vision of the afterlife, or does it just distract us from our real problems in the here and now? Are we merely drugging ourselves with “pie in the sky when we die by and by”?

6. A famous Baptist minister and preacher named Carlyle Marney once made some candid and self-revelatory remarks about heaven. “In some lectures at Southern Methodist University, Marney confessed there were days he didn’t know if he believed in the resurrection or not. Afterward his friend Albert Outler stopped him in the hall and said, ‘Marney, whoever told you that you had to believe in the resurrection every day?’ ‘Well, Albert,’ Marney responded, ‘if you know so much, when do I have to believe in the resurrection?’ Outler said, ‘On they day you die and the day you help someone else die; that’s when you believe in the resurrection.’” (Quote from The Christian Century, Nov. 2, 2010, Kyle Childress) I’m inclined to agree with Outler. We’ve heard Jesus speak on heaven, we’ve heard Augustine and Aquinas, and we’ve heard our own fantasies of heaven. But what we really need is an abiding belief in the resurrection that is there for us in our most delicate and important moments.

7. Ultimately, as Jesus teaches us, “Now [God] is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive.” You get that? For God, you will never be dead—you will always be alive. That is what counts. When this earthly life is over for you and me, we will know the resurrection made possible for us in Christ. Golden streets, harps, reunions with loved ones—these things are all wonderful consolations, but the resurrection is ultimately an act of God on behalf of life, our life. Let us conclude with another teaching of Jesus. He was talking to his friend Martha after Martha’s brother Lazarus died. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” [Martha replied,] “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” Brothers and sisters here today gathered, Do you believe this? Believe it. Because of Jesus the Christ, you will never die. Amen.