Speaking Christian: “Heaven” Mark 12.18-27

Sorry the sermon blog is late this week!  Seems like the hurrier I go, the behinder I get!

Before waxing eloquent about heaven I want to bring us down to earth for a minute or two by recommending two challenging and worthwhile books.  The first is “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker.  The book was published in 1973 and remains a classic.  Becker was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for “The Denial of Death.”  It is an incredibly insightful book about our cultural attitudes toward death and how we work to avoid dealing with the ultimate reality!  The second book is called “How We Die” by Sherwin B. Nuland.  Nuland teaches the history of medicine at Yale.  He is a doctor and his book approaches death from a practical, medical stand point.  A word of caution: neither book is for the faint of heart.  Both should be read by anyone who thinks they might die someday.

So why am I bringing that kind of stuff up when the topic this week is supposed to be “heaven”?  Well, how on earth is it that anyone gets to heaven in the first place?  That’s right, we have to die if we are serious at all about getting to heaven.  I think it is precisely that, death, that makes us so preoccupied with heaven!  The reality that death is imminent and our unwillingness to concede our own mortality causes us to consider heaven pretty important in the grand scheme of things.  Consider this:  I recently had a man in the church tell me that he and his wife are getting old and they are both in failing health.  Therefore, he would appreciate it if I would preach more on heaven for a while.  He does appreciate my sermons, he says, but they have a lot to do with how we are supposed to live here and now.  At this stage in their life, they would like to hear more about heaven.  I think this is pretty normal, especially for older people who are in failing health.  One thing that Ernest Becker points out, though, is that once we reach a certain age we become aware that people don’t live forever.  If people don’t live forever that means I won’t live forever.  I and everyone else I know and love will die.  Today I am one day closer to that reality than I was yesterday.  I am in pretty good health and only 52 years old.  In spite of that, I am always one breath, one heartbeat away from death.  At 82 or 92 I will be even much closer to death!  All of this is simply to say that heaven is so important because death is so real.

Two weeks ago I spoke about The Rapture and The Second Coming.  For many people that has to do with escapism.  It has to do with escaping life in this world in the hope of entering something better.  Last week I spoke about Salvation.  That is a term that many equate to “after-life” and the avoidance of an eternal hell.  Like heaven, these terms imply that this life isn’t something to cling to and that we expect to get out of this life and enter into something different.  Heaven is the epitome of this type of thinking.  We know deep down that we are all terminally ill with a good case of life that won’t last forever.  We want to affirm life in spite of its obvious limits of birth and death.  Therefore, some people will spend more and more time contemplating the notion of life after death.  As Paul said, death is the last enemy we all face.    (1 COR 15.26)

This week’s sermon text is basically just about an encounter with some who have a great deal of skepticism about life after death.  In the end, Jesus says to them, “[God] isn’t the God of the dead but of the living.  You are seriously mistaken.”  (MK 12.27)  I take this to mean that their speculations about afterlife is quite different from Jesus’ own thinking.  The problem is, Jesus doesn’t really explain anything about heaven.  He just tells them they are seriously mistaken in their speculations.  I also wonder what he means in saying that God is the God of the living, not the dead.  Is God only God now, while I am alive?  Once I die, I will be dead!  (I know, Duh!!!)  Does that mean God won’t be God to me after I am no longer alive?  Jesus tells them they are wrong in their speculation.  Beyond that he doesn’t offer much help or much hope, other than possibly to say, your speculations about the afterlife are baseless, mere mistaken speculation!

In scripture, this word, heaven, most literally means the sky. Often, what we receive in English as “heaven” is literally “the heavens” in Greek and “the heavens” is the dwelling place of God.  Beyond that, “heaven” also means simply, “sky.”  (See REV 21.1)  Additionally, when Jesus preached about “The Kingdom of God” he meant the reign of God on Earth.  We have become terribly confused because Matthew, a pious Jew, wouldn’t write “The Kingdom of God” because he couldn’t write or say the name of God.  Matthew was so pious that he wouldn’t even write “G-d”.  So he wrote “The kingdom of the heavens.” (Greek)  Once we realize that quirky little feature about Matthew’s Jewish piety the number of references to heaven in the NT go way down!  Those who want to argue for keeping those references have to contend with the fact that Matthew, like the other gospel writers, is speaking about “The kingdom of the heavens” as that will be played out on the Earth, though!  (Hence the prayer:  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth…  This prayer isn’t about heaven at all.  This is a prayer for this life on this Earth!)
Heaven as the hope for after-life, or heaven as the hope for avoiding hell, has a long-term standing in Christian tradition.  But by long-term we really only mean 1,000 years.  For the first 1,000 years this wasn’t an idea that occupied a lot of time when it came to preaching and writing.  Incidentally, the early patristic theologian and preacher, Origen, subscribed to the idea of life after death pretty much in terms that we know today as reincarnation.  Reincarnation wasn’t officially declared a heresy until the time of Pope Gregory the Great in the late sixth century.  Heaven seems to be a chief preoccupation of many Christians today, though.  I think that is actually detrimental to Christian discipleship and the devotion to heaven has been bad for Christian witness.

Personally, I think that Christianity has more to do with living ethically and compassionately than it does with life after death.  But ethics and compassion don’t scare the hell out of us the way death does.  So rather than focus on living faithfully as Christians in the present many take to speculating about heaven in the future.  We end up longing for heaven as the world goes to hell around us.  The more the world goes to hell then, the greater our longing for heaven.  Were we to spend less time speculation about heaven and more time living as faithful followers of Jesus, the places we live now might begin to look more like heaven!

We can speculate ad nauseum about heaven.  The truth is, we don’t know much about it, if anything, really.  We won’t really know for sure until we are dead.  From that stand point, heaven can wait.  We spend too much time speculating about something we just have to wait to find out about.  We don’t spend enough time making this life in this world more like the heavenly life we hope for.  That is our mistake regarding the message of Jesus!

I can spend all kinds of time speculating about heaven:  Will I get to be young in heaven instead of old?  Will my moustache be gray or brown?  Will there be people there that I don’t like?  If there are people there that I just couldn’t stand in this life, am I free to leave heaven?  I couldn’t get along with them on Earth.  Surely God won’t expect me to get along with them in heaven.  I have been married twice on this Earth?  In heave will I be married to my first wife or my second wife?  Will that depend on which one dies first?

In our funeral liturgy there is a prayer that says, “… and when our days here are finished, let us go forth to live. So that in living or in dying, nothing will separate us from your love.”  Maybe that is what heaven means, trusting that nothing can separate me from God’s love, not even death.  Maybe heaven means that God is with me in death and will never forsake me.  I think that may be more important than, dare I say it, wondering if I can ride motorcycles in heaven!

At the most basic level I think that heaven is so important because we are afraid to die.  But dying is just as natural as being born!  Do you ever speculate about what things were like in the spiritual realm (wherever that was) that you existed in before you were born?  Why are you so preoccupied then with what the spiritual realm will be like after you are dead?  I think it is more important to live life every day as a gift, because it is.  Spend time living this life well, and making the place you live now more like the heaven you hope to go to and there will be no doubt that heave, wherever it is and whatever it is, will be taken care of for those whose trust is in the God of the living.

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