RECLAIMING HEAVEN

We have probably all noticed

            that life on this planet isn’t a cakewalk.

A lot of bad stuff happens. 

I’ll spare you the list of horrors in the news.

You already know that.

Along with the bad stuff, there is plenty

            of goodness and beauty.

There’s a great deal to love here.

But there’s a problem with that too.

The lovely comes and then it’s gone. It’s transitory.

A thousand poems have said it.

Robert Frost put it simply:

Nature’s first green is gold

Her hardest hue to hold

Her early leaf’s a flower

But only so an hour

Then leaf subsides to leaf

So Eden came to grief

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Augustine said

            it is not so much the bad stuff that breaks our hearts

            as the passing away of what we love,

            the people, places and times we love.

That’s why religion – not just ours –

religion itself looks beyond what the Prayer Book calls:

            the changes and the chances of this mortal life

            to find a place where our true hope resides.

The Scriptures teach us to set our eyes

            upon that realm where God’s gracious

and merciful will is done

                        not just now and then

                        but forever and ever amen.

As Christians, we have another world in view.
Paul said,

            If the earthly tent we live in is destroyed,

            we have a building from God,

an eternal house in heaven.

Life was hard in Appalachia in 1784

when Christians began singing,

            I am a poor wayfaring stranger

            While travelin’ in this world below.

            There is no sickness toil or danger

            In that bright world to which I go. 

Since the 5^thcentury BC in Greece

-- and earlier in the East – 

there have been compelling philosophical arguments

            for believing in a realm of enduring

meaning, beauty, and goodness.

But our first intuitions of such a hope

            did not come from philosophy.

They came from the visions of prophets:

            Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel,

            Enoch, and St. John the Divine

            who gave us today’s lesson from Revelation.

  

During a dark time of persecution,

exiled from his home in Ephesus,

            living in a small cave on the little Greek island 

            of Patmos – a dark, grim place then,

           a holy place today adorned with candles and icons --

John had a vision that became the last book

            in our Bible. 

It has always been a controversial book.

It made it into the Bible by the skin of its teeth.

Parts of Revelation are seriously problematic.

But there are also passages of such tender consolation,

            we just couldn’t let go of it. 

Granted, there have been times when the Church 

            was so heavenly minded 

            we weren’t much use on Earth.

But in our day, we have turned our eyes 

away from Heaven,

            reducing our faith to either 

            a political agenda or an amateur psychology.

The gospel certainly has social justice implications 

            and faith can support psychological health.

But if we lose sight of our hope in Eternity, 

we betray the gospel and fail to offer

this heartbroken and despairing world

the very thing it so desperately needs.

Today’s lesson begins with the key words,

            I looked.

Albert Einstein said,

            Reality is an illusion but a very persistent one.

Our greatest physicist said this realm 

            of time and space is illusory.

John the Divine used his sacred imagination 

            to look past that veil of illusion, 

the chaos of this world,

maya, the Buddhists call it, 

            to find the context of sacred meaning

in which our so time and space reality floats. 

John looked and he saw a multitude gathered 

before the throne of God.

The multitude were those who had 

            come through the great ordeal.

Which of us has not been through

            the great ordeal? 

And the multitude sang,

            Salvation belongs to our God

            who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb.

Then John tells us the ultimate fate of the multitude

            -- that would be us.

They will hunger no more and thirst no more.

The sun will not strike them

            nor any scorching heat . . . 

and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.//

When we say Heaven, 

          we are not talking about a geographical place.

We are not talking about a date in time.

We use images of space and time 

            to  because that’s how we think.

But Heaven is a realm beyond space and time.

John is describing the larger Reality

in which space and time exist. 

It’s made of love beyond our capacity to imagine.

That larger reality already holds us in being.

1,300 years later, Lady Julian of Norwich in a vision

            saw the whole cosmos as a hazelnut,

            so frail, so insubstantial, she asked God

            What holds it in existence?

             What keeps it from falling into nothing?

It exists, God answered, because I love it. 

But why should we trust such visions?

Are they not perhaps psychotic breaks?

Why trust one vision rather than another?

  

There are two reasons for us to believe 

            in St. John’s and Lady Julian’s visions.

First, we put visions to a moral test.

What does faith in such a vision do to people?

If we say, when life’s play is done 

            and we ask what truly mattered,

            and we answer, the bottom line is love,

            what kind of person does that make?

It makes us kinder. It makes us compassionate.

It inspires us to live in hope instead 

            of the despair that possesses so many

            leading to paralysis at best

            and at worst, to violence.

The second test is coherence.

Marilyn McCord Adams, one of our very best

            philosophers of religion,

wrote a book titled, Horrendous Evils

            and the Goodness of God.

She says, if God is who we believe God to be,

            infinitely good, boundlessly merciful,

            if goodness and mercy are what make God God,

            then the Eternity which waits for us

            has to be so wonderful, so splendid,    

            that we can look back on even the worst

            things that have happened,

            and say that, awful as it was,

            the destination makes it worth the journey,

            having endured all we have endured.

God will wipe away every tear 

            we have ever shed

            and replace them all with joy.

EARTH'S THE RIGHT PLACE FOR LOVE

A funny thing happened at the end of last Sunday’s

         Gospel lesson from John.

It came to a crescendo of the revelation

of the divinity of Christ.

Then the book ended. 

Theme music played; the credits rolled.

 The End flashed across the screen.

It was like a play where they close the curtain.

Then in this week’s lesson, 

         an actor rushes back on stage 

         waving his arms shouting,

         Wait, wait! There’s another scene.

Today’s lesson was written and added

         to the book several years later. 

The original Gospel According To John

         expressed the faith as John’s congregation

saw it then.

But experience changed their outlook.

When the original book was written,

         John’s congregation was decidedly woke. 

These folks were hyper-spiritual

         so their Jesus was hyper-spiritual. 

In John, we don’t see much of Jesus’ human side.

His feet never quite touch the ground.

John is about believing your way into a mystical union.

Most of the book is silent on how we treat each other. 

Only near the end, does love even come up.

And then, the love Jesus commands is “agape”

– an absolutely unconditional spiritual love 

-- which I would be entirely for 

– if only I were capable of it.

My capacity for love is more limited.

People have to be pretty lovable for me 

          to even put up with them.

It’s a lofty thing we got going all through John.

Then Jesus’ first resurrection appearances

were over the top. 

He walked through walls. 

He invoked the Holy Spirit on the disciples.

He was more supernatural than ever.

John’s community, reading their story that ended 

with last week’s lesson, 

practiced their mystical spirituality for some years.

But reality kept tripping up their spirituality.

While preaching unconditional love, 

they fought like cats and dogs.

They were hemorrhaging from internal strife.

As John’s community struggled with their failures 

in the art of spiritual love,

         they remembered one of the old stories.

They remembered another resurrection appearance

         they hadn’t written down before 

because it didn’t fit their mystical faith.

But now, it became so important,

         they added it to their Gospel.

In the previous resurrection appearances,

         Jesus was supernaturally serene, ethereal.

But in this last appearance, he’s different.

He shows up unassumingly on the beach

looking like a grizzled old fisherman.

They don’t even recognize him.

He offers, not spiritual wisdom, but fishing advice 

-- as old fisherman do.

The disciples finally recognize him 

       and rush to worship their Lord. 

But instead of doing something spiritual,

         Jesus has built a campfire.

Instead of saying something profound like

 “I live in the Father so if you live in me and I in you, 

then you will live in the Father and the Father will  

live in you and you will all be one as the Father

                  and I are one” or some such thing 

          – instead, he says,

         Let’s cook up some of those fish and have breakfast.

This is a very human Jesus – a Christ of the ordinary.

It’s a disconcertingly normal appearance of Jesus cooking

         over a charcoal fire as people still do in poor nations.

After breakfast, Jesus takes Peter aside.

Remember this community had some conflicts

         and Jesus and Peter had a little issue. 

Peter had denied Jesus

         three times in Caiaphas’s courtyard.

So to patch things up, Jesus asks him,

         Simon . . . do you love me more than these?

But the word he uses for love is agape.

It meant, Simon do you have the most unconditional, 

highly spiritual love for me?” 

But when Peter replies, Lord you know that I love you,

he uses the word phileo – an ordinary word, not so spiritual.

           I love you as a friend.

Jesus says, Ok, feed my lambs.

Then Jesus gives Peter another shot at spiritual exaltation. 

He asks again, Simon do you agape me?

But again Peter fails to rise to the spiritual challenge.

He says, Lord you know that I phileo you.

Jesus says, Alright, tend my sheep.

The third time, Jesus changes the question.

He meets Peter on his own human level.

         Simon, do you phileo me?

All he asks now is a human love,

         a human friendship, the kind of thing

         an ordinary bloke like Peter might be capable of.

And Peter says, Yes, Lord, you know I phileo you.

I love you as a common man loves his friend.

I am not an enlightened saint, but I can do that.

Jesus says, Feed my sheep.

The good news is that an ordinary, fallible human love

         is all we have to do.

The bad news is the sheep and lambs part.

Ordinary human love doesn’t elevate us to a higher plane

than ordinary people.

Quite the opposite:

it gets us mixed up with other ordinary people

         who need us as sheep need shepherds.

Someone said, 

The problem with inviting Jesus into your life

         is that he brings his friends.

And so it is.

Loving Jesus in our little human way

         doesn’t make us the least bit special

but it will entangle our lives with an odd lot of other folks.

Jesus gets us mixed up with all the wrong kinds

         of people.

Worse yet, we may even wind up caring about them.

Like it or not, Christianity is a team sport.

We call that the team the Church,

         but the Church suffers from a basic problem.

It has people in it. 

 In recent decades, 

we have run out as many as we can,

         but there are still some of you left.

So we still have troubles.

But it turns out the troubles are necessary.

They bring us back to earth. 

The very messiness of relationships,

         dealing with each other’s quirks and foibles,

         keeps us from escaping 

into the pretentious clouds of contemplation

         and engages us in the challenging

         life-changing process of relationships.

In his classic essay, The Anglican Way, 

Dean James Fenhagen described our pedestrian spirituality  

         as holy worldliness and worldly holiness.

 The father of Humanistic Psychology, 

          Abraham Maslow, said:

         The sacred is in the ordinary . . . . It is to be found 

         in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, 

          one’s friends and family, 

         in one’s own backyard.

Or as Robert Frost put it,

         Earth’s the right place for love.

         I can’t think where it’s likely to go better.