Advent - heaven
“But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Phil 3.20
Father Murphy walks into a pub in Donegal, and says to the first man he meets, "Do you want to go to heaven?"
The man said, "I do Father."
The priest says, "Then leave this pub right now!"
He approaches a second man. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"Certainly, Father."
"Then leave this den of Satan," says the priest.
He walks up to O'Toole. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"No thank you very much Father.”
The priest looks him right in the eye, and says, "You mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to go to heaven?"
"Oh, when I die? Yes, Father! I thought you were getting a group together to go right now."
Most of us like the concept of heaven. We’re just not keen to leave right now.
In popular culture heaven is full of clouds, harps and halos; angels peeling grapes, chubby little cherubim. Each age has represented Heaven as the best of their own geography, cuisine and music, although they have often done so with a little tongue in cheek.
Here’s Alan Bennett, presumably calling on childhood holiday memories, in Habeas Corpus:
My life I squandered waiting,
Then let my chance go by.
One day we’ll meet in Heaven.
That Matlock in the sky.”
The Koran describes heaven beautifully, albeit in very earthy terms which would comfort many a priest on a Sunday morning after one of those Saturday evenings: “It is the garden in which there are rivers of water, flowing springs, branching vines with all kinds of fruits. There the saints shall recline… no headache shall they feel there from wine, nor shall their wits be dimmed. They shall be served by large-eyed damsels of modest glance.”
I had the misfortune to be in Oxford Street yesterday. There you had all the traditional advent themes in tableaux: heaven, hell, judgement and death.
And today we look to the promise of heaven: those unspeakable joys which God has prepared for those that unfeignedly love him.
Is the concept of heaven just whistling in the dark, keeping ourselves cheerful in the fearsome face of death? This is what bare-fact atheists such as Richard Dawkins or Ludovic Kennedy would have us believe.
No, death itself points any reasonable person to the continuity of personhood in the life to come. The natural inclination of all humankind has been to suppose that there is yet more.
Who has not lost a friend, a family member - perhaps someone vibrant with life, loving and much loved; or perhaps at the end, weak and frail. And is not the sense that they are still ‘here’ overwhelming and almost tangible at times?
This is how that great rationalist CS Lewis felt about the death of his friend Charles Williams:
“No event has so corroborated my belief in the next world as Williams did simply in dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death which changed.”
It is only simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ - human life is ‘nothing but’ this or that - which says, that because there is no scientific evidence for the life to come, then there is none.
It is only simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ which says, that because there are psychological reasons why we should fool ourselves into believing in the life to come, then there is none.
Obviously we no longer believe that heaven is in any sense ‘up there’. We have moved beyond the Ancient Near Eastern inverted colander that separates the waters above from the waters below. And we no longer adhere to the Greek view of layered heavens - God being beyond the seventh heaven.
Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, puts into words a valuable and common insight of Christian thinkers:
“A proper Christian understanding of heaven is not as a place remote from the present world, but rather as a dimension, normally kept secret, of present reality… ‘Heaven’ is God’s dimension of present reality.”
CS Lewis again hints at this in his science fiction novels. The hero, Ransom, questions an angel who appears to be shimmering as he stands before him. The angel explains that in heaven, he is usually still, but he has to perform amazing contortions to appear stationary in front of a human.
For we are on a spinning planet in a spinning solar system, within a whirling Milky Way, within an exploding group of galaxies, within a rapidly expanding universe. As we are sitting in church this morning, we are in fact spinning around at dizzying speeds of thousands of miles per second.
Religions are still divided in what they believe to be the nature of life after death.
Re-incarnation has a long and honourable history both among Hindus and Buddhists. And recently in the West it has become fashionable to remember a past life in which you were a consort to the Pharaoh or a Lady in Waiting to Elizabeth I. Less frequently, I find, do people remember their life as a goose or as a wretched medieval serf.
There is no place for reincarnation within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, for it is neither in the Scriptures, nor does it sit easily with the view that every person is of infinite value to God; loved by Christ; the temple of the Holy Spirit.
More popular in recent years is the idea that we will be absorbed into nothingness. This again has come from the East. Here is the Hindu Upanishad: “ My friend, welcome the joy of impersonal nothingness - nothing, this is the end, the supreme goal.”
For the Buddhist, Nirvana is a similar concept. And of course it has had its adherents within the Christian church.
This is the great Methodist preacher and writer Leslie Weatherhead:
“Would it really matter if I were lost like a drop of water in the ocean, if I could be one shining particle in some glorious wave that broke in utter splendour and in perfect beauty on the shores of an eternal sea?”
Well yes, Lesley, it really would matter.
Historic Christianity has used art and music to paint a picture which emphasises the relational aspects of the world to come: a place of completion, but not dull stasis.
Heaven is the place where the object of our worship can be viewed with unveiled face. Where we will gaze on the Lamb that was slain, who yet lives. Where we will no longer peer anxiously through a glass darkly, but see and know, even as we are seen and known.
Where our thirst for knowledge will be satisfied by the eternal wisdom of God.
We will be the people we have always really wanted to be. We will be free at last from the restlessness that drives us and the whole human race towards great beauty and ingenuity, and towards madness and self-destruction.
And we will be with the saints, and the angels, and with those whom we have loved in this life, now made perfect in Christ. Heaven is a social concourse, for there can be no being, no personality in isolation from others.
But even when we have painted our pictures, Scripture reminds us that, ‘no eye has seen, nor ear has heard, no mind has conceived’ what God has in store for those who love him.
And here in the bread and the wine, at this altar where the veil is thin, the dimensions of heaven break through into our own dimensions.
The mystical Body of Christ, lifted towards heaven, is viewed by another innumerable company, on another shore, and we are knit together with the saints.
And we are reminded again that
“…our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Phil 3.20
