Hilton Head Island, SC – September 9, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 12:18-27; Revelation 21:1-7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. – Mark 12:25
What kind of question is that, for heaven’s sake; of course heaven exists! The Bible says it exists! Many times and in many ways, the Bible declares the existence of heaven.
Let us begin at a place about which we can all agree. Whatever it means, “heaven” has mainly to do with life after death, with the “afterlife,” with eternity. But in the New Testament, there are two distinct ways of thinking about life after death. The first is to think about “the resurrection of the body,” and the second is to think about the eternal life of the soul in heaven.
So what is the difference? “The resurrection of the body” usually refers to our physical body being raised from the dead here, on the earth. Many Christians, especially certain kinds of fundamentalists and evangelicals and what some would call quasi-Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and the like, believe that eventually they and others will be resurrected into a new life after death, but that it will be lived on earth, not in heaven. In New Testament times, presumably most Christians believed that.
I suspect almost no one here believes that. Mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics may have believed that at some time in past centuries, but not now. If we believe that there is a life after death, which not all Christians do believe, it will be a life lived in heaven. But in any event, as the old spiritual so poignantly declares, “Everybody talkin’ ‘bout heaven ain’t goin’ there.”
Jesus talked about heaven. Paul talked about heaven. Others in the New Testament, especially the writer of the Book of Revelation, talked about heaven. However, I am not going to address whether anyone or who in particular shall go to heaven; I am just going to be asking the prior question, Does heaven exist?
A while back a symposium was held which asked the question, Does heaven really exist? Atheist John Derbyshire said no. Well-known Rabbi Shmuley Boteach said that heaven misses the point of religion. He didn’t deny heaven’s existence, but he said that as a Jew, his obligation is to think about this world, not the next. Jonathan Aitkin, the Christian member of the panel, told about his near-death experience, in which he got a glimpse of the afterlife. (You may have heard of similar experiences from other people.) “Heaven is where God dwells,” said Jonathan Aitken, “and its population will be full of surprises.” Probably most of us would agree with both halves of his statement, but it is the first half which really causes the problems. Where does God dwell?
This sermon has two main points. Here is the first. Heaven is not a place. At least it isn’t a place as we know other places. Every place we have ever been to or know about on earth is physical. That is, it consists of matter in many various forms. Hilton Head Island is a place. It is an island shaped like a shoe, and it is twelve to fourteen miles long, depending on how you choose to measure. New York City is a place. It has lots of tall buildings, several bridges going onto Manhattan Island, etc., etc. London or Paris are physical cities, the Sahara and Gobi Deserts are physical deserts, every place on earth is a place, and therefore, by both definition and common understanding, these places are all physical.
It is widely believed that Heaven is not a physical entity. It is a spiritual entity. Probably most of us would agree with that. But in saying that, we have an intellectual and philosophical problem. What does the word “spiritual” mean? In Greek the word for “spirit” is either pneuma or anima. Pneuma literally refers to air; “pneumonia” is a disease of the lungs. Anima is the soul or spirit or unseen essence of an animal, from which, obviously, the word “animal” is derived. We speak of spirited or animated horses or dogs or, additionally, people. Animals have spirit, but only humans have soul. Certain singers sing soulful songs. Robin Williams and Jon Stewart and Joan Rivers are very soulful, spirited, and animated people.
Presumably, heaven is where souls go after the death of the human body. (If you think your dog or cat will be with you in heaven, you’ll have to talk to someone else about that. I am agnostic about it; I am without knowledge. I strongly doubt it, but I don’t know.) But I believe in heaven, even though I know virtually nothing about it. Nor, I think, do you.
Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam affirm a celestial life after death. Christianity calls it heaven, Buddhism calls it Nirvana, and Islam calls it Paradise. Judaism, Hinduism, and some other religions are less apt to refer very much to heaven.
It has long been postulated that some people are “so heavenly minded they are no earthly good.” I take that to mean that they focus more on the afterlife than on this life. Usually such folks concentrate on doing all the right things on earth in order to be accepted by God into heaven. That is faulty theology, in my opinion, but that is nevertheless what motivates them in their earthly life.
Melanie Reid writes a weekly article for the Sunday London Times Magazine. It is called Spinal Column, so named, I presume, because she has, as she herself declares, “a severely crippled body.” In one of her columns, she wrote, “I will be very blunt. Most mornings I contemplate suicide, briefly examining the concept in a detached, intellectual way.” Obviously she has never carried through on her contemplations. But she continues, “Knowing that I have a choice is a huge comfort to me; it sustains me on the days when I make the mistake of looking too far into the future.” She ended her essay by saying, “(This) debate is not about other people. It is about every single one of us.” The minds of mortals should never ignore their mortality.
We shall all die, most of us by what we call “natural causes,” but a few by suicide. And then what becomes of us? And quite apart from suicide, what happens to us after we die?
Being as old as I am, and having known as many parishioners and other community members as I have known, I have officiated at literally hundreds of funerals and memorial services. In almost every one of them, unless asked not to do so by the deceased before they died or the family after they died, I have talked about heaven, or in other words, about life after death or the immortality of the soul. I honestly believe there will be a life after death for everyone, and that it will be far greater and more joyful than we can imagine. And yet I have no idea what it truly will be or be like, nor do I give it much thought at all. Because I am convinced it is unimaginable, I don’t try to imagine it. I have no idea what, where, or how heaven is.
Christianity has probably emphasized heaven too much for the sake of maintaining its own internal cohesion. Theologically, we are too heavenly minded to be much earthly good to those who are not nearly so heavenly minded. Why should we spend so much time pontificating on something we cannot conceive, and thus know nothing about?
Well actually, The New Yorker and the newspaper cartoons claim to know a lot about heaven. For example, a few days ago in Non Sequitur there were two angels standing on clouds, looking at a figure we instantly recognize as God. God has a lightning bolt in His hand, and He is looking down on earth with a wrathful scowl on His face. The one angel says to the other, “Uh-oh… He’s got that thinning-the-herd look again.” Is that how heaven works? God stands up there somewhere (where up there?) looking to zap human miscreants down below? In a recent New Yorker, St. Peter, with an angry look on his face, is literally kicking someone back outside the pearly gates. The booted former celestial resident says, as he catapults downward toward heaven-knows-where, “But I thought once you were in you were in!”
Who knows anything about heaven for certain? A well-known rabbi wrote an article for a well-known newspaper in which he postulated that in order to make it into heaven, each of us must be the best “I” we are capable of being. However, he said, that only gets us as far as the Heavenly Gates. He wrote, “We are still no wiser as to what happens inside and have to trust that it worth qualifying for entry.” Again my theological quibble is that nobody can really qualify, that God allows all of us into heaven solely by His grace and by no other means of entry.
This past Monday Lois and I went to meet an old friend at Mepkin Abbey, which is northwest of Charleston on the Cooper River. Father Christian Carr will be 98 on Friday. He is without question one of the most remarkable human beings I have been privileged to know. The man has more brains in his left pinky than most of us have in our entire craniums. That trait shall continue, I am sure, until in some future year or decade he will quietly slip away one night, never having lost a single brain cell. Besides being an ordained Franciscan and now Trappist priest, and the long-retired abbot of Mepkin, Christian also has three doctorates: one in law, one in theology, and one in moral philosophy. We had no sooner sat down than he began to grill me about my thoughts on the soul. Whenever I see him, he always likes to do that sort of thing. He gives me far more intellectual credit than is due me in his interrogations. Anyway, I told him the very little about the soul of which I am fairly confident.
Christian went on to say that physical things have both matter and form, but that the soul has only form, and no matter. That sounds good to me. But, said he, it is not the resurrected body which goes to heaven; it is the soul. At least I deduce that’s what he said. And that too sounds good to me. There are no bodies in heaven, but billions of somebodies.
I believe that we will be us in heaven. We will be able to recognize one another. But it won’t be like it is here, because we will not have bodies, unless they are, as Paul refers to them, “spiritual bodies,” whatever that might mean, and I haven’t the foggiest notion what it means. In other words, life after death will be very unlike life this side of death.
Years ago, someone gave me a small beige horizontal piece of wood to which were glued some short, dark horizontal and vertical wooden lines. I was told that some day I would look at that and see a word clearly spelled out by the dark wooden lines. Sure enough, one day I did, and the word said “Jesus.” It was a visual puzzle, a trick of the eye, like those two black shapes on a white background which look like two vases, but then become two faces kissing when at last the eye figures out their alternative appearance. When I lived in northern Wisconsin I used to go visit a minister friend in another town. In that church’s office there was a picture on the wall which for a long time just looked like a bunch of disconnected squiggles to me. No, I was told, there’s something there. One day I came into the office and looked at the framed squiggles, and suddenly, as clear as Werner Sallman, was the face of the traditional artist’s Jesus. I had to see these things with new or different or transformed eyes. Otherwise I couldn’t see them at all.
Heaven is like that. That isn’t what heaven is, but that’s what it’s like. It is like seeing an entirely different entity in an entirely new way.
The last verse of the 23rd Psalm doesn’t refer to heaven. “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” means “for as long as I live,” not literally forever. Jews as far back as David simply didn’t believe in life after death, at all. In heaven nobody is married, said Jesus, but they are all like angels in heaven, and I don’t know what that means either. What is an angel, anyhow? In his next to last chapter, the writer of the Revelation says he saw a vision of “a new heaven and a new earth,” but I can’t imagine what those words even mean, nor, I think, could he. He used earthly words to try to illustrate what cannot humanly be illustrated, by speaking of life after death in terms of this life. It is the only thing we can do, but it doesn’t really do it, so why try? It is outstanding literature, but it is misleading theology.
I said this sermon has two points. The first was that heaven is not a place. It is above or beyond or outside place and space and time. It isn’t a where; it is a that. And the “that” that it is isn’t like any other “that” that we have ever known or can know on this side of death.
Here is the second point. Heaven is a totally different classification of existence than anything we have known or can know in this world. Does heaven exist? Yes, but not in any type of existence with which we are familiar. To talk about heaven in ordinary language is like talking about solid smoke or hot ice or black white or black light or weightless gold. You can’t use words like that without distorting or confounding what you are trying to describe. “Heaven” (meaning the concept of heaven) and “heaven as a destination or location or level of existence” ultimately shall remain a mystery to us. We cannot possibly know what heaven is until we get there, and we won’t get there till we’re there.
You and I and everyone are all agnostic about heaven. We don’t know anything, nor can we. At best, we can only believe in and trust in and have faith in heaven.
So then, why even talk about it? I do it only because most of us talk and think about it from time to time, which means we are concerned about heaven. I am more concerned here to suggest what heaven is not that to say what it is, because I don’t know what it is. However, because the Bible talked about it, and especially because Jesus talked a lot about it, I chose here to talk about it a little. But don’t take what I have said as Gospel, because I don’t understand what I have said, nor, I think, do you. If ignorance is bliss, then let us luxuriate in our bliss. Sometime (which won’t really be time at all but will occur in a totally different type of existence), we may comprehend these things. But for now, they are incomprehensible. Amen, I guess.