Lent 1: Love Wins: Is Now the New Then?
A Sermon preached at Journey United Church of Christ on Sunday, March 4, 2012
Based on the book, “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived” (Harper Collins 2011)
“Think of the cultural images are associated with heaven: harps and clouds and streets of gold, everybody dressed in white robes. (Does anybody look good in a white robe? Can you play sports in a white robe? How could it be heaven without sports? What about swimming? What if you spill food on the robe?) (p. 17)
“For all of the questions and confusion about just what heaven is and who will be there, the one thing that appears to unite all of the speculation is the generally agreed-upon notion that heaven is, obviously, somewhere else.” (p. 17)
And so the questions that are asked about heaven often have an other worldly air to them: What will we do all day? Will we recognize people we used to know? What will it be like? Will there be dogs there?” (p. 17)
Are there other ways to think about heaven, other than that perfect floating shiny city hanging suspended … somewhere out there?’
That’s what we’re going to think about today as we continue our “divine discussion”…
READING FOR THE DAY:
Matthew 19:16-30 (TEV)
Once a man came to Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what good thing must I do to receive eternal life?" "Why do you ask me concerning what is good?" answered Jesus. "There is only One who is good. Keep the commandments if you want to enter life." "What commandments?" he asked. Jesus answered, "Do not commit murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not accuse anyone falsely; respect your father and your mother; and love your neighbor as you love yourself." "I have obeyed all these commandments," the young man replied. "What else do I need to do?" Jesus said to him, "If you want to be perfect, go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven; then come and follow me." When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he was very rich. Jesus then said to his disciples, "I assure you: it will be very hard for rich people to enter the Kingdom of heaven. I repeat: it is much harder for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle." When the disciples heard this, they were completely amazed. "Who, then, can be saved?" they asked. Jesus looked straight at them and answered, "This is impossible for human beings, but for God everything is possible." Then Peter spoke up. "Look," he said, "we have left everything and followed you. What will we have?" Jesus said to them, "You can be sure that when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne in the New Age, then you twelve followers of mine will also sit on thrones, to rule the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake, will receive a hundred times more and will be given eternal life. But many who now are first will be last, and many who now are last will be first.
“In Matthew 18 a rich man asks Jesus; ‘Teacher, what good thing must a do to receive eternal life?’” For some Christians, this is THE question. The rich man’s question, then, is the perfect opportunity for Jesus to give a clear straightforward answer to the only questions the ultimately matters for a whole lot of people. (p.18)
But in true “Jesus style”, he answers the question with another question. He asks the man: “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. … Then the answer … “If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”
“Enter life?’
Jesus refers to the mans’ intention as “entering life”? And then he tells him that you do THAT by keeping the commandments? Not exactly what we expect Jesus to say… (p.19)
He insists he’s kept them all… until Jesus tells him, “Go, sell your possessions, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven,’ which causes the man to walk away sad, “because he had great wealth”
Sometimes I don’t know if I’d thoroughly enjoy a Q&A session with Jesus or if I’d find it to be more annoying than it’s worth. He likes to answer questions with a question. And then there’s that whole thing where it takes a question and seems to provide an answer that seems to have little or no relevance to the original topic.
You’d think that Jesus would use this as a great opportunity to correct the man’s flawed understanding of how salvation works. That he’ll show the man how eternal life isn’t something he has to earn or work for; it’s a free gift of grace. The big words, the important words – “eternal life”, “treasure”, “heaven” – are all in the conversation, but he just doesn’t use them in ways that many Christians use them. (p. 19)
How does such a simple question – one Jesus could have answered so clearly … turn into such a convoluted dialogue …(p. 20 )
The answer, it turns out, IS IN THE QUESTION!
You see, when the man asks about getting “eternal life” he isn’t asking about how to GO to heaven when he dies. This wasn’t a concern for the man or Jesus. Jesus actually doesn’t tell people how to “GO” to heaven.. It wasn’t what Jesus came to do. (p. 20)
For Jesus, the important questions – the ones that really matter have little to do with where, when and how? And yet his answers provide deep insight into the how HE wants us to understand heaven.
First the WHEN: Our culture is fairly time-oriented. We’re experts at measuring time - we’ve labeled eras, we’ve measured centuries and decades, we measure the years and even know enough to add in a leap day every once in awhile. We measure the hours in the day, the minutes in the hour and seconds in the minute. We can measure it down to the millisecond. Measuring time and knowing exactly when things did happen in the past and projecting when things will happen in the future are important for us. That’s our fascination with time.
Time for Jesus was a little less complex. Jesus seems to measure time differently. He doesn’t talk about being somewhere at 6:00 p.m. sharp on Friday night for a potluck dinner and egg decorating. He says things like “it is not yet time” or “the time will come” - crazy vague references to time that would drive most of us crazy.
And that’s the way he approached heaven. “Heaven, for Jesus, was deeply connected with what he called ‘this age’ and ‘the age to come’ … we might call them “eras” or “periods of time”. … according to Jesus there is this age – the one we are living in --- and then a coming age, also called the “world to come” or simply “eternal life” (p. 20).
It’s not a concept or teaching that originate with Jesus. He came from a long line of prophets who had been talking about life in the age to come for hundreds of years before him. They believed that history was headed somewhere – not just their history as a tribe and nation, but the history of the entire universe – because they believed that God had not abandoned the world and that a new day, a new age, a new era was coming.
Isaiah said that in the new day, “the nations will stream to Jerusalem and God will settle their disputes and people will be beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. (Isaiah 2)
Isaiah said that everyone will walk in the light of the Lord and they will neither harm nor destroy in that day . (Isaiah 11)
The prophet Ezekial said that people will be given grain and fruit and crops and new hears and a new spriit (Ezekial 36)
The prophet Amos promised that everything will be repaired and restored and rebuilt and “new wine will drip from the mountains” (Amos 9)
LIFE IN THE AGE TO COME.
IF THIS SOUNDS LIKE HEAVEN ON EARTH, THAT’S BECAUSE IT IS.
LITERALLY. (p. 21)
While it may be hard to know “WHEN” … it’s not hard to know “WHERE” …
One of the most striking aspects of the pictures of the prophets used to describe this reality is how earthy it is. Wine and crops and grain and people and feasts and buildings and homes. It’s here we’re talking about. This world. The one we know … on rescued, transformed, and renewed
… And God isn’t doing it alone …
From the beginning with Adam and Eve, God’s story has been about “partnering” with human kind .. Adam and Eve are invited to “name” .. to give order to parts of creation
… Jesus and the prophets lived with the awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways.
They centered their hopes in the God who simple does not give up on creation and the people who inhabit it. The god who is the source of all life, who works from within creation to make something new.
“When we talk about heaven, then, or eternal life, of the afterlife – any of that – it’s important that we begin with the categories and claims that people were familiar with in Jesus’ first-century Jewish world.
They did not talk about a future somewhere else, because they anticipated a coming day when the world would be restored, renewed, and redeemed..(p. 24) …
The day when heaven and earth will be the same place Revelations 21: “God’s dwelling place is now among the people”
The way we prepare for the true JOY of heaven is to start catching glimpses of it now
“Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we’ve bought into the myth that WE can create a utopia given enough time, technology and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has NOT abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere.
Our eschatology (how we view the end times) shapes our ethics
Eschatology is about the last things
Ethics are about how you live.
What you believe about the future shapes, informs and determines how you live now. If you believe that you’re going to leave and evacuate to SOMEWHERE lese then why do anything about this world. A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it…That’s why the rich man walked away sad. He was not interested in partnering in making the world in which he lived a better place because he that would have meant some changes for him in the here and now. It would have called him to use his wealth in new ways. It would have meant he engaged with people and events and circumstances. It would have meant he would need to “enter the life” that Jesus was calling him to at that time in that place.
The message comes to us as well. We are called to “enter life” by partnering with Christ in our world and in our time. In doing so we will begin to taste what heaven will be like in the day when things conform entirely to God’s design for creation, for humanity, for all things.
Heaven isn’t just about another time and it certainly isn’t about another place. It’s about working now into the future. Will we enter life? Or will we too walk away sad?
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