The Park Road Pulpit

Where were you on April 12, 1961? I was not in the world to see Major Yuri Gargarin climb aboard his Russian-made rocket, the “Vostok 1,” but some of you watched, or at least heard the breaking coverage about his short voyage that day, which wrote Gargarin into the history books. Traveling at just over 17,000 mph, the 27-year-old cosmonaut made the headlines with his 108-minute trip. He had become the first person to orbit the earth in outer space.

What might be remembered of Gargarin even more than his flight, however, is the statement he made after landing deep in Siberia. There was no God, the Russian concluded confidently, soberly, for he had now been through the heavens, and God was nowhere to be seen.[1]

“Our Father, who art in heaven…” Where is heaven? What is heaven? Does God live in heaven?

Author Kathleen Norris says heaven is, “A foolish concept to be sure, and apparently irresistible to the human spirit.”[2] She is not, I think, disparaging a properly understood reading of the biblical idea as much as recognizing that the idea has always been the cause of endless speculation – and by speculating endlessly about a “place,” which is no temporal place at all, those who would follow in the Way[3] of the one who wants to teach us the prayer of faith, and the faith of prayer, instead spend their time, uselessly dreaming of harps and clouds. Wastefully wondering about angels and eternity. Foolishly taking stock in streets of pure gold.

The book of Acts tells us that following Jesus’ ascension, his disciples stood on a hill outside that city, gazing into space. We don’t know how long they stood, speculating about heaven, but if only for a moment, it was a moment too long. For two men suddenly called the disciples’ from their dreaming: “What are you doing, staring into the sky? The one who ascended will descend again – for it is earth that he cares about. Go. Don’t spend your time here, foolishly. There’s work to be done” (author’s paraphrase, Acts 1).

No one has ever seen heaven. No one has ever been there and returned with pictures. There are no souvenirs or cheap trinkets, like those tacky shirts that say, “My mom went to heaven, but all I got was this lousy t-shirt!” No one has ever proven heaven’s address. Surely speculating about such a fanciful place must, then, be foolishness. But Norris is undeniably right that the concept is also inexplicably irresistible – we’ve all wondered “where” and ”what” and “how” and “when” is heaven? And Jesus himself has contributed to our appetite, speaking of heaven frequently in the gospels, or of the kingdom of heaven, and in his prayer, as he teaches us to pray, specifically, “Our Father, the one in the heavens…”[4]

For the ancient Hebrew mind, heaven was the work of God’s hands, a dome, created on the second day, and stretching out from one edge of the flat earth to the other. This firmament, like a large hammered-out bronze bowl was solid, and useful for separating the primeval waters. This heaven marked-out a space for dry land and an atmosphere, between the mysterious, dark, and powerful waters that surrounded it all. There was water below the earth. There was also was above the heavens. (I didn’t make this up -- go read it for yourself! (Genesis 1)

Though part of the created world, “the heavens” (often used in the plural) were understood to be the home of God. “The LORD looks down from heaven… where he sits enthroned…” (Psalm 33.13-14) Yet after the Exodus from Egypt, the Jewish people also came to believe that Yahweh, who created the universe, lived, literally, in the Tabernacle (that tent-sanctuary which was used while they wandered in the wilderness). Later God’s presence, called the shekinah, was believed to reside in the Ark of the Covenant, housed in the Holy of Holies, that room at the very center of the Temple in Jerusalem.[5]

This inherent contradiction, that God’s home was both in heaven, and at the very center of an earthly, urban culture, will be important for us.

“Our Father, who art in heaven…” Where is heaven? What is heaven? Does God live in heaven?

Now, if we are going to speculate, we certainly need to spend a few moments concerning heaven as the eternal home of the saints, not just as the created dome of the sky. It is this heaven that is the constant aim of preachers the world-over, and the understood goal of faith for many who believe. But what do we really know of “heaven” from the Bible? That image which has been formed in the popular conscience comes from the writing of the Apocalypse of John, and yet, even those who claim to read literally, often distort John’s picture.

In his dream-state the writer sees the action taking place “up” in heaven. The great, cataclysmic war that will decide the fate of the world is instigated from above. But it is the final picture of John’s vision that we must note. Heaven is generally conceived as “up” – somewhere “out there,” beyond even the orbit of Yuri Gargarin, but nonetheless in an eternal, ethereal, city, bolstered-up somewhere in the clouds.

[After he had seen the great, final judgment, that ultimate winnowing of the saved from the unsaved, the writer says] Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth… And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God… And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them as their God; they will be God’s peoples and God will be with them… for the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21.1-4).

Heaven, far from the caricatured pictures that fill most of our minds from childhood and popular piety, the eternal home with God is pictured as an earthly home! And that new Jerusalem is pictured as an urban center, inscribed with gates. In John’s world, gates were the outposts of commerce and exchange. And, why would there be any need for gates on that city -- after the great “judgment”? These are the signs of God’s eternal welcome, a never-ending invitation. Heaven is no gazillion-year venture of harp-strumming, wing-flapping praise, but in John’s vision, an experience of growth, development, industry, cooperation, dialogue, exchange -- it’s life in the big city. Forever!

The effect of this sea-change in thinking should be world-altering (which is precisely what Jesus had in mind in all of his teaching![6]) To characterize “eternal life” as some dramatic after-life change in venue, from worldly to otherworldly, is to remove this life from that which is ultimately real and divinely important. It is to dismiss this life of its lasting consequence by making of it some kind of dress rehearsal for “the real thing.” But the eternal life of which Jesus taught is the real thing. It is abundant life which begins now. It is your life – with eternal significance, heavenly implication, even today.[7]

“Our Father, Who Art in Heaven…” Where is heaven? What is heaven? Do you live in heaven?

The Psalmist writes, The heavens declare the glory of God, and for centuries, those who interpreted these words, the world’s best theologians, were also those who most closely listened to the heavens songs of praise, for these theologians were also the world’s best scientists. Theology influenced science. And observation of the heavens gave credence to praise. But then came Copernicus and Galileo and Darwin and Hawking, and the findings of science seemed to push in the opposite direction. With the Enlightenment, science and religion went to war, each seeking to discredit the other. For the scientist, God had been removed from the heavens. For the theologian, God had been removed from science.

For four centuries, Alan Sandage looked through his telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatories in a-theistic awe. The heavens declared glory, but, like the young Russian cosmonaut, Sandage found no God up there. Sandage’s observations and calculations have led to the current belief that our 15-billion-year-old universe is expanding just rapidly enough to continue to do so, forever. But the more Sandage observed our infinite heavens, the more he calculated their mystery, the more he was drawn to what Albert Einstein called an “emotional conviction,” about the universe. Eventually, this conviction led Sandage to God. He says,

It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It is only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence.[8]

Even in a post-modern age of science and reason, The heavens are (still) telling, the glory of God.

“Our Father, Who Art in Heaven…” Where is heaven? What is heaven? And what difference does it make to your life and faith?

In 1994, Vaclav Havel, who was the president of the Czech Republic, noted the unhelpful animosity between science and faith, and observed, “Science is now more a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning.” But he saw hope.

Paradoxically, inspiration … can once again be found in science… a science producing ideas that in a certain sense allow it to transcend its own limits…. Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction.[9]

Havel refers to transcendence here as a belief in a renewal of science (by science), but theologians use the word to refer to that aspect of God which is infinitely beyond our understanding. In the words of our texts for today, the transcendent God, looks down from heaven… The transcendent God is that one whose ways are not our ways, whose thoughts are not our thoughts…

And so it is, that, “Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction.”

Do you hear that? Even in a quantum world, recognition of our finitude, our frailty, our fallibility, is possible, and this recognition of God, who is in heaven, calls us to transcendence even in our own lives.

I told you earlier today that you needed to remember the Jews’ ability to hold together their paradoxical, contradictory beliefs that God’s home was far removed, “in the heavens,” and that God’s presence was found, deeply enshrined in their most important earthly possession, in the heart of their city.

To proclaim God as the God who is near, as Jesus did, is to put an end to the idea of heaven as God’s distant dwelling place and to reverse the relation of God and heaven. It is not that where heaven is, there is God, but rather where God is, there is heaven. Make what you can of that! And let us stop speaking of heaven altogether, if we cannot execute this change in thinking. To put it rather foolishly[10] for once: It is better to lose heaven than to lose the nearness of God! For “Our Father, who art in heaven” means precisely “Our Father, who art present here on earth.”[11]

So let us seek the Lord – for Christ has taught us that God may indeed be found. The God high above us is the God all around us, in the poor and the oppressed. The God far beyond us is the God intimately within us, in our conscience and in our compassion. The Transcendent God of the heavens is the Immanent, Incarnate God of compassion in Jesus Christ – who seeks to be incarnate, still, in us.

[1] This information was gleaned from several websites. I do not have the exact quote which Gargarin made on that day.

[2] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace, p.367.

[3] The earliest followers of Jesus were called “followers of the Way.” There are a number of references in the book of Acts. For example, see, Acts 9.2.

[4] The gospel of Matthew uses most frequently the “kingdom of heaven,” where other writers use “kingdom of God.”

[5] “This was a completely foreign idea to every other nation. The consensus view was that an invisible god was no god at all. So when the Babylonians came to destroy the Temple, the swaggering and brutal soldiers broke into the Holy of Holies and triumphantly declared it to be empty. They had the same reaction as the Russian cosmonaut: by exposing the apparent absence of God, they thought they were exposing the whole religion as a fraud.” A sermon by Rev. Dr. James F. Lawrence, http://www.swedenborg.org/welcome.cfm.

[6] It was John’s writing that paints the picture of this urban heaven, but Jesus’ teaching gives life to my emphasis. See John 10.10, “I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.” (Jesus did not mean life after death. Eternal life begins now. And, later in our study, we will hear Jesus instruct us to pray for God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven.”

[7] This emphasis should not be taken as a denial of an “afterlife.” I believe in, hope for “heaven,” but I believe that the message of Jesus, and the themes of scripture, from start to finish, emphasize the significance and ultimate importance of the life of faith. Not just the life after death. For more on this emphasis, see my sermon, “Nothing Can Separate Us – The Transformation of Brokenness.”

[8] Michael Reagan, ed., The Hand of God, p.21.

[9] Reagan, p.28.

[10] I love the poetic irony that Ebeling uses the word “foolishly” here. What a fitting connection back to Kathleen Norris’s description of heaven as a “foolish notion!”

[11] Ebeling p. 14-15.

[12] Dietrich Bonhoeffer uses the phrase, “the Beyond, in our midst,” in one of his prayers.