Heaven Doesn't Wait

What is heaven like? Lots of people are writing books about it. But maybe we can experience a little bit of eternal life here any now! If you choose to read my sermon, you'll find out what I think about that.

There seems to be a lot of interest recently in the afterlife. Actually, people have always been interested in that topic. It’s only natural to want to know where we’re headed when our mortal lives are over. But in the last few years, people have wanted details! We not only want to know where we’re headed; we want to know what it’s going to be like! Who’s going to be there? What will we do there? What will God be like? Will I really meet Jesus? Because we’re all so interested in the details of heaven, quite a few books have recently appeared that claim to be able to describe it to us. For example, I imagine that you’ve all heard of the book Heaven Is For Real. We have a copy in our church library. It’s the story of a four-year-old boy’s experience of heaven after his death during emergency surgery. Many of you have read that book, and some probably saw the movie that was based on it. And there are plenty of other books that are similar to it. One is titled To Heaven and Back: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Her Death. Another is My Journey to Heaven: What I Saw and How It Changed My Life. A very recent one is titled Answers about the Afterlife. It was written by a private investigator who researched this topic for 15 years; and it claims to answer “150 of the most crucial questions about what happens when we die.”

I admit to having mixed feelings about these books. If they help sustain your faith, that’s wonderful. Many of us could use a little bit more confidence in our eternal destination, after all, given the number of atheists who pooh-pooh heaven and anything else connected with Christianity. But in our curiosity to nail down exactly what happens when we slip into glory, let’s not lose sight of something. Despite the experiences of so many people who claim to have experienced the afterlife, I doubt very much if it’s going to be exactly like what we read about in books. After all, the people who wrote those books are trying to explain an eternal experience in terms that limited human beings can understand. That seems to me to be like trying to describe the ocean in terms of a puddle on the front sidewalk. Oh, sure, they’re both made of water; but that’s where the similarity ends! I’m sure that when we finally experience the afterlife, it will turn out to be far beyond anything that we can describe here on earth!

Even Jesus had to remind people that some things are simply beyond describing. In the story that you heard just a few minutes ago (Mark 12:18-27), a group of religious scholars asked a question about the afterlife based on a situation in this life. “Suppose,” they said, “that a wife had seven husbands during her lifetime. Whose wife will she be in the afterlife? Will she belong to this one or to that one? Or maybe to that one over there? Tell us, Jesus. Who will get her for eternity?” I can almost see Jesus rolling his eyes. “Things aren’t going to be like that after the resurrection!” he told them. “No one will belong to anybody else! We will all be like angels: completely different than we are now!” No, heaven won’t be just like our lives are here. The problems that we have here won’t even apply when we are in heaven. And even though we’ll still be us, we won’t be us in the same way that we are now. In Jesus’ own words, it we try to describe the afterlife in terms from our lives now, we are “badly mistaken.” That’s a tough thing to understand. Even so great a writer as Paul had trouble when he tried to explain it to the church in Corinth. “Someone may ask,” he wrote, “’How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?’ How foolish! The body that is sown is perishable; it is raised imperishable. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. The trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed!” (I Corinthians 15:35, 36, 42, 44, 52) Some questions simply can’t be answered now. And let’s face it, no matter how many books we read about after-death experiences, we won’t really know until we get there ourselves.

But I’m convinced that every now and then we catch a glimpse of heaven in this life, right now. Have you ever considered that possibility? Most people believe that eternal life begins when we die. But if eternal life really is “eternal” – if it exists beyond space and beyond time (and I’m convinced that it does) – then surely we can experience it in this life, even if it’s only a fleeting feeling now and then. The Christian writer Fred Buechner has considered the possibility of experiencing eternal life here and now. He believes that we miss brushes with heaven because of the clamor that’s all around us here on earth. “This side of Paradise,” he writes, “people are with God in such a remote and spotty way that their experience of eternal life is at best like the experience you get of a place [while] approaching it at night in a fast train. Even the saints see only an occasional light go whipping by, hear only a sound or two over the clatter of the rails. The rest of us aren’t awake enough to see as much as that, or we’re mumbling over nightcaps in the club car. But the day will break, and the train will pull into the station, and the ones who have managed to stay with it will finally alight. We think of eternal life as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of it as what happens when life begins.” A cartoon in the Sunday Dayton Daily News several weeks back considered the very same possibility. The cartoon was Red and Rover, a comic strip about a boy Red and his dog Rover. In that day’s cartoon, the two of them were sitting in the shade of a tree on a beautiful summer’s day. “Pinch me, boy,” Red says. “Pinch you?” Rover asks. “Nip me on the arm, then,” Red responds, “but not too hard, OK?” “To make sure you’re not dreaming?” Rover asks. “No,” Red says, “to make sure I’m alive – because this is what I imagine heaven to be like.”

Maybe we can experience a little bit of heaven right now. I invite you to use your imagination. First, think about the place where you feel closest to God. For me, that would be on the beach, with the waves lapping on the shore, and the rays of the sun spilling over my shoulders. For you, it might be a starlit night, the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, or even the silence of a cathedral. In my God place, I’m quiet; but some of you will feel God while you are doing something creative – gardening, perhaps, or woodworking, or cooking, or painting Now, wherever you feel God’s presence, and whatever you are doing when you feel it, close your eyes and go there in your imagination. Sit in silence for about a minute, experiencing your God place. How do you feel? I hope that you feel a deep peace way down in the center of your being. While you’re there, you feel time and space slip away; and you feel as though you’re a part of something way bigger than yourself. Maybe you feel a connection with the universe, and the sense that you belong here. And I hope that you feel loved and accepted; because you are! Now come back to the physical place where you are right now. But even though you leave behind your God place, don’t leave the feelings behind! Hang on to the feelings of peace and connectedness and acceptance – because I think that’s a little bit of heaven.

Heaven, you know, is no more and no less than the fulfillment of everything that we’ve ever yearned for deeply. We want peace, security, acceptance, and love. Every now and then, we touch the fringe of that place in this life; and we are indeed blessed if we realize it when it happens. The Welsh pastor and poet R. S. Thomas wrote a poem about eternal life, and the blessedness of realizing what it is when we experience it. I offer it to you now as I bring my thoughts today to a close. The title is “The Bright Field.”

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seems as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.