Unitarian Universalist Congegation of Castine

Readings

1. From Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded the Love of This World For Crucifixion and Empire, Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 2008

   The heavens were the dwelling place of God and all the heavenly hosts, such as the council of gods and the angels. … The use of the plural, heavens, conveyed the magnitude and inclusiveness of the heavens. The surface of the dome of the heavens was the great vault of the sky and clouds, above which the heavenly hosts dwelled, and its vastness encompassed everything on the earth. … The sun, moon, and stars make their rhythmic courses, marking the pace of planting and harvesting, and generating the flow of time within the space of the great cosmos. The heavens bring sweet water to the earth… Thus the heavens were, for the ancients, the wellspring of spiritual power. They were not something out of this world, but were the locus of life-giving power within this world, a realm of constancy from which humanity received many blessings.

2. From Lisa Miller, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife, HarperCollins, New York, NY, 2010

   Our English language makes talking about heaven uniquely difficult. The word heaven in English carries all the agreed-upon meanings – a place where you go after death, the home of God, perfection, eternity, and so on – plus whatever else you dream of, minus whatever you don’t believe. When we say “heaven” we mush all the ancient theological meanings together. We mean the place where we live with our spirits or souls after death and the place we inhabit with our resurrected bodies. We mean a place that occurs at the end of the world and a place that exists in real time, now. This messy conflation causes agonies especially for biblical scholars and historians who wish we would take more care with our vocabulary … When the biblical authors said “heaven,” they didn’t mean what we mean today.

The Sermon

When I first mentioned that my sermon title was “Do We Need Heaven?” I was asked, “What’s the alternative?” Good question. Many people think they know the answer, but there is widespread disagreement. Most Christians believe that our souls will go to heaven or hell when we die. Universalists traditionally taught that a loving God would gather us all into heaven eventually, even if there was some temporary punishment for a few. The New Testament most often suggests that the bodies of the faithful will rise from their graves when the Messiah comes to establish the kingdom of heaven right here on earth, not up in the sky.

Heaven in Islam is similar to the concept of heaven in Christianity: It is a beautiful garden, with shade trees, flowing fountains of water, and palaces made of solid gold. The righteous go to heaven, the unrighteous to the Fire.

On the other hand, Buddhists and Hindus believe we will have endless rebirths, here on earth, until we get it right. Skeptics generally believe that when we are dead, we will be dead.

“Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” is a short story by Mark Twain. Published in 1909, it was Twain’s last published story in his lifetime, and his humor was showing something of his religious skepticism. Twain used the story to suggest that our common view of heaven doesn’t make much sense.

In Twain’s version, all civilized life-forms from all of the countless planets in the universe travel through space to get to heaven. They all arrive at a gate, where they must give their name and planet of origin to a gatekeeper who sends them to the part of heaven that is appropriate for the people of that particular planet. Because Captain Stormfield had raced for a while with a comet, he had veered off course and arrived at the wrong gate, causing considerable confusion. The heavenly gatekeeper had never heard of San Francisco, or California, or even America. Finally he identified Stormfield’s planet not as Earth, but as Wart.

Even when Stormfield was allowed into heaven, he was flabbergasted by the reception. The gatekeeper failed to present him with the correct items that Stormfeild thought everyone knew are necessary in heaven. Think about it. If you were doing a crossword puzzle and the clue was “heavenly item,” and the space was four letters, first letter “h,” there would be only two obvious answers, harp and halo.

“Look at me,” Captain Stormfield complains, “look at me all over.” The gatekeeper looks. “Well?” he asks. “Well!” Stormfield cries, “You don’t notice anything? If I branched out amongst the elect looking like this, wouldn’t I attract considerable attention? Wouldn’t I be a little conspicuous?”

“I don’t see anything the matter,” said the gatekeeper. “What do you lack?”

“Lack! Why, I lack my harp, and my wreath, and my halo, and my hymn-book, and my palm branch – I lack everything that a body naturally requires up here my friend.”

As amazing as it may seem, the gatekeeper of heaven was truly puzzled by all this. But he relented, and finally gave Captain Stormfield the things he believed he needed. Stormfield got a halo, a harp, a wreath, a hymn-book, and a palm branch.

At last the good captain settled down on a cloud with about a million other angels, waved his palm branch a couple of times, tuned up his harp and started to sing. About sixteen or seventeen hours later, the angel next to him asked, “Do you know any other tune but the one you’ve been pegging at all day?”

“Not another blessed one,” said Stormfield. “Don’t you reckon you could learn another one?” “Never. I’ve tried to, but couldn’t manage it.” His companion shook his un-haloed head, and declared that eternity is a long time to hang on to one tune. To which Stormfield replied, “Don’t break my heart. I’m getting low-spirited enough already.”

The problem with heaven ~

That’s the problem with heaven. Descriptions of hell are fairly easy for people like Dante or Milton to come up with. There are all sorts of tortures we can think of. But heaven is more difficult. What can you do in heaven for eternity? Stormfield became quickly bored with the palm branch, harp, and hymn-book. You can sing praises to God for only so long before singing praises is likely to get a bit dull. And then you still have eternity ahead of you.

According to another story, there was a man who died and found himself in a beautiful place, surrounded by every conceivable comfort. A white-jacketed man came to him and said, “You may have anything you choose – any food – any pleasure – any kind of entertainment.”

The man was delighted, and for weeks he sampled all the delicacies and experiences of which he had dreamt on earth. But one day he grew bored, and calling the attendant, he said, “I’m tired of all this. I need something to do. What kind of useful work can you give me?”

The attendant sadly shook his head and replied, “I’m sorry, sir. That’s the one thing I can’t do for you. There is no useful work for you to do.”

To which the man answered, “That’s a fine thing. I might as well be in hell.” The attendant said softly, “Where do you think you are?” So we have a problem when we talk about heaven and hell. Eternity is billions of years followed by thousands of billions of years, followed by billions of trillions of years, and after that you still have eternity ahead of you. I suppose that gives Capt. Stormfield time to learn a second tune. But after a few trillion years he might want some useful work to do, and then what? The problem may be that what we imagine when we think of heaven has very little to do with what the Bible says about heaven. Most people think that when we die the souls of good people will go straight to heaven; but that’s not what the Bible teaches. In the Bible, the word “heaven”is generally about “the heavens,” the place in the sky where God and the angels live. But dead people don’t go there in the Bible.

Remember, the Bible is not one book, it is 64 books, by various authors, in two different languages, written over hundreds of years. All those different authors don’t always agree with one another. In the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, people simply go to the grave. Or, in some biblical books, they go to Scheol when they die. Scheol, often incorrectly translated as hell, was not the hell we moderns think of. It was the underworld, the land of the dead – all of the dead, good and bad. Like the Greek Underworld, it was not really a place of punishment, just a place of eternal waiting.

Gehenna, also translated as hell, was really the Jerusalem city dump, where trash was burned. To say that you will go to Gehenna is to say your body will go to the trash heap.

To use the English word “hell” for Scheol or Gehenna probably just confuses English readers of the Bible into thinking that the Bible is talking about the “hell” that modern readers believe in. The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) really has no “hell” as we understand it today. And it really has no concept of anybody going to the heavens. Only God and the angels are in the heavens. That’s why so many Jews don’t believe in life after death. Heaven and hell, as we understand those terms, are not in the Hebrew Bible.

Does anybody go to heaven? In the New Testament, Jesus said a lot about heaven, but much of it is hard to understand. He says that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed; it is like the yeast in dough; it is like ten virgins waiting for the bridegroom; like a fishing net; a merchant looking for pearls; a king settling accounts; a king who has prepared a wedding banquet for his son; a landowner who hires workers for his vineyard. That’s the problem with Jesus: ask him a straightforward question, and he tells you a story.

With his parables Jesus seems to be telling us that heaven is both a place like our world and unlike our world. It is a place of love and justice, big enough to accommodate everyone, but also a place that is difficult for certain people (especially the rich) to enter. He tells us to not hoard wealth here on earth, but to “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes.”

But do people go to heaven when they die? On that question, Jesus is even less clear. He tells us that “the kingdom of heaven is near” (Matthew 3:2), but in this case he is talking about a new situation right here on earth, when God’s peace and justice will replace the oppression and corruption of the present age. He prays to God, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” There’s nothing there about us going to the heavens in the sky. Rather, he is expressing the idea of the kingdom of heaven that will be established right here on earth.

The kingdom of heaven, also called the kingdom of God, is that time described by the biblical writers when – at the end of the age – the community of the faithful will establish God’s peace, justice, love, and mercy here on earth.

So as I read the Bible, the Hebrew Bible talks about going to the grave, or to the Underworld. And the authors of the New Testament expect the kingdom of heaven to be established right here on earth, with the dead rising bodily from the grave.

What are the options?

But, when we die, are our souls going to the heavens, where God lives? From my perspective, that’s not biblical. Nonetheless, that’s what most Christians in America believe. If our souls go to heaven, what age would we be in heaven? Would we get our youth back?

Would we have gender? Would we have bodies at all?

My mother was sure she would be with my father in heaven. Would we see our lost husband, wife, or partner?

And what will we be like, what sort of people will we be in heaven, if we go to the heavens? In her book, Here If You Need Me, the Rev. Kate Braestrup asks whether any of us would want to spend eternity with ourselves. She writes, “Spend forever with myself? I mean, really! Look, I have quirks. I have eccentricities. I’ve learned, over the years, to tolerate myself well enough, but eternity is a long time to spend with someone who, for all her good qualities, talks a lot, is a compulsive knitter, and can’t keep track of the car keys.

“Of course, maybe in heaven it will be given unto me to stop jabbering.... Maybe in heaven I’ll be perfect and perfectly happy.

“But if I’m perfect and perfectly happy, I won’t be me. And if I’m not me in heaven, not Kate Braestrup, the same Kate Braestrup presently writing these words, then Kate Braestrup will be dead.” There’s a thought! If we are perfect in heaven, we won’t be us. So we will be dead.

Then, do we need heaven? Well, most people seem to want heaven. Biologically, when our bodies die, we are dead. Do we have souls that live on? Most Christians think so, even though it’s not very biblical.

Do we need heaven? Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan, a non-practicing Catholic, when asked if he wants to go to Heaven replied, “I’d like to know the options and conditions before I say yes.” I don’t know what happens when we die. What I don’t wish for is any certainty about who’s going to heaven and who is not. I don’t want a sense of hierarchy that says Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh-Day Adventists get in, or straight people, or people who voted for a certain political party get in, but everyone else is tortured forever because they had the wrong theology or the wrong politics. That kind of certainty tends to make Christians very un-Christian.

Maybe heaven is simply hope, a hope that we might someday reach perfection, even as we fail to achieve it. Heaven, then, is that which we cannot reach. But it is worth a lifetime of trying.

Amen.

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