Materials
Just Like Heaven
Revelation 21:1-4; 22:1-5
by R. Todd Bouldin
I am going to admit that I shy away from heaven sermons. I
am not sure exactly why, but I guess I just don’t relate much
to the concept of heaven. If you have ever watched the sun go down
over the Grand Canyon, or looked out from a mountain peak in the Rocky
Mountains, or sat in wonder at the coast of Big Sur, I am just not
sure how heaven gets much better. I’m not really looking for
something to be better than the beauty God already has created here.
I also will confess that I’m not that unhappy in my middle class
American life that I have now, so the idea of pearly gates and golden
streets just never has done it for me. Malibu works quite well for
my tastes, thank you. There was a time in America when a Great Depression,
poverty and disease made heaven sound like a nice place to be, but
I think most of us probably feel as I do … if we could just
pay our bills, eliminate some hurricanes, have peaceful nice families,
find love, and never die, we’d be ok right here. And maybe I’m
the only one, but for a multi-tasking hyper guy like myself, the idea
of sitting around on clouds and singing all day just doesn’t
sound too thrilling. I do want to believe in life after death, and
that that life will be happy and perfect, but these visions that are
the stuff of funerals and Christian novels just are not enough to
motivate me to be faithful today. But I can’t deny that the
Bible does speak about our future with God, and what it says about
this future is meant to help us live more faithfully right now.
Therefore, I think it serves us well to discover that future again
so that we may begin living now as we shall be forever.
Prayer
Christ’s revelation to John takes us through a series of horrific
images, all depicting hard times with great persecution, tribulation,
bloody battles, and unimaginable suffering. Perhaps the images coming
across our television screens of towers falling in New York, of death
and devastation in New Orleans and Texas, and of suicide bombings
in Iraq and London, these might just begin to shock us the way these
apocalyptic images shocked those of the first century who heard them.
But it was hard to shock people who had already seen so much devastation.
These were not future conditions of a tribulation to come –
these were depictions of life as it already was for John’s churches
who received this letter. Jerusalem had been ravaged by Rome, which
also had begun to persecute the church in certain locations under
the Emperor Domitian. Some even faced the horror of martyrdom. The
emperors Nero, Vespasian and Domitian could all have competed for
the title of Antichrist if there had been a contest.
All of the heartache and loss that the church experienced flew right
in the face of their great hope that Jesus would return soon and establish
His Kingdom on earth. Jesus had spoken a lot about that Kingdom of
Heaven on earth, and He said it was coming soon. He told story after
story trying to describe it. He said it was like a treasure that was
lost, or a great feast where the lowliest attend, or like a great
party for lost people who come home.
By the time the Apocalypse is revealed to John, it had been over a
generation since Christ had planted those dreams in His followers,
and now their lives looked like anything but a party. Jesus had promised
to return to make all of these kingdom dreams come true, and He still
had not shown up. And things were getting worse. Where was this Kingdom
of Heaven? With the world crumbling around them, it seemed so far
away but they clung to the dream because it was the only way to survive
such a dreadful existence and a fearful death. Surely Jesus was coming
soon.
For the last 2000 years, hardly a time has past when someone hasn’t
noticed how bad things are and said, “This is it. This is the
end of history. Surely Jesus is returning very soon.” Some said
it was when 20th century genocides seemed to return us to the evil
days of Nero and Domitian. Others said it was when we created nuclear
weapons capable of creating a fiery Armageddon on earth, or when Clinton
won the Presidency in 1992, or when the Supreme Court held that school
prayer was unconstitutional, or when the year 2000 brought a new millennium.
In the words of church historian Martin Marty, "the world is
always coming to an end." Someone in every generation seems to
always think they will be the ones to read the signs correctly. But
in another sense, they all are right. The world as we have known
it is coming to an end. Whether it is the world of the first
century, or the world of modernism, or your world -- everything faces
a certain death, even your loved ones.
When that happens, when you bury someone you love, that is when you
most want to believe that the end is not the end. At those times,
we long to believe that there is something else beyond the life we
know, and that this something else might lead us back to the people
we have loved. We have heard Christ say that He has gone to prepare
a place for us, and we want to see what a grand place He has prepared
for thousands of years. We want to believe in the Kingdom of Heaven.
This is a common question when someone dies. I often have people ask
me about heaven, whether we will know our loved ones, and whether
people have gone to heaven now. There are two problems with these
questions, as well meaning as they are. First, the Bible does not
speak to these questions in very much detail. Second, I haven’t
been there yet, so I am a bit limited in what I can report. But Scripture
does tell us a few things about heaven, and most importantly, that
heaven is real.
A recent Newsweek magazine poll found that 67% of Americans believe
in heaven. Interestingly, only 24% of us believe in hell, which is
nice and convenient. It might be surprising that so many people would
believe in heaven in a scientific era in which we only believe in
what we can see or prove. Others point out that scientists are now
making room for heaven as they have growing doubts about a self-contained
universe. The new discoveries of black holes, quarks, supernovas and
big bangs lead some scientists to wonder if there is not a grand designer
of it all. I recently read of how scientific speculation about parallel
universes, new dimensions and anomalies in the space-time continuum
have even provided an intellectual framework to discuss a wholly different
realm of existence beyond the earthly realm. Gone are the old days
of modernism and we are seeing even scientists who are making room
for heaven. Scientist or not, many of us have a deep seated feeling
that there has to be something beyond right now and right here.
Christians in every age always have speculated about what this place
is like. For the hearers of John’s revelation, they could imagine
heaven as a celestial city using images and metaphors from their first
century Roman culture and life. Christians of the Middle Ages depicted
heaven as an ethereal Camelot, and American Christians of the 20th
century have envisioned heaven as a Wisteria Lane on clouds with nice
mansions. These are all quite interesting ideas, but you won’t
find much support for these in the Bible. The Bible doesn’t
emphasize what is in heaven as much as Who is there.
The doctrine of heaven in Scripture centers around one thing:
the Presence and worship of Jesus Christ who is “the Alpha and
the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
(Revelation 22:13). So as we said last week, when you get to the end,
in Jesus Christ you only are at the beginning again. Because you now
participate in the life of the One who is Beginning and End, you are
never really at the end ever again. Jesus waits at the end with life
everlasting.
That is John’s vision of heaven. Yes, he does provide us with
some rich symbols and metaphors of heaven that I do not believe John
intends for us to take literally any more than we would take the beast
or dragon of Revelation literally. I also don’t think that John
wrote down this vision of the new heaven and new earth to tell them
details of the heavenly kingdom. Instead, he provided these struggling
believers with a vision that was much more compelling than a gaudy
mansion that looks like the set of the Trinity Broadcasting Network.
This was a compelling vision that would encourage all believers who
face tribulation and death as they approached what seemed like the
end of time, in whatever age, when people long for a place other than
the hell in which they live. At the end of the day, so to speak, this
vision was one of the Presence of God, and even more surprising, the
Presence of God among mortals. Listen to the conclusion of John’s
vision of how it looks when God makes His home with us, “He
will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. Mourning
and crying and pain will be no more. Nothing accursed will be found
there anymore. And there will be no more night.” (Revelation
21:3-4). Now that sounds just like heaven. The Presence of God among
us will bring complete shalom and wholeness to our lives, and we will
return to the Garden once again. That is how the story ends, and it
also is how your story can end. If you know that is how your story
ends, if that becomes the destiny of your life, then it changes your
perspective on the chapter of that story that you are living today.
John seems to be saying one thing to these persecuted Christians of
the first century, and to us doubtful Christians of the twenty-first
century: If you believe that heaven is waiting up ahead for you, then
it is always above you. Heaven exists not just as a future place
to go after we die, but as a template and vision of the life you have
to live today. If you believe that Jesus Christ is the Alpha
and the Omega, that Jesus Christ is behind you and ahead of you, then
this time that you are living now is not just a waiting period for
the really good times later. Knowing the past and the future, you
are free to live under heaven every day of your life now. The Presence
of Christ you will experience fully then is already present with you
today. So you can pray, “on earth, as in heaven.” This
can make a world of difference in how you live right now.
If you read church history, you will find that those who did the
most to reform the present world believed most strongly in the world
to come. From the apostles who brought the Gospel to the Roman
Empire, to the architects of the cathedrals that inspired society
for a thousand years, to the English pietists and the American abolitionists
who abolished the slave trade, to Martin Luther King Jr. who gave
us a dream of a color blind society, to Mother Teresa in Calcutta
who taught us to treat the poor and dying with dignity, these all
got their vision for life in this world by seeing that vision fulfilled
in the life to come. Heaven as it was to be enjoyed then was not an
excuse for doing nothing to improve life here but became a great vision
that inspired them to start recreating the Garden now. If heaven
is where we are heading, then why not get started right now making
a little heaven on earth? And so they did.
People who believe that there is an “end” to their story
that never ends live differently in this world. They don’t live
for the moment now, because there will be moments for all eternity.
They make choices more easily because they don’t believe that
any choice is “the” choice of an ending life. They are
much less cautious with life, much more inclined toward adventure
and risk and generosity because life is not a matter of acquiring
but an ongoing journey towards God in which all of life is received
as a gift. They are much more likely to laugh at themselves because
they are clear that Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, and they are
not. They are much more likely to love others because they no longer
are wasting time trying to save themselves. And they are more able
to enjoy life now because it is not a life that is coming to an end
but a life that is just beginning. As I said last
week, death is in the rear view mirror and now there is just life
ahead. That makes every day a gift to be savored and another day that
is leading to the time when you will be fully in the Presence of God
who will then be “all in all.”
Are our loved ones in heaven today? Will there be golden streets and
Starbucks on every corner? I sure hope so, but the Bible doesn’t
tell us for sure. What the Bible does say is that in life
and in death, we belong to God. So what we can know
is that our loved ones and saints are in the Presence of God. But
so are you. Heaven then can start on earth now. Heaven is just
a graduation into the full expression of the life you can begin living
under God now. Lift your heart above the flooded earth, and the
death and loss, and the ending of things you hold dear. Lift your
eyes to heaven where you will discover a vision for your little corner
of earth now. If you do that, if you pray and meditate and live every
day in the Presence of God, if you love and you serve, if you continue
God’s work as you create places of justice, peace and beauty
here, you may just look up at all the places you find yourself now
and declare, “This is starting to look just like heaven.”
Then one day when we thought that it could never happen, we will look
into the sky, and we will see our Savior coming in the clouds. Then
everything will be restored to God as it was in the beginning. We
will enter the Garden again and live without shame in the very Presence
of God. There will be a new heaven and a new earth, and all of us
gathered there on that day will hear the beginning and end of our
stories when we hear Him say, “I am the Alpha and the Omega,
the beginning and the end.” And that will be heaven for me.
And for all those who love His appearing.
Amen.
September 25, 2005
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