William H. Willimon - "Heaven" (October 31, 1999)
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| - | As we were preparing to come to chapel this morning, | 0:05 |
| we heard the news of the downing of the Egyptian | 0:11 | |
| Airlines plane and perhaps a reminder that in this world, | 0:19 | |
| there is much pain and heartache, so much so | 0:27 | |
| that it cannot be set right through human doing. | 0:33 | |
| Thus, our gospel for this All Saints, Jesus begins | 0:40 | |
| his ministry by going up on a mountaintop | 0:45 | |
| and speaking to the crowds about God's promised future, | 0:48 | |
| God's blessing on those whom the world | 0:57 | |
| has often cursed. | 1:00 | |
| When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountian | 1:05 | |
| and after he sat down, his disciples came to him | 1:08 | |
| and he taught them, saying, "Blessed are the poor in spirit. | 1:12 | |
| "Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. | 1:17 | |
| "Blessed are those who mourn. | 1:21 | |
| "They will be comforted. | 1:23 | |
| "Blessed are the meek, they will inherit the earth. | 1:26 | |
| "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst | 1:31 | |
| "for righteousness, they will be filled. | 1:33 | |
| "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. | 1:39 | |
| "Blessed are the pure in heart, they will see God. | 1:44 | |
| "Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called | 1:49 | |
| "children of God. | 1:53 | |
| "Blessed are those who are persecuted | 1:56 | |
| "for righteousness' sake. | 1:58 | |
| "Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. | 2:01 | |
| "Blessed are you. | 2:04 | |
| "When people revile you and persecute you | 2:06 | |
| "and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely | 2:08 | |
| "on my account, rejoice and be glad, for your reward | 2:10 | |
| "is great in heaven, for in the same way, | 2:15 | |
| "they persecuted the prophets who were before you." | 2:19 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 2:23 | |
| Thanks be to God. | 2:27 | |
| - | Thanks be to God. | |
| - | This summer, I received a long email from a student | 2:31 |
| who was in the wilds of Montana counting birds, | 2:36 | |
| and to pass the time, he had begun reading | 2:40 | |
| Augustine's Confessions and he sent me this long list | 2:44 | |
| of questions about his reading of Augustine. | 2:49 | |
| Why was Augustine so troubled by sex? | 2:54 | |
| Isn't sex good? | 2:58 | |
| What was the deal with the stolen pears? | 3:01 | |
| Why was that such a big thing? | 3:04 | |
| Had he not an odd relationship with his mother? | 3:06 | |
| I suggested in my reply that when reading Confessions, | 3:11 | |
| one ought not to get bogged down in the details. | 3:16 | |
| It's good to read it as a kind of love story. | 3:22 | |
| Augustine is a young man, about the age of a Duke sophomore, | 3:27 | |
| was obsessed by the fear that we might be alone | 3:33 | |
| in the world, we might be on our own, | 3:41 | |
| and the Confessions is the story of his astonishment | 3:47 | |
| not only that there is a God, but that this God | 3:50 | |
| was looking for him. | 3:55 | |
| This God desired him even more than Augustine desired God, | 3:56 | |
| and that changed his life. | 4:03 | |
| Maybe you ought to read the Bible as a love story. | 4:06 | |
| An account of God's relentless yearning for us, | 4:12 | |
| God's determination to get a family. | 4:17 | |
| Each of us has a pressing question that persists | 4:20 | |
| throughout life, do you love me? | 4:26 | |
| We ask it first of our parents I suppose, | 4:31 | |
| but we know they are a stand in for some larger | 4:33 | |
| presence by whom we want to be loved. | 4:38 | |
| Neurosis transforms the do you love me | 4:42 | |
| into the sad am I worthy to be loved? | 4:46 | |
| Or now, what can I do to make you want to love me always? | 4:51 | |
| It's sad if in our ceaseless attempts to get an answer, | 5:01 | |
| we're too busy to hear God saying, | 5:05 | |
| yes, open yourself up to my love. | 5:08 | |
| Enjoy it, revel in it, return it always. | 5:14 | |
| Jesus said he had come to seek and to save the lost | 5:21 | |
| and then he told us these stories about the lost coin | 5:27 | |
| and the lost sheep, and the lost boy, | 5:31 | |
| all about the persistence of a God who just loves | 5:36 | |
| to seek and to save lost, and then loves to throw a party | 5:41 | |
| for when the lost have been found. | 5:48 | |
| We are not alone, we're not living our lives | 5:52 | |
| purely for ourselves. | 5:57 | |
| Our lives are not merely our decisions, | 5:59 | |
| and our choices, and plans. | 6:01 | |
| No, the Bible depicts us as moving inexorably, | 6:05 | |
| sometimes being tugged and pulled, yes, | 6:10 | |
| sometimes being jerked through that narrow needle's eye | 6:13 | |
| of salvation, moving toward embrace, eternal embrace. | 6:18 | |
| Where are we headed, where does it all end? | 6:27 | |
| Maybe it's sad we rarely ask that question until someone | 6:32 | |
| we love dies or maybe we get a whiff of our own mortality | 6:37 | |
| and realize this life is terminal, and it's then we ask | 6:43 | |
| where are we headed, where does it end? | 6:53 | |
| And maybe it's a pity that we wait for such moments | 6:58 | |
| to ask such a pressing question because where we're headed, | 7:02 | |
| the end, the T loss of existence, it makes a big difference | 7:06 | |
| for how we live now, today. | 7:12 | |
| These things are tough to talk about. | 7:16 | |
| Paul, when he gets into descriptions of what next, | 7:19 | |
| what about the future, what about the long view, | 7:24 | |
| life after this life? | 7:29 | |
| He tells the Corinthians it's a mystery, | 7:31 | |
| a (speaking in foreign language). | 7:37 | |
| For Paul, it's something that you know, | 7:39 | |
| but it is so large and unfathomable, | 7:42 | |
| it's very difficult to talk about, | 7:45 | |
| and Paul was really good with words. | 7:48 | |
| He says, "Eye has not seen nor ear heard the things | 7:52 | |
| "that God has prepared for those who love him." | 7:58 | |
| Heaven, heaven is that word we use to talk about | 8:04 | |
| the completion of God's creation, the world | 8:09 | |
| as God intends it to be, the consummation | 8:12 | |
| of creation, heaven. | 8:16 | |
| If heaven is the fulfillment of the highest and best, | 8:20 | |
| the triumph of God's love, oh, we earthbound, finite | 8:23 | |
| creatures are going to have trouble talking about it | 8:28 | |
| 'cause we think mostly on the basis of what we know here | 8:32 | |
| and heaven is that great beyond | 8:37 | |
| everything we've experienced here, | 8:42 | |
| but maybe not everything. | 8:46 | |
| Heaven is where God gets what God wants, | 8:49 | |
| and so much of this present world | 8:55 | |
| is less than God's desire. | 8:57 | |
| On Sundays we pray. | 9:01 | |
| We shall pray today our father who art in heaven, | 9:03 | |
| thus defining heaven as that place where God is fully God, | 9:10 | |
| but we know even as we pray that, there's more to be said. | 9:18 | |
| And modern people tend to be frustrated | 9:23 | |
| whenever we're thinking about something | 9:26 | |
| that for which after all is said and done, | 9:28 | |
| there's still more to be said, and heaven, | 9:32 | |
| because it is heaven, is going to be | 9:37 | |
| about much, much more. | 9:42 | |
| For Christians, heaven is that place, that time | 9:45 | |
| where Christ is, where we are one with Christ, | 9:50 | |
| where all of those tuggings and pullings | 9:57 | |
| that we've experienced in life are fulfilled, | 9:59 | |
| when Christ is our all in all and we all are his, | 10:03 | |
| all of us. | 10:08 | |
| Our egos, so relentlessly searching, | 10:10 | |
| lusting with desire, or at last overwhelmed | 10:14 | |
| by having our heart's desire, our true desire met in Christ. | 10:20 | |
| I expect there we shall feel some pain there | 10:28 | |
| at how puny and silly have been so many | 10:36 | |
| of our desires here, those desires which occupy us here | 10:39 | |
| when we are given there what here we know not even | 10:44 | |
| how to desire, we who have spent our whole lives | 10:48 | |
| so restlessly trying to make it with God, | 10:52 | |
| trying to get all dressed up and right, we'll be overwhelmed | 10:56 | |
| at having received God, given God's self as gift | 11:02 | |
| rather than our heroic moral achievement, | 11:07 | |
| there at the end where God takes us and welcomes us home. | 11:11 | |
| But death, death that we had spent our entire lives | 11:19 | |
| avoiding, dreading, fearing, fighting, not talking about | 11:23 | |
| is in the light of heaven seen as a kind of final purging, | 11:29 | |
| a final opening up of ourselves fully to God, | 11:33 | |
| a last relinquishment of our miserly selves | 11:38 | |
| so that we might be embraced, and loved, | 11:44 | |
| and forgiven by God, transformed into our true selves. | 11:47 | |
| As Paul says, we who have only seen here God | 11:53 | |
| as through a glass darkly, there at last, face to face. | 12:00 | |
| Here, you know what it's like here. | 12:07 | |
| We have communion with God just in these little bits | 12:11 | |
| and pieces and some rare mystical glimpse | 12:13 | |
| and some rare momentary, transitory encounter. | 12:18 | |
| It may be one reason you come here on Sunday morning, | 12:24 | |
| just hoping for one of those glimpses. | 12:26 | |
| It can come in a hymn or a sip of wine, a bit of bread, | 12:30 | |
| is that's said, or read, or heard. | 12:34 | |
| Well, in heaven at the last, our union with God | 12:37 | |
| will be so intense, unmistakable, eternal, | 12:43 | |
| the God whom we've spent so much of our lives avoiding | 12:47 | |
| and disappointing and evading will be revealed | 12:52 | |
| to be the friend who all the time was out busy | 12:57 | |
| seeking, and waiting and desiring us. | 13:01 | |
| Charles Wesley described it better than I | 13:06 | |
| in the hymn Love Divine, All Love's Excelling, | 13:09 | |
| "Joy of heaven to earth come down. | 13:12 | |
| "Change from glory unto glory till in heaven | 13:16 | |
| "we take our place, till we cast our crowns before thee | 13:19 | |
| "lost in wonder, love, and grace." | 13:23 | |
| So you will note that the Biblical seer in say, | 13:30 | |
| the Book of Revelation describes heaven | 13:33 | |
| as a great banquet, and that makes sense, | 13:36 | |
| a kind of great communal, joyful sharing, a party | 13:39 | |
| when all those that had to go to bed hungry at night | 13:43 | |
| with nothing but their tears to nourish, | 13:47 | |
| they shall be invited to sit down and eat | 13:49 | |
| and have their fill. | 13:52 | |
| The first promise Jesus makes to us | 13:55 | |
| is blessed are the hungry, you will be filled. | 13:59 | |
| Elsewhere in the Bible, heaven is described | 14:05 | |
| as a great raucous crescendo of song, | 14:07 | |
| and that makes sense because a lot of times in worship, | 14:12 | |
| that's where you come closest to it, music. | 14:15 | |
| When all those who've been silenced, and numbed, | 14:18 | |
| and dumbed by the pain of life will sing | 14:21 | |
| and there will be no end to their song. | 14:26 | |
| Last year here, Tony Campolo was asked | 14:31 | |
| about Christian Evangelism and Evangelism, | 14:34 | |
| Tony Campolo said, is not recruiting people to be saved | 14:38 | |
| or join the church, it's recruitment for a choir! | 14:42 | |
| Read the Book of Revelation. | 14:46 | |
| Who will be there? | 14:50 | |
| Well, of course, that's God's business, not ours, | 14:54 | |
| but I must confess that universalism, the notion | 14:57 | |
| that in the end, all, all shall be somehow, some way | 15:02 | |
| united with God, I think it makes sense. | 15:06 | |
| It makes sense because well, I'm amazed that I feel | 15:11 | |
| even here, now, at least to some degree united with God | 15:16 | |
| despite my sins and shortcomings in life. | 15:21 | |
| More than that, I suppose it's difficult for me to imagine | 15:28 | |
| that God's purposes for the world | 15:31 | |
| will ever be defeated, finally frustrated. | 15:35 | |
| I just can't conceive that there will be that moment | 15:40 | |
| when the shepherd stops looking for the lost sheep | 15:43 | |
| or the loving father finally says of the wayward | 15:46 | |
| prodigal son, I'm going to stop waiting. | 15:49 | |
| I believe this, not on the basis of some sentimental, | 15:55 | |
| sappy conviction about the future, | 16:00 | |
| but out of my own experience of God seeking, | 16:03 | |
| searching relentless love right here, now. | 16:07 | |
| God is so resourceful. | 16:11 | |
| I believe God's grace is triumphant, victorious, | 16:14 | |
| that God shall ultimately, despite us, | 16:18 | |
| have God's gracious way with us, all of us. | 16:21 | |
| USA Today reports 67% of adults in the USA | 16:28 | |
| are certain there is a heaven. | 16:32 | |
| Curiously, 88% of adults in the USA | 16:35 | |
| say they are going to heaven. | 16:40 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 16:41 | |
| However, I suppose I can imagine also, | 16:48 | |
| there are people who despite all of God's good efforts | 16:55 | |
| choose not to join the party. | 16:59 | |
| There's a lot of people out there that are just stuffy, | 17:02 | |
| that steadfastly want to stay out in the dark, | 17:06 | |
| even when the father's pleading with them to come on in | 17:09 | |
| with a younger brother and party. | 17:12 | |
| They refuse to join the dance, silent despite the invitation | 17:14 | |
| always to sing the song. | 17:20 | |
| And if that's true, I suppose heaven must also be a place, | 17:24 | |
| despite what Revelation says, of some sadness | 17:28 | |
| among the saved. | 17:34 | |
| If they are filled with God's love, they must be | 17:36 | |
| in great grief for those who have eternally | 17:39 | |
| rejected such love. | 17:42 | |
| I, again, have just found God to be incredibly resourceful | 17:46 | |
| in getting what God wants, and the Bible asserts | 17:52 | |
| repeatedly that God wants us all. | 17:56 | |
| And maybe I say that as a campus minister | 18:01 | |
| because I have the great privilege of sitting | 18:04 | |
| and listening to sophomores who report that God, | 18:06 | |
| despite their best efforts and the Department | 18:10 | |
| of Philosophy and everything, God is out getting them | 18:12 | |
| and I said that's amazing because I can't even | 18:18 | |
| get in the dorms without a ID card. | 18:21 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 18:24 | |
| When you think of the defenses | ||
| we've got here against God, it's just quite a tribute | 18:26 | |
| to God's resourcefulness. | 18:30 | |
| Personally, I think there's a lot to be said | 18:34 | |
| for the Catholic idea of purgatory. | 18:36 | |
| If none but the pure of heart can fully see God, | 18:39 | |
| why not a place or a time where we're made to wait | 18:44 | |
| until our impurities are burned away, purged, | 18:50 | |
| our ground smooth until we are made | 18:54 | |
| to look at the mirror of honesty, | 18:57 | |
| until we're ready for heaven's searing vision of God? | 19:01 | |
| God has shown a willingness to wait a couple | 19:10 | |
| of thousand years to get us. | 19:13 | |
| What's a thousand years when you're talking eternity? | 19:17 | |
| Would I say that for like, a Hitler, or a Mao, | 19:21 | |
| or history's other great butchers? | 19:24 | |
| Well, as we've said, their fate is of course, left up | 19:28 | |
| to God and not me. | 19:31 | |
| However, I having been myself overwhelmed | 19:33 | |
| by the persistence, the resourcefulness, | 19:36 | |
| the dogged determination of God to have me, | 19:39 | |
| well, I can imagine God is determined | 19:43 | |
| to have them as well. | 19:45 | |
| I'm sorry if the prospect of spending eternity | 19:49 | |
| with the person who's seated next to you | 19:52 | |
| in the pew this morning is for you less than appealing, | 19:54 | |
| I just think all is grace | 19:59 | |
| and the transformative power of God's love | 20:02 | |
| really is amazing. | 20:06 | |
| Dante, maybe because he was Italian, | 20:10 | |
| knew a lot more about heaven than anybody else | 20:13 | |
| I've met and Dante noted in one of his writings | 20:16 | |
| that an angle at the center of the earth, an angle | 20:22 | |
| with even the very smallest of opening, | 20:27 | |
| say one millionth of one degree angle, | 20:30 | |
| that if you project that angle on out into infinity, | 20:34 | |
| it will eventually open up as wide as any other angle. | 20:40 | |
| Given enough time, given enough space, say, | 20:46 | |
| like eternity, maybe every person, even people | 20:50 | |
| with the smallest degree of love in their hearts for God, | 20:58 | |
| even with a tiny bit of faith, hope, and love, | 21:02 | |
| maybe eventually when it's all cast out into eternity | 21:06 | |
| is opened to the love of God. | 21:11 | |
| God's relentless determination to have us in life | 21:17 | |
| suggests God will not be deterred in death, | 21:20 | |
| and here I'm thinking like, of Romans 8 | 21:24 | |
| where Paul claims nothing, not angels or not life, | 21:26 | |
| not death, nothing will be able to separate us | 21:31 | |
| from the love of God and Christ. | 21:33 | |
| And I've always liked that 'cause you think Paul | 21:36 | |
| might say I believe that death will not separate us | 21:38 | |
| from the love of God and Jesus Christ, | 21:42 | |
| but what Paul says is, "I believe that since life | 21:44 | |
| "and all of its necessitudes does not separate us | 21:49 | |
| "from the love of God and Christ. | 21:53 | |
| "surely God shall not be defeated in death." | 21:54 | |
| The pain of death, as those of you who are going | 22:01 | |
| through grief right now can testify, | 22:05 | |
| and by my count, that includes just about 99% of you, | 22:09 | |
| part of the pain of death is the separation. | 22:15 | |
| Well, heaven is reunion. | 22:20 | |
| Throughout my life, God has used any number of sly devices | 22:25 | |
| to reunite me to lure me toward reunion. | 22:28 | |
| I look back on my life, | 22:34 | |
| there's just been too many coincidences. | 22:35 | |
| C.S. Lewis once wrote that about the only sure way | 22:39 | |
| to avoid eternal communion with God is to, in his words, | 22:43 | |
| "keep hard at work, try to listen to no music. | 22:48 | |
| "Never look up at the earth, the sky, | 22:53 | |
| "and above all, don't ever fall in love with anybody." | 22:56 | |
| There is in this life a lot of pain. | 23:02 | |
| There's too much pain, and some of it | 23:04 | |
| is self-inflicted, yes, but not all. | 23:06 | |
| There is, as we've been reminded this moment, | 23:10 | |
| this morning, a kind of surplus of tragedy | 23:12 | |
| and injustice which no matter how much is done | 23:14 | |
| to make it right now, it isn't going to be made right | 23:18 | |
| this side of the grave, so the old spiritual, | 23:21 | |
| the slaves sang of heaven as a place | 23:25 | |
| where all God's children get shoes, | 23:29 | |
| and when I get to heaven, I'm gonna wear | 23:32 | |
| my shoes and I'm gonna walk all over the place, | 23:34 | |
| the song sings. | 23:36 | |
| At last, in other words, heaven is where God | 23:38 | |
| is gonna get what God intends for the world, | 23:43 | |
| I will at last be who I am meant to be. | 23:46 | |
| And when the church speaks of heaven, | 23:51 | |
| we reach for this poetic language of the greatest delights | 23:53 | |
| known on earth, melody, song, shining light, | 23:57 | |
| great banquet, embraced by the beloved, | 24:02 | |
| the marching in of the saints. | 24:06 | |
| It is that place, that time, that existence | 24:11 | |
| where all that is false and fictive, and cruel, | 24:14 | |
| and deadly has just been burned away | 24:20 | |
| and God's pure will for the world | 24:24 | |
| is visible and undeniable, real. | 24:26 | |
| Will we know those whom we have known and loved here there? | 24:30 | |
| I certainly hope. | 24:39 | |
| When Jesus was resurrected, though he had mightily changed, | 24:42 | |
| his disciples with just a little bit of coaxing knew | 24:45 | |
| for sure, yeah, it was Jesus. | 24:48 | |
| Maybe we'll have some difficulty recognizing those | 24:52 | |
| who have died, of whom we've loved, | 24:55 | |
| not just because they have died and are now alive, | 24:58 | |
| but because now they are transformed | 25:02 | |
| into what they most truly have always been meant | 25:05 | |
| by God to be. | 25:09 | |
| Odd that we should wonder if we will know | 25:12 | |
| other people in heaven whom we know on earth | 25:15 | |
| since heaven is that place where we shall be | 25:19 | |
| most fully recognizable as ourselves, | 25:23 | |
| as we've ever been before. | 25:27 | |
| God shall at last have God's way with us forever. | 25:30 | |
| As our choir always sings, | 25:36 | |
| at the end, God will be in our heads, | 25:39 | |
| and in our thinking, and in our eyes, | 25:45 | |
| in our speaking, and in our hearts. | 25:48 | |
| God shall be at our end, at our departing | 25:52 | |
| so that surprise, our departing | 25:58 | |
| was actually homecoming, reunion. | 26:03 | |
| Amen. | 26:10 |
