Questions Continued: Heaven
Sept. 24, 2006
Crestwood UCC
By Pastor Marcia Moret Sietstra
Romans 3:23-24 and Matt. 19:16-22 (The Message)
I want to begin this morning by telling you about a guy who was pulled over by a state trooper. “Sir,” the trooper said, “You are the 5000th person to cross this traffic counter wearing a seat belt. You have just won $5000! What are you going to do with all that money?”
“Well,” said the driver in a slurred voice, “I don’t rightly know for sure, but I s’pose the first thing I oughta do is buy a driver’s license.”
“Oh, don’t mind him officer,” said the woman sitting next to him, “He’s always a smart aleck when he’s been drinking!” And then a muffled voice from the trunk yelled, “Hey buddy, are we over the border yet?”
The point is this: Things are not always what they may seem.
It’s certainly that way with the Bible…let me explain. Last Sunday Jean and I did something new—instead of a formal sermon, we answered as many of your questions as we could in 20 minutes. As I thought about all those questions this week, I realized that a lot of them related to how we use the Bible. So often there is confusion about a subject because one verse seems to say one thing, but another verse contradicts it. Or one verse seems to say something quite clearly, but what it seems to say doesn’t mesh well with the overall themes of the whole of scripture.
If there is one thing I have learned as a student of the bible, it is this: You’ve got to look at the whole picture, and not just one or two verses to discover the broader wisdom in scripture…so when a few verses seem to say one thing, but the stronger, consistent message of Jesus says another, we give more weight to the clear and strong themes of Jesus. So when the Bible says slaves should obey their masters, we say, “It’s not that simple” because the clearer theme of scripture is to love your neighbor as yourself. You can’t possibly enslave people who you are to treat as you would like to be treated yourself.
As a young adult, I was taught that we needed to stick as closely as possible to a literal understanding of every text, but I have learned that the literal reading of a text—the one that seems to be clear at first glance—is not usually the most accurate one—a literal reading of a text is actually only the most elementary reading.
So with that in mind, I want to return to one of the difficult questions I answered so briefly last week. The question was:
What must I do during my lifetime to assure I go to heaven?
Throughout the Bible, the answers to that question changed over time. Today, there are two predominant answers given to the question of what one must “do” to please God, and today people generally emphasize one or the other.
Some folks say that you must believe a correct set of beliefs in order to “go to heaven,” especially the belief that Jesus died to save you from your sins. There are lots of verses that say this, in a way that seems quite clear, like John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. I can still say it from memory just as I learned it as a child. Of course, what my Calvinist teachers did not realize, when they taught me this, was that “to believe in Jesus” meant to give your heart to—not just decide in your head about who Jesus was. In the Greek, to believe means to “commit yourself to.” It implied a way of life more than a way of thinking.
That’s the other emphasis that so many Christians believe is more important: that a way of life is what is important, specifically to follow Jesus’ WAY of life, which is the way of compassion and caring for all our neighbors. That’s what he tells the rich young ruler in our text today. He doesn’t say, Think correct things about me. He says, Give what you have to the poor, i.e. make caring for others your priority. According to this way of thinking, it is in losing one’s life that we find it, i.e. when we start caring so much about others’ needs that we get the focus off ourselves, then we enjoy true relationship with God. It is a taste of heaven right here and now when we live the kingdom ethics.
But it occurred to me last Monday morning, that I didn’t really finish answering the question. I talked about what today’s Christians believe is necessary to please God. There is a distinction to be made between what we need to do to please God, and how one “gets to heaven,” which is what the original question asked. Remember, the question was: What must I do during my lifetime to assure I go to heaven?
In fact, how one attains heaven is not so clear in the Bible. Paul says, no matter how strongly you believe or how good you are, you will never have faith enough or be good enough to earn salvation. But, Paul says, you will receive heaven as a GIFT…it is undeserved favor from a God who is biased in your favor, just as a mother who loves her child is biased in her child’s favor before that child does anything to earn it. This gift is called GRACE. Grace is one of those big, strong, clear themes of scripture that trumps single verses here and there that seem to deny it!
So here’s the rest of my short answer to that question today: Don’t worry about individual verses here and there that point to a day of terrible judgment. Be the best person you can be, and rest in the assurance that our creator is good and loving. Rest in the assurance that God loves what God has created—each one of us—and will provide for us when this life ends and we move on to whatever is next.
In the end, Paul and the other New Testament writers, land here. They debate about whether faith or good works are most important. Sometimes Paul comes off sounding like all you need to do is give intellectual assent to the idea that Jesus died for your sins. Sometimes James comes off sounding like what you think is actually of little importance compared to how well you live your life. But they would both point to God’s grace that is sufficient for us—grace that is a gift to all of us.
I
find a huge amount of assurance in that. I trust that the God who gave us
the capacity for love and goodness, will hold us. In the words of Edward
Teller: When I come to
the end of all the light I have known, and it's time to step into the darkness
of the unknown, I believe that one of two things will happen: Either I
will be given something solid to stand on or I will be taught to fly.
I have no idea what heaven is like—and neither does anyone else. The visions in the Bible, particularly in the book of Revelations, are just that—visions, dreams, and it says that at the outset. But again, often people read more into these texts, and things are not as they seem.
I want to close by giving a short answer to another question submitted last week. The question was the flip side of the heaven question. It reads: Is there a hell, and if so, who are the poor people going there?
Again, the bible is full of metaphors and a wide variety of ideas on hell, and they reflect the thinking of the writers’ culture. It’s a primitive idea of a fiery place “down below” which when you think about it, is impossible. “Below” doesn’t exist as a place in view of what we know about the round shape of the earth and the absence of above and below in reference to outer space.
Today, many scholars of the Bible don’t believe in a literal hell. Some say hell is not a place but rather a state of being—the state of being eternally separated from God. A person might simply cease to exist after death—that would be separation from God.
Personally, I find the idea of hell as a physical place of eternal punishment to be inconsistent with the loving God I experience. No decent parent would subject their child to such a place, and I cannot believe God would either.
You are God’s art, God’s child, God’s pride and joy…you are imperfect and you will screw up often…but by God’s grace you are forgiven people, you are loved and you are, in a very real sense, “saved” so although we do not have full knowledge of what that means beyond this life, we can trust that God will care for us. May it be so, amen.