First of all, then, the most basic question of all, where is heaven? I am of an age to remember Nikita Khrushchev proudly announcing that Communism had finally disproved its existence because the Soviet Union had successfully launched the first man into space and he had found no evidence whatsoever of such a place. But all Khrushchev had in fact demonstrated was how little he understood of the way in which religious language works. When as Christians we talk of God being above us in heaven we are using pictorial language to suggest something quite different, not that God is physically distant from us but that his nature and character are radically different from ours. So the distance between earth and heaven is in fact being used, not to point to where God is to be found, but rather to draw an analogy: God is as far above us morally and spiritually as the sky seems to be above our heads.
That. I'm sure, you already knew. But it is worth repeating, for Christians often fail to draw the further conclusion that heaven must then be seen as elsewhere, as in fact alongside us. Because heaven is God's dwelling place, like God it is in fact everywhere. To use an analogy first suggested by St Augustine, God's universal presence is in fact a bit like the way in which water can permeate everywhere in a sponge. Wherever we are, whatever we are doing, God is there, and so with him, his dwelling place, heaven. Following similar notions in Columba and many another saint, John Henry Newman once spoke of us being able almost to hear the skirts of the angels' wings as they move close by. It is probably Newman, then, that inspired the familiar lines of Francis Thompson's poem:
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
Tis ye, 'tis your estrangd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
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The traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched between heaven and Charing Cross.
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And, lo, Chirst walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!
In other words, heaven is, as it were, the next room running just alongside us, which only our 'estranged faces' prevent us from seeing. And, if your first thought is to find the analogy of the room next door altogether too far fetched, just go back for a moment to your childhood, and hear once more C. S. Lewis describing what happens in his tale of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Freed from all the burdens of adult disbelief, the children move easily between worlds, and all because of an unassuming door in a wardrobe, the mysterious point of contact for them between the two worlds.
In the past one might have been tempted to say that all this is utterly incompatible with a modern scientific world view, but nothing is stranger than some of the elements in modern science. One such is the notion of what are called parallel universes, the idea that there may be in existence total systems running parallel to our own world and yet with no inherent physical contact with it. And that is precisely what I am suggesting in respect of heaven.
But in bringing heaven closer in this way, I still have done nothing to deal with what is perhaps the more fundamental objection of our secular friends, that what is on offer is still a hopelessly impossible and selfish utopianism. Certainly, at one level one has to concede that much Christian talk of heaven does reek of a rather revolting sentimentalism, as though it were merely a reversion to an idyllic childhood with all responsibilities gone and the teddy bear always there for a reassuring hug. But that is emphatically not what our faith teaches us, which is of an altogether tougher complexion. Remember at its heart lies God on a Cross. The new creature, salvation, cannot, therefore, come easily. Each week we affirm in the Creed the resurrection of the body. What exactly that means I want to leave to one side in this sermon, but please note the implication that goes with that assertion: that salvation is not about part of ourselves being redeemed, but our entire identity as human beings. It is thus about the redemption of the disturbing and painful aspects of ourselves, not simply about their elimination.
Even with Christ himself, when we assert that the whole identity of the human Jesus is now in heaven, we must mean unpleasant as well as happy memories: memories of betrayal not only by Judas but also whenever his other disciples fell short of his expectations, or his distrustful brothers who thought him a madman and only came to faith after his death, and so on. Add to that his knowledge through his divine nature of the way the world now is, and how his disciples, including ourselves, continue to let him down. Such knowledge cannot destroy his present happiness because he knows for certain that his heavenly Father will have the ultimate victory. So I am not in the least trying to suggest that heaven will after all be an unhappy place.
No, my point is quite different. It is that heaven will be a realistic place. Take the apostle Peter. A key part of who he is, his identity, is given by the fact that he denied his Lord. So their relation in heaven cannot be about forgetting that that ever happened, but about its significance being transformed through Christ's forgiveness. Similarly, then, with ourselves. Christianity marvellously affirms that even the victim of a brutal rape and the rapist can be reconciled through God aiding a mutual, transforming love, but this will hardly be achieved without significant cost. No less then, it is only by all our own hidden faults being exposed to God's healing but painful light that our own particular new identity can emerge.
Some of you may know Rupert Brooke's parody of 'pie in the sky,' with its portrayal of a fishy heaven:
We darkly know, by faith, we cry,
The future is not wholly dry.
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But somewhere, beyond space and time,
A wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,
The little fish may enter in.
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Fat caterpillars drift around,
And paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.
But the Christian fishy heaven is in fact quite different. It will still have its hook and its torn flesh. For it is a heaven where not only will our lives reach their proper fruition, it is also a place where we will find Christ reaching out in forgiveness to embrace even Judas, and where you and I, drawn into that circle of love, are no longer afraid to have every crevice of our lives exposed but delight to know and be known as at present only God knows us.
Sermon by: David Brown