It was only when I had finished this sermon that I realized it was a very natural sequel to the sermon I did just a few weeks ago on our faith as being an adventure, an exploration, a quest. And I was thinking, well, if you’re talking about the Unitarian Universalist faith as being this kind of exploratory adventure into the unknown, what is more unknown than what is beyond life?—what has traditionally been called Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, Limbo.... (Of course, Unitarian Universalists have been described as people with no evident invisible means of support.) And I also thought, you know, we live in a Heaven-drenched society. Everywhere you turn—movies, Hallmark cards, best-selling books like Mitch Albom’s book The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and his brand-new book, which is being sold in every Starbucks in the world, about if you just had one more day with someone who has gone on, passed on, what would you do? What could be more uncharted and compelling than visions of Heaven?
Now, the heaven I’m going to talk about today is not the Heaven you see in New Yorker cartoons. It’s not the sentimental Littlest Angel vision of Heaven that we so often give to children, and that we as adults often still keep carrying around in us. It’s not even the satirical Heaven of Mark Twain, in his wonderfully funny and effective vision of Heaven in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, where he shoots down so effectively the visions of the celestial choirs, the Pearly Gates, and the streets of gold. The heaven I want to talk about this morning is a bit more subtle, and a bit more complex, and I think infinitely richer; because I actually can’t think of anything more boring than the traditional vision of Heaven that we tend to carry around inside ourselves.
I begin with a late 13th-century manuscript that tells of three Mesopotamian monks who agreed that they were going to journey to “the place where heaven and earth are joined.” And so they embark to their destination using the very blank maps of the time, that showed basically nothing; but they’re bold, so they embark. Some believed that this vision where heaven and earth meet might be an island off the East Indian coast; another, in the region of Ethiopia. They don’t know. But they embark, going east, and very quickly they feel that they are moving into territory where as far as they know no traveler has ever gone. And so, crossing the Tigris through Persia, across the plains of Asia, where Julian the Apostate was killed, four months brings them on into India, where they’re taken for spies and imprisoned, and later they escape; then they find themselves farther on, to a statue that notes this is the farthest reach of Alexander the Great. And they keep going into bleak and mountainous territories beyond, where they describe dragons and unicorns; and climbing still higher, the three monks keep going, into what they describe as a region of continual darkness. And moving on, forty days beyond, into a place of what they call terrible torment, they keep going, passing past the fearful sights-- the monks at last come onto signs that they believe indicate that they are now close to celestial country; because there are speaking birds, calling continually upon God; and four venerable old men wearing jeweled crowns, carrying golden palms; and a beautiful country where there is sweet air and the air is filled with singing voices; and another hundred days beyond, the wonderful church where the great altar pours forth milk. They keep going through a second land, past an immense river into a huge cave; and here they find a teacher, an old man with long white hair. He, too, has sought what he calls the end of the earth. He says, “An angel has led me here to speak to all travelers who come this far; and I’m going to tell you, do not complete this journey. Turn, and go back home.” They were only twenty miles from the place where heaven meets earth; but even so, they obeyed the master; they set out in the way that they had come, and made the long trip back home through the marvelous lands of India and Persia, and finally back to their monastery.
It’s a fascinating document. It contains deep historical analysis, and also describes a psychological vision of what it’s like to move through the spiritual life: that spiritual pilgrimage containing an earthly paradise and hell; pain and joy and song, all of these mixed together; teachers; and yes, that unattained place where heaven meets earth. And though their destination was the very gate of Heaven, the seam between the earthly and the heavenly realms, it’s very interesting that in this story from the 13th century, the monks never leave this earth of ours. And neither do we. Our spiritual paths, no matter what our glimpses of the beyond, are resolutely bound into the textures of our days, the years we have upon this earth; and our path, like the monks’, is a winding, confusing, and a long one—as Unitarian Universalists, maybe more exciting and thrilling than perhaps we even know. You know the old joke about a Unitarian who dies, and in front is a forked road. One sign says, “This way to Heaven”; and the other road is marked, “This way to a discussion about Heaven”; and you know which way the Unitarian Universalist goes!
As a minister, I sit by the sides of a lot of people who are near death, and I know that people have quite different views of what lies beyond this world; but one thing that has helped me immeasurably in the last twenty-five years, frankly, is learning that this confusion, if you will, is very much a human story. The people that are really confident about Heaven really don’t know very much about their faith at all. I think about the early Jews, and even in Orthodox Judaism today, where the afterlife is simply not an issue; they do not waste their precious spiritual energies wondering and imaging a heaven beyond this world. They live through their children, the survival of their people, and their message and their covenant with God; and it suffices, and it’s good enough. It’s more than good enough; it is a sustaining and powerful spiritual life. But about 200 years before Jesus, some Jews had another vision (influenced deeply by Zoroastrian thought) that began to permeate Jewish life. We talk today about how modern religions and New Age religions are influencing each other, and it was no different even 2000 years ago. There was a specific group of Jews called the Pharisees, and they were different from other Jews because they began to have a specific doctrine about what happened to you upon death. They evolved a vision of Heaven. It was a realm of communion with God, beyond this life.
Now I have to emphasize: like in Greek thought, like in Zoroastrian thought, like all the ancients, this vision of Heaven is not the medieval vision of Heaven that so many of us have, that somehow we ascend in little angel wings, and we pal around in choirs, and it sounds really boring to me (sorry to you in the choir!). For them, the ancients, even their newly evolved vision of Heaven was a place where your ‘shade’ lived and was nurtured and held by God. It wasn’t so much about the survival of your soul; it was about who you were, and who you were in communion with the eternal. And even after Jesus’ time, the notion of the Second Coming and all that came very slowly. I want to read you something from Revelations. I feel so heretical from a Unitarian pulpit reading from Revelations; but let’s do it, let’s go, let’s do this thing, because it gives you a note that I want to try to bring home today, to say that the essence of our faith really is in a note that we find here, and I’ll explain why. It’s from Revelations 21:
And then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. And I saw a holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven. See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God, and God himself with be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, for the first things have passed away. And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new!”
Why am I reading this? Because the place where heaven and earth come together is the place where all things are being remade. They are new. This is not the old vision; this is not the old you; this not the old world out of which you’ve come, but a vision of something new and fresh, where tears are going to be wiped away. “See, I am making all things new!”
I don’t know about you, but when I grew up, religion as often transmitted to me was about that which was in the past. The truth was in the past; it was in old creeds, old scriptures, old wisdom. But there is, even here, the place where heaven and earth come together, a new vision of what your religion can be, of what all the great prophetic voices have really tried to tell us: that we have within us the capacity to forge with the eternal something new. We need not be mired in the past. We need not be enslaved by it. A true and compelling faith moves us forward; it compels us forward. “See, I have made all things new.” Heaven is not a place you die to ascend to. You notice what it says here in Revelations, that heaven descends to dwell with mortals? This is a really powerful insight, and I believe that Unitarian Universalists can take it and believe it, because what is says is that heaven is not what is beyond; heaven is what is fresh and new now, that descends to be among us. You don’t have to die to taste Heaven, but you do have to move into what is new.
Is Heaven a spiritual realm? The ancient Jews said over and over again that if you wanted to understand heaven, there were two meanings forged within the same word, shamayim. It combined both the sky, the great canopy of sky above us, and also the invisible realm of God within each heart. Both meanings were together; and so they were with Greek, in ouranos. We have separated the two; we talk about the heavens above us, and we talk about the inner realm of God; but they believed that they were combined. That is where that fresh beginning comes from. The heavens and the earth means literally everything. It’s not a paradise; it is this world, come to fruition.
It is this world when you fully engage with it.
It is this world when you sense what is new within it.
We don’t ascend into heaven; over and over again, the vision is that it drapes down among us, that we live within it. Heaven comes to us. It is a new beginning; more, it is a way of seeing life—our life—in this transformative new way.
Seventy-one percent of Americans say yes to the question, “Do you think that there is a Heaven where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded?” But in so many ways, this old Heaven is being drained of its old power. When I was a young kid growing up in the Episcopal church, I never heard a sermon about Heaven, nor Hell; and even with all the afterlife books (and we used live in Connecticut, which was a center of the afterlife-experience scientific studies), even then, with the vision of the Pearly Gates, and even St. John’s vision, there was something else going on. Maurice Sendak has a children’s story about a pampered dog. This little dog has everything: her own pillows, her own comb, her own brush; she has a red wool sweater, two wide windows through which to gaze out upon the world; she even has two bowls to eat from, and a master who loves her. And despite all this, at the end of the book the little dog decides that she must hit the road. She must move on, explaining, “I’m not discontented; I want something I do not have. There must be more to life than having everything.”
The old story of the monks really has it right. It is a long and an arduous journey. You’re traveling into the unknown. There will be places that will frighten you, and there will be places that delight you, but you move on. You need ‘more than everything.’ The poet Robert Browning said that ‘earth is crammed with Heaven;’ and it is, because the new heaven and the new earth is this life, when you dare to live it fully.
So where are we? Heaven is not a dream. It’s not a metaphor. It’s not a vision. It is your new beginning. There is always being born a new heaven and earth, not from the future. The physicist Neils Bohr said that prediction is a very difficult art, “especially if it involves the future.” This is about the here and now: not tomorrow, not the end of your life; it’s about your spiritual path, your journey.
This is the place, and you are the place, where heaven and earth are joined; and like reaching out and touching and feeling a child’s fevered brow, or the wind brushing your cheek, or your feet wet with dew, or the kiss of a lover, or an old friend’s embrace, and the final goodbye, or the vision of a flower that’s opened that morning, heaven is a place (as the great monks knew) where no traveler truly arrives. But as we skirt the dangers of the shoals of life, this journey takes us into unknown lands, further and further and further in, deeper. We visit places that are beguiling, where mentors and friends and loved ones greet us and hold us; and we will be in places that frighten us; but at last one will say we were just twenty miles away from the place where heaven meets earth. Don’t go further, but head home.
Go home to your life. Go home to your families. Go home to who you are. And so the journey winds back to the place where we grow, and learn, and explore; and as Unitarian Universalists we are committed to this path, the hope that is no dream, for the dome of heaven descends to dwell in the everday-ness, and we reach out and touch eternity itself. The path is leading us to heaven and earth, home. Amen.
