The Dangers of Heaven
A Sermon by Revs. Kathleen Rolenz & Wayne Arnason
Sunday, June 2, 2013
West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church
One of my favorite classes that I attend is
our Path to Membership series, held every
month in preparation of this day. I love the
class not only because I get to meet those
who eventually become members of this
community, but because I get to hear their
stories. And there’s one story that is all too
common and with which I’m very familiar.
It’s the story of the radical in the family,
who chooses to leave the faith of their
childhood, much to the dismay of other
family members. This is a composite
conversation, with someone I’ll call “Sue.”
Sue says:
“I was at a family gathering
recently, and I told my family that I had
joined a Unitarian Universalist church.
They wanted to know what it was, and when
they discovered that it wasn’t their faith,
they were worried and sad.” At this point in
the narrative, I ask, “Sad, about what?
Wouldn’t they be happy for you to have
found a church home?”
“No. They’re sad because I won’t be
able to join them in heaven, because I
stopped believing the way that they believe.
So, they say that they’ll pray for me and
hope that I’ll be join them as a family,
together again in heaven.”
I didn’t grow up with this kind of
theology, so I am always perplexed by it,
and yet, it is as pervasive in our culture as is
the images of heaven that you saw in the
Diane Keaton film. I love the film because
it contrasts the Hollywoodish and popular
culture concepts of heaven with real people
being interviewed about what heaven is
like—about what it means to them. What is
believed about heaven is intensely personal,
based on what the interviewee feels is
important to continue in the afterlife. So this
morning, Wayne and I want to look at this
idea of heaven—why it’s important; when
the belief can be damaging and what it
means for us as Unitarian Universalists who
have typically rejected the popular
conception of heaven.
Before I go any further, I want to
state very plainly that if you have a
conception of heaven as part of your own
personal theology, maybe even one that
includes clouds, angels, harps, and endless
amounts of food and drink, Wayne and I
don’t intend our sermon today to offend you.
At the same time, if you’re a religious
skeptic who scoffs at the belief in heaven,
we hope to challenge you, because the
universe is more mysterious than any of us
can imagine, and what we believe about an
afterlife does affect how we behave in this
life. So for the first part of this sermon, let’s
look at what heaven means in popular
religion; and later, we’ll try to understand
when that belief is helpful and when it’s
harmful.
Most religious traditions have a
belief in some kind of heaven—a place
where we go after death. The two most
important reasons for heaven in religion are
reward and reunion. Ancient Egyptians, for
example, believed in reward: that departed
souls would undergo a literal journey to
reach Heaven; at the end of the journey,
“their heart would finally be weighed with
the feather of truth, and if the sins weighed it
down their heart was devoured.”1 If not,
they had a place in heaven. The ancient
Norse conceived of heaven as a place of
reward but only for warriors who had fallen
bravely in battle. In Valhalla, these fallen
warriors would feast and drink until the end
of time when they would engage in a last
battle with the forces of darkness. The most
mistranslated belief about the rewards of
Heaven in Islam is that if one decides to
become a martyr for Islam, then you will
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Heaven-Wikipedia
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receive the reward of 72 virgins in Paradise,
along with an all-you-can eat buffet of food
and wine. There are literal translations of
the Quran that would support that idea;
however there are at least two other
translations that are just as legitimate; the
word “virgin” can also be translated as
“companion” and, in a completely different
vein, another Arabic scholar has proposed
the translation “white raisins”. White raisins
is a long way from virgins, but apparently
not in Arabic, and so this scholar suggests
that along with the food and drink you’ll
receive in heaven, you’ll get plenty of white
raisins, an extremely rare delicacy. In
Judaism, the notion of an afterlife is not as
pronounced as in Christianity or Islam. The
Mishnah, or the collection of oral teachings
from rabbis, speaks about “the world to
come.” Rabbi Yaakov said “this world is
like a lobby before the World to Come,
prepare yourself in the lobby so that you
may enter the banquet hall.” The world to
come is a mysterious place of hopeful
reunion with those you love, something to
be hoped for, but not understood. It’s
Christianity’s interpretation of heaven is the
one that we probably have the most
exposure to. SLIDE HERE – HEAVEN.
This is a 16th century picture of Jesus
ascending into heaven, with the
accompanying clouds and cherubs to
shepherd along the way. The Gospel writers
refer to “the kingdom of heaven,” as a place
to be united with Jesus; and later writers
suggested that those who live a good life,
profess a belief in God, Jesus and the Holy
Spirit, will become one with the Savior unite
with loved ones, dwell in heaven, and rest in
eternity with God.
That all sounds really nice, but I like
the more earthy approach of St. Brigit of
Kildare, a 6th century Irish Christian nun,
who is most famous for her prayer about
heaven that goes like this:
“I should like
a great lake of beer for the King of Kings. I
should like the angels of Heaven to be
drinking it through time eternal.” Heaven,
then for St. Brigit, would look something
like this: SLIDE HERE: LAKE OF
BEER….a giant lake of beer that people
would enjoy endlessly, drinking and never
get drunk; giving and receiving in kind.
Now most people who reject he puffy cloud
notion of heaven, are pretty excited about
this version of heaven, unless of course,
drinking in this worldly life is experienced
not as heaven, but as an earthly hell.
Whatever your taste in rewards and
reunions, Christianity seems to have both of
them in its theology of heaven. The need to
include both is easy to understand when you
consider the kind of life that human beings
have led for most of our history – “nasty,
brutish, and short”, to quote Thomas
Hobbes. In a world where evil people seem
to go unchecked, where the good die young,
and where daily suffering seemed inevitable
for most people, a belief in a heaven where
these wrongs would be set right and where
those you love were waiting to see you again
makes all kinds of psychological sense as a
beacon of hope.
What was so radical about the beliefs
of Universalist Christians in the 18th century
is that they did believe that a heavenly
reward could exist without a heavenly
punishment. The rest of the Christians of
their century believed that heaven could
only exist as a reward if Hell existed as
place of punishment, and that God’s role in
all of this was to be a judge. The
Universalists said – “The God we know is
not a judge at all, but a loving parent, who
seeks the best for each child, even when
they need discipline.” So their picture of
heaven was not a place of reward and
punishment, but a place of correction, where
you could complete the work you needed to
do to become a righteous person and be a
suitable citizen of the heavenly realm.
So what about Unitarian
Universalists today? As you know, heaven
isn’t an issue where we feel we have to
enforce any agreement among us.
Conversations about what happens after we
die can be quite nuanced and complicated. I
do believe, however, that the views of
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theologian Forrest Church are pretty typical
of us today. Church had an opportunity to
reflect on the afterlife in his book, Love and
Death, written while he was facing the end
of his life. Church wrote this: “No one
knows whether heaven actually exists. All
we can say with any confidence about the
afterlife is that it cannot be any stranger or
more unexpected than life before death.
The least prepared pilgrim could not be any
more startled by heaven the moment
following death than a an embryo would be
astounded by life on earth the moment
following birth. Nonetheless, we can learn
something about the appropriateness of our
earthly desires from the images we create of
heaven. Many of them are really quite silly,
an eternity of harps, halos, and hymnals, the
heavenly hosts fluffed up on clouds singing
hosannas forever. Whatever happens after
we die, I hope it isn't this. So defined,
heaven then might best be described as
punishment for good behavior. 2
So whatever else Unitarian
Universalists might believe about heaven, or
life after death, we can be sure of one thing
we do agree on – we would prefer heaven
not to be boring !!
I can testify that one of the things
that has not been boring about the traditional
Christian concepts of heaven, and that is all
the amazing classical and choral music that
it has inspired. Right now we’re going to
take up this Sunday’s offering for the work
of West Shore UU Church, and as the ushers
come around to receive your pledge
envelopes or your ritual gifts of generosity,
we get to listen to a section from one of
those amazing pieces, Messiaen’s
“Ascension”.
READING The Swan by Mary Oliver
Across the wide waters
something comes
floating–a slim
and delicate
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Forrest Church - Love and Death
ship, filled
with white flowers–
and it moves
on its miraculous muscles
as though time didn’t exist,
as though bringing such gifts
to the dry shore
was a happiness
almost beyond bearing.
And now it turns its dark eyes,
it rearranges
the clouds of its wings,
it trails
an elaborate webbed foot,
the color of charcoal.
Soon it will be here.
Oh, what shall I do
when that poppy-colored beak
rests in my hand?
Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:
I miss my husband’s company–
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! the path to heaven
doesn’t lie down in flat miles.
It’s in the imagination
with which you perceive this world,
and the gestures
with which you honor it.
Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when
those
white wings
touch the shore?
“The Swan” by Mary Oliver,
SONG Holy Now by Peter Mayer
“It used to be a world half there
Heaven's second rate hand-me-down But I
walk it with a reverent air 'Cause everything
is holy now
Sermon Part 2 Wayne Arnason
Heaven is a dangerous place !! According
to Forrest Church’s picture of traditional
heaven as “punishment for good behavior”,
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you could run the risk of being bored to
tears for all eternity! But that’s not the only
danger involved in some of the belief
systems we’ve heard about heaven. You can
get yourself into a lot of trouble right here
on earth with some of the heavenly ideas
that run rampant out there. If you buy into
the popular orthodox doctrine that heaven is
a reward for right belief, you stand a good
chance of alienating those around you who
do not share that belief by your mournful
concern for their plight. In too many
religiously conservative families their
worries about being separated from loved
ones in heaven are a guarantee that they will
experience separation from their loved ones
in this life.
If heaven for you is a better life
than the one you have, the danger you face
is that you might miss the opportunities to
make this life better because you have your
mind set on the rewards of the next one.
That’s what Peter Mayer means when he
sings to us about how he used to perceive
the world as only half-there, because it was
Heaven’s second-rate hand-me-down, and
Heaven was our true home, not this Earth.
So, feeling uncomfortable with most
traditional religious images of heaven, and
very aware of the dangers they present,
many Unitarian Universalists will decide
between what they perceive as the only two
possible theological paths they can follow –
they either actively deny the existence of
heaven or they don’t think about it all,
adopting a passive agnosticism about the
whole conversation.
I would like to suggest to you that
either of those two paths, active denial or
passive agnosticism, are as much fraught
with danger as the two paths of traditional
religion that we’ve been discussing today,
the path of heaven as a reward or the path of
heaven as a reunion. Here’s why – the
reason is to be found in the line from Mary
Oliver’s poem. Remember what she said:
“ the path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat
miles.
It’s in the imagination with which you
perceive this world,
and the gestures with which you honor it.
So let’s take these lines very
seriously for a minute. Oliver is saying that
the path to heaven is in the imagination with
which you perceive this world. What if we
agree that heaven is a place in our human
imagination? Is that a bad thing? Is that an
inconsequential thing? Is imagination silly?
Is it a place of random daydreams?
In my own reading of our human
history, imagination has been one of the
most important drivers of human progress.
Imagination is the mother of invention and
technological progress when it is applied to
the material world. Imagination is the father
of human rights in the political world, when
we human beings bestow upon each other by
our agreement that we can see the inherent
worth and dignity of every other person who
has a life as valuable as our own. In almost
anything that we want to learn to do well,
from hitting a golf shot onto a green, to
becoming President of the United States,
those who know how these achievements
happen will tell you that you have to be able
to imagine yourself doing them first. So how
we imagine heaven makes a difference. If
we imagine that heaven is not just a place to
go lounge around on soft cushions, drinking
beer and eating white raisins, but rather it’s
a place that is rich with loving companions,
it makes a difference. If we imagine Heaven
as a place that can be understood in both
completely non-religious terms and in
deeply religious language, it makes a
difference. If we can imagine heaven as a
place of neither punishment or reward, but
as a place where the love of God is revealed
to us through the best of human community,
it makes a difference. The life we can live
here and now becomes driven not by a fear
of what happens after we die, but the slow
revelation of the importance of this life. Our
friend Rev Mark Morrison Reed describes
the act of imagination that Universalists
undertook when they pictured God as love
and not judgment. He wrote: (Imagine) a
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God who drags the last unrepentant sinner
kicking and screaming (no, actually
profanely cursing and resisting) into
heaven—that might be a God we can
envision, we can admire, we can have
confidence in, we can have feelings about,
we can even laugh at. It is a personification
of the Most Holy rooted in a powerful,
sometimes overwhelming, feeling. It is an
experience that transcends description, a
yearning that defies analysis. What a relief
to feel that ultimately there is nothing I can
do to alienate myself from God’s loving
embrace, the almighty but tender arms of the
creative force that upholds and sustains all
life.
One of my favorite liberal Christian
definitions of hell is “to be eternally
separated from the love of God”. So even if
I don’t know for sure if there is a God, I do
know that being eternally separated from the
possibility of love in this life would be hell.
So here is where the second part of what
Mary Oliver had to say in the poem becomes
important for me. It’s not enough to have a
wide inclusive imagination about heaven as
the place where we realize the love of God –
it’s necessary to make the gestures in this
life which do honor to that imagination
Now – “gestures” – another
underwhelming word for me to use – a word
as underappreciated as “imagination”. What
good is a gesture? Does a gesture
accomplish anything? Communicate
anything? Change anything? Think about it.
When you swing your bat in baseball and
the umpire makes the “out” gesture, you
have to go back to the dugout. When
someone you have offended by your driving
raises a middle finger out the window at
you, it creates anger and fear. When Rosa
Parks sits down on the bus and won’t get up
until the police come to arrest her, the world
imperceptibly at first but inevitably at last
becomes a different place.
So what are the gestures that we
should be undertaking to match our
imagination of what heaven might be? The
heaven I believe in is a place where human
beings live in right relationship with the
immense diversity of life, where everything
is holy now, and the church of the earth is
experienced both inside sanctuaries such as
this one and in every gesture we make to
honor and protect the integrity of the planet.
The heaven I believe in is a place where
human beings live in right relationship with
the immense diversity of cultures, races,
sizes, genders, and types of people in the
human community, where everyone has the
chance to express their truth in gestures that
are pleasing to God and delightful to other
humans. The heaven I believe in is a place
where human beings live in right
relationship with their own emotions and
ideas, where we actively recognize the ways
that greed and anger and ignorance can
poison our lives and alienate us from the
love of God that we find expressed in human
community.
In the heaven where I want to live,
people have bodies, and history, and cultural
identities and feelings, and they are all
honored as holy expressions of one life we
share. In the heaven where I want to live,
old grudges are set aside and people
recognize that the threat of violence and the
desperation of war never achieves security
or stability in living. In the heaven where I
want to live, people live out their days to
fullest of their capacity, without being
warehoused into ghettoes of income, race, or
age. Do we have the imagination and can
we find the courage to make the gestures
which will enable us to go to this kind of
heaven, not some day, but right now, right
here?? Our religion says that we do and that
we must. So let us close this time together
by praying for what we need to make this
heaven possible.
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