That Place Beyond Place

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 01.25.15

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 13:24-35

Listen To Audio Here:

“Who art in heaven.”

Or so goes the second bitlet of that prayer that Jesus taught us, and for a very long time this was not a particularly easy one for me to wrap my head around.

Even when I was a kid, I struggled with it, because “Heaven” was just a tough concept to accept.  Sure, there’s that mental image of it, with St. Peter with his book at the gate, clouds and harps and everyone you know...wait, check that...everyone you like… happily sporting a pair of pegasus wings.  That, and the dark chocolate fountains and lakes of imperial india pale ale and the shining palaces filled with sleeping golden retriever puppies.

It’s a familiar image, but it...well...it just never felt right to me, even when I was a kid.  Why?  Beyond the sweetness of it, there was this little problem of *where* it was.  

The ancients thought they knew, of course.  Where is heaven, you would ask, and then, like those singing Indians in that scene from Close Encounters, they’d all point up.  It’s in the sky, the ancients would say, dazzled by the mystery of it.  Heaven was behind the firmament, that huge solid dark dome of the sky.  The Hebrews called it the raqi, and knew that in it, holes were punched that allowed the lights that we call “stars” to shine through, and there were little tracks in which the planets ran, like toy trains chugging across the sky.  This is not the way things are now.

We can look across all of time and space, look out past the blue of our sky, past even the dark of our night sky, and into the great deep.  And what we see is...well...everything there is to see, falling out and away, deeper and deeper with every passing discovery.  Like just a hundred years ago, back in 1915, when the big argument in astronomy was about these little swirly smudges that seemed dappled all around the skies.  Humans knew how big things were.  We lived in not just a solar system, but a universe that was a huge swirling spiral, filled with countless stars.  In that universe, there were “spiral nebula,” which most scientists believed were protostars.  Only...they weren’t.  They were, as we know now, other galaxies.  That discovery meant that the great deep grew even deeper, but in the vastness of it all...what?  

Now we look out with the machines we cast into orbit and we see light stretching back thirteen point nine billion years and change to the moment when everything Banged Bigly into existence.

When I was a science-loving boy, nine or ten, I remember a friend asking me where God was in all of that, and where heaven was, and I struggled to have an answer.  “Maybe it’s whatever lies on the other side of the Big Bang,” I’d suggest.  But...what if it was nothing?  What if it was just this endless cycle of banging out and compressing and banging out again?

While it was infinite, it all seemed simultaneously so painfully finite.  It was both vast and defined, both dizzyingly huge and observable, and peering out and back across space and time, it seemed somehow inadequate.  Where, in all of this, is the Creator?  Where in all of being is this “heaven,” in which God resides?

There are the books, of course, the ones that rise out of a genre that’s semi-mockingly called “heaven tourism.”  The stories are usually riffs on similar themes, with tunnels of light during near-death experiences, visits from angels or Jesus himself, the faces of the long lost and the beloved.  Despite the recent, strangely sad apology from a young author who admitted he hadn’t actually had the experience he described, I don’t choose to doubt that most of the people who write these books have experienced something that leads them to write about their encounter.

I don't read them.  I just prefer not to know, because I don't think we know what that will be like, not in the depth of it.  Even if a person has had an experience that dipped them into that chasm, that vastness, I don't think we can know well enough to meaningfully articulate it.  So we have this first fleeting glimpse of eternity, as our selves filter it through the lens of the tiny flicker of life we've lived.  So what? What does that mean, in terms of what is to come?  Very little.

And yet, still and all, we hear Jesus, in that one place he taught us to pray, placing the God he referred to as “father” in heaven.  Care to elucidate, Jesus, we ask, politely.  But when Jesus talks about heaven, or about the dynamics of what heaven means, it’s really amazingly nonspecific.  Sure, we want specific coordinates, latitudes and longitudes.  We may want detailed descriptions, maps and schematics and a couple of selfies with you, Robin Williams, and Mother Teresa.  But when describing heaven for us, Jesus doesn’t do that.

Instead, he talks about the Kingdom of Heaven, the Reign of God, which is something both similar and importantly different.  We get these peculiarly blurry stories, these willful bits of narrative imprecision, one after another.  Here, heaven is described, and we do not hear: “The kingdom of heaven is:”  Instead, we hear, “The kingdom of heaven is like.”  It’s metaphor and story, image after image of growth and harvest, goodness and darkness, value and choice.   It is like someone who sowed good seed in a field.  It is like a mustard seed.  It is like yeast.  It is like a treasure, hidden in a field.  It is like a merchant, in search of pearls.  It is like a net that was thrown into the sea.  And that’s just in this chapter of Matthew.

Every one of those images seems to blur the boundaries between heaven and earth, between “heaven,” where God hangs out, and “earth,” where, well, it’s a little less obvious much of the time.

This teaching about the Kingdom of Heaven is at the heart of what Jesus told us, and the center of the Gospel, but it’s something else.  It flies in the face of the way we think about heaven, about our tendency to cast it out as this realm that is impossibly far away and completely different.  “Our Father, who isn’t anywhere near us,” we tend to think, as we pray this.  “Our Father, who art not part of this crazy mess down here.”

That’s both understandable and a little bit off.  Because though the fullness of God’s reality...the Kingdom, Heaven itself...may be dizzingly different from our own, the intent of Christian faith is not to clearly delineate between one realm and the other.  It is to affirm the presence of the Divine, and to assert that there are realities beyond the one beyond the one we perceive right now in this particular place and time, and...importantly...to deepen our sense of connection to those states of being.

Though I pray it when I wake, I’ll often pray this one as I walk in the morning darkness, my dog by my side.  And on a clear morning, with the moon a sharp crescent, I’ll peer up into the same sky that was the dazzling heaven of our ancestors and see it both differently and in the same way.

Differently, because I see it for what it truly is.  In the same way, because I see it as a place of wonder and the presence of the One who created it all.  But it’s not a distant place, nor is it different from the place we dwell.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.