It’s not about getting into heaven…

The title for this week’s sermon comes from a quote that I encountered somewhere: “Jesus did not come to get you into heaven. Jesus came to get heaven into you.” It is hard to determine who first came up with this quote, and many variations of it are circulating on the Internet. Some of these include the following: "Jesus not only died on the cross to get you out of Hell and into Heaven, but to get God out of Heaven into YOU;" "the authentic Christian life is not merely getting into Heaven – its getting Heaven into you;" "The purpose of religion -- at any rate, the Christian religion -- is not to get you into heaven, but to get heaven into you" (from Frederick Kates).

However it might be phrased, it is a point well-taken. A careful review of the New Testament reveals that most of the times Jesus talks about heaven, it is in comments such as “Heaven is in the midst of (or within) you” or “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel.” Many of his parables concerning the Kingdom of Heaven are not about something that exists in the afterlife, but rather are about life here and now.

Which is the point of all of this. Jesus’ focus seems to be primarily upon the here and now, this life more than the next. It is almost as if Jesus is saying, “Focus your efforts on what lies immediately before you, and let God worry about what comes later.”

The Way that Jesus lived and taught, in other words, is not a ticket into an eternal dinner party with God. It is about a life that is infused and filled with a consciousness of the presence of God. This consciousness changes us. It changes our attitudes. It changes our behavior. It changes our priorities. It heals many of our inner wounds. It instills hope with in us. It connects us with a deeper sense of purpose. It plugs us into a web of deep and richly meaningful relationships. It engages us in actions that help people in need, advance the cause of justice, and make the world a better and safer place for all people.

What this does over the course of a lifetime is establish a trajectory to our lives that continues after our death. The basic Christian proclamation is that this is not all there is to life, and that the life that follows this existence is continuous with that existence in some way. The details are very sketchy in the Bible, but the Christian imagination has been very active in visualizing what the afterlife might look like.

A number of years ago, historians Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang published a book entitled Heaven: A History, which traces the development in Western Christian cultures of the idea of what the afterlife might look like. It is actually a rich and varied portrayal. The reason it is so rich and varied is because the Bible is actually relatively vague if not silent about the afterlife outside of a few brief elliptical references. Most of our ideas of heaven arose after the Bible was put together and often reflect the hopes and aspirations of people over the course of centuries as well as changing conceptions of God.

This is the force behind the quote, “Jesus did not come to get you into heaven. He came to get heaven into you.”

Mark Twain is famously quoted as having once said, “It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.” Jesus is famously mute about the afterlife. Heaven is actually mysterious and not understandable in the Bible. However, Jesus is very vocal and even forceful about how to live now in this world.

I don’t tend to preach much about the glories of heaven because, frankly, it would be purely speculative, and reflect a whole lot more about my imagination than about what Jesus and the Bible teaches. While I believe strongly in a life after this life, and I have my own theories and speculations, they are simply that: theories and speculations. So I take a cue from the Biblical record of Jesus: where he is silent about something as a matter of faith, I try to not to be very loud either.

So that’s where I settle: the Way of Jesus is about how to live a life transformed by the Spirit of God in this life, here and now, in whatever situations I find myself between the event of my birth and the event of my death. Believe me, that is enough of a challenge without worrying about anything afterward!

(Image sources: path and sky: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/3/4776861_8378a73db1.jpg;   stairway to heaven from http://www.timeoutofmind.com/images/bryce/bryce_large/stairway_to_heaven.jpg;   Mark Twain from http://www.yesselman.com/Twain1907.jpeg;