We say ‘heaven a lot’ but we really don’t talk about heaven at all. ‘Heaven and earth are full of your glory’ we sing in the Eucharistic responses. ‘Our Father in heaven’ we say in the Lord’s prayer, along with ‘your will be done on earth as in heaven’. In some quarters, it is common to address God as ‘Heavenly Father’. But, if someone asked to you to explain what heaven is, or where heaven is, or what the term ‘heaven’ means - what would you say? I can’t let myself off the hook here - one of the motivations for today’s sermon was reading a book by Dr Paula Gooder, a British theologian who has visited Perth a number of times, entitled Heaven.
Before we go too much further, we should name the reality that heaven is not located in the sky. We’ve been there and checked, and there is no heaven there. On Thursday, Ascension Day, we’ll retell the story of Jesus’ ascension, in which it is implied that Jesus flew up towards the sky and returned to God. As one wag has pointed out, if that text were taken as scientific description or literal observation, we would have to assume that Jesus is still flying through the universe, looking for his Dad’s house.
But even in an ancient worldview, there was an understanding that heaven was not part of this world. Rather, heaven was a kind of parallel realm, the realm of God, in which God ruled as sovereign. There was some to-ing and fro-ing between the realms - angels and visions and occasionally people like Elijah and Enoch went there to visit. But what doesn’t appear in holy scripture, and is in fact a superstition largely from the medieval era, is the idea that Heaven is a place where people go when they die. In some versions of the folk tale admission is based on the deceased’s behaviour, or their beliefs, and there are variations on what happens there - apparently a lot of rugby is played, and the streets are paved with gold and so on. But none of this is found in holy scripture, and none of it is reflected in our statements of belief.
Hopefully we all appreciate that orthodox Christian teaching is that when we die, we die, until Jesus returns for the final judgement and inaugurates the new heaven and the new earth. This is mentioned in today’s reading from Acts 1 - This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’ It’s a reference to the parousia, or second coming.
So, if heaven is not a place in the sky where you go when you die. And if, at the end of all things, there will be a new heaven and a new earth, what about the old heaven? What is going on there?
Throughout the scriptures, heaven is talked about as if it is a place just beyond our experience. You can imagine being an ancient person and looking up at the night sky, and imagining that the stars were reflections of God’s glory, or imagining God riding through the skies using the sun as a chariot.
There are lots of poetic accounts of people glimpsing Heaven. Isaiah describes God sitting on a throne in a place greater than the Temple in Jerusalem, Jacob sees a ladder between heaven and earth with angels flying about, Stephen describes Jesus seated at God’s right hand, and John The Divine speaks of God on a throne surrounded by a rainbow.
Now, we’re all mature enough to know metaphor when we see it, and to appreciate that grandiloquent use of lyrical prose is meant to inspire rather than define our view of God.
And yet.
And yet, there does seem to be a thin veil between the ordinary, mundane stuff of this world, and something more glorious, more pure - something divine. And there are, even if we don’t know how to explain them, times and places and experiences in which the veil is lifted, and we get a glimpse into the realm where God is fully revealed. I’m going to call them thin places today, but you’ll appreciate that I mean the full spectrum of ways that God breaks through into commonplace.
Sometimes the thin places are officially religious - music and architecture and sacrament and word can be the catalyst for an epiphany of God.
We’ve spent the past ten years or so working our official religious space, and I’m glad we did. It’s heart-warming to have fresh paint and thick carpet and a well-lit, climate-controlled space. But sometimes you find a thin place in an entirely unexpected context, not somewhere stereotypically religious. As we’ve been in the lockdown phase, I’ve had many conversations with people who have discovered God’s presence by slowing down, or by being in their own home, or by rebuilding connections with other people.
So I wonder where your thin places are? The sacraments of holy communion and baptism are, we think, a means by which we can have confidence that God is present and working. Sometimes a church building is the catalyst for an experience of God. Others tell me of a particular location, or type of location - the beach or the bush or the desert - where God is more likely to break through. But even those things can be stereotypes, and we can go looking for God in sweeping landscapes and soaring architecture, without being ready to glimpse God’s presence in other ways.
Leonardo Boff, the great prophet of the Liberation Theology movement in South America, described how he turned away one day after saying his daily mass at the altar. There on the table was a chipped coffee mug and a cigarette butt in an ashtray. They seemed to symbolise the shared struggle for justice in his native Brazil, the shared discourse, the solidarity, the movement. He described how anything can become a sacrament if it brings us into the presence of God - and went on to develop his most dangerous idea - that the poor might be living sacraments.
Regardless of whether we are ancients who describe God as inhabiting a heaven beyond the sky, or whether we are frightfully modern and envisage God’s presence lurking parallel, or at the source of our material world, the lived experience is much the same. We Christians are on the lookout for thin places. Instances where we glimpse the fulness of the glory of God erupting into our world.
And we remember that there was once a thin place who lived and breathed and walked and talked - one who, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, embodied the fulness of God breaking through into the world. And we remember that a time is coming when the veil will be torn asunder, and the whole universe, and all that lies beyond will be restored to wholeness.
Christ is Risen, Alleluia! Alleluia!