Back in 2001, the Christian band Mercy Me released a song called “I Can Only Imagine.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRPGRdbGHSs The song writer wonders what it will be like to stand before God in Heaven, whether he’ll dance or fall to his knees or be rendered speechless. The song struck a chord with the Christian community, winning awards for Song of the Year and Songwriter of the Year. And it had surprising appeal in the secular market as well, reaching as high as #5 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary charts and selling over 2 million digital downloads. Some of you may know and like the song already; some of you might find it overly sentimental, especially the bit suggesting that heaven might be a never-ending hands-in-the-air praise music session...
Contrast that with another song called “Imagine,” released in 1971 by John Lennon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVg2EJvvlF8 “Imagine there’s no heaven/ it’s easy if you try/ no hell below us/ above us only sky/ imagine all the people/ living for today…” Pretty much the opposite message, suggesting that religious views of heaven are counterproductive or harmful. But on the other hand, Lennon is raising the same question as Mercy Me—what does the best possible reality look like? For Lennon, it’s earthly peace and harmony, a vision that is ironically quite biblical. And both songs see great value in imagination, that dreaming is somehow part of getting there.
I begin with these song lyrics because I agree: when it comes to heaven, most of what we’re talking about is intangible and unknowable, our hopes and dreams and imaginations. As Christians, we collectively hold to the God’s revelation of Scripture, which no doubt offers promises for the future and perhaps even some glimpses of what that might look like. But what the Bible does say about the afterlife is just a glimpse, full of literary imagery and symbolism that usually obscures as much as it reveals. At least that’s how I read it—I’ll be absolutely shocked if I someday stand before God seated on a rainbow throne surrounded by six-winged beasts. I guess it could happen, but there’s much more going on in John’s Revelation vision than a literal snapshot description.
My point is that I don’t know what heaven is like, and I’m very skeptical about anyone who claims to know for certain. I think it’s outside of our human capacity to really know what happens after we die, and I don’t think that God in the Bible is particularly interested in easing that mystery. Instead, I find that we are invited to live into the mystery, to embrace faith and hope and imagination.
I imagine that you might have some opinions on the subject, so discuss together: Discussion Questions: 1) Where do our ideas about Heaven come from?
2) What is the difference between “wishful thinking” and Christian Faith/Hope in Heaven? Is there harm in hoping/wishing for things that aren’t “proven” or that might not come true?
3) Why might God have chosen to call us to hope and imagination instead of giving us a detailed picture of life after death? Questions for Kids: A) Have you ever hoped or wished for something really badly? Did you get what you hoped for or not? How did that feel?
B) Do you think God wishes for the same kinds of things that you wish for? Do you think that God gets what God wants?
With the rest of my time this morning I’d like us to look at a little bit of how the biblical imagination works. We read earlier from Revelation 4 and 5, and if you want to follow along in your Bible that might be helpful to turn there now. The pictures on your tables are some artistic renderings of the Heavenly Throne Room described in this text.
As you can see, there are quite a few differences of perspectives in these pictures, and that’s my first point. In reading the Biblical vision(s) of heaven, a great deal depends on the perspective of the reader. We have options, we make choices about how we understand what we read.
Before we even start asking what this text means, we have options about what we’re looking at. John tells us right away that this is a vision—he’s looking through a door into a heavenly throne-room. So in describing the vision, is John:
A) simply describing what he has seen? Is he painting a word picture with as many details as possible? “Around the throne is an emerald rainbow.”
Or, B) is John using metaphor to describe the indescribable, telling us what the scene is “like” so that we’ll get the essence if not the details? “Around the throne is… pure beauty, like the colours of a rainbow with the depth of an emerald.”
Or C) is John drawing on a common set of knowledge and symbols that he knows will carry a certain significance with his readers—there’s a rainbow, as with Noah, the symbol of God’s Promise and Goodness.
Or D) is the whole thing more of a literary exercise where the word picture is not of something that John actually “saw” but of what he knows/has experienced of God?
All of these are faithful options, and it might be that John’s writing uses several of these at the same time. It might be that someday we’ll look at God’s throne room ourselves and say “huh, it really does look like a rainbow and an emerald.” Or there might not be anything visually like this at all, but yet it will feel exactly like what John has described. Again, this is imagination, and even with divine inspiration we have a few choices to make.
I enjoy the symbolic meaning of all the images, so that’s what I usually choose to focus on. (A little of option B and a whole lot of option C.) There’s a lot that I don’t understand, but I’ll give a few highlights that I think make sense.
First of all, the 24 thrones and elders.
Twelve is a biblical significant number: twelve tribes of Israel, the People of God. Israel understood themselves in the role of elders to the rest of the world, the keepers of God’s story, the ones charged with passing on God’s wisdom by example and by teachings. By the time John was writing his vision in the late first century, the Christian Church had assumed this role for itself—the Jewish Temple had been destroyed and now the followers of Jesus were the People of God carrying God’s gospel to humanity. The Church, led by 12 apostles, the 12 disciples chosen by Jesus.
Twelve and Twelves, the People of God old and new, drawn together around the throne of God not in rivalry but in common worship of the One “Who Was and Is and Is To Come.”
The next set of images are also very Jewish. Where have we seen God associated with thunderbolts and lightning (very very frightening!)? The Exodus story, the Mountain of God where God calls Moses up to make a covenant on behalf of God’s People. Power, Transcendence, Holiness—God’s Presence is not to be taken lightly.
The seven flaming torches reflect the seven-stemmed menorah in the Tabernacle and Temple. And in the Temple there was also something referred to as the “molten sea,” a huge bronze basin of water used for ritual washing. Perhaps something similar to this “sea of glass, like crystal” that John describes. Taken together these symbols point to the presence of God in the Tabernacle and Temple, the same but bigger and grander.
And then comes the really bizarre part of the picture, the four living creatures full of eyes and wings and animal faces.
(photo: http://thebricktestament.com/revelation/heaven_revealed/rv04_05-06p08.html)
As strange as this seems to us, the Jews had heard about this part of the vision before. The prophet Ezekiel also saw a vision of God on a throne, in Ezekiel 1. Ezekiel saw God’s throne carried by four winged creatures resembling a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a human, perhaps representing the rulers of various parts of the animal kingdom.
And the prophet Daniel also had a vision of four animal-like creatures in God’s throne room. Daniel calls his “beasts” and they are a bit more mixed up and disturbing. They come up out of an ocean one at a time, first a lion with eagles wings that get ripped off as the lion tried to walk on two legs like a human. Then a bear, with three tusks like a boar for ultimate destructive power. Then something like a leopard with four wings and four heads, and then finally a terrifying beast that ripped things to shreds with iron teeth and 11 sharp horns including 1 with eyes and an arrogant mouth. I’m not making this up (Daniel 7).
In Daniel’s vision, these beasts come before the throne of the Ancient One, who judges them. The fourth beast was put to death, and the others were stripped of their power, as the Ancient One recognized a new king, one like a Son of Man, whose glory will not pass away and his kingdom will reign forever and ever… (hmmm…wonder who that could be?)
Thankfully, Daniel receives a straightforward interpretation of this vision: the four beasts represent four kings, four Empires, who will struggle for power and rebel against the Most High God. But in the end, God will subdue these beastly kingdoms and God’s Holy Ones will rule in a kingdom without end.
So, it seems that John is pulling together the visions of Ezekiel and Daniel to remind the young Church of Jesus that the Empires of the world are ultimately under God’s reign. The beasts of Rome that were literally tearing into the Church will someday bow and sing “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” Still with me? This is just one example of the kind of divine imagination I see in the biblical descriptions of heaven. Not everything is as full of symbolism as the book of Revelation, don’t worry. But I do find it helpful to approach most of what the Bible says about that afterlife with that kind of artistic, free-form slant.
So what does all of this say about Heaven?
Until midway through the 16th century, pretty much everyone in the known world thought that the earth was the center of the universe. Clearly, the sun came up in the morning and down on the other side at night, revolving around the earth. And the moon and the stars and the planets likewise. It was fairly obvious, and rather predictable—many people studied the skies and geocentrism, the earth at the center, made almost total sense. Except for some inconsistencies that just weren’t explainable.
Until Nicolaus Copernicus came along with a new theory. And complicated mathematics to back it up. The earth orbits the sun, he said, and this makes better sense of the available data and more accurately predicts the movements of the heavenly bodies. A century later, Galileo and his telescope offered confirmation and expansion of this theory. Then Johannes Kepler tweaked it further by suggesting elliptical rather than circular orbits.
And on it went, so that now pretty much everyone in the world accepts this model. Because it works. It accurately tells us where the stars and planets will be each night. When you hold up your phone with the “star tracker app” it doesn’t say, that’s weird, that’s not where Venus is supposed to be tonight… the model works. I imagine Copernicus sitting outside in the evening working at his charts and figures, and then the sky darkens and the stars come out, and he looks up, and “ahhhhh….. everything is where it’s supposed to be.”
That’s the feeling I get from John’s vision of the Heavenly throne room. Yes, everything is in order, all is as it should be. The People of God, past and present, they’re all represented, doing what they are meant to do. The rituals and symbols of the Temple, this is the Presence of God that they were pointing to. The nations and Empires, not twisted and distorted by violence and power, but whole and at peace, filling their various roles well. All of the pieces of God’s Creation as it should be, orbiting the Presence of God—not because God demands 24-7 ego-boosting praise songs, but because this is where we’re all at our best. The music is the hum of the world moving in harmony and right relationship.
In this sense, Heaven isn’t so much a destination as an orientation, a way of being that we can live into now, that will be fulfilled “then.” The Hebrew word for this is shalom, “nothing missing, nothing broken.” That’s what Heaven is like. And as Jesus said, this kind of Heaven isn’t just in the future, but it’s near, it’s among us. We can’t grab hold of it, but we get glimpses when our relationships work like they are meant to. When we do the work that God made us to do. When the Church acts like the Body of Christ we are called to be.
All of that is Heaven. Incomplete and short-lived in this life, no doubt, but very much the same as I expect to find on the other side of death.
That goes together with what N.T. Wright likes to say, that “Heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.” http://ntwrightpage.com/sermons/Road_New_Creation.htm By that he means that at the end of the biblical story, we don’t all go up to heaven to live happily ever after. The end of the story, and actually the whole of the story, is that Heaven comes to us. In the final chapter, “the New Jerusalem,” the heavenly city, comes down to earth as God makes a permanent home among us. This world, this earth is transformed, made new, but still earth. Much like Jesus’ resurrected body was substantially different, but still very much Jesus’ body, scars and all. The end that we commonly call Heaven isn’t something otherworldly and disconnected at all, but something very much tangible and embodied.
I don’t think that should come as too much of a surprise to us. God created this world and called it good. God gave us bodies and breathed Life into us. God chose to become flesh, to walk the earth and live among us. That’s the story, of matter and embodiment, of God coming to us. So it’s not surprising that the end of the story is the continuation of that pattern of God coming to us, bringing fullness and completion, everything oriented around the presence of God. On Earth as it is in Heaven.
Let’s pray together the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, The power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen.