“How
to Get to Heaven”
Revelation
21:1-6
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
May 2, 2010
Beside the passage we
earlier read from
In
that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other,
more secret, movable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What
you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To
be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To
remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You
are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents.
You were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now
looking through
the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is
it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk? (1)
I
love that poem. When the poet writes
about our moments of waking up, when we come
back to this life from the other, more secret, frighteningly honest world where
everything began, I take him to be talking about those occasional, inspired
moments in our lives when we are blessed with flashes of insight or
enlightenment or revelation that seem to come from beyond us or from deep within
us. “God moments” is how one
writer describes them. They
are brief opportunities to move our lives in a new direction or to live them
with greater depth. But the power
and energy of these “waking up moments” do not last long.
We either “listen” to them when they happen and take their heed or
they get scaled over by the seeming inevitability of our present lives and our
resistance to change. “There is
a small opening into the new day,” the
poet says, “that closes the moment (we) begin (our) plans.”
The
opening into the new day closes when we begin our plans because “what (we)
can plan is too small for (us) to live.” Do
you see? Without intentional effort
to do otherwise, we “obey” the life we think has been prescribed for us.
We hesitate to depart or deviate from what seems to be a default life
heavily determined by cultural norms and others’ expectations of us.
The pressures to conform to societal roles and “rules” keep us in our
place. Our lives become like
kiddie cars in amusement parks that are slotted into their paths so that they
stay always “on track.” There is something to be said for routine,
predictability, and equilibrium in our lives but those same qualities can
flatten our humanity if there is little room for Spirit to work in us because we
cease to breathe the breath of life but only the stale air of inertia and
boredom. Then we live in servitude
to fear and lethargy that keeps us stuck in our places and so we mount no
resistance to the present arrangements of things that, no matter how injurious
to our souls and spirits, we delude ourselves into believing are too complex,
complicated, and inconvenient to change.
This,
then, is salvation: to hold in abeyance our lives as they are long enough to be
open to that which is calling to our deepest heart and soul, to pay attention to
what makes our spirits sing and our souls soar.
Remember when Jesus said that we are to “love the Lord our God with
all our heart and soul and mind and strength”?
Loving God means living into the fullness of our own particular
humanity. We do not love God only or
mostly by singing praise songs and reading books purchased in Christian
bookstores. We love God by living
more fully into our humanity. “The
glory of God,” as we often have
quoted St. Irenaeus, “is a human being fully alive.” There
is only a small opening into the new day, the transformed life, the new heaven
and new earth and we shall miss it if we do not attend to that which
comes to us from beyond ourselves or from deep within us.
“To be human,” David Whyte says, “is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.”
I
do not think I know a better description of the Christian life than that.
Being a Christian is all about developing our humanity.
That is what Jesus did. Cognizant
of the small opening into a new day, a new way of life and living, he did not
quickly busy himself in plans of his own making but was open to a Plan – a
vision of Life – that came, in the poet’s words, “from another world.”
The world of Spirit. God.
The reason that Jesus is such a towering presence in the life of the
church is that his humanity seemed to become more and more divine to us as he
carried faithfully what was hidden within him – the call to authenticity, the
call to the way of love – as a gift to others, all others, to the world.
“To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true
inheritance,” the poet proclaims. Of
course, we need to make our smaller plans to get us through our days, but they
never should obscure the larger Plan that we hardly can describe or name but is
the truest thing about us.
Our
lives hold truth in them, purpose, meaning.
“You are not a troubled guest on this earth,” David Whyte
says. “You are not an accident
amidst other accidents. You were
invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just
emerged.” So before we close
that small opening into the new day that comes to us from beyond us or from deep
within us, here is a question we ought to be asking ourselves:
What is the courageous conversation I should be having right
now? We can have it with
ourselves, or with the silence, or perhaps with a trusted friend, but we each of
us need to have it. What is the
courageous conversation I should be having right now? The
poet poses the question this way: “Looking
through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of
everything that can be, what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?”
Heaven,
in John’s understanding, is not a place where we go when we die.
It is not remote from earth. It is not separate or different.
John’s heaven is, in David Whyte’s image, “the other world in
this world.” Heaven is not the
promise of anything more or other than what we already are given in faith, but
it is the completion of it, the fulfillment of it, the perfection of it.
Heaven is a matter of attending to what is usually just outside the range
of our senses, the realm of the Spirit, so that we “may carry what is
hidden as a gift to others.” When
John in his vision sees and hears Jesus saying, “See, I am making all
things new,” that is a far different thing than if Jesus had said, “I
am making all new things.” The
heaven that matters now is right here, life renewed and transformed by embracing
the small openings into a new day with which God graces our
lives. In that way, our lives and
the life of the world around us grow deeper, lovelier, more just and kind.
This
is the great work of our lives to which God is all the time calling us…to be
healed and to heal and to be loved and to love.
That is how we get to the heaven of this life.
Amen.
(1) Poem by David Whyte found in his collection of poems entitled The House of Belonging published by Many Rivers Press in 1997.
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© 2010 First Presbyterian Church