“Glimpses Of Heaven”

“Glimpses Of Heaven”

Text: Revelation 21:1-6

© May 6, 2007 by C. Edward Bowen at Crafton United Presbyterian Church.

If someone were to come up to you and say “Tell me about heaven. Tell me what heaven’s going to be like,” how would you respond? Judging from many of the cartoons and paintings and movies that we’ve all seen during our lives, we might be led to be believe that heaven is a bunch of people sitting around on top of the clouds, wearing white robes and sandals, and playing harps all day long.

Is that what heaven is going to be like? Back during the first centuries of Christianity, it was a common belief that in heaven everyone would be naked. They figured that Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden when God first created them, and it was only after they sinned that they put clothes on. So, they concluded, if heaven is like the Garden of Eden in that it’s a place where there is no sin, people wouldn’t wear clothes there either.[1] So I guess you’ll have to take a look at the people sitting in your pew and decide for yourself if a naked heaven would be a good thing or a bad thing!

Or another common belief that many of the first Christians had was that everyone in heaven would look like they did when they were 30 years old. The thinking was that since Jesus was about 30 years old when he was raised from the dead and taken up into heaven, and since generally speaking most people hit their prime around age 30, those first Christians figured if you were going to stay one age forever and ever in heaven, then God would probably arrange it so that everyone looked like they were about 30 years old.

What is heaven going to be like? Is heaven going to be filled with a bunch of naked 30-year-olds? Although there are many things that we wonder about when it comes to heaven, the simple fact is that the Bible doesn’t give us a whole lot answers. No, instead of providing us with a complete, detailed panoramic picture of what heaven is like, the best the Bible seems to do is to give us just a few glimpses of heaven.

That’s what we find here in this passage that we heard today from the book of Revelation. We aren’t given all the information we might like about what heaven is going to be like, but we are given at least some glimpses of what it is that we can look forward to. For instance, one glimpse we are given of heaven is where it says that God “will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

Each year the U.S. State Department puts out a list of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world. Recently when that list was issued, of the 30 most dangerous and deadly groups in the world, over half of them were religious groups.[2] In other words, most of the greatest threats to the peace and safety of the world today come from groups that have the philosophy “We’re going to attack and kill you because we believe our god wants us to attack and kill you.”

That was the attitude, of course, of the terrorists who hijacked those passenger jets on September 11, 2001. But even though the events of that day are indelibly engraved in our minds, the reality is that religious terrorism was going on long, long before September 11. Going back centuries to the Middle Ages, Christians engaged in religious terrorism against Muslims during the various Crusades. Or religious terrorism has shown up in recent decades in the deadly civil war in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, in the brutal and bloody conflict in Bosnia, in the cross-burnings and the lynchings of the Ku Klux Klan, and in the abortion doctors who have been gunned down and murdered by people who claimed that God told them to do it. And sadly the list could go on and on.

But what they all have in common is the attitude: “We’re going to attack and kill you because we believe our god wants us to attack and kill you.” And so when we read in the book of Revelation that in heaven there is going to be no more death, no more grief, no more crying, no more pain, one of the things we’re being told is that violence, and most especially violence perpetrated in the name of God, is going to come to an end. That might be a difficult thing for us even to imagine, but that day, God says, is surely coming.

Another glimpse of heaven we receive here in this passage in Revelation is where it speaks of God creating a new heaven and a new earth, and coming down out of heaven is the holy city, the new Jerusalem. Often we tend to think of heaven in very individualistic terms. Often we tend to think of heaven in terms of me getting to be with God, or in terms of me and the friends and families members that I like getting to be with God. But when we’re told here that heaven is going to be something like a special kind of city that we get to live in, we’re being shown that heaven isn’t just about God and me – heaven is going to be about God and us – heaven is going to be about God and me and us and all of God’s people being together and enjoying life together forever and ever.

In our world today, for the most part we’ve gotten used to separating ourselves from the people around us. We’ve gotten used to the fact that rich people tend to live together in rich communities and that poor people tend to live together in poor communities. We’ve gotten used to conservative people coming together and forming their own groups, while liberal people come together and form their own groups. And we’ve gotten used to the fact that people of different races often keep their distance from each other and tend to live as strangers to each other.

But the Bible keeps reminding us that that’s not the way that God wants it to be. No, God didn’t create us to live as strangers to each other – God created us to be in relationship with one another. And whether we realize it or not, we are more connected to each other than we might think.

For example, consider this experiment that was done in the late 1960s. It was conducted by a psychologist named Stanley Milgram, who wanted to find out just how connected to each other people truly are. And so what he did was he picked 160 random people who lived in Omaha, Nebraska. And he gave each of them an envelope, and the name and address of a stockbroker who worked in Boston. And what each of those 160 people were asked to do was to send their envelope to a friend or a family member or some acquaintance that they thought would get that envelope closer to that stockbroker. For instance, maybe one of those people in Omaha had a cousin near Boston, and so they would mail the envelope to that cousin. And maybe that cousin had a friend who worked in the same building as the stockbroker, and so the cousin would send the envelope to the friend, and so on, until the envelope finally arrived at the stock broker. And what that psychologist found was that most of those envelopes got to that stockbroker in just five or six steps.[3]

In other words, that experiment suggests that if we were to pick any of us at random, and then if we were to pick a name at random from, say, the Detroit phone book – chances are you would know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows that person. Maybe that doesn’t make us all first cousins. But when you think about it, even though there are more than 300 million people in the United States, the odds are that you are only five or six relationships away from being connected in some way to every other person in the whole country.

And so when this passage in Revelation gives us a glimpse of heaven and describes heaven as being like a city, what we’re being told is that one day all the walls that keep us apart are going to come down and we’re going to live together in God’s presence as one community. That might be a difficult thing for us even to imagine, but that day, God says, is surely coming.

And at least one more glimpse of heaven that this passage in Revelation provides us with is where God says at the end of the vision, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” In other words, God is saying that these glimpses of heaven that we’re given here aren’t just some wishful thinking. No, we can count them. We can stake our very lives on them.

Back during the 1300s and 1400s stories were collected and put into a book called The Art of Dying. And those stories told about Christians who neared death, but who didn’t show any signs of fear or anxiety. Instead, those stories told about Christians who had such faith in God and in the reality of heaven that they experienced complete and total peace when it came time for them to die.

One such story was told about a Christian scholar known as the Venerable Bede, who died in the year 735. He was working on a translation of the Gospel of John when he sensed that the time for him to die was approaching. And apparently right after he finished translating the last verse of the last chapter of that book, he put down his pen and began singing “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost” – and he kept singing those words until he eventually peacefully breathed his last breath.[4]

“Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Those are God’s words to us. Heaven is for real, God says. This earthly existence isn’t the end. You can stake your life on it.

Even though we’re not given all the answers to the questions we might have about heaven, God does offer us glimpses of what it is that awaits us. And from those glimpses we can see that heaven will mean an end to violence and pain and sadness. From those glimpses we can see that heaven will mean living together in peace with God and with one another. And from those glimpses we can see that heaven isn’t just some wishful thinking, but is a certainty that we can count on. Heaven might be a difficult thing for us even to imagine. But that day, God says, is surely coming.