Text — Romans 5:1-5

“Heaven” and God’s location have changed a lot over the centuries.  In the opening verses of the Bible, Genesis 1, heaven is something like an inverted glass bowl that holds back the water above heaven.  When “the heaven’s open” as the saying goes, the water falls through as rain — sort of like a leaky roof.  God and the angels live up there, above that glass dome.

As time passed, Biblical writers started to see God as not only up there in heaven.  Jeremiah, speaking for God, says, “Do I not fill heaven and earth?”  In Psalm 139, God’s location gets extended further, even to the shadowy underworld or the realm of the dead, called Sheol in Hebrew.  The psalm says, “If I ascend to heaven, you are there”.  Nothing new in that.  But listen to this.  “If I lie down in Sheol, you are there.”

So even within the Bible, we can see a lot of re-thinking and revision on the subject of where God is.  God’s location becomes less geographical and heaven more figurative or even abstract.

But the evolution doesn’t stop there.  Beginning around the 6^th or 5^th century B.C., Judaism and all western religion came under the influence of Persian religion, since Persia was the great empire of the time.  Persian religion was the first religion to see the world as the battleground of a cosmic war between the forces of good and the forces of evil.  Some people still see it that way.  It’s a way of seeing that can be taken to extremes, but it’s a major contribution to moral thought and it comes from the ancient Persians.

This view got imported into Judaism, with the result that both heaven and sheol took on a moral meaning.  Now heaven is where the good people go.  And sheol, which up to this point had been a rather benign place where everyone goes, not a punishment, now becomes hell, a torture chamber, where only bad people go. 

But notice the effect this has.  Adding this sharp moral edge makes heaven still more relevant to this life, and it makes this life more of a justification for heaven and hell.

To go to heaven means to be morally vindicated.  Even if you suffer in this life, if you hang in there and do the right thing and stick with God, the truth will come out in the end.  If you go to hell, it means that you chose the wrong side in the cosmic war.  All of this takes place in the Old Testament period.

In the New Testament period, the concept of heaven continues to evolve and the word “heaven” itself starts being replaced with other words like “eternal life” and “glory.”  Paul speaks less about going to heaven and more being “in Christ” or with Christ.”  Salvation, for Paul, is more about being in the right company, and being in the right company is something available now. 

This is what Holy Communion is about.  We’re in the company of all the saints who lived in the past — so they are still with us in that sense — and we’re in the company of the saints living now.  So, heaven has come down to earth and become more of a quality of life.

But part of the beauty of this language is that we can use terms like salvation and justification and heaven when we pray and sing without having to agree on a single definition.

Now I’ll say something about what these words mean to me.  This won’t be everything I might say, or would like to say, or everything I think when I say “heaven.”  I’m not writing a book here.  But here’s my little testimony for the day.

The term Paul uses in our Romans passage that got me started in this direction is “justification.”  That’s a word with a very modern ring.  I can relate to it.  A lot of my life has gone into what I call “self-justification.”  That sounds a bit like what Governor Rowland is trying to do, but I don’t mean it in such a mendacious way.

Self-justification is what we do when we’re growing up, going through school, competing for grades, for a place on the team, trying to be liked, trying to find a place in the world, getting a job, making money — in other words proving ourselves.  Proving we’re smart, proving we’re good, proving we’re likeable, proving we can fit it, proving me can do something worthwhile, proving we can make it.

This is a big deal.  I don’t dismiss for a second this need for us to prove ourselves at many points along the way.  Without that, the world would be chaos. 

One picturesque memory I have is of brief period I lived across a gravel road from a community called “Sky ranch.”  It claimed to be an alternative school on the site of a dilapidated old dude ranch, but it really amounted to what was called at the time a “hippy commune.”  Their philosophy was: “Here no one has to prove anything.  That’s just hierarchical, oppressive and destructive.  Here we believe in unconditional love.  We do what we want to do.  Some want to garden.  Good.  We’ll have food.  Some like to cook. Good, we’ll eat.  Some like carpentry.  Good, we’ll have shelter.  Everyone is loved unconditionally.  We do what we want to do.  Everything else will fall into place.” 

Guess what?  Everything didn’t fall into place.  Everything quickly fell apart.  It was a big mess.  After about six months of this experience, year 8 out of 10 people were gone.  There was no unconditional love.  There was anger and resentment because what most of the people did was lie around drinking wine, smoking pot, and once in a while reading poetry or playing the guitar.   Believe it or not, some parents actually paid to have their pre-adolescent children under the care of this crowd, thinking it was a creative, new age boarding school.

Unconditional love — at least of the human sort — ends at about age 1. From that point forward, it starts getting rolled back and we have to get in line.  So self-justification definitely has its place.

But as I’ve gone through life and passed a few tests, and found a wonderful place for myself in the world, I’ve also realized (and this is kind of sad, or even pathetic) that even now I’m still not completely relaxed about measuring up.  I still have a lurking, residual need to prove something.  I still hope to shake it, but maybe I never will.

This is sort of pathetic because, realistically, I’ve proven about as much as I’m ever going to prove.  I am what I am.  I didn’t deserve to be here but it’s a beautiful world, full of wonderful people.   It’s full of love.  I should just relax and enjoy it.  I should just let it be.  Sometimes I can.  Thank God I’m not trying to justify my existence the way I was twenty years ago.  And that’s a part, a big part, of what heaven and salvation really mean to me.

The greatest treasure in life doesn’t come by proving ourselves.  It doesn’t come by being better — even though there’s a place for trying to be better.  The greatest treasure is given to us.  We can only receive it — which sounds easy but it isn’t easy because we’re so trained to justify ourselves. 

Paul tells us here, we’ll never justify ourselves — what he calls justification by works.  Justification, in the truest and deepest sense, comes by faith.  It’s done for us.  It’s given to us.

So I’ll end this with two questions you can ponder.

What are you still trying to prove?  How are you still anxious about justifying yourself and measuring up?

And second:  Can you think of a moment when you were free from that?  Have you ever been lost in the simple joy and gratitude for the chance to be alive?  If you can think of even one moment like that, or imagine it, that’s a moment truly worthy of your attention.