Heaven is a wonderful place – but don’t get too comfortable

Let me steal from N.T. Wright here: “Heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.” I’ve been wrestling with just how to respond to a couple of arguments that have been bouncing around my head for awhile now.

Just today, while at work, a coworker came to me and asked about a quote from the Book of Common Prayer: “Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.” What’s the significance of this phrase: “awake we may watch with Christ?” What are we watching for? How is this comfort at the end of the day?

I realized in this conversation just how important our thinking about the end of all things is to us. How you think about the end of the world dictates how you live your life right now. It expresses itself in what you find most important, most cherished; and in what you give cursory attention to, what you feel is least important.

If, as is commonly thought in contemporary Christian circles, God hates the earth and one day (really soon) he’s going to be so fed up with this sinful world that he will destroy it with fire and brimstone – then it doesn’t really matter if you recycle or not. It doesn’t matter if you take care of the poor, the hungry, or the oppressed – all that really matters is whether or not everybody “gets into heaven.”

But, if God loves the world – so much in fact that he sent his only son…, then of course it matters if you take care of creation. Of course it matters if we take care of those on the underside of power. If God loves it and we love God, then we should love it too.

So when it comes to this phrase: “awake we may watch with Christ,” what is it that we are watching? I think that the writers of the Book of Common Prayer understood an element of this eschatology (the belief that all of history is moving somewhere under God’s direction) which has since been misrepresented. We watch with Christ over this newly inaugurated kingdom (Rev.11:15). We watch with Christ over the world which is slowly being reshaped, repaired, restored into God’s intended purpose (Gen.2:1-2). We watch with Christ in eager expectation of “that day” the parousia, when all our tears will be wiped away – not off our disembodied souls, but of our bodies, raised from death into life – new life on a new earth.

When I was a child, I used to sing this song in Sunday school: Heaven is a wonderful place, filled with glory and grace. I wanna see my Savior’s face ’cause heaven is a wonderful place.

Now that I’ve grown older, I’m beginning to understand that this sense of Heaven as eschatological Disneyland isn’t anywhere close to the truth. The truth is much more disturbing. The streets of gold pave the way back to an empty tomb. And at the center of the garden stands a tree of life with buds springing forth from a crude wooden cross.

~ by sholander on March 4, 2008.