July 26, 2009: Imagining Heaven (Part 2)

When I compared Alice Sebold's and C. S. Lewis' visions of heaven last week, I wonder if any readers thought, "Why bother imagining heaven at all? Can't we just go by what the Bible says about it?" And that might seem like a simple and obvious thing to do. But the problem is that the Bible never gives a single coherent view of the blessed afterlife.

What it gives instead is a variety of images that are hard to put together in a single frame. I would go as far as to say that our finite minds cannot assemble all the images meaningfully.

Sometimes heaven is viewed as a city (Revelation 21:2). Sometimes it is a country comprised of cities (Luke 19:11-19). Sometimes the scale is reduced, and it is viewed as a many-roomed mansion (John 14:2). Sometimes it is a serene countryside (Isaiah 11:6-9). What will we be doing there? In Matthew 25:1-13 and Revelation 19:9 it looks like we're having a party in a wedding reception hall. In Revelation 4 and 5 it looks like we're worshipping in a great throne room. In Hebrews 4:1-11, I think we're just relaxing in a hammock under a shade tree.

So, which is it? Are we relaxing, dancing, or bowing? Are we in a room, or a great hall, or an open space? Are we in a city with a huge throng, or are we walking along grassy hills with a lion on our left and a lamb on our right? And is Jesus at our side speaking words of love - or is he off in the distance, seated on a throne before which we lie prostrate?

Yes.

I suppose if you wanted to insist on a literal fulfillment of all the images you could gerrymander a way to do it. Like this: on Tuesdays in heaven we exit our condo units at the mansion and walk over to the big worship center for some angel-led praise. Wednesdays we drink and dance and stuff ourselves at a party. Thursdays we tour the cities we've been assigned to govern and take care of administrative duties that have piled up during the week. Fridays we frolic with wolves and lions by a viper's pit (and give thanks they're all vegetarians now). Saturday, hammock. Sunday your choice. Then Monday is the day everybody looks forward to, because, since Matthew 22:30 says we are like genderless unmarried angels, we get to indulge in that mysterious thing God has prepared for us that we all like better than sex.

Or we can let the literalisms go and recognize that the images given to us are just that - images. They are word pictures designed to communicate the incommunicable. None of the pictures is false – they are simply inadequate for the task of conveying even a little bit of heavenly reality to us.

For a while it intrigued me (I'm not sure I could say it bothered me) that, while I preferred to see heaven as beautiful open countryside - the Rocky Mountains! - the Bible more often saw it as a city. I don't like cities, especially crowded ones. Why does the Bible give me such an inferior picture?

Then a couple things occurred to me. First, the "wilderness" known by ancient Israelites simply wasn't all that beautiful. They didn't have a Glacier National Park, or a Grand Canyon, or even Smokey Mountains. (Of course, I must confess I've never been to Israel and have not been able to evaluate the scenery there. But I have seen pictures. Meh.)

Secondly, Israelite wilderness was not a lush vacationland but a barren, hostile threat. Their wilderness was the place where you could die of thirst, find no food, maybe be set upon by thieves or foreign soldiers. It was the city, your city, where you found refuge, safety, food, comfort, fellowship. So of course, to such a people, heaven must be pictured as a city. That is the best place they knew. But I wonder, had Revelation been written in 21st century America, if urban terminology would have been used at all. To me, at least, the very word "city" conjures up no thoughts of heavenly delight but rather of crime, noise, blight, honking horns, crowded subways, unpleasantly overwhelmed senses, and the smell of car exhaust.

I think the main thing we need to understand about heaven is that we will be with Christ and we will like it. Beyond that, it's a little hard to see. Paul said once, "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). And when he caught sight of heaven, he wasn't even allowed to talk about it (2 Corinthians 12:2-4). Some things about heaven will remain unseeable and unknowable until we get there.

I'm getting married in 11 days. That's pretty heavenly.

July 21, 2009: Imagining Heaven (Part 1)

A friend loaned me Alice Sebold's best-selling novel The Lovely Bones and asked me to comment on the author's view of heaven.

The book is narrated from heaven by Susie, a 14-year-old girl who was murdered on earth. In the afterlife, Susie finds an adjustable reality that is personalized to her wishes. It takes her a while to understand this. "When I first entered heaven," she writes, "I thought everyone saw what I saw." They don't. There's some overlap, but the people there, like her friend Holly, are all adjusting to their own heavens. Susie explains, "We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams. There were no teachers in the school. We never had to go inside except for art class for me and jazz band for Holly...; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue." Holly, a Vietnamese girl, spoke perfect English because, in her heaven, "she wanted no trace of an accent."

After five days in this paradise, Susie and Holly tell their intake counselor, Franny, "We're bored." Franny asks, "What do you want?" and Susie says, "I don't know." Then Franny helpfully explains how heaven works. "All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why - really know - it will come." So Susie and Holly imagine themselves a duplex and get one.

What stunned me in reading these pages was the similarity to the afterlife depicted in C. S. Lewis' novel The Great Divorce. But there is a key difference. Lewis perceives that the post-death place where you get whatever you want is not heaven but hell! That's one reason why hell seems so big to those inside it. "You see, it's easy here," a damned soul explains to the narrator of TGD. "You've only got to think a house and there it is. That's how this town keeps growing."

Sebold's heaven grows the same way. Commenting on her friendship with Holly, Susie writes, "Our heavens expanded as our relationship grew. We wanted many of the same things." Wants, desires, are what dictate the size both of Sebold's heaven and Lewis' hell.

The residents of Lewis' hell don't have to remain in their ever-expanding world of met desires. They can tour heaven if they like, and some do. They can even move there and stay permanently. But most, finding they cannot own, change or contaminate heaven – cannot adjust heaven to their personal satisfaction - wind up taking the bus back to hell.

Heaven in TGD is astonishingly beautiful, but it won't budge an inch to the efforts of hellish souls to manipulate it. Lewis symbolizes this idea by representing the heavenly nature as perfectly hard. His narrator wanders about beautiful scenery, and writes, “Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn't break. I tried to twist it, but it wouldn't twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like a diamond." The beautiful river into which he longs to dive has a surface like glass. He can walk on it, but cannot swim in it.

But if he stays, he is told, he will eventually become more solid. The grass will bend under his feet, and he will bathe in rushing waterfalls, and he will eat the golden apples that trees joyously shed. A mighty angel tells him, "The very leaves and the blades of grass in the wood will delight to teach you."

Why would anyone turn away from such bliss? Because it requires yielding to God and his desires rather than to oneself and one's own desires. As the narrator's guide and mentor explains, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done."

While I don't believe that the real heaven bends at all to our wishes (if we go there, we must bend to its reality!), I certainly believe that descriptions of heaven accommodate - necessarily - our limited understanding of the perfect and the good. My favorite imaginative depictions of heaven are in TGD, and the last few chapters of The Last Battle (book 7 of The Chronicles of Narnia), and the penultimate chapter of Leif Enger's modern classic Peace Like A River. I hope Lewis and Enger got it right. I hope heaven looks like Grand Teton National Park. But if it doesn't, I know it will be because it is so much better, and I trust by God's grace to adjust to that. Heaven forbid that I should expect it to adjust to me.

July 14, 2009: Maybe I'll Get To Recant Something!

A friend told me how a friend told her that she had read something in one of my Pastor's Pages that she disagreed with, and that got me very excited. Experience has taught me that great things result from disagreements between thinking Christians. I may soon have to refine, correct or disambiguate something I wrote, and I relish that opportunity. Or maybe I'll stand my ground with holy zeal and persuade this friend to see something differently. Or, maybe - it could happen! - I'll find that I'm wrong and need to recant.

I do recant from time to time. Back in 2004 I wrote a Pastor's Page that turned out to be based on bad information - I've deleted that essay and have kept it out of bound volumes. About 10 years ago I foolishly said in a Bible study that, while the Old Testament forbids slander and false testimony and oath breaking, Scripture does not forbid lying per se until you get to the New Testament. Then somebody showed me Leviticus 19:11: "Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another." Oops. My bad. You're right. Forget what I just said. A year ago in a sermon I made some idiotic point about St. Paul being a servant of God, not the church. Then a few days later I remembered 2 Corinthians 4:5: "ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake," and so the next Sunday I had to spend a few minutes retracting that observation. And I can think of two Scriptural interpretations my mother espoused 25 years ago where I strongly disagreed with her until I got older, and wiser, and discovered that best evangelical scholarship confirmed what she knew instinctively. Mom 2, Paul 0.

Thankfully we Christians have a ground for settling disputes: Scripture. Scripture Scripture Scripture Scripture Scripture. When Martin Luther was threatened with nasty things by the church of Rome (which had burned his predecessor John Hus), he said, "Show me in Scripture where I'm wrong." In a memorable exchange with his opponent John Eck, Luther said, "When Christ stood before Annas, he said, 'Produce witnesses.' If our Lord, who could not err, made this demand, why may not a worm like me ask to be convicted of error from the prophets and the Gospels?" Eck blustered hopelessly: "Your plea to be heard from Scripture is the one always made by heretics." Luther responded,

Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason...my conscience
is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant
anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here
I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.

Words to carve in stone.

Some time ago I was - at least in my own mind - cruelly wronged by a fellow minister. In my wounded fantasy I marched into his office with a Bible - several Bibles, including a Greek New Testament – dumped them on his desk and challenged him with, "Here, make your case against me with these, you miserable twit!"

Right ground, wrong attitude. The Holy Scriptures are indeed our guide and arbiter in all disputes. But we make our appeal to them with calm humility, careful thought and gentle admonition. When Eck debated Luther, he wanted stenographers out of the room because "taking them into account would chill the passionate heat of the debate." Luther's colleague Philip Melanchthon responded, persuasively, "The truth might fare better at a lower temperature." The stenographers stayed, and Melanchthon was proved right. Cool Scriptural truth prevailed over hot unscriptural rhetoric. May it always do so.

July 7, 2009: A Man Of Substance

There's a story I've shared from the pulpit but never on this page, and today I'd like to write it out.

Sometime around the year I was born my father painted the church basement. He donated his labor. Mr. Lemm, a wealthy man, gave money to buy the paint, and Dad did the work. After painting all day on Saturday dad was exhausted, and so naturally fell asleep during the sermon on Sunday. (Which is why, to this day, I don't mind it if people fall asleep during my messages. Dad did it: it must be ok.)

Dad was snoozing away when the offering plate was passed, and the usher foolishly nudged my 13-year-old brother Dave and chuckled as he pointed to the slumberer, inviting my brother to share in the joke at his father's expense. Dave wasn't amused. He was still seething over the fact that Mr. Lemm had been publicly thanked from the pulpit for his generous gift while Dad's contribution of labor had gone unnoticed.

Afterward Dave spoke to Dad and unleashed some of his anger. He asked Dad if it bothered him that Mr. Lemm was thanked and honored while all his hard work was ignored. Dad said simply, "Dave, my reward is not here."

After my father passed away suddenly when I was 17 (and began immediately to enjoy his great reward), my brother took me aside and told me that and several other stories that illustrated Dad's wisdom and faith and integrity. Though I had known, for example, that Dad lost his job in his mid-fifties, I hadn't known that it was because he refused to defraud clients as his corrupt boss insisted. Nor had I known about his boss's deliberate attempts to humiliate him, nor how Dad not only endured that disrespect but kept amazingly quiet as he covered for the fool's mistakes behind the scenes.

About 20 years later my sister happened to meet the former chief of the Oak Lawn Fire Department. "Are you Al Harker? she asked. "I think you knew my dad, Lowell Lundquist." "Lowell was your father?" he said. Mr. Harker sat down in a chair. His eyes filled with tears and he said, "Lowell Lundquist was the most honest man I ever knew."

I told that story at our church's recent graduation banquet, and concluded by imploring our young people to maintain absolute integrity at all times, so that, 80 years from now, maybe long after they're dead, somebody will tear up at the mention of their name and say, "Jonathan Luk was the most honest man I ever knew."

I selected Jonathan's name at random - he was one of our 8th grade graduates - but afterward found out that the pick was providential. A few minutes later Jonathan came up to me and told me that earlier that day when he picked up some Baker's Square pies, he gave the cashier a $20 and a $5 for a $24.95 bill and received $15.05 in change – as though he had paid with two $20s. He returned the $15 to the cashier, telling him, "You gave me too much." The stunned cashier explained that he could lose his job for mistakes like that, and said to Jonathan, "You're my hero." I rejoiced too with Jonathan and told him, "That's the man you want to be for the rest of your life."

In the film Almost Famous there's a great scene where a mom played by Frances McDormand confronts a rock star, Russell Hammond, who has befriended her 15-year-old journalist son. She challenges the musician's lax moral code and flexible ethics with angry vigor, and warns him not to corrupt her boy. But then she relents and says, "Now go do your best. It's not too late for you to be a person of substance, Russell."

Those words appeal to me: "It's not too late for you to be a person of substance." That is a message I want to get across to the younger generation as I find myself plodding through middle age. These days in particular I'm wondering how to get that message across to a couple young men whose mother is a lying, faithless, perverted soul who made them her sworn confidants as she plotted secret betrayals of those who loved her dearly. How, after being morally abused like that, will they not grow cynical of the values of faithfulness, honesty, self-denial and purity? Only by God's grace. This morning the contrast hit me with the force of a thrown rock: my father - his memory be blessed! - humbly hid his virtue from his sons; whereas the mother of these boys coldly employed them as shields under which she hid her vice.

But it is not too late, I choose to believe it is not too late, for them to be men of substance still.

A prayer for all who waver between honesty and lies, faithfulness and betrayal, purity and perversion: "God, grant by the power of your Spirit that I be a person of substance whose character will be found worthy. Thank you for the example of those who went before me and never compromised their integrity. Give me grace both to honor their memory and to walk in their steps, for the glory of your Son Jesus. Amen."