Sermon: The Way to heaven (May 18, 2014)

Easter 5A

John 14:1-14

            There has been quite a lot of buzz lately about the book and now the movie, Heaven is for Real. Even as I was wandering around St. Martin’s garage sale this week, I heard people talking about it to each other across the tables. It isn’t just this book-turned-movie, either. There have been a slew of books written lately about people’s near death experiences, and their encounters with Jesus and/or heaven. People love them – they are flying off the shelves.

            I can understand why. Death is for many people their greatest fear, largely, I imagine, because it is such an unknown. Not many people die and live to tell to the tale, after all! Lazarus is raised from the dead… but he never tells us all about the experience. Jesus hung out for a while after his resurrection, but he also does not elaborate on the experience, at least not visually like we so long to hear about. So death remains a frightening unknown, and we humans don’t do well with the unknown. And so when someone does die and then comes back to tell about it, especially through such innocent eyes as young Colton, whose story is told in Heaven is For Real, we cling to it, looking to it for answers, for peace with the prospect of dying, for hope, and for proof that our faith in Christ is legit.

            I’m as intrigued as the next person by these stories, and I have read a couple myself. And I admit I do find some sense of calm and even some validation in them. But as a pastor, I also find a bit of concern. Not in the stories themselves – I’m not one to judge people’s experience or their telling of it. Life and death stories are some of the very best, and I do believe that people’s telling of their experience is true – at least for them, if not also in some broader, more eternal sense.

            So if I believe the stories, what is my concern about? First of all, it is that when we read such accounts, we are tempted to turn heaven into a distant location, a place with a zip code, an almost physical destination that is what our existence is all about. Of course we’re in good company on that one – the disciples in today’s Gospel reading do the same thing. The part we hear today of Jesus’ story

actually brings us back to Maundy Thursday, the day before Jesus died. Jesus has just washed the disciples’ feet, and given them a new commandment, to love one another as he has loved them. He has foretold his death. And then when he says he is going to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, and they will know how to get there, Thomas immediately goes to the same place we do, assuming “there” is a physical place, and he blurts out, “But Lord, we don’t even know where you are going, where this house is that you speak of. So how are we supposed to know the way?” He wants Jesus to give him what to plug into his GPS, so they will be sure not to get lost, and avoid any tolls along the way.

            It is an honest question, an authentic question, and one I would probably have asked as well. But as we can see from Jesus’ response, Thomas misses the point. Jesus responds with what have become some of his most famous words: “I am the way, and the truth and the life.” Taken alone, it is a pretty bizarre response to Thomas’s very practical question. But remember the context in which Jesus says it: he has just given them the new commandment, to love one another as he loves them. He has just sat before them and washed their feet. And now he is saying, “I am the way.” Like in English, the Greek word for “way” can mean a pathway or route as well as a “way of life” or practice. Given that Jesus has just shown them in the profoundly humble act of washing their feet that he wants them to love and serve one another, it seems likely that when Jesus says, “I am the way,” he is referring to himself as a way of life, rather than the pathway to a destination.

            Taken that way, faith in Christ is no longer about ending up in heaven, a location that can be described and pinpointed, and which is lauded as the ultimate goal of the Christian life. Rather, it is about a journey, walking a walk, walking the way, the truth and the life. Life with Christ is not about a destination or an achievement. It is a way of being, and a way of becoming. And so going back to where I started this sermon, I get concerned when we are so focused on the destination, a place called heaven, and also about who is going to be there and who is not, that we forget that following the Way, the Truth, and the Life is not just about then, it is about right now.

            We talked about this just yesterday in confirmation class. In the midst of talking about Jesus’ crucifixion, a question came up about how we get to heaven and who is there, and I told them plainly what I believe about heaven: that it isn’t so much a destination, or a physical location, as it is an eternal existence within the loving and light-filled embrace of God, a place ruled not by sin and brokenness, but by God’s love and grace.

            But even beyond that, I don’t believe it is something we just hang around and wait for, nor something to be thought of as a reward, or a carrot to dangle, or a threat (like, “do this if you want to go to heaven”). Rather, it is something that we seek and pursue even here on earth, even now.

That is the reason, after all, that God decided to come down from heaven, to be God-with-us, Emmanuel: it was so that heaven might come to earth, so that God’s kingdom, might be present here and now. That is what we pray each week, after all, in the words of the Lord’s Prayer. We pray, “thy kingdom come,” and not, “to thy kingdom, we go.” This we pray so that we remember that not only is God’s kingdom a place where we hope to someday go, but it is a place that comes to us – that comes to us when we love one another as Jesus loved us, when we truly believe and behave like Jesus really is the way, the truth, and the life.  

            And this is where my second concern about to-heaven-and-back stories comes in. How tempting it is to place our hope in these stories – when really, our hope is in the story of a God who would come from heaven to earth to be with us and show us the way, the truth and the life. Our hope is in the story of how that man named Jesus would suffer on our behalf and die, bringing all of our sins with him to the grave. Our hope is in the story of how Jesus defeated all our fears and rose from the

Photo by Bill Madigan, walking "The Way"
(the Camino de Santiago) in Spain with his wife, Sue,
who was my 4th grade teacher. (They are there now!)

dead to prove to us that death doesn’t get the final word; God does. Our hope is in the promise that Christ continues to be with us here on earth – when we hear the Word of God proclaimed, when we are baptized, when we partake of the Lord’s Supper, when we gather to pray, to worship, and to praise, and every time we love and serve one another as Christ has loved and served us. And in the end, when we have done all we can to participate in an experience of heaven on earth, then we enter into the eternal glory that is life basking in God’s unfailing love. And what a hope that is.

            Let us pray… God, our Way, our Truth, and our Life: We search for hope in so many places. Help us to always place our hope in you. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Sprit. Amen.