August 26, 2007

by The Rev. Constance Jones

Luke 13:22-30

A few years ago, when I was working as a hospital chaplain, a great drama erupted.
A Code Blue was called on a patient in cardiac arrest.
Every sort of emergency equipment and a couple dozen people rushed to the scene.
My job was to stay out of the way.
But also to keep company with the woman’s roommate and her husband,
who had been taking a wheelchair-stroll in the halls when the code was called.

The husband wanted to pray for the woman whose heart had stopped, and we did.
Then he asked me point-blank, “Was she a Christian?”

Now, that’s a pretty heavily-freighted question.
It wasn’t my business to discuss somebody else’s faith with him, for one thing.
And for another, I immediately figured the question said a great deal
about the man’s faith orientation.
He seemed to imply that things might go badly for the woman if her faith was lacking.
But the question was asked in authentic concern for the soul of a dying woman.

I remembered this incident in the last few days
as I contemplated today’s Gospel and Jesus’ hard words about the narrow door.
But there was more this week that got me thinking about the big heaven questions:
what is it, and who gets into it?

The first incident was a lunch date with a woman who, like me,
recently buried her husband, and who wanted to talk about where our husbands are.
The next was that I ran across not one but two books entitled Heaven.

So, with a fragment of that old Gospel tune
“Everyone talkin’ ‘bout heaven ain’t goin’ there” rattling around in my brain,
I figured I couldn’t avoid this Gospel lesson,
and the troubling prospect that God might say to me on judgment day,
“Who are you? I don’t know you.”
So let me tell you about the different approaches I found in the two books.

Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven is a very positive, certain, and clear.
He says that all our questions about heaven can be answered,
including what heaven will look like
and whether you drink coffee and have pets there.
Scripture answers all the questions, he says,
and as for who goes there, there’s nothing complicated about it.

“Do not merely assume that you are a Christian and are going to Heaven,” he says. “Make the conscious decision to accept Christ’s sacrificial death on your behalf. When you choose to accept Christ and surrender your life to him, you can be certain that your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. . . . For those who know Christ, their place is in Heaven. For those who do not know Christ, their place is in Hell. . . .You cannot get Heaven without Jesus, or Jesus without Heaven.”¹

The second book is a collection of essays by different authors,
some of my favorite writers in fact,
and none of them seems to be possessed
of such certainty and concreteness as Randy Alcorn.²
They don’t promise that the physical existence we have now is reproduced in heaven.
They see an mysterious indistinctness in the dividing line between heaven and earth.
And they aren’t so quick to judge who’s going to heaven and who isn’t.
In fact, they tend to think God may issue invitations
to some candidates the world might disapprove of.

Benjamin Morse,³ for example,
a young man I realized with surprise that I know at one remove,
writes movingly of the death of his mother,
then just weeks later, his sister, and not long after that, his father as well.
His mother was a well-respected professor at my seminary,
and she’s buried in its small historic cemetery.
But what about his sister, whose death was technically a suicide?
She died after dramatically escaping from a treatment center for anorexics,
swimming across a river, and suffering a heart attack.
Morse can’t imagine a God who would deny his sister heaven,
or who would burden her survivors with even such a suggestion.

The other essays are thoughtful, and they look at the subject of heaven
from various perspectives.
But all of them focus on the goodness and mercy of God,
in the context of a world filled with sorrow, half-shadows, and mystery.
None mentions the narrow door, but I suspect some might agree with me
that the narrow door more aptly describes
the trials and suffering of this world
than any gateway after death that only people with the right answers get through.

Two days ago I sat for hours with the family of George Emery at his bedside.
He died that night, and will be buried from Grace Church on Thursday.
George grew up in this parish, and recently rejoined it.
He acknowledged Christ, he received the Sacrament on his deathbed,
and I suppose he satisfied Randy Alcorn’s criteria for entrance into heaven.
But as I reflected on his experience and his family’s,
I sensed that his narrow door was his terrible suffering from cancer.
Then also this weekend, on the road as usual and listening to the radio,
I heard two different reflections on the new memoir of Mother Theresa.
It’s been getting a lot of attention⁴
because it reveals that she spent much of her fifty-year ministry doubting God’s existence,
and feeling more of God’s silence than his presence when she prayed.
What if, I thought, the narrow door is the thirst for God, the dark night of the soul,
and the willingness to reach for God even when he is silent?
What if this is just another version of what Jesus’ life taught us,
that the way to resurrection is always and only through death on the cross,
Jesus’ own cross of course,
our the crosses we encounter that have a million forms and names.
Like cancer, doubt, and poverty.
Like unjust judgment, loss, and agonizing decisions which all carry loss.
Like fear and uncertainty and loneliness as cold as the grave.

This Gospel passage may seem to give weapons
to those who’d like to declare who’s in heaven and who’s out.
But it might just have a different twist.
And always count on Jesus and Luke to turn things upside down.

Maybe Jesus says, don’t be so quick to make that list
of who’s in and who’s out.
For many people will come to eat in the Kingdom of God
who come from east and west.
In the New Testament, you know,
that phrase “people from east and west” always means outsiders to the covenant,
people you’d sort into the “reject” bin.
They’ll have a place at God’s table.
Indeed, Jesus says, the last will be first.

I admit to you I’m not as certain about heaven as Randy Alcorn is.
I’ll further admit that the prospect that God might say to me
“I do not know you” both perplexes and frightens me.
Yes, I do believe that God calls us to live in this world
with goodness, compassion, and decency,
and that he has shown what those things are.
I know, though that we can’t earn heaven by our works.
We need God’s grace.
But I confess to believing, or at least hoping,
that in the end God gives everyone grace
sufficient to ensure that they accept his invitation to salvation.
I’m afraid I don’t really believe in hell, at least hell after we die.
Even in my own limited experience, I’ve seen enough of it on earth
to think that God wouldn’t wish it on anyone for eternity,
instead of tenderly inviting them to be made whole.

So, count me as somebody who can’t nail down the details of heaven for you,
but who might tell you
from what I know of goodness and beauty and mercy on this earth
what it might be like.
Count me as somebody who decided to trust in God
that the woman whose heart stopped that day at Riverside Hospital is in heaven,
and George Emery who died Friday,
and everyone I have ever loved and those that you have.
Count me as someone who is glad that this Sunday’s Gospel reading
is tempered with today’s psalm.
I invite you to join me in reading again, this time in unison,
the first four verses of this hymn to the God of mercy.5

•

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the mountains be toppled into the depths of the sea;
Though its waters rage and foam, and though the mountains tremble at its tumult.
The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold.
Amen.

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