The Kingdom Of Heaven Is Like…….

Acts 2:1-11 Ezekiel 36:22-28 Acts 2:22-38 Psalm 84 1 Cor 2:9

I’d been chatting to a group of sixth formers who attended a most exclusive public school about the life of a Vicar and towards the end of the session, one of them leant forward with a look of real concern on his face.

“What I can’t understand” he said “is why a perfectly reasonable sort of bloke like you, would want to spend his life telling fairytales as if they were true. All this stuff about babies in a manger, angels in the sky, white fluffy clouds and God with a white beard”

He was not mocking me. He was not belittling the church. He was deeply concerned about me wasting my life away  on myths.

I love the way the first disciples f unleashed the Gospel on the world. Sent forth from a locked room in the heart of the city and suddenly finding they could speak the truth about Jesus in a language everyone could understand and in a manner which was persuasive. Right into the city they went into a whole mixture of cultures and backgrounds, and right there and then, in the midst of the lives of everyone, it made sense. Nobody was left indifferent it seems. Either they were converted on the spot or they were sent into such a rage that their only thought was to get the disciples behind bars as soon as possible.

The teaching sessions  of Jesus were usually  prefixed by six words “The kingdom of heaven is like..” for this was his task to describe  heaven as a reality which was both attainable and attractive. A sense of it being grasped in the “here and now” of our daily lives and as something mysterious and other, beyond words, beyond imagining.

As I sat with those sixth form students I remember thinking that we were in desperate need of a second Pentecost where once again we could speak with clarity and truth about the world in which we live and the world to come. To speak as Jesus did “The kingdom of heaven is like”

The hymn “Pleasant Are Thy Courts above” makes a valiant attempt to describe the indescribable. It is inspired by Psalm 84 which is a wonderful  heartfelt prayer that the goodness of heaven might be showered upon us where we are and that there is a place where we shall  be caught up in the fullness of the glory of it. Yet the imagery of flying birds circling an altar and then an ark and the notion of the world God created, as being essentially a wretched place takes to the place where free thinking sixth formers might say – “We told you so”   

The people in the days of Jesus had plenty of religious language to help them make sense of it all. So that our second reading this evening finds Peter showing how Jesus actually fits into and extends the traditions of Judaism. It was quite a simple task for him to meet people where they were and lead them on towards this kingdom Jesus had been speaking of. 

Similarly, those of us here this evening have been steeped in religious language which has a scriptural base and a service such as this can lead us to the gate of heaven. The familiar words we use in this liturgy are not an end in themselves, but create space for us to walk around in with God, space for us to engage with the essence of God which is beyond words.

 Pentecost is finding the language for “out there in the streets”

My worry is that nowadays the language of heaven we use in churches makes so little sense to the unconvinced. We had seemed to be saying something like – heaven is a place with clouds and harps and everyone wears white and it’s where you go as a reward for leading a good life. If you don’t lead a good life then hell is waiting for you with its fire, its devils and its darkness.There is adanger of our promoting  Heaven as an escape from something terrible. Heaven as a way of keeping people in order. If this is as far as it goes, there is little room for a morality to grow that is based on anything other than fear, there is little room for a God of love to begin to have a say.

So when heaven ceases to mean anything much, morality has no foundation and we behold the sort of society we live in today. Heaven as chocolate, Heaven as Summer holidays. Heaven as me dressed in the right clothes. And when people begin to realise that heaven is not in these things, with what language will the church fill the streets of the city in a way that will attract.

So at one level we promote this rather scary image of life with God and at the other level we promote something cuddly and easy. Crowds flock to church to hear the Christmas story, when there are angels and bearded men all over the place. A lovely story is told which does not always connect with life beyond the nativity tableau.

Put these two sets of pictures together and you have heaven as a deterant against bad behaviour on one hand and a place of comfort and consolation on the other all told with narratives that fail to connect beyond the faithful.

The  alternative heavens are thrust at us so readily that we are able to push into the background the concept of death, we don’t need to think about the fact that judgement might have to be faced, albeit with the mercy of the loving God we find in Christ rather than the tyrant of the church’s making. We happily keep our destiny under wraps, fearing the reality of it, when actually it is at the heart of the Pentecost gift.

With what language then shall we go out into our streets, where do we begin to give the stories of Jesu the cutting edge they had when he told them. We have to get behind the themes of Samaritans and prodigal Sons, Sowers and Mustard Seeds and not just think that telljng the tale is good enough.

When we are brave enough to do this we find something important is being unearthed. That the kingdom of heaven is like.., is like small experiences being seen for what they truly are.

Meals, journeys, losing and finding, growth, celebration, sharing, marriage, coming home, building and suffering. The great chapter of Matthew 25 which continually haunts me is “I was hungry and you fed me” is not about doing the good thing for the reward we might get – it is about a choice between living in love and its opposite.

That’s where I took those sixth formers actually, to get them to articulate the things they felt most strongly about in life and to get them to  consider where such convictions might have their origins.

We often think of St Paul as being on another planet from Our Lord, but in the matter of the kingdom of heaven he is quite helpful. He does not map out a future heaven at all. He says its beyond description “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, the things which God has prepared for them that love him”. The important thing for the present is knowing Christ and thus giving our lives a heavenly dimension in the here and now.

The kingdom of heaven Jesus described begins to take shape for me in the experiences of resurrection people and we would do well to mediate on those themes as we pray for a Pentecost language of our time.

The risen Christ is not easy to recognise. Many miss Him completely, others find him only when they look hard enough.

Mary Magdalene recognises him when he speaks her name in love.

Peter recognises him in the midst of his daily toil and through the experience of forgiveness.

The disciples going to Emmaus recognise him in a contemporary explanation of scriptures and at a shared meal

Thomas recognises him in the touch of wounds and the airing of doubts.

I think we can take theses encounters as the basis on which we can speak of heaven both in terms of what we can expect to find in our daily living and as a clue to our ultimate destinations.

Centred in Christ, inspired by scripture, touching the common experiences of everyday living> The Holy Spirit can enliven these elements to make of them no longer fairy tales for the deluded, but that which only gives meaning in the end to the question of why we are here.

RH 31.5.09