I told Emily after the service last Sunday that she’d teed things up nicely for me, in a couple ways; I should note I hope to do the same for next Sunday for her when she takes up one of my favorite parts of Scripture, the opening of Revelation 21. That’s for later, though. One way she set me up was bringing the concept of “heaven” into the conversation, because that’s one of those words that when you say it, people think they can stop listening because they already know what you’re going to say. When we die, our bodies aren’t us anymore, and our immortal souls go up to heaven where we watch over the people we’ve left behind. Add in the usual clouds and harps and pearly gates, with St. Peter standing outside them behind a lectern with a huge book—and what on earth did poor Peter do to get stuck with that, anyway?—and you have the basic picture that floats around in the back of most people’s minds; that’s what “heaven” means to us.
Among churchgoers—well, and Kirk Cameron fans of a certain age—you mix in a particular popular understanding of the book of Revelation. At some point, on this view, there will be the Rapture: all true Christians will disappear from the earth in the blink of an eye, leaving their clothes fluttering to the ground and their tennis shoes smoking in the streets. Then will follow the Great Tribulation, with all sorts of terrible CGI-type events; that will continue until Jesus comes back and ends it with the Last Judgment.
Now, I believe beyond even my capacity for doubt that Jesus is coming back to set all things right and make all things new. For the rest? I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t believe I have an immortal soul, and I don’t believe it’s going up to heaven when I die, and I most especially don’t believe any of us in this room will be playing harps. (If you want to tell me heaven would be a place where I’ll play bassoon well enough that it will still be heaven for everyone else, we can talk about that, but I’m no harpist.) Obviously, if by “heaven” you mean the place where God lives and is fully visibly present, yes, I believe in that, but I don’t believe in heaven as most people think about it; and the reason I don’t is because the Bible doesn’t either. The Bible, instead, promises us two very different and very much greater things: the resurrection of the dead, and the new heavens and the new earth.