May 4/5, 2007

HEAVEN AND ITS HOPE

I can tell you precisely when I became forever skeptical of sweepstakes, lotteries, and their promises. When I was 10 years old, my parents entered what must have been The Original Readers Digest sweepstakes. I sat at the kitchen table while my mother and father filled out the form, answered the contest questions, and sealed the envelope. Later on that afternoon my brothers and I sat beside the street in Garber, Oklahoma, talking over what we'd buy with our share of $100,000.

It never happened. I was at first impatient for the mail to come, announcing our success, with a check enclosed. then after weeks went by, the doubt began to grow. I trace my suspicion of grand promises and my gritty realism to the date when, finally, six months later, I gave up hope.

If you're a grownup, no doubt you've had such experiences yourself. If you're a child, you are probably disappointed that adults can be so cynical and hopeless about such things. And I'm not going to tell anyone of us not to be optimistic. Hope is wonderful. Hang onto it as long as you can, and keep teaching the rest of us to be more hopeful than we are...

...because we are used to being disappointed also about more important things than sweepstakes. Even something better than a lottery - good friends, good jobs, good marriages, good health - even those things, good gifts from a gracious God that they are, they may escape us or last only temporarily.

Anything good on this earth comes to an end, sooner or later. Weekends and vacations always are too short; childhood doesn't last; and in the most serene of lives, conflict is a frequent visitor. Sometimes when we get what we want, it's not as good as we had hoped.

Today the Bible promises, "He will wipe every tear from their eyes; no more death or grieving or crying or pain..." Boy, we connect to hope like that! Life is not always death, grief, tears, and pain - but it's that way more often that we'd like.

'S the way our world is now. But that's not the way it will always be! Something new is afoot - a new heaven and a new earth. God is promising a new set of realities different from what we've always known. "Now the dwelling place of God is with humanity, and he will live with us." Heaven, in a word.

However, I think our picture of eternity, our "heaven," is often too narrow, too individual, even private. When we envision heaven we think only of our immediate families and our current relationship with God. But the Bible gives us another look, on a wide-angle, even cosmic screen, a NEW heaven and a NEW earth - vast relationships around us, new experiences with God which we cannot now imagine. The ancient gulf between... There... and Here... the "gravity" which confines us to earth and keeps God in some distant, unreachable place - someday those barriers will be forever gone.

Then never again will our faith waver and flicker like candles in the windy dark. Never again will we wander away from God for an our or a day or years - because God's immediate presence will hold us close in safety.

Change and decay will trouble this world no more. No more will life be temporary, success be fleeting, and happiness a sometime thing. No more will lives be left unfulfilled. God will create security from beginning to end, tranquility which will not evaporate.

All will then for us be new. Right now we know how something new delights us, brief as it is. A new car - take a deep whiff and smell it. This time next year... smells like the last car we owned. New clothes that fit well and look good... 'till we gain more weight.

Well, if all things will someday be new in heaven and on earth, then it might be worth investigating this present life to see what God might have hidden here, beneath the old. We might, by snooping carefully in the corners of our lives, uncover new opportunities to affect the lives of those who need to see... traces of resurrection.

If God is making all things new, then what is new for us in this old system? Where is God preparing his new dwelling place? What evidence can we find here of the wedding between earth and heaven? How can we now be residents of the heavenly Jerusalem and still pay taxes in Minnesota? And how can God's new creation leave anything, really, untouched?

We have recognized and honored Easter. We still live within its influence. We see the vision of an Easter yet to come for us. Heaven is our hope, based on what we see in the cross, in water, in bread and wine, and even in one another. Seeing all this, we cannot imagine life without resurrection, nor can we imagine anything the way it used to be.

Nathan Castens
Chanhassen, Minnesota