Heaven is a Relationship

  Heaven is a Relationship:

Sermon (Acts 7:55-60 & Jn 14:1-14)  

 St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Easter 5, May 22, 2011

Today’s readings are just full of puzzlements.  There are so many questions, like in the reading from Acts, what was young Saul doing at the killing of Stephen?  Of course, Stephen is our hero, the first Christian martyr, our patron saint.  And insiders know that this Saul is really Paul who will become St. Paul, the great apostle.  Why was he there, approving of this murder?

Another puzzlement.  Jesus is quoted in the reading from John that in His Father’s house there are many dwelling places and that He will come and take us there?  Does that mean that heaven is a big house with a lot of rooms in it?  Should we read that literally?   Do souls, once they leave our bodies, need a physical place to dwell, since they are spirit?  Or is it imagery?

Further down in the same passage Jesus says something astounding to the Apostles and maybe to us.  “Truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and in fact will do greater works than these.”  Those who believe in Jesus will do greater works than He did?   That’s really hard to believe.   

That’s three puzzlements, in one Sunday’s set of readings.  How do we solve the puzzles?  Let me make a suggestion.  Let’s look at it from the standpoint of relatedness, of connectedness.  We human beings are made up of connections, both internally and externally.  Just looking at our brains alone there are trillions of synapses interrelated, firing messages and storing information inside our brains.  Synapses are the connections between nerve cells or neurons.  David Brooks in his book the Social Animal estimates the brain of a developing child creates 1.8 million synapses per second from the second month in the uterus to the second birthday.  How those synapses organize themselves, what memories are stored, what perceptions of the world are formed in this little brain depend on connections outside his or her body, the way they are nurtured by the mother and many others.  That process doesn’t stop as the child grows through adolescence into adulthood.  We humans maintain our freedom of choice, but the options we have for choosing are very dependent on our social relationships.  What our spiritual identity is and whether we believe in a power greater than ourselves depends to a great degree on the beliefs and practices of those in our social network.  Whether we like it or not, we are so connected to the earth from which we came and to the whole world of living things, including other human beings, that we are unable to function in a healthy way if we don’t stay connected.  No man is an island.

In fact, let me suggest further to you that God is a relationship.  Oh, He’s far more than that, but He, should I say “They,” is a relationship.  What is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity if not the description of a relationship?  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, intimately related to one another, make up the one godhead.  The Son was sent to become a human, Jesus of Nazareth, in order to bring us into relationship with the Godhead.  What did He say in today’s reading?  “I am the way the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.  If you know me you will know my Father also.”

So, it was no coincidence that young Saul was at the execution of Stephen.  His conversion to Jesus on the road to Damascus was connected to Stephen’s martyrdom.  There was a saying in the early church that the blood of martyrs was the seed of Christianity.  The Pharisee Saul with the fire in his eyes to stamp out this heretical sext known as the Way was transformed into arguably the greatest of the Apostles, certainly the most prolific writer of the New Testament.  Stephen’s death lead to Paul’s conversion, as Jesus death led to Stephen’s conversion and subsequent death.

So, when Jesus said greater things than these you will do, he wasn’t blowing smoke just to make the Apostles feel good.  It was true.  How many disciples did He have at the time of his death?  Maybe a few hundred, at the most, depending on who you count.  Most of those ran like wild horses when it came to taking a stand.  Yet look what the Apostles were able to do after His Ascension.  Christianity took off.  It spread throughout the civilized world, maybe not quite like wildfire, but with a steady and unrelenting force.  What made the difference?  The Coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the third member of the divine relationship.  He, the Holy Spirit, enabled the Apostles and us to enter more fully into a relationship with the Trinity.  Read the Acts of the Apostles and you will pick up the enthusiasm that was present in the early church.   People like Stephen didn’t run away, nor did Paul when he got the word.

So, is heaven a big mansion in the sky?  Maybe.  I see it as a relationship with God that develops in this existence and comes into fullness after we die.  WHERE WE ARE doesn’t matter nearly as much as HOW WE ARE.  How else was Jesus going to explain it, though, except as describing a place.  Talking about trillions of synapses isn’t nearly as consoling as saying: “I go to prepare a place for you,  and I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am you may be also.”

Citation: The Social Animal by David Brooks.  Random House, 2011