A priest walked into a pub, indignant to find so many of his parishioners there. He rounded them up and shepherded them into the church. Then he solemnly said: “All those who want to go to heaven, step over here to the left.”
Everyone stepped over except one man, who stubbornly stood his ground. The priest looked at him fiercely and said: “Don’t you want to go to heaven?”
“No.” said the man.
“Do you mean to tell me you don’t want to go to heaven when you die?”
“Of course I want to go to heaven when I die. I thought you were going now!”
We all want heaven, but just like the people stepping to the left with the priest, we can be in our religious traditions but fail to embody them. And just like the man staying in the pub, we can also just fail to even enter one at all. So what are we to do with our religious traditions?
Embodying his religious tradition all the way to heaven cost Jesus his life, while the disciples deserted him. If we seek eternal life out of our own self-interest, how is this salvation?
As even Rowan Williams has recognised: “Religious practice claims to offer liberation: but if God is conceived as just another bundle of stimuli for the greedy self, and if our relationship with God takes on the character of a personal love affair with longings and raptures, rows and reconciliations, how on earth can it liberate?”
In the towns of Galilee, John the Baptist had sent his disciples to ask Jesus a question: “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”
And to be able to demonstrate the truth to John’s disciples, Jesus had to refer back to the past, and to his own religious tradition. When he said; “the blind receive sight,” he referred to Isaiah 29:18; “the eyes of the blind shall see”. When he said; “the lame walk,” he referred back to Isaiah 42:18; “then the lame shall leap like a deer”. When he said; “the dead are raised”, he referred to Isaiah 26:19; “your dead will live”.
It was however not enough for Jesus just to refer back to his religious tradition. The tradition had to be embodied in the eternal present, and so somehow Jesus would end up helping people to be able to see, to be able to leap, to be able to live. As a Jew, Jesus was already acquainted with the scroll, but he was somehow coming to realise Isaiah in his own life.
And here is our lesson. As Christians, we are already acquainted with our own religious tradition, but to embody it we should be somehow coming to realise Christ in our own lives. We should be: “in Christ”, as St Paul put it. To quote St Theresa of Avila: Christ has no body now on earth but yours; No Hands but yours; No feet but yours: Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion looks out into the world; Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good; Yours are the hands with which he is to bless now.
The light of awareness should make our old texts suddenly, spiritually, present themselves anew. The word becoming flesh in us.
Meanwhile humanists have been putting posters on buses. The posters read: “There probably is no God. Stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
It is amusing that Christians are responding by creating websites called: “There probably is.” Because it is an irrelevant argument in many ways - God is being, he is the very presence giving you the ability to debate his existence or non-existence.
Therefore, as Theologian Paul Tillich has said; "to argue that he exists is to deny him."
If God is spirit, and if by Christ, we mean the divine come into human nature, a meeting ground of humanity and divinity in creation, then we can give ourselves to Christ by saying; “You are my life”. And this means the personal pronoun “I” can become a doorway to something much larger.
Not out of self-interest, but out of self-emptying.
However, this will inevitably bring us to the question of eternal life. Is eternal life what both evangelical and liberal theologians have called; “pie in the sky when we die,” or does eternal life really begin here and now? Or is that a false dichotomy anyway?
Let’s park that for a moment and come back to it.
Because I think to understand the answer to all this we need to understand sacrifice.
Embodying his religious tradition in the present meant more than death for Jesus. It meant sacrifice. Death is much more common than sacrifice. But sacrifice is rare. To understand sacrifice we understand that sacrifice isn’t giving something up, like giving up your time and your money, for example. Nor is sacrifice about being burned or stabbed on an altar. The meaning of sacrifice comes right out of two root words, sacer, meaning sacred, and facere, meaning to make.
So quite literally, when our lives are being made sacred, this is sacrifice. Now we can start to go back to eternal life.
I suggest an eternal life is a life that is being made sacred. Being made sacred is what the embodying of religion is all about. It is something done in us, rather than something which we do. So while we can help this to happen by being open to it happening, going all the way with it is generally a cost we don’t want to pay.
Hell, so to speak, is quite a common dilemma.
Take Woody Allen for example. “Would I ever be happy, if only I was happy,” he said. But we are cut off from happiness by the very hope which impels us to pursue it.
By the very definition of hope, we only hope for what we can’t currently have, and so to hope for the kingdom of heaven must necessarily mean it is beyond our reach.
But we are not beyond its reach, and this is what God’s liberating grace is.
The Celtic saints knew about it. As well talking about; “places of my resurrection”, the Celtic saints would also talk about; “thin places”, which were the places where the veil between earth and heaven lifts, and if this has ever happened to you, you will know it as a continuum, and as the very fulfillment of the Lord’s prayer - thy kingdom come, on earth, as in heaven. In other words, death is now.
Don’t take my word for it. “To live is Christ, and to die is gain”, wrote St Paul, who also said Love was greater than faith and hope.
In his Soliloques, Augustine said this of heaven; “Then it will no longer be faith, but sight”.
“In Christ,” wrote St Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, “there was perfect charity, but there was neither faith nor hope.” He didn't need them, he was in heaven.
So the answer to our question about eternal life being either now or not yet, is that the promise of eternal life not yet disappears along with our own enclosed and separated life. Life becomes God. “To live is Christ, and to die is gain”, wrote St Paul.
When God is all in all, hope and fear are gone.
If we really understand sacrifice we will not have worshipped a religious tradition, but like Jesus Christ we will have allowed one to embody us, to live us out, and to make us disappear.
This is called self-emptying, or coming to realise Christ in our own lives. This is what being made sacred is all about.
Phillipians Chapter 2 verse 5 - Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the very form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing.
God made himself nothing, therefore he was exalted.
But humans fear nothing.
If, in fulfilling a religious tradition, self-emptying is what God did for us, are we responding?
In the name of the creator, the redeemer, the sustainer. Amen.
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