Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 17, 2011

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Heaven is where God is, right? God lives in a place called heaven. It’s located ? up there somewhere. God lives in heaven and looks down on earth. Occasionally God may send an angel to earth to do something. Like in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” where God sends the angel Clarence to earth to talk Jimmie Stewart out of killing himself. God may intervene on earth in other ways too, but mostly God is in heaven. At least, isn’t that we all, or at least most of us, thought at some point in our lives? It certainly is a common image in traditional Christianity. Heaven is some place that isn’t the earth, and that’s where God is. We want our souls to go there after we die so we can be with God. That’s where God is, in heaven, so we need to go there if we are going to be with God.

Well, OK. Heaven is where God is; but in our story from Genesis this morning we see another vision of where God is. The patriarch Jacob is on a journey. He stops in a particular place as night falls. He takes a rock of that place and uses it for a pillow. He has his famous dream of a ladder connecting heaven and earth with angels going up and down on it. A lot of us know that image from the old hymn “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” The God Yahweh, called the LORD in our translation, appears to him and repeats the covenant promises he has previously made to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham. Jacob wakes up and says “Surely the LORD (that is, God) is in this place—and I did not know it.” So he named that place Bethel, which in Hebrew means house of God.

So what does this story teach us? The first thing it teaches us, I think, is that if you use a rock for a pillow you’re going to have really weird dreams. But I doubt that that lesson is why we’re still reading this story well over two thousand years after it was written. So what else is there is this story for us other than a lesson about rock pillows and dreams?

Like so many great Bible stories, this one makes we want to ask a question. This one makes me want to ask: If heaven is where God is, is the place that Jacob named Bethel, the house of God, the place where he had his dream of God, heaven? That’s the purely logical conclusion. You know: If A is B and B is C, then C is A. Basic logic. Here, if heaven (A) is where God is (B) and God is in Bethel (C), then Bethel is heaven. Which may be perfectly logical, but it doesn’t make a lick of sense. How can heaven be a place on earth, a place in Israel to be specific? Well, I think it can be. In fact, I think that any place on earth can be heaven, but how can that be?

It can be because this ancient story is a very early expression of a very profound truth. It shows ancient Israel starting to tumble to a profound truth about God. God may be in heaven, but that doesn’t mean that God is somewhere beyond the earth, or at least it doesn’t mean that God is only somewhere beyond the earth. God is also here, on earth, in the ordinary places where we humans live. The fancy theological language for that insight is that God is both transcendent and immanent, God is both beyond the earth and present on earth at the same time. The part of Psalm 139 that we also heard this morning is another ancient and a more complete statement of that truth. There the Psalmist confesses that God is present everywhere, even in the farthest reaches of the earth. Wherever the Psalmist is, there is God.

That insight about God, which is at least as ancient as the story of Jacob’s ladder, is also as modern as today. Many Christians today are rediscovering the ancient truth that God isn’t some person living up in the sky somewhere but is present here with us, on earth, here and now. And not just in Bethel, Israel. Also in Bethel, Oregon, and Bothell, Washington. And in Moscow and Mumbai, in Mombasa and Monroe. God is everywhere where God’s people are. Jacob said “Surely God is in this place.” Many of us say, “Surely God is in every place.”

And like Jacob most people today don’t know it. Many of us don’t know it. We don’t know it because the Christian tradition has for so long so focused on heaven that it has displaced God. It has moved God out of creation into heaven. This understanding produced Michelangelo’s famous image painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel of God as an old man with a gray beard up in the clouds reaching down to earth to give life to Adam. That image may be great art, but taken literally it is very bad theology. God isn’t a being in heaven separate from creation. God is infinite Spirit present everywhere in creation. Surely God is in this place. Surely God is in every place. If only we would truly know it and would live as though we knew it.

If only we would know it, if only we would live as though we knew it, we would have very good news indeed. We would have very good news because having God with us here on earth, with us everywhere we are, with us in everything we do, is about the best thing that could ever happen to us. Because, you see, God present with us in creation is precisely God for us in creation. God isn’t just present. God’s presence is active. God is present always seeking to benefit us, always seeking to bless us. God is present always extending grace. God is with us always offering forgiveness. God is with us always seeking to guide us and to inspire us in God’s ways. There could never be any better news than that.

Now, I don’t want you to think that I am denying here that there is a heaven in a more traditional sense. It wouldn’t be a place in the sky. Our modern scientific understanding of the nature of the universe makes that impossible. But it could be someplace of eternal peace and happiness on some other plane of existence that we can only imagine, or that we can’t even imagine. I don’t deny that possibility. I don’t deny the traditional Christian concept of an afterlife for our souls, although I suppose I imagine it a bit differently than a lot of Christians have imagined and do imagine it. My point is not to deny that reality. My point is to say that if heaven is where God is, as we have always been taught, then we don’t have to wait for that future reality to experience heaven. We don’t have to wait for that future reality to experience heaven because heaven is where God is, and God is right here, right now.

As I was thinking about these things I remembered one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, the movie The Field of Dreams. I imagine many of you know it. It’s the Kevin Costner movie in which Costner’s character Ray Kinsella turns part of his corn field in Iowa into a baseball diamond. Old, long dead baseball players appear on the field. Toward the end of the film a solitary figure appears. It is Ray’s father John Kinsella as a young man. That’s when this exchange takes place, an exchange I’ve always wanted to preach on: John: “Is this heaven?” Ray: “It’s Iowa.” John: “Iowa? I could have sworn it was heaven.” Ray: “Is there a heaven?” John: “Oh yes. It’s the place where dreams come true.” Ray: “Maybe this is heaven.”

We’re using a different definition of heaven of course. Heaven is where God is. So yes, that field in Iowa was heaven. Yes, it was Iowa. Yet surely God is in that place too. I’ve never been to Iowa, but I have no reason to think that God is any less present in Iowa than God is anywhere else on earth. So yes, it was Iowa; but it was also heaven. It was, and is, heaven because surely God is in that place. This is heaven, because surely God is in this place. Surely God is in every place. Amen.