the radio goes to hell again, part ii

The problem with heaven being “the place you go if you die when you know Jesus” or as the evangelicals remind us, “when you die if you know Jesus” is…it’s such a small view of heaven, and it rejects the real heaven. The thing is, heaven is everywhere. It is all around. It affects everything. It flows in and out of every good deed, every act of godliness and love everywhere. It embraces everything. It pervades everything. It is in all, and through all. It’s here, it’s now, it’s past, it’s present, it’s future, it’s everything.

And so when you say, “Everyone needs to accept Jesus as their personal savior so that they’ll go to heaven when they die”, you are rejecting every other instance of heaven, except for the one you’re in after you die, wherever that happens to be. You’ve never seen it, experienced it, Jesus didn’t even really talk about it (except in the vaguest and most enigmatic terms). That’s the real problem.

And because you are rejecting heaven, you’re winding up with all kinds of unheavenly things…like a divorce rate that’s higher in the church than it is in the secular world, out of the church. Priests and pastors in these heinous sexual sins and crimes. Like, just bizarre stuff. Because heaven really hasn’t come to all those places.

Just like it hasn’t come to all of my life, and my domain. There are places in my life where I am not holy, where I have not been swept into heaven, been rescued from sin, and been given the peace that comes only in heaven. There are places. But I’m looking for heaven. I want heaven to sweep me away, to take over, to baptize me, to immerse me in goodness and holiness, in righteousness. I’m not writing it off to “oh well, it’ll just…someday when I die, then I’ll be perfected”. That is totally anti-Christ. Jesus talked about heaven, this heavy way to live, where you can experience the rule and the reign of God now. The rule and reign of God is awesome. You’ve never known what a real and good king, and the pleasure and joy and peace and satisfaction and freedom he brings until you’ve known…until you’ve been to heaven. There’s no abuse. There’s no abuse of power, no abuse of priviledge. It’s amazing.

But the thing is people put heaven off. And so you get people that casually divorce each other and abandon friends, that bail on people, that just act completely selfishly, and do other things that we’re tempted to say, “Oh it’s just a weakness of theirs”, but they end up hurting other people. Anyway, that’s another story.