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The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies

St. Martin's Church

May 16, 2010

EASTER VII

              “We don't have a doctrine of heaven,” said Gene Robinson when he preached here two weeks ago. “We have something better; we have a doctrine of God.”

              That's something to think about on this seventh Sunday of Easter, this odd in-between Sunday when Jesus has ascended into heaven, but the Church is still waiting for the promised gift of the Holy Spirit. We talk about Jesus going up into heaven, and sitting down at the right hand of the throne of God, but usually on the Sunday after the Ascension, we concentrate more on what it means to live without Jesus, what it means to get on with the business of following Jesus without Jesus here to show us how. That was one of the first lessons the disciples had to learn, and it's a big part of what the book of the Acts of the Apostles is all about.

              We don't have a doctrine of heaven, we have a doctrine of God – and more specifically, we have a doctrine of the love of God. But maybe, on this Sunday after Ascension, we can try to put the two of those things together – and maybe, our doctrine of the love of God can give us a glimpse of what heaven might be like, and maybe, learning how to practice for heaven in the future can help us live more fully in God's embrace now on earth.

              One thing we believe about God is that God is perfect. Not perfect in the sense of getting 100% on exam, or perfect in the sense of passing a strict inspection – but perfect because nothing is missing. God is perfect, because God is whole – complete – a wholeness and a completeness that I think simply lies outside human comprehension. We use lots of different images and metaphors to try and express what we mean – it's hard, because we don't just say that God is perfect, we also say that we believe that God is alive, active, engaged with creation. That's something of what Gene was getting at when he said that his hope of heaven, was to curl up in God's lap and purr. God is perfect, but like anyone who strokes a purring cat, God is engaged and in relationship with us. God is perfect, but God is also continually showing us just how much God loves us.

              We use lots of metaphors to try and express God's loving perfection – God's completeness. We say that God is the Alpha and Omega – the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet – the first and the last and everything in between. Jesus used familiar images to tell people about God's loving perfection – good shepherds, forgiving fathers – and Jesus also taught people about God's loving perfection by how he lived – who he ate dinner with – who he spoke to, and healed and forgave. Again and again we hear about how God's love never runs out, how there's always enough, how no matter how much God pours out on us, that love continually wells up like a living, eternal spring of cool, fresh water. God is perfection – God is whole and complete.

              When Jesus is teaching his disciples in the Gospel of John on the last night of his life, he concludes by praying for them one last time before they all go out to the Garden of Gethsemane. And he prays that they will be able to participate in God's loving perfection by being perfectly united themselves in love: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.“

              All those pronouns – I, me, you, them – everyone bound up together into a perfect unity of love. “I in them and you in me” is I think a way of saying that God's loving perfection is not just something we'll get to experience in heaven, but that it is possible to at least glimpse it while we are still in our earthly pilgrimage. I've been promiscuously quoting Larry Bradner ever since he said a few weeks ago that the church is a school for love, and that lately at St. Martin's, we been earning an advanced degree. What we have been learning, in the midst of terrible grief and loss, is something about being part of each others' lives and sharing with each other as much of God's love and healing and compassion as we can.

              We can practice for heaven. That's part of what our baptism means. Next week we'll baptize a passel of babies and young children, and we'll be so enthralled by their sweetness, that we may miss the fact that we're drowning them – putting them to a symbolic death so that they can be reborn in the new life of the resurrection. In baptism, we ask God to let us practice for heaven, to live as if death has no power over us, to share in God's eternal perfection of love right now, right here. And we promise to practice for heaven by learning to love what God loves and choose what God chooses, and the best way that Christians have found to practice for heaven is by being part of a worshiping community of other people who want to learn to love what God loves and choose what God chooses.

              Just like Jewish people have always done, the first disciples told stories. They told stories about what Jesus had done for them, how he had healed and taught and lived and died – how he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. And then they kept telling stories, because they wanted the world to know how much they themselves had changed – they wanted to let all the world know that they had learned that death had no power over them and that they had learned something about loving what God loves and choosing the way God chooses.

              The story from the book of Acts is a perfect example. First of all, Paul and his companion Silas deliver a young woman from the bondage of slavery. The young woman 's  owners were exploiting her mental and emotional weakness, using her like a trick pony to tell fortunes. I think it's a nice touch that Paul seems to be motivated more by vexation than by compassion when he casts the demon out of her, but the end result is the same. The woman's owners are outraged, Paul and Silas are beaten by the mob and then thrown into prison.

              But they are not abandoned in prison – they pray and sing hymns until an earthquake shakes the foundations of the prison and all their chains are broken. That would be a good enough ending to the story right there, but we're not done yet. Paul and Silas aren't in a mad rush to escape. They reassure the frantic jailer that they are still there, and the jailer sees something in them that he wants a part of. “How can I be saved?” he asks. So Paul and Silas go home with the jailer, and he binds up their wounds and feeds them and they baptize him and his family and share something of the perfection of love they've already experienced themselves. They school the jailer and his family in love, partly by how they live and partly by what they say. They share the new life of the resurrection with the jailer and his family.

              And really, that's  that's what we're doing here this morning. We've come to our school for love to learn a little more about God's loving perfection, to celebrate how much we are loved, and to remember what we hope for. We've come to practice for heaven – proclaiming with all the saints that where Christ is, we shall also be. We've come to celebrate that God is perfect love and that nothing in all creation will separate us from the One who was and is and is to come.