A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 3, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
All Souls
I once went on a three-day conference to talk about heaven but no one actually did talk about heaven. Instead everyone talked about who gets into heaven, and about how best to offer words of comfort to the bereaved. I want briefly tonight to talk about what, when later in this service we read the names of those we have lost, is our hope for them and, in due course, for ourselves. I’d like to describe three things heaven is not before going on to describe three things heaven is.
Heaven is not the continuation of a person’s eternal soul. The dualist idea that we are essentially physical bodies and spiritual souls, which become detached at death whereupon we continue simply as spiritual souls – this idea is one that arises among the Greek philosophers centuries before Christ. It’s not something the Old Testament comprehends. For the Bible, humans are one in life, body and soul, and one in death, body and soul. Death is real. Our death is the end of us. Our hope lies not in pretending otherwise, but in knowing that our death is not the end of God.
Next, heaven is not our reabsorption into the infinite. This idea that when we die we blend back into the ground of being, is a mixture of the simply biological assumption that we dissolve into the soil and the quaintly spiritual notion that we become part of the ether. Perhaps the reason that the verses usually entitled ‘Death is nothing at all’ and ‘Do not stand by my grave and weep’ have become so popular in our contemporary culture is that they offer pictures of continuity beyond death that require no belief in God or reference to Jesus whatsoever. The trouble is, they do so by denying the reality of death, and the pictures they offer, of heaven as a waiting room or as a disembodied wind, are so bleak as to offer little or no real hope at all.
The third thing heaven is not is simply the reconstitution of our fleshly bodies. This is less of a mistake than the first two, and it may sound obvious in an age where cremation of dead bodies is relatively commonplace, but it’s still worth stating. The funeral sermon that says ‘I’m sure Peggy’s up there now watering and pruning her roses just as she did down here’ seems to be assuming that heaven is basically a continuation of our present physical life in all its prosaic mundanity. To be sure, heaven is a physical existence, but the bodies of the saints are not simply embalmed versions of the ones we have here.
For Christians, there is only one thing greater than the overwhelming horror of death: and that’s the overwhelming glory of God. The Christian hope is that after death we come face to face with the wondrous power and love and passion of God, an experience we could liken to a tidal wave or a raging fire or a dazzling light: and yet because of Jesus that overwhelming glory doesn’t destroy us, sinners that we are, but transforms us into the creatures God always destined us to be. After death we face neither the oblivion of physical disintegration nor the obliteration of spiritual destruction but the transformation of glorious resurrection.
The first thing heaven is about is worship. It’s no coincidence that one scriptural picture of heaven is of a choir, because a choir are a wonderful picture of what it means to have a body of your own but find your true voice in a much greater body, a body where your voice sings most truly in harmony with the voices of others, where you find your voice most fully in words of praise and thanksgiving, where you are lost in concentration and where every detail matters, where you rejoice at the gifts of others which only enhance the gifts that are your own, where fundamentally you are all turned to face the source of your gifts and the focus of your praise. Every Sunday Christians gather together and depict and anticipate the life of heaven. That’s why worship matters so much – because in eternity, that’s all there’ll be.
And here’s the second thing heaven is about. Heaven is about friendship. Jesus said at the Last Supper, ‘no longer do I call you servants – I call you friends’. The heart of God is three persons in perfect communion. And yet at the table there is a fourth place – a place left for us to join the communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is heaven – the experience of being invited to the table of friendship to join the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. At last we discover, not just what God can do when left to do it on his own, but what is possible when in perfect communion humanity and all creation join the everlasting dance of the Trinity.
And the third and final thing heaven is about is eating together. This is maybe the most common picture of all in the New Testament – heaven as a great feast, a banquet celebrating the marriage of heaven and earth, the perfect union or communion of God and all God’s children. Just imagine a fabulous meal where there were no allergies, no eating disorders, no inequalities in world trade, no fatty foods, no gluttony, and no price tag. The reason why the Eucharist is at the centre of the life of St Martin’s is because the Eucharist is where food, friendship and worship all come together. We are made friends with God and one another when we eat together in worship. The Eucharist depicts what creation was for and what it cost. And when we gather together as two or three or twenty or two hundred and make new friends by eating together we’re celebrating a little Eucharist, a little icon of the Trinity at table together, a little glimpse of heaven.
There’s a great sense of mystery about heaven, but I think the scriptures tell us all we really need to know. They tell us what matters. What matters is being overwhelmed by the power and love and glory of God, now and for ever. Heaven is being overwhelmed by the horror of death and then finding not oblivion or obliteration but a further overwhelming. This second overwhelming is an overwhelming by the glory of God. It’s a transformation into the life that the Father gave us, Jesus lived, and the Spirit infuses in wondrous worship, loving friendship, and a feast of praise. That’s what matters. In the end, that’s all that matters.
