Scripture
Holy One of Old, you are my God;
I will exalt you, I will praise your name,
for you have worked wonders,
ancient counsel, faithful and trustworthy.
For you are a refuge to the poor,
a refuge to the needy in their distress,
a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat.
God—the Commander of heaven’s legions—
will make for all peoples on this mountain,
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food prepared with marrow,
of refined well-aged wines.
And God will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that shrouds all peoples,
the veil that veils all nations.
God will swallow up death forever.
Then the Holy One will wipe away tears from every face,
and will sweep aside the shame of God’s people from the whole earth,
for the Holy One has spoken.
It will be said on that day,
Look! This is our God; in whom we hope, and who saved us.
This is the Holy One in whom we hope;
let us be glad and rejoice in God’s salvation.
For the hand of the Holy One of Old shall rest on this mountain.
Sermon
I asked our Bible Study folks on Tuesday… what do you think Heaven will be like?
“A great expanse—a wide, wide place…”
“A green place with trees, and grass, and children running and playing…”
“Clouds and angels and harps, and angels with harps on clouds…”
“For me, it’s the people, the saints that went before me: my sister, my parents… could I meet my grandparents? And now, my friends that go before me…”
My parents told me, long ago, that when I was very small, I had very specific and elaborate ideas of what heaven looked like, and I told them all about it. In later years I tried to reproduce that description for them. They would get a far-away look in their eyes, and they would say, “No, that’s not it.” They were pretty confident that I learned all that pre-birth.
This morning’s passage from Isaiah presents one prophet’s vision of what heaven will look like—the moment when all is right, and God calls us all together for a great celebration. So, now I’ll ask you. What do you think heaven will be like? What do you expect? What do you hope for? Feel free to discuss it among yourselves for a minute or two, and then we can pass a mic around.
***
Where do we get all these ideas? Maybe from our parents, or from church, or maybe even popular culture. Remember the TV Show, “The Good Place”? It portrayed a lovely idea of heaven that never quite worked the way it was supposed to, and eventually we all came to understand why.
In the Old Testament, the afterlife is mostly described as “sleeping with the ancestors,” or “going to the bosom of Abraham” (who was the ancestor of all the Israelites). Isaiah’s image—the feast—stands out as another way of thinking about it.
We can look to the writings of our own church throughout history. The Westminster Confession (1649) offers this view of heaven:
1. The bodies of [people], after death, return to dust, and see corruption; but their souls (which neither die nor sleep), having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them. 2 The souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies…[i]
On the day of Judgement, the text says,
For then shall the righteous go into everlasting life, and receive that fullness of joy and refreshing which shall come from the presence of the Lord.[ii]
Another more recent Confession, the Confession of 1967, equates heaven with God’s rule. There, we read:
Biblical visions and images of the rule of Christ, such as a heavenly city, a father’s house, a new heaven and earth, a marriage feast, and an unending day culminate in the image of the kingdom. The kingdom represents the triumph of God over all that resists his will and disrupts his creation.[iii]
We don’t talk a lot about heaven here, but the Feast of All Saints seems to call for it. John Calvin was convinced that we need to have more attachment to the hope of heaven than anything else in our lives and in our world. So, let’s talk about it—about Isaiah’s idea of it. And let’s see where that takes us.
This bit of the prophet Isaiah is out of character for his entire enterprise at this point in his book. In general, chapters 1 through 39 are all about “afflicting the comfortable,” by which I mean: Nearly the entirety of this portion of Isaiah is the equivalent of the “Lost in Space” robot saying, “Warning, Warning, Danger, Will Robinson,” except it’s “Danger, People of God.” That’s because there is a string of unsavory kings who don’t care much about obeying or worshiping God, and there is a gigantic Borg ship (by which I mean, empire) lurking out there, ready to gobble up the people of Judah at any moment. Which is to say, take the royalty into captivity and maim and/ or kill them, and ship most of the people off to exile in Babylon.
But even in the midst of those words of caution, despite the many pleas Isaiah makes for the people and the rulers to return to God with all their hearts, here we find a tiny oasis of hope for a glorious future. God calls people to the holy mountain and gives them the richest food and the finest wine. In fact, God calls, not only God’s covenant people, but all people—all the people in the world—to come to the celebration, because God will have made everything right.
And—here’s the highlight of the passage:
And God will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that shrouds all peoples,
the veil that veils all nations.
God will swallow up death forever.
Then the Holy One will wipe away tears from every face,
and will sweep aside the shame of God’s people from the whole earth,
for the Holy One has spoken. ~Isaiah 25:7-8
Today is a day on which we reckon with the truth of the human condition: We are made in the image of God, we are born, we live, and we die—sometimes, far sooner than seems right, sometimes in painful ways, and nearly always, leaving behind those who love us. We grieve, we weep, we long to see those beloved faces again, or hold those hands, or give them one last bear hug. We long for their wisdom when life gets complicated. We long for the sound of their voices.
We also long for their legacies to go on. We long for their goodness to be remembered, their humor, their kindness, their accomplishments, their generosity. We long for the things they valued to go on.
We long for these things for ourselves, as well. In this season of our lives here at UPC, we are thinking collectively of our legacy for the future. We are, each of us, pondering how we can be a part of seeing our beloved faith community thrive well into that future we believe God holds for us. There are many ways we can nurture, not only that future, but the present, our needs right now, and one of them is with our gifts of financial support. May we all give as we can, may we all give as we hope to give, and may we all have the joy of seeing that future bear fruit.
And we trust in God’s part in all this. We trust in God’s promises for us, and we trust in God’s promises for those we love: that God will make everything new. In his book, Whistling in the Dark, Presbyterian writer Frederick Buechner writes about heaven. He begins with a quote from the book of Revelation:
"And I saw the Holy City, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying . . . 'Behold, I make all things new.'" ~Revelation 21:2-5
He continues,
Everything is gone that ever made Jerusalem, like all cities, torn apart, dangerous, heartbreaking, seamy. You walk the streets in peace now. Small children play unattended in the parks. No stranger goes by whom you can't imagine a fast friend. The city has become what those who loved it always dreamed and what in their dreams it always was. The new Jerusalem. That seems to be the secret of heaven. The new Chicago, Leningrad, Hiroshima, Baghdad. The new bus driver, hot-dog man, seamstress, hairdresser. The new you, me, everybody.[iv]
I once read somewhere that in heaven we will be as we were in the prime of our lives—the strongest, the fittest, the most energetic we have ever been. In C.S. Lewis’s book, The Great Divorce, people who reside in heaven seem, to visitors, to be oversized versions of themselves, and everything there is more real that it is here. Everything is new. Everything is as it should be.
This is God’s promise. God promises to make everything new, to throw a banquet the likes of which has never been seen, to organize an incredible reunion, and, as Isaiah makes clear, everyone—everyone!—is invited.
On this day, as we remember and give thanks for those we love, let us also give thanks for the promise of heaven, which is still a mystery, and still likely to be a surprise that surpasses anything we can ask or imagine. Thank God for the lives of the saints who have gone before us, especially the fifteen whose names we will share in a few minutes. And Thank God that that neither death, nor life, nor present things, nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA) Part 1: Book of Confessions, Westminster Confession, Chapter XXXII, 6.177, “Of the State of Man After Death, and Of the Resurrection of the Dead,” p. 186. (Louisville, KY: The Presbyterian Church, USA, 2016).
[ii] Op. Cit., 6.181, p. 187-188.
[iii] Op. Cit., The Confession of 1967, Part 3, “The Fulfillment of Reconciliation,” 9.54, p. 296-297.
[iv] Frederick Buechner, “Heaven,” Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary (HarperCollins Publishers), on FrederickBuechner.com, “Quote of the Day,” https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2016/9/1/heaven.