Whad’ya Know, Part V: “We Have a Building from God”
September 20, 2009
II Corinthians 4:16-5:5
In recent weeks my sermons have grown out of the question: “Whad’ya know?” We’ve been reading sections of the letters of Paul and listening to some of his answers to that question. Sometimes Paul writes out of an assured sense of certainty. Sometimes he writes of what he hopes to know. And sometime he writes of his prayers for what those early Christians might know.
This morning Paul’s words speak not only about his own knowledge but also that of the Christians in Corinth. “We know,” Paul writes. “We—all of us—know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God…eternal in the heavens.” He writes as though this is simply common knowledge, a shared understanding.
I often read these words at funerals, for they are a strong and beautiful expression of the Christian hope. They point us beyond what we can see, what we can touch. In these words we can hear an echo the comforting words of Jesus: “I go to prepare a place for you.”
But these words strike me—and maybe you as well—as words of hope, not knowledge.
Here Paul leaves us behind, traveling far beyond where most of us are willing to go. We know life—with all of its ups and downs, its great joy and deep anguish. We can listen to Paul about our living—arguing with him, agreeing with him, being challenged by him. We can recognize the truth in his statement that our outer nature is wasting away. Many, if not all, of us know that the affliction Paul writes about is a part of life.
But this morning Paul asks us to go beyond life. He asks us to set our gaze beyond what can be seen and look at what cannot be seen. He asks us to look beyond the temporary and consider the eternal.
He wants to stretch our knowledge beyond its limits.
Whad’ya know?
I’m not so sure anymore.
Heaven, of course, is a difficult image.
The poet Kathleen Norris calls heaven “a foolish concept, to be sure, and apparently irresistible to the human spirit.” Our popular imagination so trivializes heaven that, really, most clergy are reluctant to talk about heaven at all. Clouds, harps, wings, pearly gates are the stuff of cartoons and jokes. And, as the song says, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”
Reflecting on our trivialization of heaven, the physicist and theologian John Polkinghorn says, “Even the man who said that when he went to heaven he would play golf every day, might sicken of the game after a few thousand years. . . . [Such] images are totally inadequate,” he concludes. Adding, “What awaits us is the unending exploration of the inexhaustible riches of God, a pilgrim journey into the deepest reality that will always be thrilling and life-enhancing.”[i] Certainly that’s better than endless golf—but still more about what we hope than what we know.
Heaven, as we encounter it in the Bible is a complex, multi-layered concept.
Sometimes “heaven” is God’s “dwelling place.”
Sometimes God is said to “dwell beyond the heavens.”
Read your Bible. You’ll also find that evil powers are said to dwell in heaven—which might give us pause about wanting to get there quickly, or about envisioning a great difference between heaven and earth.
Heaven is certainly not a reward in the sense of being some kind of compensation for the life of faith. Heaven is not a “reward” at all—other than the reward of being delivered from any seeking for rewards. It is the end of a life of faith, hope, and love, the working out of the life oriented by these principles.[ii]
Even Paul, in spite of his strong “We know…” seems to be at a loss for words as he struggles to speak of what by its very nature we cannot know. Listen again as he mixes metaphors, trying with words to say something beyond words: “In this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling—if indeed, when we have taken it off we will not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden, because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed…” It sounds as if Paul is bluffing his way through an essay test when he hasn’t read the material.
“We know that we have a building from God, eternal in the heavens,” Paul tells us. And yet we confess that we don’t know any such thing. Listening to Paul, we are aware that we have come to the limits of our knowledge.
Maybe we can get some help from the great Reformed theologian, John Calvin, whose 500th birthday we celebrated in July of this year. Marilynne Robinson is going to speak about Calvin during our worship service on Reformation Sunday, October 25, sharing some of what she said last May at the Calvin Festival in Geneva, Switzerland. Perhaps I’m getting ahead of things, but I want to say a few feeble words of my own about Calvin and how he helps us think about what we know and what we can know.
In the first paragraph of his foundational work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin famously writes: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
These two types of knowledge are joined together in many ways. That is to say, the more we know of ourselves, the more we know of God. And as our knowledge of God develops, we come to know ourselves better as well. When we know our own finitude, we come to better recognize the depth and breadth of wisdom and goodness and love that are found in God. In the same way, as we grow even in our limited, human knowledge of God, we begin to better understand who we are as human beings—finite and fallible, yes, but also created with an ability to create, with the freedom to choose, with the need to love.
One of the things we know about ourselves as human beings is that we will die. Indeed, it’s said that human beings are the only creatures who know that they will die. And such knowledge has an ambiguous nature to it. On the one hand, the awareness of our mortality can be a cause of great anxiety. At the same time, an existence that went on endlessly, in time would seem to be senseless and pointless. Our existence has meaning and our actions have urgency because one day we will die—and we know that. We are finite.
As we know ourselves as finite, we come to a deeper knowledge of God as the infinite, the Eternal One. This infinite God whom we come to know in Jesus is the loving and merciful creator of humankind who willingly gives God’s very self for our sake. To have faith in such a God is to affirm that while we cannot know the shape of our eternal destiny in any detailed manner, in life and in death, our future is in God’s loving care. We have no special knowledge, no secret wisdom about life beyond the grave. That is beyond all human knowledge, experience, and power.
Still, we can entrust ourselves at all times to the God who created us and gives us life.
This morning we have reached the limits of our knowledge. As we shall hear next week in the final sermon in this series, there is something even greater than knowledge. But what we know, even as we come to our limit is that we are held in God’s care.
In life and in death, we are held in God’s care.