What you do in the present -- by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself -- will last into God's future. Whatever we do to mend the world has lasting value.
Popular theology has not always followed traditional thought.
Some Christian thinkers have extrapolated that death releases an inner divine spark whose battery never runs out and that floats along heavenly streets of gold and other adornments of crystal, halos and white robes. Salvation, tritely referred to as "going to your rest," is pictured as a continuous holiday in a gated community monitored by St. Peter. Background music is supplied by harps. God performs, in theologian Ted Peters' words a "soulectomy," separating soul from body for a nonphysical world.
So the result is a bodiless person and a worldless God. Caricature or not, some of those notions left me perplexed as I grew up in the church of my youth. Surely God had something far bigger in mind.
N. T. Wright (no relation), a new testament scholar and Anglican bishop, summed it up not long ago when he explained, "What (Jesus) was promising for the future, and is doing in the present, was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity, but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, the renewal of creation which is God's ultimate purpose -- and so they could thus become colleagues and partner in that larger project."
In other words, a promise of a new creation and an invitation to a new vocation stretches beyond "me and Jesus" to God's worldwide purposes. The Christian life is so much more than one person's long-term survival. It is about the world's future, it is about our hope turning our heads and hearts outward to the world. This, ideally, should be the focus of churches struggling to be relative in the troubling times of the 21st century and beyond. Connecting mission with change.
Mission provides the major standard against which all activities, services, and decisions are valued. Mission is the preserver of congregational integrity. It is about God's love for the world, not about what I like or don't like about my church.
When talk show host Stephen Colbert interviewed the previously-mentioned N. T. Wright, he said his vision of heaven was a harp, mint julep, and asking former U.S. President Ronald Reagan questions. Farcical as Colbert was and is, it is not to much of a stretch to suggest that far too many people want to go to heaven for similar self-serving and fanciful allusions of eternal bliss. But the biblical final destination is a surprise, not merely a heavenly reward where we see and hear what we want to see and hear. It is a new heaven and a new earth.
All creation has a future. Our journey in life is not a private affair. We are invited to become agents of God's creative work -- seeking the lost, feeding the hungry and befriending the lonely.
It should be remembered that Israel became a community of hope by refusing to allow the exile to be the epitome of their destiny. They confidently trusted that God would in his own time mend the brokenness. They had no assurances, no natural endowment for rosy expectations, no hope that the law of averages had to play their number eventually -- just "My hope is in you (Ps. 39:7). It all came about because of God's will being done on earth as in heaven.
His promise to renew all things creates hope, not the need for hope. The future is different.
"The dark door of the future has been thrown open," Pope Benedict XV1 declared, "the one who has hope lives differently." We can take our lyres (guitars, drums, tymphonies, tom toms, tambourines and trumpets) off the trees in this time of dislocation and sing our songs of Zion which glorify God's presence, always.
Every now and then, we and our places of worship need to step back and take a long look forward. God's kingdom is beyond our efforts, even our vision. In a lifetime we participate in only a fraction of God's work. But, while we cannot do everything, we can do something. Incomplete as it may be, it is a step along the way, a beginning.
End results? We may never realize or see them, only hold them trusting in God's future promise of the creation of a new heart in us and a new world out of the old.
Prayer: God who made us the creatures of time, so that every tomorrow is unknown and every decision a venture of faith, grant us frail children of the day, who are blind to the future, to move toward it with a sure confidence in your love, from which neither life nor death can separate us.
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