All Saints'

Revelation 7:9-17 - All Saints' Day - November 6, 2016
Looking Forward to Heaven

What will heaven be like?  How will we enjoy ourselves?  I recall reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when I was young.  Mark Twain, a clever observer of human behavior and custom, assigned to his character a common misunderstanding of heaven.  In his attempt to justify why he would rather remain a naughty and precocious boy, Tom Sawyer said that he would rather not spend eternity sitting on a cloud and playing a harp anyway.  Is that what heaven is like?  Watching Loony Toons as a kid filled me with the same kind of apprehension.  It looks like heaven will be awfully boring … and lonely.  Of course, this caricature of heaven is untrue.  But many modern replacements of this uninspiring image actually fall even further from the truth. 

Nearly every morning I take a walk through the Springdale Cemetery.  It’s beautiful in there, especially this time of year.  Many faithful Christians are buried there including some of our own departed members and some of your dear loved-ones.  It always strikes me, though, to see some of the memorials that are erected in honor of the dead – whether it be some little banner that describes heaven as a never-ending fishing trip or just a Hawkeye flag in place of flowers.  Some of them are permanent too – like the image of golf clubs on the headstone or an engraved poem about how one has become an angel in heaven.  But how are these images of heaven any closer to the truth than the imagination of Tom Sawyer and Elmer Fudd?  These are fantasies.  They are unspiritual fantasies too, that turn heaven into an extension of earth.  In reality, the life we live on earth should be regarded as an extension of the life we will live in heaven. 

This is what I mean: Heaven is not a place where man continues some sort of ideal earthly life.  Heaven is what God brings to us in order to rescue us from the curse of earthly death.  We hold onto heaven by faith in the gospel.  To go to heaven when you die is to go where nothing can ever again challenge or deny the comfort God gives in the forgiveness of sins.  No one enters heaven above who has not first entered heaven here below. 

The idea of having harps on clouds, as simple and silly as it sounds, is actually way more accurate than any crass worldly idea of heaven where people continue to pursue their earthly hobbies or help guide the affairs of their living loved ones — because what makes heaven what it is is the fact that even here on earth we are able to make music to God – we are able to sing his praises – we are able to confess the gospel and praise the Lamb by whose blood we are saved.  What will heaven be like?  How will we enjoy ourselves?  The same way we enjoy eternal life right now – but more so.  Heaven comes to us here on earth through the free grace of God in Christ Jesus.  “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” we say.  “Blessed is he who hears the word of God and keeps it!” Jesus says.  He comes to us.  He teaches us.  And where he does, we stand in his presence. 

One thing I have desired of the Lord,
That will I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord
All the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord,
And to inquire in His temple. (Psalm 27:4)

He who has no desire to do this on earth also has no true desire to do it after he dies.  Nor will he.  It is as we sing from Psalm 28:8, “Lord, I love the habitation of Your house, and the place where your glory dwells.”  This house is here, now.  It is our habitation.  We enter it by heeding the voice of our Lord, who says, “Come unto Me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” and “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”  We enjoy heaven today by taking seriously our duty to hear God’s word and learn it, and by taking such an interest in the doctrine God teaches as though perhaps our life actually depended on it. 

When God became man, we often say that he left his throne in heaven.  But this is only a poetic way of expressing the fact that he humbled himself and chose for a time not to use all his power and prerogative as the Son of God.  He came with no pomp by hiding his glory.  But he did not truly leave heaven at all.  Heaven is wherever he is.  Heaven is wherever the angels stand guard over those whom God loves and serve the Lord God of hosts.  And so during his time on earth, angels continued to flock around Jesus, ministering to his every need, serving him as he fasted, strengthening him as he prayed, and adoring him as he served humanity as a Man. 

Where Jesus is there is God’s abiding favor.  Where God’s abiding favor is found there heaven is found.  Where Jesus invites us to himself there God invites us to stand before his throne as sons of God – unafraid and uncondemned, served by angels and clothed in the holiness of him who called us to himself.  This is what makes us saints.  No one is able to go to heaven above unless he enters heaven below.  No one wakes up at the top of Mount Zion unless he first finds his rest at the foot of Mount Zion, hearing the voice of God who opens his mouth to bless his people.  No one is born from above except him who is born again by water and the word.  No one feasts on choice meats and fine wine unless he first learns to hunger and thirst for righteousness here on earth where righteousness is seldom found. 

But we know where to find it.  It is not where we fulfill the life of one who has earned God’s blessing.  It is where he who has fulfilled this life serves us in mercy.  God’s saints are those who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  They who stand before his throne in heaven, praising him for his power and might are those who first kneeled before his altar on earth crying out Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy. 

“Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”  So sing the saints in heaven – forever.  Where did they learn this holy song?  Where did they learn to praise God so well?  They learned how to sing in heaven by learning how to sing on earth.  And so must we.  Heaven is not a tacky continuation of earthly life.  Rather heaven is the glorious consummation of that heavenly life which we already live right now by faith in Jesus. 

If you want to imagine heaven as a wonderful Sunday dinner with family and friends, you will find no argument from me.  If you want to imagine eternity in the magnificent forests and mountains of a perfect earth, I could love to do the same.  Or perhaps you picture heaven on a boat or driving down the highway forever with the girl you married and later buried with tears.  You go ahead.  Picture happiness.  Look forward to joy unmingled by any sadness ever again – where the lion grazes with the lamb and the child plays with the viper (Isaiah 11:6-9).  Far be it from any of us to discourage such images of peace and serenity when God himself encourages such images in Holy Scripture.  But he does so because of the simplicity and infirmity of our sinful minds.  He paints pictures to tell us in cloudy images – like he did for St. John – what God has prepared for those who love him.  But eye has neither seen nor ear heard, nor can our hearts imagine (1 Corinthians 2:9).  We must wait.  For now we must embrace what it truly shall be by faith, our hope resting in God’s promise alone. 

It is a Lutheran tradition to give a blessing at the end of every sermon based on these words from Philippians 4: “and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”  The peace of God surpasses all understanding – not just human understanding, as some pastors say, supposing that by adding human it somehow intensifies the point.  But it doesn’t.  This peace surpasses angelic understanding too.  Not even the elder in Revelation 7 to whom St. John said, “Sir, you know,” had any better understanding than the image we consider this morning.  But in this image we see truly what the peace of God is and will always be.  We see as clearly as we need to because the Holy Spirit has made know to us in the gospel those “things which,” St. Peter says, “angels desire to look into” (1 Peter 1:12). 

And so we look into them.  We inquire in God’s temple.  We seek truth.  And though we peer into a blurry mirror as regards to what we shall one day be (1 Corinthians 13:12), yet we see with crystal clarity what God’s word teaches us about our sin and death and about his grace.  We who see the stain of our own sin desire to know where that sin is taken away.  And as next week we will be happy to be depicted as sheep, so today we are happy to depict Jesus as the Lamb who was slain.  And as the week afterwards we will be happy to be depicted as the five wise virgins with oil in their lamps, so today we are happy to confess that our virginal purity is found nowhere else than in the blood of the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.  And as we flee for refuge to that spring of mercy, we embrace the images of heaven even as we understand the images of our redemption.  Our lamps are filled with that which fuels our hope, namely, faith in God’s most certain word: our sins are forgiven.  We stand righteous before God.  And with this robe of righteousness, we need not hide ourselves.  We shall see God face to face (ibid.). 

We understand the images of heaven as well as the images of our salvation, because we are taught to understand them – we are taught the gospel – in plain and simple words: your sins are forgiven.  We are taught that the love we fail to show is the love that God bestows: your sins are forgiven.  We who did not love God with our whole mind are given to learn the good news that has been on God’s mind since before the beginning: your sins are forgiven.  We who have ignored the needs of others have a God who became a Man in order to meet the needs of all his brothers – including your need for pardon: your sins are forgiven.  We who have spoken ill of our brother or delighted to hear gossip about him have the eternal God as our Brother who bore in himself all damning accusations against us.  He now pleads before the throne of God, refusing to listen to any ill word spoken about his dear lambs: your sins are forgiven.  We who coveted what was not ours are purchased and won by God who above all things desired us to be his own: your sins are forgiven.  We now belong to him.  We are his. 

Our sin brought us into bondage.  But Christ sets us free.  He now teaches us to enjoy heaven in two ways: 1^st we believe that our sins are truly forgiven for Jesus’ sake and that heaven is freely opened to us.  2^nd we love one another as though we were already in heaven.  This is what it means to be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord.  We serve one another here, knowing that in heaven we will love one another perfectly as we all sing the same hymn of praise to him who loved us more. 

We love one another here for the same reason that we gladly learn God’s word.  We love and pursue what we already have – like a husband whose love for his wife makes him want to know her better and spend time with her more.  And so even as we fall short of that blessed life that our Lord speaks of in our Gospel lesson this morning, we take hold of our eternal inheritance by hearing and believing everything that God teaches us in his word.  It is he who blesses us, clothing us with the holiness of Christ.  And even as we feel contrary feelings that would place ourselves above another, we pursue that love that perfects our faith – that love that seeks our neighbor’s good – that love by which we are able to love God as well.  And so with both faith that receives forgiveness and eternal life, and love that seeks to live eternal life right now, we learn “to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:14-19). 

And so we will.  We anticipate heaven by receiving it now.  And while we do – while we wash our robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb, we join all the saints who have gone before us.  We commune with God and so also commune with those who have died in the faith.  This is the image of heaven.  What angels and archangels and all the company of heaven rejoices for us to receive at this altar – this is your foretaste.  This is your future and eternal reward.  Jesus draws near you today in order that he may always be near you in heaven.  Amen.