Heaven Can’t Wait

"Since you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above…" It’s easy for this morning’s second reading to slip past without really registering in our minds. It’s tucked in between Peter’s powerful sermon from Acts and the awesome Easter story in the Gospel. The reading from Colossians is short. It’s without context. But listen again: "Since you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is."

I gather that there have been several movies issued under the title Heaven Can Wait. The one I vaguely remember came out in the late 70’s and starred Warren Beatty. I never actually saw it, but I remember the advertisements featuring a picture of Beatty wearing athletic sweats and sprouting feathered angel wings. Football came into the story somehow. An earlier movie from the 40’s, also titled Heaven Can Wait, had a somewhat different story line. I was also reminded, as I was researching all this yesterday afternoon on the Internet, that that well-known recording artist Meatloaf issued an album and title track entitled Heaven Can Wait.

Heaven Can Wait. Heaven can wait in all of these cases because we’re not ready for heaven yet. It isn’t our time. We still have things to do here on earth. We have living still to do before we go to heaven. Heaven can wait.

I have some vague idea that Warren Beatty’s character had to make it to the Super Bowl before he would be ready for heaven. First things first. But more seriously, all of us do have unfulfilled dreams, unresolved issues, unfinished business… things to which we are committed here in this life, on this earth. Heaven can wait until we get the last child through college, until a conflicted family relationship is resolved, until human kind finds a cure for the common cold. Heaven can wait until we actually take that long-planned, but never realized vacation to the Grand Canyon, until I’ve answered that nagging desire to really somehow find myself, to figure out what it really is I’m supposed to be doing with my life. Heaven can wait until we’ve established financial security, or learned how to send e-mail attachments. Surely heaven can wait until we’ve built peace on this earth in the Holy Land, until human kind has figured out a way for all of us to live in an ecologically sustainable way as true stewards of God’s creation, until I, as an individual, have made peace with every one I have wronged in my life. The list could be longer, infinitely longer. Heaven can wait. There is so much here on earth that still needs to be done.

But heaven can’t wait. We may think we want to wait before we go to heaven, but heaven can’t wait to come to us. Like a young child who just can’t keep a wonderful secret, but blurts it out too soon, heaven just can’t wait until we’re ready to come to it. God is too eager. Heaven can’t wait. Heaven comes to us today.

Last night at our Easter Vigil we heard the Exsultet, an ancient and glorious Easter hymn sung as the light of the Christ candle is brought into our midst. "This is the night when you brought our ancestors, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt… This is the night when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin… This is the night when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell… How holy is this night when wickedness is put to flight… How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined." How blessed is this night when earth and heaven are joined. Heaven just couldn’t wait. Last night heaven and earth were joined.

Or if you weren’t there and aren’t sure that it happened last night, listen to these words from one of this morning’s hymns, "Welcome happy morning, age to age shall say: hell today is vanquished, heaven is won today!" Not that we won it, of course, but Christ won heaven for us today, and just couldn’t wait to pass it on. "Since we have been raised with Christ, we may seek the things that are above, where Christ is." Colossians, chapter 3, verse 1. We may seek the things of heaven. Today, on this day of resurrection.

At the diocesan youth event I participated in a few weeks ago, the subject of true love came up. It was a serious conversation. A young man described to me the angel with whom he is in love. We talked about the nature of true love. Whether or not this young man’s feelings qualify is not for me to judge, but in the course of our conversation I was reminded of a definition of true love I learned not from Shakespeare, nor from the novels of Jane Austen, nor from the poetry of Lord Byron, but in a theology textbook. True love is love that always seeks the best for the other person. True love, God’s love is the "spontaneous, outgoing, total concern for the well-being of…" us. True love finds its joy, its fulfillment, in the well-being of the other. To be the recipients of such love is to be in heaven.

Spontaneous, out-going, totally concerned with our well-being. God’s love for us is spontaneous. Instantaneous. In any and every instant of our lives God’s love is there before we even have time to think about it. Out-going. Going out from God to us. We do not have to look for God’s love or ask for it or wait for special occasions to experience it. And total. God’s love for us seeks our well-being in all of the cares and joys of our daily lives. To be loved in such a way changes the color of every activity in our human, earthly lives. Such love is an anchor in times of confusion or tumult; it is a source of peace and strength in the face of hardship and evil; and perhaps most wondrously, it brings to the good places in our lives an added richness of joy and blessing that is beyond human imagining. God’s true love. All of the resources of heaven continually poured out for our well-being. How could we possibly pursue any of those infinite things we need or want to do in this life without such heavenly love?

Heaven will wait, if we insist, and not come to us until death. But God is eager. Eager to grant us his heavenly love today.

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