Sermon: Citizens Of Heaven

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Citizens of Heaven

Ana Levy-Lyons

November 9, 2014

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

 

A rabbi I know tells a story of when he was just starting out in the rabbinate, he visited a maximum-security prison to offer pastoral care to the inmates and teach a class about Judaism. The group he was working with was a group of women serving life sentences. He taught his class and they were very interested and curious and asked lots of questions. And toward the end someone asked what Judaism teaches about the afterlife. He explained that there is no single answer to that question – that the ancient texts suggest many different concepts of the afterlife, including that there isn’t one, and that modern day Jews believe many different things.  She then asked what he personally believed. He said, “I don’t really think there’s an afterlife. I think when you die, that’s just it.”

 

Tears welled up in her eyes and then she started to sob and he realized what he had done. This woman was never again going to see life outside of these prison walls, never again going to see the ocean or make love or share a holiday with her family and he had just told her that this was it. That after this twilight existence in prison, the decades of loneliness and suffering, she would someday simply cease to exist. The existential horror of that for someone in her shoes is hard to fathom. (Needless to say, this caused my friend to question, not only the wisdom of saying such a thing to someone serving a life sentence, but to question whether he really believed it – whether the loving God that he knew would really allow such a thing to happen.)

 

This idea, this faith, this hope that there is something more to life than where we happen to be is part of religious thought throughout the ages; the sense that we are not truly home where we are, but are longing for our true home in another place or time. Some of us can feel this longing, too. It’s the longing for our childhood or a bygone era. Or a longing for the childhood we never had or an era that never was. It’s a longing for love, for innocence lost, or for a place of total peace and harmony. It’s a longing for who we might be if we lived outside of our own prison walls. Do you recognize this longing?

 

In Christianity, the metaphor for the  “true home” is sometimes an afterlife – a heaven where we are finally with God, free from the sin and suffering of this world. I say “metaphor” because many modern Christians don’t believe in the kind of heaven that chronologically follows our time on earth, but rather a state of being in the presence of the divine. Jesus teaches about always keeping one eye toward heaven, not being preoccupied with the material, physical world here on earth. He says, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal.”

 

Rick Warren, the longtime pastor of the Saddleback mega church in California, preaches about humans being just temporary residents on this earth. In his best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, he writes, “In California, where I live, many people have moved from other parts of the world to work here, but they keep their citizenship with their home country. They are required to carry a “green card,” which allows them to work here even though they aren’t citizens. Christians should carry spiritual green cards to remind us that our citizenship is in heaven. God says [Christians] are to think differently about life from the way unbelievers do… Real believers understand that there is far more to life than just the few years we live on this planet.” Then Warren quotes the book of Philippians in the Christian Scriptures: “All they think about is this life here on earth. But we are citizens of heaven, where the Lord Jesus Christ lives.“

 

This phrase from Philippians, “citizens of heaven” is actually a pretty loaded phrase. Originating at the time of the Roman occupation, when all the subjects in the occupied territories were supposed to be citizens of Rome, it was a seditious notion. It was written by St. Paul, probably when he was sitting in a Roman prison. It was a way of saying to the early Christians, “No, we’re not citizens of Rome or any earthly power. Refuse to give in to that! Whatever happens to us here, we ultimately belong to God.” Citizens of heaven. We wear our earthly skin lightly.

 

The Jewish version of this concept is the theme of exile and return. Exile first from the Garden of Eden, where the Torah describes the early humans as innocent and childlike, all our needs provided for. We’re naked in a garden where God also walks and converses with us. All the food we need grows on trees and the world is beautiful and peaceful. After our infraction we are cast out of the garden, and suffering and pain begin for the first time. No longer taken care of, we now have to work for our food. We are alienated from God who no longer walks among us. It’s the nightmare of a forced maturation process where the parental nurturing dries up suddenly and the child is compelled to fend for him or herself. The regret and the longing for return permeates the literature and art and music even to this day.

 

Then it’s the recurring dream of exile from the Promised Land – the land promised by God to Abraham and Moses, a land “flowing with milk and honey.” This exile was not mythological but historical – Jews were ejected from the land of Judah (which they called Zion) time and again as various warring empires took over and drove them out. In the 6^th century BCE, the Babylonian army took over and captured a number of Jews and deported them to Babylon. Out of this Babylonian exile came Psalm 137 – a wailing lament for the lost homeland of Zion.

 

To me, the words of the psalm are so powerful – they point to a refusal to view this new land of Babylon as home, a refusal to sing songs and “normalize” their new existence. The psalm goes:

“By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our lyres.

For there our captors demanded of us songs, and our tormentors mirth, saying,

‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’

How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

 

So again, just like in the Christian Scriptures, there’s that edgy, seditious refusal to accept the current political reality. There’s that insistence on keeping citizenship in the real homeland elsewhere.

 

In a sad irony, some Palestinian groups living in occupied territories today have now adopted exactly this anti-normalization strategy in their dealings with Israelis. Having been forcibly displaced from their land and living as second-class citizens, they resist any kind of dialogue or athletic play or socializing that would legitimize the Israeli regime in any way. They won’t sing or pretend to mirth – anything that would suggest acceptance of Israeli oppression and occupation. After all, how can they sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? Like the Jews in ancient Babylon, these Palestinians contest the status quo with every breath.

 

So Christians tend to look forward to a future time – the end times when everything is finally made right; Jews and perhaps Muslims tend to look back to an idealized past of intimacy with God in a natural paradise. Both work to keep the dream alive of a better time and place and state of being.

 

Classic Unitarian Universalism, on the other hand, rejects that idea that there’s a better time and place. We tend to focus on this world, this life, this time, and this state of being. We don’t know from an afterlife and we are appropriately skeptical about romanticizing the past. We figure that the “good old days” weren’t as good as they were cracked up to be. The minister of First Unitarian Church in Providence, Rhode Island, James Ishmael Ford, has an article about this very topic that articulates the UU perspective beautifully. He’s just had an encounter with a Christian minister who was talking, much like Rick Warren, about encouraging her congregants to see themselves as “citizens of heaven,” just passing through on earth.

 

He writes, “This really bothered me. …I had to respond that I couldn’t disagree more. My mission, my work, is to recall people to the fact that our home is here. In a larger sense we are citizens of this world. And, more intimately, our knowing is found in this body. This place here, this place now, this being and nowhere else, is our true home.” This is a very Unitarian Universalist perspective and it’s also very Buddhist: carrying a torch for some imagined past or holding out for some imagined future, we will miss the spectacular beauty of the present moment. Reality itself will pass us by. Instead, our task is to embrace our real lives in all their marbled wonder. And this is clearly right on some level. It’s, on the face of it, obviously true. We do risk dreaming our lives away waiting for something better and there is tremendous beauty in the here and now.

 

But the story is not exactly that simple either. Because, as my rabbi friend found out the hard way, it’s an incredible privilege to be able to shrug and blithely say, “I don’t believe in an afterlife” or “I prefer to focus on this world.” That’s all well and good if you’re not serving a life sentence on Rikers Island. That’s all well and good if you’re not a Palestinian mother whose son was shot by the IDF or if you’re not a gay man in Uganda. It’s great to embrace this life wholeheartedly if you’re not struggling with depression, if you were loved as a child, if you have friends and a roof over your head. Otherwise the suggestion can sound brutally empty and patronizing.

 

As we’ve seen, the question of our true home is both spiritual and political. Even those of us who are not materially down and out, whose lives are objectively good, still live in a fragmented, broken world. We still live in a world where we are so often dislocated, alienated from our communities, our God, ourselves. We’re disconnected from nature, watching helplessly while our ecosystems collapse around us. We’re plugged into entertainment and unplugged from relationships. We scramble to make money while we lose time. We’re chronically isolated and lonely. In a world like this, it is appropriate to be, in Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s term, “maladjusted.” It is spiritually healthy to resist normalization. It’s essential to remember that the world, as it is, is not the world as it has to be. That we, as we are, are not who we have to be. It’s right to feel a little uncomfortable and out of place and to sense that we were made for something else, something better. This is not all there is.

 

And so maybe the answer for Unitarian Universalists is to see with dual vision: on one hand embracing the beauty of the present, living fully into this reality and making the most of this life. On the other hand, keeping a little strand of resistance in our hearts, a faith that there is a Promised Land and we’re not there yet. Maybe the work is, in the words of one of our dharma statements, to “love where there is life and lead where change is needed.” Let’s allow the prison inmate and ourselves the hope that life is much larger than it seems and that we can hold this world a little lightly. Let’s maintain dual citizenship: both citizens of this world and citizens of heaven, praying and working for the day when earth and sky meet and the world we inhabit and the world we long for are one and the same.