The Gate of Heaven (is everywhere)

“The Gate of Heaven (is everywhere)”

Romans 12:1-8    Matthew 16:13-20

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 16, Year A, August 23, 2020

First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho

Andy Kennaly, Pastor

          Most Christians seem to project heaven “out there” or “up there” as a separate location with a different time zone.  Not only is Heaven detached from Earth, but they assume it exists outside of linear time, and apparently space as well, as sitting on a cloud with Jesus forever is the game plan for millions of people, its what they’re betting on as their planetary exit strategy.

But there is an alternative orthodoxy that not only allows heaven to be a distinct place in another realm of existence, unaffected by time and decay, but also avoids one of the downsides of this dominant system of belief.  That downside involves the discounting of earthly experience: that when heaven is projected or futurized as the goal of life, then this world is suddenly second-class, not worthy of divine status, and it becomes viewed as an object of scorn.  This is on the scale of a planet to be used because its destined to die anyway as it crumbles into finite dust.  But also, our own bodies become viewed as sinful, broken vessels, the flesh that is impure when compared to a spirit that is considered separate.  Comparing, judging, and defending become the name of the game.

This view does not take the Incarnation seriously, that in Jesus heaven and earth come together in a human being in physical form.  And this view leaves the ego largely in tact as we allow our false self to run the show.  Life becomes limited to what our minds can perceive and verify; everything else is a threat to be pushed away, even death and suffering.  Once again, Jesus debunks this operating system and, as Paul reminds us, invites us to conversion of mind and heart, giving us an entirely different way of perceiving reality.

Through this transformation, scripture readings like this morning’s texts from Romans and Matthew take on a different hue, and the same words can come across differently.  Like Jesus talking to Simon, whom he renames as Peter, saying that he’s giving him the keys to the kingdom of heaven.  This is Jesus’ way of sharing with his disciples, in Caesarea Philippi, that the  Earth, and everyone in it, is imbued with God’s Presence, right now, and our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, right now.  This is our True Self.

Looking at Romans, it is the mercy of God experienced in Paul’s life that brings him to appeal to others at a relational, subject to subject level as he says, “brothers and sisters, […] present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”  Spiritual worship is equated with our bodies, both holy and acceptable.  He shares the importance of humility, challenges individualism by focusing on inherent unity.  As one body there are many gifts, but Paul doesn’t get hooked on the contextual, doesn’t get overly attached to how things are in their external forms, but invites people to claim this deeper unity, to live into the sacredness of life as a gift through conversion of heart and transformation, which leads to renewing of the mind.

Renewing the mind, shedding false narratives, opening to mystery grounded in experience of the divine, healing our survival-tactic delusions, and loving away our fear.  Our typical ways of thinking do not help us discern the will of God, because the ego, by default and as a coping mechanism to survive in this world, assumes it is separate and superior, and because it’s easily offended, it reacts to defend itself, which is exactly what Paul is helping the Church in Rome move away from, sharing the importance of conversion of heart, transformation of mind, and unifying the material with the spiritual, for both are holy and acceptable.

Jesus says a similar thing through his conversation with Peter.  This week we read part one of that dialogue.  Jesus enters Caesarea Philippi, which for the disciples would be a rather frightening place, considered very distant from God’s Presence.  It has temples for the pagan god Pan, the god of shepherds and herds, or Jupiter, or other fertility gods, and the city was exceedingly patriotic, with a strong presence of the Roman Empire.  It’s in this seemingly distant, morally corrupt place of false-allegiance, (God-forsaken, they might assume), that Jesus gives a lesson about true identity.

It starts out general as Jesus wonders what the general public says about who he is.  But then Jesus hones it in more personally, directly to the disciples, asking, “Who do you say I am?”  Simon responds, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”  With that, most Christians are satisfied, Peter gets a gold star for his faithfulness and his speaking on behalf of the other disciples, and the Church finds it’s foundation.  But the scandal is: it was a trick question.  Not only did they miss that it was a trick question, but they answered it, which only served all the more to put their delusions on display.

What makes it a trick question?  Jesus uses the pronoun, you.  In a lesson about identity, he uses the word, you.  In a teaching that takes place in the context of the Empire, they miss the implicit, experiential dynamic of shedding false narratives.  The fact that Jesus asks them, “Who do you say that I am” is another way of him pointing out the fact that they are still operating in the judging mind, still clinging to definitions based on externals, still assuming separation as their paradigm.  The key word, is his use of “you.”  This, by the way, is behind Paul’s words in Romans, encouraging humility and thinking through a renewed mind with sobor judgment, not ego-centric or self-referential, but based on spiritual perception of unity, grace, and love; gifts that invite a dying before you die.

In a CD audio series called The Art of Letting Go, Richard Rohr explores the theme of dying before you die by mentioning the monk, Thomas Merton.  It’s Merton who said, “One thing for sure about heaven, is there will not be much of you there.”  Rohr explores how to practice heaven, now, which is really what Jesus is talking about with Simon.  Let’s keep a mental picture of Jesus teaching the wide-eyed disciples in the strange place of Caesarea Philippi as Rohr says, “What religion is primarily doing is talking about the now, in all of its revelation of the good and the bad of everything.  When we can stand before that and accept it in its emptiness and humiliation that it’s human and divine at the same time and they don’t cancel one another out, then it seems to me we’ve entered into heaven.  Merton observes that the gate of heaven is everywhere, that there’s nothing that cannot lead us to God, that the spiritual world is the same as the Earthly world, the material world, and so it’s heaven all the way to heaven.”  Transformed people can see this, live this, experience this, and trust this; not that its always perfectly practiced, but it only takes one experience to realize there is more to life than “the seductions of life: fancy clothes, fancy cars, fancy houses; they just don’t seduce you quite as much.  You can enjoy them, but you don’t need them, […] or build a society based on greed, or consumption, or control.”

This is why Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is good, acceptable, and perfect.”  It’s all there, all the time; it’s the perception that comes and goes as we waffle between our True Self in God and our false self.  What’s the false self?  Its simply the person we think we are, which is a relative identity.  Thus, “Who do you say that I am?” as Jesus baits them, exposing them as living in their false self.  But “What holiness is about is collapsing into your absolute identity.”  It means letting go of anything less than the ultimate and unending love of God, the very framework and enlivening energy of reality.

The unity of the spiritual and material world is what Jesus is sharing as shows the importance of conversion, so important that he changes Simon’s name, calling him Peter; switching the contextually conditioned identity, the Simon that Simon thinks he is, with that more absolute identity of a spiritual being grounded in the love of God, calling him Rock, which is what Peter means.  There is unity and agreement in that ultimate identity that can see heaven and Earth united as the same, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  The heaven is Peter’s very life, the fabric of living with warp and weft interwoven, one moving with the other.

Peter had answered, saying, “You are the Messiah, Son of the living God.”  Jesus declares this as a spiritual revelation, not dependent on the limitations of egoic thinking, but deeper and more reliable, so much that even the gates of hell will not prevail against it.  In other words, Peter and the disciples, in their contemplation of these spiritual truths, are moved to action from the sure foundation of spiritual freedom found in the Living Christ.  But Jesus also knows that even though Peter gets the right wording, he is filled with misunderstanding, prevailing assumptions of what Messiah means as a political savior.  But this is what next week involves.

For now, we rest in the grace of heaven and earth, unified, in Christ, as heaven is less a place and more a reality to experience, both Now, and even forevermore.  Thanks be to God for revelation, conversion, and ongoing transformation.  Amen.

Quotes from Richard Rohr, CD series by Sounds True, Living the Wisdom of St. Francis, The Art of Letting Go, Session Three, Dogmatic Liberation from Our Certitudes, track six, How to Die Before You Die