Musings on the Daily Lectionary - Heaven

Last night on the Colbert Report, the intrepid host interviewed Lisa Miller about her new book entitled, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife. She noted that most Americans believe in heaven but few of them have a very well defined sense of what that means. In fact, most notions of heaven are cobbled together from a variety of sources, with very little reference to the Bible or any other sacred texts.

"For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the human spirit goes upward and the spirit of animals goes downward to the earth? So I saw that there is nothing better than that all should enjoy their work, for that is their lot; who can bring them to see what will be after them?"

I know a lot of Christians who might find these words troublesome, even offensive. But of course they are from the Bible, today's reading from Ecclesiastes. They are perhaps even more offensive when you realize that the word "spirit" doesn't describe what most of us mean by the word. There is no immortal soul here. Rather it describes the essence of life, including the bodily part.

It startles many people to discover that the Bible nowhere speaks of people going to heaven when they die. (Paradise, mentioned by Jesus from the cross, is not the same as heaven.) The first Christians were terribly concerned about fellow believers who died before Jesus' return, worried that they had missed out on the Kingdom. The Apostle Paul reassures them that when Jesus returns, the dead will be raised. But in the meantime, they are dead.

Going to heaven when you die is one of those places where Christian belief got merged with Greek ideas about immortal souls - another idea not found in the Bible. And if one of the most deeply held beliefs of many Christians isn't actually biblical, what other places have we gotten way off track?

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