Christianity as a religion is very good at using things from the world around us to tell our stories. We talk about the nature that surrounds us; we talk about the culture of our time; we talk about our communities; and we talk about the ideas, the philosophy, that controls our thought world. Christianity has been very willing to take on ideas from many different cultures and make them part of our life together. That’s because, fundamentally, Christianity is a religion about relationships, not ideas. Relationship with Jesus, relationship with God, and relationship with one another in this world and the next. It’s not really a religion about agreeing to a set of intellectual statements; they are important, but it’s not what sits at the heart of our faith; that’s relationships.
As a result, the Christianity we have now in Maine, here at Emmanuel, has absorbed a lot of different influences over the centuries. We dress our clergy in Roman royal court fashion from about 1,500 years ago. That's what's up with my fancy ponchos on Sunday. It’s what an official would have worn to visit the Emperor, so I wear it at the Eucharist because the Emperor of the universe- that’s Jesus not Palpatine from Star Wars- is present in our bread and wine, so I best dress for royalty. We have also dressed our thinking with ideas from different eras of the church's history that the church has lived through.
There is the Hebrew scriptures from the Jewish culture that Jesus was a part of. They are the bedrock of Christian thinking, but throughout our long history, Christians have acquired many more differing images of heaven. Starting with the world of ancient Greek philosophy and the Roman Empire, in which the New Testament was written, layers of imaginative thinking have been added. Every subsequent generation added its thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and places to the library of Christian imagery.
From the Greek philosophy of the New Testament era, we got the image of heaven as a place that is more real than the material world. For pagan Greek philosophy, heaven was the perfect world of ideals, from which human souls come and to which human souls return, escaping this material world, which was seen as evil by its very nature. Unlike Jewish thought, which believed God made the world good, Greek philosophy regarded our world as a mistake, a shadowy copy of the perfect eternal world.
The image of heaven as a perfect world of ideas is pagan, not Christian and follows from the thinking of Plato, who had a profound influence on the early church, as his writings were taught in schools. Because it was the first thought world Jesus' teaching was transplanted into from its Hebrew native soil, Plato's thinking has had an outsized effect on the Christian imagination. Later Christian thinkers developed his perfection/flesh thinking into the dualism of heaven and hell, grafting it ever deeper into Christianity. Notable thinkers who engaged with Plato's image of heaven as perfect ideas include Paul (of Bible letter-writing fame), Austine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, and even Martin Luther.
Consequently, Christians have created many images of heaven as being something celestial: bright lights in the sky where eternal beings exist as pure thought. I think of Dante's divine trilogy. You’ve probably heard of Dante’s Inferno, which is his description of his haters suffering in hell, and a very good read. The other two books in that series are Purgatory and Heaven. Dante's heaven is all spheres of light in the sky, and unlike the Inferno, it’s really boring. These ideas of heaven as a skyward celestial place stand in opposition to Jesus' own storytelling about the Kingdom of Heaven.
Jesus pretty consistently uses earthly metaphors to create his image of heaven. For Jesus, heaven is not progressing into the light, or flying around in space on a starship, boldly going where no one has gone before; rather, heaven is like a landowner’s vineyard. When Jesus tells today’s gospel story, he is on his way to Jerusalem in the area of Jericho. This was and still is a winegrowing area; if you Google it, the first results are for booking winery tours. Vineyards were familiar to Jesus' listeners; they were probably walking by one as he told this story. In Jesus' telling, heaven is not distant, unattainable, or intellectually perfect. It's more human, earthy, and homely. It’s relational, growing, and somehow already planted in this world.
The vineyard is a perfect example of humanity and nature working together to produce great fruitfulness and abundance. Vineyards are built on sloping hillsides that face just the right direction to catch the sun and ripen the grapes. These hills are terraced, and vines are planted. To grow, the vines require many years of continual tending and pruning in order to produce fruit. Wild untended grapes are small and bitter, and grow in little bunches.
The grapes you and I can buy in the grocery store are the products of many years of human effort: terracing, planting, watering, pruning, and tending all to produce this fruit. Yes, establishing a vineyard takes many years, and tending it was equally labor-intensive. Many people have to work sometimes over multiple generations to make a vineyard truly profitable. Consequently, the owners of vineyards in the ancient world could be quite stingy people. Jesus' image of a generous landowner is unexpected. Yet what he tells the first labourers is true: all have worked, and all deserve the reward. The modern formulation of this principle might be Karl Marx's maxim, “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” With vineyards, those who started a vineyard might labor many years in it, without seeing a crop, and those who come later might only be present for one harvest, yet all received the grapes.
The image of heaven as a vineyard that Jesus presents is one of both the slow justice of nature and the social generosity of God. It is not one of intellectual perfection but of growth. It’s the wisdom of trees, which grow slowest, last longest, and feed the most. Nature's economics features more of chance and generosity than calculation and planning. God, who planned the universe; who planted the vineyard, who set humanity to work in it throughout all the ages, gives to all the equal wage of love and relationship beyond our deserving. Heaven is made out of the things of earth because earth is made good by God so it can enter into a relationship with Heaven. Perfect eternity looks less like modern ideas of luxury and more like a restored garden of Eden, in which humanity's work is given dignity, and all receive equally.
The idea of the rapture is the ultimate outworking in our modern culture of Plato's' heaven of perfect idea and our world as an evil trap for the eternal soul. The rapture is just coming up on 200 years old, it comes out of the Industrial Revolution's domination
of nature. If we are all going to be taken up into the sky and the earth left behind for sinners, why would Christians try to save nature? We can burn the forests, poison the seas, and pave over the prairies because it’s going to be replaced anyway. We live in an economy and a culture that has embraced Plato's lie of an evil creation good for nothing but financial profit. We fail to see Jesus' truths of just work and wages for all, and that the world in which we labor is good. May we have eyes to see that Earth is the soil out of which the trees of heaven sprout. Amen.