Why I’m not Going to Heaven

 Every year in my neighborhood I get a knock on my door by a group of Christians who ask, “If you were to die today, would you go to heaven”. My answer to them is no. They always have a follow-up and ask, “Why”. For this, I simply tell them that I don’t accept the logic behind their question and that I plan on coming back here after I die.

Salvation peddling in the sense of giving people a ticket to heaven is destroying our churches. It makes them funeral homes. They become just places trying to get people into heaven and they all have various systems for doing it. The Christians at my door told me that all I needed to do was to confess that Jesus is Lord and I’m on my way after I die. In addition, they also said I don't even need to go to a church. I just need to wait to die.  The only problem with all of this, at no time in the gospels did Jesus preach about going somewhere after we die. He preached about a coming Kingdom, a judgment, and about the resurrection of the dead, but never about going any place after we die.

The only person in the NT who made a definitive statement about where we go when we die was the apostle Paul, who said, “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8)”. Obviously, we can have the confidence that when we die our Lord will be taking care of us. However, whatever Paul is speaking about it’s not about our final destiny. As it says at the end of the Book of Revelation the dwelling place of God (Heaven) will be here on earth. Being back here on earth is our destination.

I understand that much of this might seem like semantics. Being with God is obviously the big picture.  Unfortunately, without a proper understanding of the resurrection the life we live now makes the created world meaningless. It becomes the place we are just trying to escape from. The thinking that follows this is that God is just going to destroy the world anyway. In contrast, if you believe that the Earth, the Creation, is the destination of God, his future dwelling place, it will change your whole understanding of reality.

If this world is God’s future dwelling place what I do here matters. My future resurrection will be built on how I have made this place for Heaven. This is why we worship, it is the reason behind our Divine Liturgy. The Liturgy brings God into the Creation, not just in us. The greatest evidence for this is that our whole liturgical cycle is built on an agricultural cycle. Consequently, we should probably get angry when someone wants to move a feast day to make it more convenient. For example, Ascension Sunday as it has become in the Latin church makes no sense. The Liturgy in all its expressions is aimed at renewing the created order. With a church that is all about getting out of here, liturgy becomes just holy entertainment.

Our future resurrection will be built on how we have made this place for Heaven. Not just our bodily resurrection but how we have influenced the world around us and how we have made it an extension of ourselves. It is real environmentalism.  I think the greatest example of this is how we relate to the animal world. In Genesis when God brought the animals to be named, the name was an extension of our ancestor’s humanity. To put it simply, when you love your pet, it becomes a part of you. It will be here with you on Earth in the resurrection. This is also part of the thinking behind some of our fasts. We Byzantines in our times of fasting do so from animal products. We are not being healthy vegans. Abstaining from animal products is a prophetic action that prepares the world for the coming Kingdom where we will no longer be eating animals.  

God will be making a new Earth as it says in scripture. That does not mean he is getting rid of the old one. He is going to renew it, perfect it, and make it his dwelling place. This is something that begins right now with his sons and daughters on earth. As Paul teaches the whole creation groans as in being labor awaiting the revelation of the Children of God. Creation is not going to be wiped out, it is going to be built upon and this building begins with all of us.  We are called to make this a holy place and God has given us his Spirit to sanctify the Creation. After all, we were commanded to bring the gospel to all creation, not just humans (Mark 16:15).

We are all coming back here. Heaven’s destination is here on Earth. We are not stewards of creation, as some might believe, that’s not even a biblical idea. We are the high priests of creation called to perfect it and make it new. This is an essential belief behind the resurrection. God is going to bring us all back here to finish what we started.  If we start teaching this our churches will stop being functionary funereal homes that prepare people for death. We need to learn that our worship in a church is not for the dying but for the living. When we worship, we prepare the world for what is to come.