The Heaven Agenda Part One

The Lord's prayer includes the important line "thy (God's) will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

I find something very compelling about the ancient covenant through which God's love redeems the earth and its people. First of all, it is a theological vision of faith that is entirely relational. It contradicts the highly individualized notion of salvation that has developed in the last 100 years. It is also a theology that is incarnational, like the Lord's prayer it suggests that honest spirituality works toward the emergence of heaven on earth.

The ancient covenant calls people into a way of life together. The way of life is summed up by Micah 6:8's proclamition of faithful living - "what is required of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God."
This is the path to heaven, not just for the individual, not just for the sake of when you die, but for the sake of the whole world.

My vision of church is that it aims, however humbly, to approximate this ancient covenant. A people who live not just for themselves, but for the sake of the neighbor, stranger, and friend. A people discovering what it means to love what God loves. A people learning to live and breath God's love.

Heaven and Hell are often taken to be literal places in the afterlife. I suppose it makes it easier for pastors to dramatize the meaning of things like redemption, grace, sin, and the like. Yet the reality is that most of our images of the afterlife don't come from the Bible, for little is said about it there, but rather from the classic book Dante's Inferno (The full title being The Divine Comedy) Dante's Inferno gives us a very dramatic and frightening image, but those images are theologically lacking when taken literally.

The best theological interpretation of Heaven and Hell that I've encountered is that what these terms reference is how close or far we are from God.
Are we close to God? Do we love what God loves?
Are we far from God? Do we lack love for what God loves?
Look around in the places on this earth that appear hellish. Some of them are the most religious places on earth. Yet they seem unable to love what God loves.

I believe the most basic mission of the church is to love what God loves. I like to think of it as the heaven agenda. This is what brings me back to the ancient covenant.

The ancient covenant, a vision of a people called out, a community bound only by a spiritual commitment to love what God loves. It is a commitment to be the vehicle through which God's love redeems people's lives, and the lives of our communities. It is a commitment to join with others to do justice, love mercy, and walk humby with your God - it is faith that through this commitmet, this way of life together that God's will is done, on earth as it is in heaven.