Lord's Prayer part 3

"Who art in Heaven"

The above picture captures pretty well our image of Heaven.  Some oasis in the clouds, perhaps with Pearly Gates, St. Pete with some kind of scroll or book in front of him, and maybe a line of people waiting to see where they end up.  What is heaven?

In Matthew, Jesus often talks about the realm of God as being the "Kingdom of Heaven" , while Luke envisions the Kingdom of God.  Matthew might have used the word "Heaven" because for some Jewish folks to write or even speak the name of God was too sacred.  Heaven became a safe way of referring to the sacred.  Is that what Jesus was getting at with this line?  Maybe, but I'd also say there is more too.

Wayne Muller in his book, Learning to Pray, writes, "When Jesus described heaven, he never spoke of a place; rather, he described a state of the heart, a way of being attentive to the sacred in ordinary things, thins we might easily overlook." Muller is building on an understanding from our Celtic Brothers and Sisters often thought of Heaven as all around us and that we could not usually see it. It is when we stumbled upon a "thin place" where the curtain separating the sacred and profane all of the sudden became translucent for a few fleeting seconds. So is heaven part of earth?

When the above four words fall from my lips on a Sunday morning, what I hear in my mind is "Whose realm is heaven".  This reminds me of Karl Barth's understand of God as "Wholly Other" (or "Holy Other").  God is not like us as human beings, no matter how much we want to try to craft God in our image.  God is Other.  Yet, for whatever reasons, God does make God-self accessible to us.  For Barth, God did that most profoundly in the incarnation (flesh/birth) of Jesus.  Jesus' life became a thin place in our world.  Jesus' teachings became wisdom for those of us who follow him to sense God in a new way, in the everydayness of our lives. Jesus opens us to this realm of God, which is different than the realm of this world and yet oddly the same.  Heaven becomes a way of describing God's way and God's vision for all of creation.

Part of the problem in our world today is because there can be moments when I sense God close, I start to accumulate these experiences of God.  Those experiences can boost my confidence and I start to go out on the shaky limb of thinking, "Oh, I've got this whole God thing figured out."  To speak of Heaven, reminds me of the Otherness of God and that I need to take care (as Matthew does) in what I say about God.

This part of the poetry of the Lord's prayer encourages us that even if God is as close as our next breath, even when we experience God in the collective "our" of our lives, there is also a "more than" quality to God, just out of our grasp, the Wholly Other Barth spoke of.  It's okay to life in that mystery, tension, and messy middle.  Because God is there and maybe even a bit of Heaven too.

May the traces of God's grace be scattered in your life today so that you are wrapped in the presence of the One who is Holy Other.

Peace