I’ll start with the insurance salesman. In an effort to “connect” with me he said, “You know, pastor, our professions have a lot in common.” Not wanting to cause a scene I obliged and replied, “Really?” “We both sell a product.” “I’ve never thought about ministry as product before.” I told him. “And I don’t get commissions.” “Look at it this way, pastor. Our challenge is to get people to buy something they won’t need until they die.”

I thought, “Where was this guy four years ago? I could have saved lots of time, work, and expense in seminary studying scripture, theology, church history, preaching, counseling, and pastoral care.” If I had known ministry was a sales job I could have gotten by with a couple courses in persuasive sales techniques and made a living selling tickets to heaven!”

I did not purchase a policy from “Joe the Insurance Guy.” I did not, and certainly do not see the sole purpose of the Christian faith as an insurance policy to get to heaven. But I’m sorry to say that this is the most prevalent impression people have of Christianity. It is a means to an end. Life in this world is something you “get through” as best you can. Your pay-off comes after you die and your beneficiaries divvy up your insurance money.

Jesus’ promised the thief on the cross, “You will be with me in paradise,” It’s a promise to all who walk in his way. With Paul I say, “If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is futile,” (1 Cor. 15: 16-17). In unison I say with Paul, “Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, and human hearts have not conceived the glorious things that await those who are in Christ. But we cannot reduce the gospel to an evacuation plan from our sin-sick, God-forsaken planet.

From the beginning of Christianity in Ireland, the Celtic Christians did not believe there was an unbridgeable gulf between heaven and earth. They believed the physical and spiritual realm “touched” each other. Only a thin, porous veil separated them. Heaven was not a place light years away. They believed that glimpses of heaven could be seen, experiences of heaven could be felt, and God’s Kingdom had a foothold on earth as it is in heaven.

There’s a verse from a song from the Steve Miller Band that says, “You’ve got to go through hell before you get to heaven.” But for those who have come to know that God is near and here, life as hell-on-earth isn’t necessarily so. The medieval Christian mystic, Catherine of Sienna said, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” Discipleship cannot be reduced to an exercise in delayed gratification. We do not have to wait a lifetime for our heavenly reward. We can have a foretaste and “live into” the reward now.

In Revelation 5 John has an epic vision that takes place before the throne of God and Jesus, “the Lamb.” It is a big crowd--myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands; wave upon wave of every person and creature in heaven and earth. ALL creation is there—everything that ever lived and lives, everything that has been or will be is singing. A vast choir made of humans, whales, wolves, whippoorwills, and wombats sings in perfect harmony: “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing,” (Rev. 5: 12). It is a diverse choir, and most of it’s members wouldn’t be considered choir material.

The southern writer Flannery O’Connor created the character, Mrs. Turpin, a self-assured, self-righteous, sanctimonious Christian who prided herself being several steps above the ugly, lunatic, white trash crowd. Mrs. Turpin had a frightening experience. In the doctor’s office waiting room she provoked a young woman who tried to strangle Mrs. Turpin, calling her a “wart hog from hell.” Back home as she slopped the hogs, Mrs. Turpin had a vision of a brilliant, fiery bridge coming from the pigpen and reaching to heaven:

A vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. Whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of lunatics shouting, clapping and leaping like frogs.

Bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself… always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.

They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable, as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away,” (Best Sermons 1, page 22).