This idealized newsfeed (HT ME) was really fun for me. It might not be all your hopes and dreams, but it got my imagination going.
It also got me thinking about how we talk about heaven. A lot of our songs and language about the restoration of a broken, groaning creation amount to odd quotes of ideas and images that don’t connect much to the greatest hopes we have for ourselves, or humankind. The glory of streets of gold and vindicated martyrs that fills the eyes (and ears, and nostrils) of John of Patmos has come, too often, packaged as an ancient-future aesthetic in the worst way: a distant, irrelevant, often gaudy and usually baroque collection of characters and props that don’t generate the excitement incited by what we experience in a movie theater, even when it’s no closer to experience than what we read in Revelation.
But in John’s vision, the imagination is cast around something super-real; something on the fringe of conceivable, but rooted very much in the world we inhabit. What are the things out of our reach, that only God could be worthy to hold in hand? Who are the people or situations that seem least likely to gain favor or justice in this lifetime? Which regimes seem least likely to ever submit to righteousness?
Yeah, that’s at the center of things, when the New Jerusalem drops.
NP: Al Green, Just for Me
Oh this reminds me of a joke!! About a rich man who is told he can take ANYTHING he wants with him to heaven. So he packs a ginormous like carpet-bag of gold bars right? He gets to St. Peter and St. Peter asks him “You can bring anything you want to heaven. So why in the world did you bring bricks from the street?”
get it?? get it?? because heaven’s streets are bricks of gold!! buwhahahahahaaaaa. (I heard that one in a sermon!)
As for your conclusion…
From your lips to God’s Ears…
A few weeks ago we went to Fresno to celebrate my paternal Grandfather’s 90th birthday. Days later I was thinking about what it must be like to know that your life is near the end. I wondered how he would be eulogized, and how so much of what I know about him would not, could not be explained at a funeral service.
Then I imagined my own eulogy. And I conjectured that many of the things that I make priorities today will not be worth mentioning at my funeral, or even after a few more years of living. Now your blog entry got me to thinking about what seems important in the scope of eternity.
I think they use ground up microphones to fill in the cracks between the gold bricks that pave the streets in heaven…
I’m sure they do. Thanks for that reflection, Randy.
but microphones are instruments. that’s not Christian!!
i’ve always thought it’s kinda weird that considering everything that makes up creation, heaven is supposedly going to be a bunch of man made stuff like houses and roads. i’m hoping for more of a garden-like heaven and less of a mansion. that’s just my personal preference.
Exactly Erin. That’s why they grind them up.
ohhhh. well that makes much more sense
I can’t imagine heaven actually being like a gold cobblestone road or like the Wizard of Oz either but it is really interesting how we (collectively) imagine and describe heaven.
David, as long as you write sentences like this, I am your biggest fan. This one jumped out a grabbed me.
“What are the things out of our reach, that only God could be worthy to hold in hand?”
Thank you for reflecting, and thank you for writing.
Your aunt in the Spirit