Is Happiness Reserved for Heaven?

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

Heb. 11:1-3, 8-16

Today I want to talk about happiness and heaven and how they’re connected and why that matters.  So we’ll focus on the question: Is Happiness Reserved for Heaven? 

Scripture teaches and the church confesses that this life isn’t all there is.  In addition to our earthly lives as God’s creatures, God gives us another gift – heavenly life.  So death is not the final word.  By God’s grace, we too will share the resurrection from the dead that happened first to Jesus Christ. 

And while this is what we confess and believe, we also recognize that the life of faith isn’t believing in a list of things.  It’s about allowing your life to be shaped and formed by these basic beliefs.

Imagine a couple of scenarios with me and we’ll have a better feel for how this works:

 

Imagine that over the course of several years you experience a series of failures, setbacks, and disappointments.  Important relationships are lost.  There are financial worries and problems finding work.  Your health fails.  Now it’s not tough to imagine that this might rob you of your resolve.  It would become difficult to stay hopeful about your future. 

Now here’s the rub.  If you believe that happiness is reserved for heaven, you might throw in the towel.  You might despair of ever finding happiness in your own life, thinking, “Well, life is too hard.  I’ll be happy in heaven, but there’s no use hoping for happiness now.”

While that kind of response is understandable, it fails to receive the life that God offers to us now.  By deferring happiness until heaven, we lose sight of how God loves us and wants to bless us with joy, delight, pleasure, and contentment now.  Even in the midst of difficult and painful experiences, God invites us to seek opportunities to flourish and grow, to love and be loved.

Now imagine a different scenario.  Imagine that I’m face with another person or a group of people who have enormous needs.  I’m a teacher and I notice that there is a student who is struggling.  Or I find out my neighbor has lost her job.  Or a co-worker has become ill and has no family to care for them.  Or I find myself challenged by a group of young people with a drug problem.  Imagine coming up against some problem so large that it would require enormous sacrifice and the reorganization of your life to offer help.  And even then I don’t know if I could really make a difference. 

Now suppose I feel overwhelmed by this problem and my own meager resources and think to myself, “I’d love to help.  But this problem looks too big.  This is the kind of thing that God will deal with in heaven.  But as for right now, I don’t think there’s anything I can do.”

The issue here is not despair about my own happiness.  It’s despair about the happiness of someone else who is in great need.  Again, the despair is understandable.  The costs of entering into the situation to make a difference in the well-being and happiness of the other person are very high. 

And yet whenever we use “heaven” as an excuse not to act on behalf of others, we’re on dangerous ground.

In our reading from Isaiah, God’s fiercest judgment is for those of us who act and sound religious, but who use our religious lives to avoid becoming the kind of people God wants us to become.  “I don’t want your offerings and sacrifices,” God says.  “I don’t want your observance of the holy festivals.  I don’t want your pretend prayers.  What I want is for you to seek justice, defend the cause of the fatherless and the needy.”

In her introduction to God and the Art of Happiness, Ellen Charry writes:

“Western Christian theology is skittish about temporal happiness . . . because happiness has been primarily construed in terms of [heaven or the afterlife].  If proper Christian interest is in one’s ultimate destiny, attending to temporal happiness is at least beside the point, if not an affront to the Lord” (ix).

Charry’s suggestion here, and I think she’s right, is that Christian beliefs about heaven have some times undercut our beliefs that God wants all creatures to flourish here and now too.

Some of our familiar hymns give voice to this slighting of earthly happiness:

“Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face; and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.”

“Onward to the prize before us!  Soon his beauty we’ll behold; soon the pearly gates will open, we shall tread the streets of gold.  When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be!  When we all see Jesus we’ll sing and shout the victory.”

Now with this in mind, consider our reading from Hebrews 11:

Faith, we’re told, is “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (vs. 1).  So the life of faith isn’t like having in hand all you desire; it’s more like trust that hangs on God’s promises for the future.  God promises us a share in the resurrection that has already happened to Jesus Christ.  And we’re “sure” of that, not because it makes sense, and not because there’s any good evidence for it, but simply because God makes the promise and we trust that promise.  We have to place our confidence in a future reality that we can’t “see.”

But this teaching can be overcooked and taken too far.  This verse does NOT say that our present experience (our life in physical bodies) doesn’t matter.  It just says that this isn’t the basis of our faith and hope in God.

We’re invited to look to Abraham as an example of this kind of faithful trust in God.  Abraham lived in Haran as his home town.  It was where his house was, where he earned a living, where he raised his family, and where he enjoyed friendships.  But God asked Abraham to leave that familiar, comfortable place.  And Abraham did.  That’s faith.

Why is that a model of faith?  Because he obeyed God and left his home place “even though he did not know where he was going” (v. 8).  Instead of having a settled home, Abraham “made his home in the promised land” (v. 9).  That’s a beautiful turn of phrase.  God’s promises to us can be a kind of new home – providing the only stability and security we need. 

Abraham lived a wandering, mobile life in tents, we’re told.  Now, there is nothing wrong with tents.  Our son Henry loves Eastern Mountain Sports and REI and wants to work in a place like that.  And I saw a little one man tent that I almost bought because it was so cute.  And I don’t even like camping or tents!  Anyway, the point about Abraham and tents is that tents aren’t permanent.  You might drive a few stakes around the tent to hold it down in the wind.  But you don’t set them firmly in a foundation.

Living in flimsy, ramshackle tents, Abraham “was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (v. 10).

So Abraham is like us.  He wanted stability in life.  He wanted a life with some durability and permanence.  He wanted to live in buildings with foundations.  God promised to provide that for him if he would wait faithfully.  And he did.  He waited and trusted God his whole life.  And guess what?  He never received what God promised to him! 

“All these people were still living by faith when they died.  They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance . . . they are looking for a country of their own . . . they were longing for a better country – a heavenly one” (v. 13-16).

And the entire point of this chapter in Hebrews 11 is to encourage us to live with faith.  So we, too, are not to become obsessed with having all our deepest needs met in this life.  Nor are we to become sullen and angry with God if our lives are marked by unfulfilled desires.  We are to find our confidence and hope in a “heavenly country.”

OK, so let me ask again.  Is happiness reserved for heaven?

We have been talking together this summer about happiness.  In our culture we are awash in self-help books on happiness and so the assumption is that if you aren’t happy there’s something wrong with you.  Is that true?  Are we supposed to be happy all the time?  Is that what faith in God means – that you smile no matter what?

That doesn’t sound right to most of us.  We sense that there’s something “off” in  popular talk about happiness: on the one hand, it seems rather selfish and individualistic; on the other, it looks unrealistic, because all of us go through periods of struggle, failure, depression, and sadness.  And when those we love go through these things, we go through it with them.  The invitation to be happy all the time has a dark underside: it comes with the terrible burden that if you’re NOT happy, then you’re doing something wrong.

The picture that emerges in Scripture is quite different.  What God offers to us is a life rich with possibilities.  And while you might call it a certain kind of happiness, it has a depth and richness, a connectedness to other people, and a way of sharing in God’s own life, that no self-help book will ever suggest.

Here’s how Ellen Charry puts it in her book:

“Happiness characterizes God-lovers, and loving well is the key to happiness. . . . Therefore, ultimate happiness is becoming wiser and better by loving God.”

And it’s true that this kind of happiness won’t be perfected until heaven, but it BEGINS now.  Now let me add another quotation from Charry’s book to move us a little further:

“Salvation is an excellent pattern of living that is personally rewarding because it advances God’s intention for creation” (xi). 

So it might not look like this is about happiness, but it is.  She’s talking about the biblical word “salvation.”  But notice what she says about it:

1)   Salvation is an “excellent pattern of living”

2)   Salvation is “personally rewarding”

3)   It’s rewarding because “it advances God’s intention for creation”

This helps show that the Bible’s talk about “salvation” isn’t talk about something that will happen later, when you die.  It’s something taking place in your life right now.  She doesn’t mean that by living in patterns of excellence that we earn God’s favor.  She means that God loves us in a way that calls for a response from us that takes the shape of an “excellent pattern of living.” 

And living this way is deeply satisfying.  She calls it personally rewarding.  She doesn’t mean that there’s some distant reward called “heaven.”  She means that we can experience the life of faith as rewarding right now.  “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” says Psalm 34.

The most direct response to our question – “Is happiness reserved for heaven?” - must be “No, happiness isn’t reserved for heaven.”  The promise of eternal happiness in heaven does not bar us from happiness now.  It invites us to a life of excellence now, a life committed to increasing the happiness of others, as we become better lovers of God.

Here’s the recommended practice for this week:

This week I encourage you to take up one phrase from the Lord’s prayer as the theme of your week.  Pray it as often as you can.  Say the prayer when you wake up, before each meal, at work and in conversation with friends (not out loud, that would make you weird).  Here it is:

“Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”  Let this simple prayer roll around in your heart and life this week, and see what happens.