After this I looked. . . . - Revelation 7.9

Shakespeare called death, "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns." Maybe that was true in 1600, but not, it appears, four centuries later. In fact, we find ourselves awash in accounts of the afterlife. I personally know one individual who claims to have made the round-trip, but there are plenty of others.

Darryl Perry, a financial adviser from Florida, claims that after a six-month heads-up, God spirited him away to Heaven where, awash in brightness, warmth, and color, he met several relatives and, eventually, God who, against Perry's veto, slung him back to earth. Mary Neal, an orthopedic surgeon from Wyoming, drowned while kayaking; she also saw lots of lights and colors before making the return trip to write her book, To Heaven and Back.

Then, of course, there's Colton Burpo who, as a toddler, died of a burst appendix and visited the afterlife preparatory to publishing the best-seller, Heaven Can Wait. Well, it was ghost-written (so to speak) by his dad, Todd, a Wesleyan minister. The franchise now includes a website, a children's book, and a feature-length movie. 

Are these accounts true? I like what my friend and colleague Dr. Tony Miranda of Stark College and Seminary says on the subject: "I don't know. What I do know is, we don't need them." And we don't, because we have one account of such an incident that the ancient church recognized as divinely inspired and has continued to read, one which remains a best-seller (well, the anthology that includes it is a perennial best-seller) after two millennia. Sure, we argue about what it means, but that only proves that for two thousand years now, we've agreed that whatever it means is the truth. The apostle John went to Heaven (without the bother of dying) and, at Christ's behest, wrote an account of his experiences. We know it as The Revelation.  

So what is Heaven like? Well, it's a little disappointing. John didn't meet any dead relatives, such as his brother, James, one of the first Christian martyrs. In fact, to hear John tell it, Heaven seems to be entirely focused on the throne of God and the worship God receives there. In Revelation 7.12, for instance, redeemed souls in glory offer seven-fold praise to the Almighty. The number seven is big in Heaven, if John is any indication. Here, it most likely conveys the idea of the sum total of all possible praise. James and Peter and Paul, all probably dead by the time John wrote, could've been jostling shoulders in the scrum and never even noticed one another, so focused were they on the Lord. 

Mark Twain once noted that, for the average person, Heaven "has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists - utterly and entirely - of diversions which he cares next to nothing about, here in the earth, yet is quite sure he will like them in Heaven." Heaven for eternity; Sunday worship for ninety minutes max.

And toss in another factor: John's Heaven jumbles up redeemed souls from both sides of the world's border walls: from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages. And since John could plainly see this to be the case, we conclude that their nationalities and pigmentations and dialects do not meld into a tasteful beige and a bland Esperanto, but retain all of their racial and regional peculiarities. 

Once again, Twain wonders that "Here in the earth all nations hate each other, and every one of them hates the Jew. Yet every pious person adores that heaven and wants to get into it. He really does. And when he is in a holy rapture he thinks that if he were only there he would take all the populace to his heart and hug, and hug, and hug." 

So as our dreams of endless green fairways and calorie-free ice cream fade in the face of an eternal worship service, and our red-lined racial boundaries buckle, we have to wonder: If Heaven disappoints us, is there something wrong with Heaven? Maybe the better conclusion is that there's something wrong with us.

Jesus said the two greatest commandments are to love the Lord our God with everything we've got, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Then, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, he defined a neighbor as the guy we tell light-bulb jokes about. Since salvation is by grace alone, maybe these two ordinances are not ways to get into Heaven, but ways to like it when we get there.

Maybe Heaven, like coffee or opera or Russian novels, is an acquired taste. And maybe the process of acquiring that taste is what the Bible calls "sanctification." And maybe we'd better start developing our appreciation for the Heaven that really exists. So go to church on Sunday, and sit next to somebody who isn't like you - or somebody you don't like! If it won't help get you into Heaven, it will help you get into it once you're there.