We Do Not Know
The drive to protect religious truth from heresy has animated many people their whole lives long. "Let's make sure nobody deviates from right belief. It's very, very important that we all think the same thing. Nothing is more important than that...." There have been eras in our history during which people paid with their lives for voicing the wrong opinion.
And yet, what can we really know about the things of God? Hardly anything. Even if we read our Bibles until they fall apart, even if we choose to think that every word in them is literally true, as concrete as a cookbook, much remains a mystery to us. All religious language is metaphor, the fumbling attempts of limited beings to communicate something beyond our power to know. Try as we might to get it all straight, it's beyond us.
To receive good news requires a certain humility about the things you already think you know. We are not the ones who tell God what he can and cannot do, based on our reading of scripture. God is the lord of history, not its captive, and scripture, divinely inspired though it is, was divinely inspired in history, and it is read in history. Throughout history, we have done different things with it, mutually exclusive things sometimes, making it the tool of our changeable nature without even knowing we were doing so. Scripture does show God, contains in its pages the hints of God, some of them yet to be unearthed from there, but scripture itself is not God. It also shows us our learning curve and our refusal to be taught. And God stands above it, unknowable.
Know God? Know what heaven is like, where it is and who is there? Know what they do? Not likely. We must leave the knowing for the time when knowledge is given us. For us, hope and trust in the love that sparks God's whole enterprise with us, a love that can welcome us into Paradise from the very cross itself, will have to be enough.
Lord, we do not know what heaven is like. We do not know what you are like. We know so little, and you know so much. Help us to accept our humility with joy, trusting in you to teach us what we need to know when we need to know it, and give us the wisdom to use what we do know to the betterment of the world in which you have placed us and to your glory.
-AMEN-
