It is often said that the clergy have only one or two sermons in them and that every sermon is a variation on an oft repeated theme. I’m not sure what my regular themes are but in preparing for this last sermon today it seemed to me that I have rarely preached on the subject of heaven. I don’t think I’m alone in that – unlike our Victorian predecessors neither heaven nor hell feature very often in the modern sermon. The point of those Victorian sermons was to encourage the congregation to avoid the one and head for the other. Nowadays I think it might be possible to talk about heaven not as a reward but as a model – what image do we have of heaven which might influence our vision for life here and now? John Donne once starkly implied that we wont recognise or feel at home in heaven if we take nothing of heaven with us when we die; ‘Christ shall consider what joy thou broughtest with thee out of this world and he shall extend and multiply that joy unexpressibly; but if thou carry none form hence, thou shalt fund none there.’ So a present reflection on heaven might be important after all.
I have never been very impressed by those supposedly after-death experiences which talk about walking into the light or being greeted by lost loved ones – they are understandable but the problem with them is that they do not mention God and what lies most immediately beyond death is the nearer presence of God. Heaven is the presence of God so that it might be appropriate to say not, ‘Our Father who art in heaven’, but, ‘Our Father in whom is heaven.’ So this question about our image of heaven becomes a question about what it might mean to be in the fullness of God’s presence.
That was a question which most challenged Edward Elgar when he came to write that part of the Dream of Gerontius which tells of Gerontius coming beyond death into God’s presence. There is a kind of blinding flash in the orchestra followed by a sometimes, somewhat strangulated tenor, singing on a rather high note, the words, ‘Take me away…’ Elgar’s friend Jaeger described it as nothing more than ‘a touch of the miserables.’ What Elgar seeks to describe musically is the experience of a soul ‘consumed yet quickened by the glance of God’ and most listeners have disagreed with Jaeger. That glance is the glance of judgement which shows Gerontius his need for cleansing and healing in purgatory. It is the recognition, at least in Catholic theology, that dying is not a dramatic ending but a process of preparation for life in the fullest presence of God.
And how are we to imagine that life? It is unusual in books on serious theology to find a chapter headed, ‘How to be happy’ – and yet any decent book on Thomas Aquinas should contain such a chapter. Aquinas believes that we are perfect, fulfilled and good when we are happy, and that that is the goal to which God’s grace draws us. So to imagine the life of heaven in God we have to imagine what for us might be an image of perfect happiness. And to express that I want one last time to talk about music.
Clearing up the vicarage has involved looking through a lot of videos on which I have recorded television programmes going back to the earl 80s. One such programme concerned the Amadeus Quartet, whose one surviving member Martin Lovett has lived here in Hampstead for over 40 years. In that programme the second violinist Sigmund Nissel responds to a question from Bernard Levin concerning his feelings about always playing second fiddle. Nissel replies: ‘When we play, one hopefully knows everything that goes on, but isn’t quite aware of one’s own part – it disappears – after a long time of playing it doesn’t matter what part you play.’ The experience of playing in a string quartet or perhaps also of singing in a small choir or even perhaps, on special occasions, of singing a hymn in a full church can be like that; you know your own part, you know what everyone else is playing or singing and eventually you become conscious of being a part of the whole; as Eliot put is, ‘You become the music while the music lasts.’ Perhaps that is why Christian tradition has so often imagined heaven as a choir – a body of individual musicians each contributing a voice but dependent on the whole because their own part doesn’t make sense without the whole. And that is not just true of music it is true of all Christian worship and service on earth as in heaven.
And it is also true of Christian ministry. Looking back over the past fifteen years I am conscious not of being the first violin but of having been a part of a great work – the work of this parish has gone on and where it has achieved anything it has been because of a group of people working together each contributing his or her own voice, for the sake of the whole. And where that truly works in any church it truly gives you a glimpse, I think, of the happiness of heaven. Amen