A cartoon in this week’s New Yorker shows us St. Peter standing at a podium before the gates of heaven. He has a quill pen in his hand, and he is consulting a book. Behind him, at either side of the gates, are sentry boxes manned by foot-soldiers from one of the regiments of the Household Division that guards the British monarch; they are dressed in their red tunics and bearskin helmets, with bayoneted weapons at their sides.
Much though there is to consider here on earth these days, today draws our minds to heaven as we contemplate death. Not only are we still processing the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the grief of the English nation; we are gathered here on the anniversary of our own national grief - a day the New Yorker memorialized at the time with an image made in shades of black ink on black ink, which seemed to say almost everything that could be said about how we felt that day twenty-one years ago today. Those feelings return easily when we think about that awful day, don’t they?
Part of the church’s ministry is to not look away from death, but to confront it, to be honest about it, and to try to grasp the truth about death that God has shown us through the gift of his Son Jesus, whose death was the turning point in the divine enterprise, where death was concerned. It was Jesus’ death that began the process by which, as the old hymn puts it, “he closed the yawning gates of hell; the bars from heaven’s high portals fell.”
There are no bars holding shut the golden gates in the New Yorker cartoon by Brooke Bourgeois, which bear only the slightest resemblance to the gates of Buckingham Palace. They are not locked tight. You can perceive a gap between the two gates, and you can see that they are ajar. It could be that they are just beginning to open, or that they are almost finished closing. But they are not locked shut.
Heavenly gates are mostly the subject of cartoons these days, since not so many people believe in them or worry about them as used to be the case. But with death so much on our minds, we might wonder about them. And if we do wonder about the gates of heaven, I suppose the question is: Who will be allowed through? Or, more specifically: Will you or I be allowed through? When life on earth has ended, is there a life in heaven that awaits us, and if there is, will we be allowed in? Who can get past the gates of heaven, and enter into the presence of the Lord?
The Gospel reading assigned for today offers us a hint to the answer to that question, even though, at first glance, it does not appear to have much to do with death. Jesus concludes the parable of the lost sheep with the assertion that “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” I don’t know who those ninety-nine righteous persons might be. I don’t think I have ever met them. But I have known some lost sheep; I have been lost myself. And if there’s joy in heaven over the repentance of a sinner, I suppose God might be keeping track of the repentance of us sinners here on earth. Maybe that’s why in the cartoon, St. Peter is consulting a book. I know it’s childish and naive to think of heaven and our relationship with God this way. But sometimes our religious and theological insights are childish and naive.
Childishly, we tend to think that the better we are - by which I guess we mean the more perfect, more holy, more pure we are - the better our chances of getting into heaven will be. But this calculus - that heaven is a reward for the righteous - has never been very appealing, and it is based on a faulty premise; that the better you are, the more God loves you.
I’m reminded of an insight that I heard expressed years ago from this pulpit, and that it’s been valuable to repeat from time to time. It came in the context of challenging the notion that God will love you if you are good enough. If that’s the case, then we might live our lives haunted by the question: How good do we have to be? And this is a problematic question, because there isn’t really an answer to it. But here’s the insight that I heard from this pulpit years ago: God doesn’t love us because we are good enough. God loves us because we are weak and stupid.*
God loves us because we are weak and stupid. Not despite the fact that we are weak and stupid, but God love us because of it. Of course, we are also marvelously made in the very image and likeness of God. So, please don’t hear this insight as an attack on your self-esteem. But it’s partly because we humans are so stupendous in our accomplishments and abilities that it is useful to remember, from time to time, that we are also weak and stupid. And I’ll say it again, God does not love us despite who we are; God loves us because of who we are, because he knows how much we need his love. We heard Moses reminding God of this very aspect of divine love when he convinced God to “turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind, and do not bring disaster on your people.” Moses might just as well have reminded God that we humans are weak and stupid, but that God made a covenant of love with us anyway.
In the Gospel today, we heard the Pharisees and the scribes grumbling about Jesus because he welcomed sinners and ate with them. That is to say that Jesus made fellowship with people who were not good enough for God’s love, as far as the Pharisees and the scribes were concerned: sinners who should be left in the hands of an angry God. The Pharisees and the scribes are depicted in the Gospels as hypocritically holier-than-thou, quite in contrast to Jesus and his followers. But, of course, today it’s us followers of Jesus who are often regarded as hypocritically holier-than-thou. We still have much to learn from Jesus.
“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices.” God loves us because we are lost, and God rejoices when we get found. There is joy in heaven over every sinner who repents. And repentance is the choice to turn around and do things differently: the decision to seek forgiveness and to offer it, the will to work for peace while everyone around you is waging war, the conviction that you should give when all you have ever been taught to do is take, the possibility of living your life as though there are only two kinds of people in the world: good people and good people in pain.
Today, death seems close at hand as we remember the victims of 9/11, as we hear the muffled bells tolling across the British Isles, as we think of those whom we love who have died, or who are near to death. I could name names of the deaths that seem close at hand, and so could you. And still we wonder: Who can get past the gates of heaven, and enter into the presence of the Lord?
Who knows whether or not there really are gates at the entryway to heaven? I prefer to hope that heaven is not actually a gated community. But the image of the gates of heaven helps us to consider that there is a way in to heaven, just as it helps us to consider that there might be ways to be kept out of heaven. And the way we live our lives might have something to do with it.
In the parable of the lost sheep, Jesus teaches us that the question was never really, How good do we have to be? The question was never really about how perfect, holy, and pure we could be, since we could never be perfect enough, holy enough, or pure enough; no one can be. The only question, really, is whether we repent: whether we have tried to turn away from our own mistakes, and to do the best we can to amend the things and the people we hurt when we were being weak and stupid.
Maybe there are gates at the entryway to heaven. If there are, then everything I believe about God suggests to me that there are no bars across those gates, they are not locked shut, rather, they are still ajar. And whatever guards might be standing there will be, I hope, only for show. And the book that rests on the desk before St. Peter is not, I think, a book in which are recorded the details of just how good or bad you have been, whether you are a queen or a commoner. The book includes your name, the name by which God himself knows you, and perhaps some intricate marking that tells St. Peter if you have ever turned away from the thing you needed to turn away from, if you have sought forgiveness, and offered it, if you have worked for peace in the midst of war, if you have chosen to give when everyone else was taking, and if you have lived your life, despite evidence to the contrary, as though the only two kinds of people in the world are good people and good people in pain.
That’s repentance. It’s what leads us out of an existence that is drawn in shades of black ink on black ink, and leads us toward the golden gates of heaven that have been unlocked and still stand open and ready to welcome the likes of you and me, for whom the angels of God are ready and waiting to rejoice!
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
11 September 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
*This insight came from Fr. Nicholas Stebbing, CR, in a sermon preached at Saint Mark’s
St. Peter preapres for a royal audience by Brook Bourgeois, in the New Yorker, 12 Septemeber 2022 issue