Written on April 25, 2008

[For the May 4 (or May 1), 2008 lectionary: Luke 24:44-53]

"LET'S (NOT) PRETEND" by Larry Patten

These are heavenly days.

Right now in California’s Central Valley, though summer’s blistering heat is rapidly approaching, we are blossoms and brisk mornings, green foothills and lingering snow on distant Sierra ridges.

Outside my office window Papaveraceae are orange blasts. Which is to say the California poppy’s are darn pretty in my garden. Today on a bike ride I saw leaves falling from trees. Odd. Wrong time of the year! Then, biking closer, I realized it was a flock of birds. Scores swooshed from the trees, circled low to the ground, and then swooshed up into branches thick with spring growth.

Indeed a heavenly time.

Over the last weeks, the lectionary is heavy with heavenly times. In this after-Easter sojourn, many of the scriptural readings pay homage to where Jesus goes next . . . heaven. The right hand of God. With the heavenly hosts. The dwelling places beyond.

Just two short verses from the end of Luke’s Gospel and we read Jesus was “carried up into heaven.”

But I think heaven is all pretend. Not that I’m completely against pretend. I’m working on a novel and spend part of my day making things up. Pretend often helps my faith.

Earlier in Luke Jesus was asked about “eternal life” and told a tale of a Jew beaten and left for dead on the road to Jericho. What happened next? You know! That pretend story still rattles our cages today.

Fly fisherman and raconteur of radical faith David James Duncan said that Jesus’ call to “love our neighbor as ourselves” was a fictional act of the highest order. It’s pretend! Duncan wrote:

Jesus orders anyone who’s serious about Him to commit the “Neighbor = Me” fiction until they forget for good which of the two of themselves to cheat in a business deal or abandon in a crisis or smart-bomb in a war—at which point their imaginative act, their fiction making, will have turned Christ’s bizarre words into a reality and they’ll be saying, with Mother Teresa, “I see Christ in every woman and man.”

The leap we take (or even the fearful stumble we barely manage) to imagine what it is like to be our neighbor and to serve our neighbor is the foundation of Christian faith. And yet, that act of serving starts with pretend. We entrust the unknown next moments to Holy transformation.

How much is Heaven a pretend place? In those final words of Luke, Jesus departed from the disciples and was “carried up into heaven.” Luke’s author repeated that scene in Acts 1:9, but a cloud was added for transportation purposes. Heaven by way of clouds? More pretend?

Is Heaven above us? I think it’s made up. Pretend. And, as much as I relish some “pretend” faith, I’m not much for heavenly pretending.

Yesterday, I took a walk near my suburban house. With my gaze narrowly focused on the dirt path in front of me, I pretended I strolled beside a mighty river. There were trees to my left and flowing, raucous water to my right. OK, the trees were scraggly pines thoughtlessly planted by a long ago developer, the “flowing water” was an irrigation canal, and the “raucous” sound was the constant traffic a few feet away on one of Fresno’s busiest streets. But I pretended. And it (almost) worked until I raised my eyes.

Unlike the ancients, we now know what is above. We really can’t pretend. Beyond the blue skies, beyond the far horizon, is a wondrous universe. Like a child’s first step, we have touched the moon and yet there are light years upon light years of planets and galaxies beyond the lunar surface. Ride a cloud all you want, the oxygen will run out soon enough.

I don’t ever pretend about “heaven.” In a memorial service I helped with last week, I never mentioned the person was “going to heaven.” I simply don’t and won’t say that. I have no idea what is next. The Bible doesn’t help much. Oh, yes, you and I can find bits and pieces that speak of heaven or hell. But even those zip codes, when mentioned, are suspicious. I remember a seminary professor explaining “Sheol,” the Hebrew word sometimes used for hell. Sheol, he noted, was likely an actual place where dead bodies were discarded. I shudder. Not because there is an otherworldly “inferno” ala Dante, but because there are still far too many “Sheols” on earth.

Of course we pretend there’s a better place, where clouds transport us to an ethereal zip code.

I walk along the path near my house. Scraggly trees. An irrigation ditch. I imagined a mighty river.

But I looked up. I wanted to see where I was going.

If there is any pretending I want to claim to strengthen my faith, it will not be by narrowly focusing on my patch of ground or gazing above and beyond the clouds. Instead, let me seriously pretend to look through the eyes of another. Let me leap or stumble forward to help turn “Christ’s bizarre words” into an earthly reality.

in Peace,

Larry