Expecting Heaven

In a scene of the movie Perks of Being a Wallflower, a teenage Charlie Kelmeckis asks his English teacher, Mr. Anderson, why nice people choose the wrong people to date. Mr. Anderson, speaking from his wisdom and experience, responds, “We accept the love we think we deserve.” This seems to be Mr. Anderson’s way of telling Charlie, and us too, that our expectations have a way of determining what we are willing to accept for ourselves.

Mr. Anderson’s words have proven to be true as I’ve lived in a perpetual state of disappointment and despair the last 15 years as a Tennessee football fan. Of course, every fan wants their team to win, but I have noticed that there is always more pressure to succeed on teams that have a history of winning, like my beloved Vols. It’s hard watching your favorite team lose year after year when you grow up hearing about the program’s giants like Peyton Manning, Jason Witten, Reggie White, Al Wilson, and Tee Martin. It’s hard to stomach being a middle of the pack SEC team when you hear of the glory days of always being at the top of college football. You see, the problem isn’t so much the average, and occasionally above average, seasons that we Vol fans see each year. Plenty of football teams are happy about winning 7 or 8 games per year. Rather, the problem is that Vol fans have an unquenchable lust for winning, one rooted in the exceeded expectations of 30 years ago, that is not satisfied by the product they see on the field as of late. It’s because Vol fans deem themselves worthy of a dominant and successful football program that they allow their high expectations to drive their passionate demands until they get what they want.

While there isn’t a lot of proof these days that Jesus is a Vols fan, I suspect that he intimately understands the power of expectations. In Luke 4, Jesus comes preaching good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovered sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed – all declarations of hope and expectation that these groups of people surely hadn’t imagined they’d ever attain. Jesus is injecting an energizing vision of a different reality into the hearts of his tired and weary hearers. He is providing them new wine skins of expectation in which they can hold the new wine of God’s kingdom (Matt. 9:17). Jesus knows that the poor and oppressed will never fight for a different world, a world that looks like the kingdom of God, unless they first realize that they are worthy of healing and love.

Luke 17:20-21 tells us, “Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.’” Jesus is telling us that God’s kingdom isn’t just a place we go to when we ‘fly away.’ It is also, and I would argue more predominantly so, a new world that we find when we look within the sacred beauty and worth of our own souls. In hearing “the kingdom of God is within you,” God has given us permission to imagine, expect, and realize the will of God on earth as it is in heaven. 

As Christians, we continue to expect Heaven in our lives, homes, communities, and countries because we believe that we and our neighbors are worthy of the love, justice, and care of God’s kingdom. It is because we are already citizens of God’s kingdom that we are enabled to reveal God’s coming kingdom in the present (Phil. 3:20). Gordon Fee writes that, in a sense, we are a people “stamped with eternity” who “now live the life of the future in the present age, the life that characterizes God himself.” In other words, being a Christian cannot be marked with a passivity of waiting to die and suddenly perfected. Rather, being a Christian is about the active toil of laboring with God in transforming the world as it is into the world as it should be.

Because God’s kingdom is within us, God has bestowed upon us an enormous capacity to be the authors of our world. However, in light of an ongoing opioid epidemic, widespread poverty, rising COVID-19 deaths, and inadequate access to healthcare, I suspect we haven’t began working for a different Appalachia because we simply don’t think we are worth it. We’ve internalized the garbage of Hollywood and Wall Street, who only see us as people who are too slow and dumb to be taken seriously. The dominant culture of our society tells us that saying “ain’t” and “y’all” somehow makes us “deplorables,” and it seems as if we have started to believe these lies. Yet, accepting this wrong and dehumanizing narrative as our own leads to detrimental effects not only emotionally and psychologically but also socially and institutionally. If it’s true that we only accept the love we think we deserve, then it is also true that we only accept the justice we think we deserve. To unpack this a little bit, it means that we only accept the health care we think we deserve. It means we only accept the public schools we think we deserve. We only accept the wages we think we deserve. We only accept the economic relief we think we deserve. Simply, our expectations about what we are worth receiving from our government, our churches, and each other directly affects the kind of Appalachia we are willing to complacently accept or tirelessly create.

Philosopher Leo Tolstoy offers us some wisdom around how the kingdom of God should inspire us to work for a world that is radically different than the one we currently survive in today, one that is marked with violence, debt, poverty, senseless death, and scarcity. He writes, “The condition of Christian humanity with its fortresses, cannons, dynamite, guns, torpedoes, prisons, gallows, churches, factories, customs offices, and palaces is really terrible. But still cannons and guns will not fire themselves, prisons will not shut men up of themselves, gallows will not hang them, churches will not delude them, not customs officers hinder them, and palaces and factories are not built nor kept up of themselves. All those things are the work of men. If men come to understand that they ought not to do these things, then they will cease to be … Men cannot know when the day and the hour of the kingdom of God will come, because its coming depends on themselves alone … All we can know is what we who make up mankind ought to do, and not to do, to bring about the coming of the kingdom of God. And that we all know. And we need only each begin to do what we ought to do, we need only each live with all the light that is in us, to bring about at once the promised kingdom of God to which every man’s heart is yearning.”

I urge you to listen to the light that is in you, that light that reveals the kingdom of God in our very midst. What we expect to see when we take our last breath should also inform what we expect to see while we live and breathe. Yet, this requires that we believe we are worthy of living in a better world. I want you to know that what others say about us isn’t what God says about us. We deserve more than the crumbs of Wall Street’s table. We deserve more than a seat of the peanut gallery of Congress. We deserve more than the hollow lies of Republicans and empty promises of Democrats. No, we deserve more affordable health care. We deserve more rural hospitals. We deserve more stimulus checks to help survive a pandemic. We deserve broad-band internet access across the Appalachian region. We deserve a living wage. We deserve paid maternity leave. We deserve better education. We deserve churches that care about our bodies as much as they care about our souls. We deserve the kingdom of God made manifest in Appalachia because God says we are worthy of its peace, justice, and love.

Perhaps I am guilty of expecting too much. Or perhaps I just believe that God’s will for our world is eternally better than the current reality in which we live. I admit that it is not easy living into our belovedness in a world that says we are otherwise. But we don’t have to believe that we are who billionaires say we are. We don’t have to believe that we are who our institutions say we are. We don’t believe these things because we are God’s beloved, and it is the love of God that grants us permission to expect nothing less than the fulfillment of God’s will on earth as it is in Heaven. We wait in hope of the eschaton, but we actively wait. Yes, we are in pain, but we are worth healing. Yes, we are rejected, but we are worth accepting. Yes, we have only been given crumbs, but we are worth a seat at the table. Yes, we feel the weight of our grief, but we are worth saving. Friends, expect Heaven in this world and do not stop working for its completion in our midst until the day we realize that we journey our hollers and hills on streets of gold.