The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 16, 2025

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. 1 Corinthians 15:19

I had a clergy colleague once who had some choice opinions about Christians “who were so heavenly minded they were no earthly good.” He felt very strongly that the business of religion and spirituality was serving others, advocating for justice, changing the world, and making life better for everyone — especially those who experienced injustice and oppression in this life. Too much attention given to notions of “heaven,” too much time spent maundering around in “mysticism,” he felt, detracted from the main mission of working out God’s will for worldly betterment, and was to be avoided.

I can see his point. I have known people who have tried to use their religiosity as a kind of defense mechanism against having to face the harsh realities of the world we live in. I have encountered believers who seem to think that the promise of a better life in the world to come means that we are not required to make any kind of effort to seek justice or improve social structures or make life better in the world as it is. I wrestle almost daily with the wish that my spiritual practice could lift me up and over and out of the messiness of politics and economics and worldly matters, and the conscience that spiritual practice is precisely what is supposed to give me grounding to engage the concerns of politics and economics and worldly matters.

I very much don’t want to be someone who is so heavenly minded that he is no earthly good.

And yet…

I have a hard time accepting that striving for justice and peace and social transformation in this life is the only meaning of faith and practice and spirituality and following Jesus. I can’t shake the feeling Paul expresses when he writes, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Partly that’s because the work of justice is never completed in this world. When Daunte Wright, a young Black man, was shot and killed by Kimberly Potter, then a police officer in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, grave injustice was done. When the jury returned a guilty verdict in Potter’s trial for manslaughter, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said it offered accountability, not justice. “Justice would be restoring Daunte to life and making the Wright family whole again. Justice is beyond the reach that we have in this life for Daunte.” The “accountability” afforded by the verdict gives a basis for working for better laws and protocols in policing, and is an element in creating a more just social system in Brooklyn Park; but it is not full justice. Full justice would make a difference to Daunte, personally; and that is no longer possible in this life.

For there to be full justice, there must be something beyond this life as we know it.

I think this is a particular instance of a more general principle as well. There is always more to an individual person’s life than can be captured in any political arrangement or social system. There is always more potential in an individual person’s spirit than can be actualized in any finite human lifespan. We are each motivated by fundamental desires for goodness, truth, and beauty that are never entirely satisfied within the limits of this life.

For there to be fullness of life, there must be something beyond this life as we know it.

Now of course, just because this life is often unsatisfying is by itself no argument in favor of there being a larger life. Perhaps it is just the case that life as such is unsatisfying. The feeling of a limit is not a sufficient argument in and of itself for there being something beyond that limit.

But as someone who believes in God — and particularly in a creating and co-creating God — I also believe that God gives us desires for goodness, truth, and beauty for a reason. And I don’t believe that reason is so that we will be tormented by desires that can never be fulfilled. If it is by God’s purpose that the desire exists, then the proper and fitting satisfaction of that desire must also, in God, be possible. And if we see that it is not possible in this present life, then there must be something in addition to this present life where the fullness of goodness, truth, and beauty, for each of us individually as well as in community, can exist. Our own innate, divinely inspired, transcendental desires point to the necessity of transcendent life.

Moreover, most of what we know about this life suggests strongly that reality is very much bigger than we know. This life, as I experience it day by day and moment by moment, is mostly confined to what I receive through my senses and retain in my memory and construct in my perceptions. I see light and hear sound and feel touch; I converse with a handful of people per day, and maintain direct relationships with a smallish circle within the community; I am aware of being connected to my environment through certain sorts of inputs and outputs, through uses of certain resources, through aesthetically appreciating certain vistas and weathers and skyscapes. This life is an ongoing synthesis of these elements.

But I also know that there is a great deal more going on in and around me than I am aware of in this synthesis of this life. The light I can see is only a very small band of the entire electromagnetic spectrum; radio waves and microwaves and even cosmic rays are also streaming around me all the time; and some of them create interactions and relationships that are important elements in the life I perceive — such as the Wi-Fi signals that connect my computer to the internet as I type these words. I certainly don’t perceive the Wi-Fi radio; but it makes an important relationship in this life. Other sorts of energy exchanges and physical interactions, both below the threshold and above the ceiling of my perceptual range, constitute the environment that makes this life possible. In a lecture I once heard, the physicist and priest John Polkinghorne pointed out that the motion of the molecules of air that we were breathing in that very room was affected by the gravitational pull of a single electron on the far side of the moon. This life is embedded in a very much larger reality.

That is true even of my own body. My body, I am surprised to discover, is not just a single organism, but is a colony of organisms. Within my gut lives an entire microbiome of bacteria, many of them absolutely necessary to my digestive processes. A balanced microcommunity of bacteria and organisms helps to regulate my immune system. Some of the organisms that make their home within me produce vitamins that keep my other tissues healthy. Even if I think of this body as entirely “my own,” there is much more to it than just me. This life is composed out of a very much larger reality.

And that is true on the psychic level as well, not just the organic and the physical levels. The contents of my consciousness are delivered to my awareness through processes of imagination and synthesis that operate at depths not immediately accessible to conscious thought. My immediate awareness is a mosaic of multiple influences — some obvious: the sun coming through the window, the feeling of air in my lungs, the memory of typing the last word and the intention to type the next one — some more subtle: the scrap of melody playing in the background of memory, the quote from a philosopher relevant to this topic that I can’t quite remember, the trace of love for my wife that is always there even when she is not — multiple influences too numerous to single out, together forming the dense texture of each and every now. People have left influences in me that have come to fruition long after the initial interaction, when that influence becomes connected to other influences and is lifted up into prominence in thought or feeling or action. And I have left influences in other people, for good or for ill, that have similarly been taken up into complexes of thought and feeling and action in their lives. What I think of as my self shades off into other selves and other personal realities, just as their selves shade into mine. In my own moment-to-moment awareness, this life is woven into a very much larger reality.

The reality in which I live is so much larger than I might guess just from the experiential content of this life.

The largest reality, encompassing psyche and organism and physics and society, is God. My life is a process of receiving and offering many influences, psychic and physical and social influences, most of them below the threshold of awareness; God receives and offers all the influences. God offers to all the actual occasions of the Universe the initial aim that influences them on their course, and God receives from all the actual occasions of the Universe the influence of their completed action. And God weaves all those influences into a single awareness of the-Universe-as-it-is-now-and-as-it-can-become. Alfred North Whitehead called this the “the Adventure of the Universe as One.” This life as I live it, this life as I share it with these lives of others, is only a single thread in this vast tapestry, only a single episode in this interwoven universal Adventure.

And that is why my hope in Christ is for so much more than just this life. What Jesus showed us in his life, ministry, teaching, healing, table-fellowship, death, and resurrection is a Way of receiving and offering in freedom and gratitude — a pattern of relationship, of mutual influencing, in which our lives are intentionally woven one with another and all with God. As we practice this pattern, we offer ourselves to be integrated more fully into God’s mission in the world for goodness, truth, and beauty. Striving for right-relationships of shared well-being, as we are empowered by the Spirit, worked out in personal relations of love, and in social relations of beloved community, and in political relations of justice and equity, makes us heavenly minded enough to be of genuine earthly good.

But offering ourselves to be taken up into God’s purposes reaches beyond the immediate framework of this life as well. Practicing receiving and offering makes us deeply aware of how we are always being taken up into larger divine patterns. The political campaign for policing reform that fails to be voted into law is not lost, but is taken up in the Adventure of the Universe as One and becomes an influence for new strivings for justice. The community organizing that seeks to work out equity and accountability and shared well-being, and is constantly frustrated by setbacks and resistance and incomplete successes, is not wasted, but is taken up into the Adventure of the Universe as One and becomes an influence for renewed effort. The life that is cut short by violence or illness or suicide is not gone, but is taken up into the Adventure of the Universe as One and participates in a reality larger than this life can imagine. Hoping in Christ, practicing the Way of Jesus, show us how this life is always and everywhere embedded in the larger life of God.

My colleague saw “heaven” and “earth” in a kind of opposition, and feared that too much preoccupation with the one would distract from important work in the other. But in truth “heaven” and “earth,” and “this life” and “resurrection life” as well, are better seen as complementary phases of the same thing, the one thing, the Adventure of the Universe as One. This life on this “earth” is that part of the Adventure, that subset of influences received and offered in co-creativity between God and creatures, that we can perceive and participate within the limits of the consciousness we have now. Resurrection life and “heaven” is that part of the Adventure, that nearer presence to God and deeper participation in God’s process, to which our transcendental longings point, and into which our consciousness momentarily expands in extraordinary experiences of worship or prayer or compassion, which the Apostles knew in their midst when the Risen Jesus appeared among them.

We hope in Christ for this life and for that larger life, because practicing the Way of receiving and offering in freedom and gratitude given to us by Jesus opens us up to God’s loving influence, and takes us up into God’s everlasting Adventure, for all degrees of life.

How can you receive the love of heaven, and offer yourself for good on earth, setting your hope in the Way of Jesus, today?

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The Rev. Dr. Paul Nancarrow is an Episcopal priest, whose theological work has focused on process-relational interpretations of religion and science, spirituality and liturgy, and especially on the co-acting of divine action and human action and natural action in sacramental work and worship. He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World, and blogs on “Transfigurations” at paulsnancarrow.wordpress.com. He can often be found contemplating the Adventure of the Universe as One from the saddle of his bicycle on back roads and rail-trails in the Midwest.