Wayne Danielson
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

June 6, 2004

John 14:1-7
Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

Revelation 21: 1-4
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Matthew 6:9
Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.

Son Paul's company has moved him again for the third time in six years - this time to Seattle. Paul, Judy and the two girls - Lauren and Paige - are settling in out there. I would like to pay them a visit, but LaVonne thinks we need to give them time to unpack first. We can go in the fall, I suppose.

Actually, I have an additional reason for wanting to go to Seattle.

Seattle is only a short ferry ride away from the famous Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia. Have you ever been there?

In 1904, the Butchart family began a project to convert 55 acres of an old stone quarry outside the city into a series of beautiful gardens. At first the gardens were simply for the family to enjoy. But so many people came out on Sunday afternoons and asked to see them that the family began to charge admission. Now, after 100 years of careful tending, the Butchart Gardens are among the most beautiful in the world. We visited them a few years ago, and, as we prepared to leave, we turned for one last look. All at once, I heard LaVonne sniffling.

"What's the matter?" I asked. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," she said, wiping her eyes with a tissue. "It just makes me think of heaven that's all. I don't want to leave - ever."

Indeed the gardens were difficult to leave. Their beauty made me think of heaven too, although my usual idea of heaven is more mundane.

My favorite image of heaven is a truck stop near Waxahachie that I chanced upon a few years ago. It had been a harrowing day on I-35 - lots of driving rain, trucks spraying our car with blinding sheets of muddy water - accidents all around us. But finally we drove in to a roadside café. It was what Ernest Hemingway would have called "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." It served breakfast 24 hours a day -- excellent bacon and eggs, pan-fried potatoes, and pancakes so light they seemed to float right above the plate. Nothing had any calories, of course, because after all it was heaven. And an angel named Mae kept an eye on my cup of coffee and filled it up again and again.

Yes, my version of heaven is over near Waxahachie. I won't tell you exactly where, because too many people might wind up going there, and that might spoil it.

We all have a personal concept of heaven don't we? We all have ideas of where or what heaven is, but we all know in our hearts that a café in Waxahachi or the Butchart Gardens are only pale reflections of the real thing.

In Iowa where I grew up we thought about heaven a lot. Iowa was cold and boring and filled with hogs and corn. Thinking about heaven provided a pleasant contrast. If we had a good piece of cake we called it "heavenly." The ladies at West Hill Methodist Church made a salad they called "heavenly hash." Its main ingredients were green Jell-O and lots of those little marshmallows. It did taste heavenly. When we were surprised by a bit of gossip we used to say "For heaven's sake!" We thought about heaven a lot in Iowa.

It was heaven that made me want to become a writer.

Hartzell Spence, a young man who graduated from Burlington High School a few years before I did, wrote a novel about his father, who had been the pastor at the First Methodist Church. He called the book, One Foot in Heaven. Hollywood made a movie out of it starring Fredrick March. Everyone in our town went to the movie and tried to figure out who was who. We decided that the woman who tried to boss everyone around in the church was Rena Richardson, and the tightwad who was against putting a new roof on the parsonage was almost certainly Old Man Swanson.

When Hartzell came back to town for the premiere of the movie, I went down to the hotel to interview him for the high school newspaper paper, The Purple and Gray. He seemed to me to be leading a pretty good life, what with a best-selling book and a movie, but he told me he suffered a lot from stress. He said he had eaten 80 pounds of chocolate-covered peanuts while he was writing One Foot in Heaven. He was still overweight from eating all those peanuts, but he seemed pretty relaxed to me. And rich - he looked rich. I decided to become a writer then and there, stress and peanuts and all.

Hartzell picked the title for his book from an expression we used in Iowa to describe people who were especially nice -- like Hartzell's dad. We said that they had "one foot in heaven." In other words, unlike the rest of us, they were so good and so nice they were practically assured a place among the angels when they passed on.

We thought a lot about heaven back then. Heaven was close to us, looking over our shoulders. Day by day we used heaven to put our ordinary lives in perspective. We compared earth and the things of earth with heaven and the things of heaven and tried to move things along in a heavenly direction.

We remembered that Jesus himself placed great emphasis on heaven in his teachings. He urged his followers to store up "treasures in heaven" instead of treasures on earth. Actually during the Great Depression it was pretty hard to store up any kind of treasure, but we were willing to try.

Jesus taught his disciples to pray to "Our Father, who art in heaven" and to ask that "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." To Jesus heaven seemed to be both a vision of the hereafter and a vision of the way life could be lived here and now.

In Iowa, a better life here and now was what we mainly wanted. We wanted a little heaven on earth. We wanted it to come right down in Des Moines County. We could see that God's will needed to be done here and now, and we were ready to assist in any way we could.

My dad had a job as a school janitor, but that didn't stop him from correcting the behavior of any juvenile delinquents he encountered in the schoolyard or in our neighborhood. Out for a drive one day, he saw some teenage roughnecks throwing rocks at a dog. He jammed on the brakes, got out of the car, and told those boys that they needed to stop it - right now. They looked at my dad, stopped throwing rocks, hung down their heads, and walked away. My dad checked on the dog, and when he saw that he was OK, he sent him on his way home as well.

At that moment, I think I saw the power and the glory of God for the first time. I was sure that the kingdom of heaven could come on earth, if we all continued to work at it as hard as my dad did. I was pretty sure that he at least had one foot in heaven.

Back then, we often read from the Book of Revelation. Revelation is a difficult book. It has many puzzling passages in it. We tried and failed to penetrate its secrets, but we all loved and appreciated and understood the writer's poetic description of how heaven would come down to earth one day:

And I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

The Book of Revelation seemed to say that heaven hereafter and heaven right now were both possible. What a remarkable idea that was. What a goal that was to strive for in our lives.

I am retired now, but it seems to me that I am as busy as ever. I have not found the time to do the serious thinking I looked forward to in retirement - the chance to bring some order out of chaos - the chance to find greater meaning in daily life - the chance to read the Bible from cover to cover one more time and see how my interpretations of it have changed. I think we all are busy. We all have lots of things to think about. We all have lots of distractions. But perhaps we can all find a few moments now and then to think about heaven -- the heaven to come and the heaven that surely exists all around us and among us, if we take the time to look for it and to do our part to strengthen and support it.

Surely we can find the time to think about heaven more than we usually do. Surely we can find the time to do the things we can to bring a little heaven into our daily lives and the lives of those around us. After all, what does it take? It takes no more than inviting someone to breakfast at a roadside café. It takes no more than helping a neighborhood dog who needs a friend. At least, that's the way it seems to me. I think if we put our minds to it, we can all find something heavenly that needs doing today. I'm sure of this -- with each good deed we do, we can come closer ourselves to having "One Foot in Heaven." And that would be a good thing.