Heaven on Earth

Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, Coming for to carry me home. I saw a band of angels coming after me, Coming for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home.

If you get back to heaven before I do, Coming for to carry me home. You'll tell all your friends I'll be coming there too, Coming for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home.

Such a good song. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is credited to Wallace Willis, a Choctaw Freedman who was emancipated from slavery in Oklahoma at the conclusion of the Civil War.

The imagery employed is particularly important for us, as we grapple with the implications of the Gospel and the eternal destiny of humanity. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is on the very surface a song about going to heaven. I mean when we consider what we have been traditionally taught about the end goal of the Christian life — that we accept the salvation of Christ and go to a great party in the sky when we die — then it’s incredibly easy to assume that this is where the chariot that is “swinging low” is taking us.

But I think that there is more to it.

This is the final message in our sermon series “The Simple Gospel” where we have been looking at the Gospel — The announcement of a new king named Jesus — and seeing that while it is vast in its implication, it is quite simple. It goes like this:

God created us for the purpose of spreading goodness across the world

We have proven that we are not good at that on our own. In fact, we are incapable.

So God came to earth in the form of Jesus Christ to step in on our behalf and rewrite our stories, making it possible for us to fulfill our God-given purpose to spread goodness across the earth.

So today we are going to talk about the final piece of the simple gospel puzzle — the end game.

How shall we then live? How do we live in light of the knowledge of what Christ has done for us?

This was an incredibly controversial question that polarized the first century Christian scene. You know what a polarized world looks like? Yeah I figured.

So here’s the deal. In the first century the gospel message of Jesus started to spread pretty rapidly across the Roman and greater middle eastern world. Now the message and the movement began in a centralized place — Jerusalem — which to this day is the religious center of the Jewish faith. The first Jesus followers were Jewish. It’s very important we remember this.

Now, the Jewish faith had a very serious way of living the religious life. And without getting too far into the weeds, we have to understand that they had very specific practices and ethics when it came to like every single aspect of personal and communal life. These practices are what was called “The Law.” What can get really confusing is trying to understand what “The Law” refers to. Most obviously it referred to the 613 laws of Moses that are contained in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.

But the law didn’t really stop there. The law had been interpreted and debated and added to over the many hundreds of years that the Jewish people did life together in this world- Just like the practices of the Christian faith have shifted in many ways over just the past 500 years since the protestant revolution.

So by the time of Jesus, “The Law” was much more strict and far reaching than just the 613 laws of Moses — which is hard to believe. Also by the time of Jesus people of the Jewish faith are not all living in Jerusalem. There is this phenomenon called “The diaspora” which is the disbursement of God’s people throughout the known world as a result of conquest, the Babylonian Exile, Persian and Syrian oppression, and then the widely connected world that Greek and Roman culture brought when they started massive building projects and roadways that connected their empires.

So this means that the message of the Gospel which began in Jerusalem and then spread outward to the rest of the Roman world had to face some pretty staunch hurdles and growing pains when it came to converting and incorporating Jewish persons into a new religious community that was open to non-jewish people as well.

Because Christianity was born out of Judaism, there was a lot of concern about whether or not Jesus’s followers needed to become Jewish first, and whether or not they were bound to follow “The Law.”

Are you with me here? That’s a lot… but it’s critical to where we are going here. Because these early followers of Jesus were receiving this good news of Jesus and wondering the same thing that we wonder… “How shall we then live?”

Well, in a not so little town in Modern Day Turkey called Galatia, Paul answers this very question. There is dissent in the community and the people in control have begun to insist that non-jewish converts to the Christian community join the jewish faith via circumcision and follow the law of Moses. To which Paul says — ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

After a long diatribe on how wrong they are, he finally settles down to explain to them why the law existed and how they are called to live now that they have encountered the Spirit of God through faith in Jesus and his Gospel.

Galatians 5:16–18 NRSV

Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.

So the law existed to put moral constraints around human activity. Remember, before the transformed heart made possible through Christ, humans were incapable of living in a way that fulfilled the diving purpose of spreading goodness across the world, so God gave these moral guidelines — and punishments — to try to teach people how to live.

But now, as people who are led by the Spirit, the law isn’t the highest authority in the lives of believers.

Now quick Time Out: This doesn’t mean the speed limit doesn’t apply to you. The laws of the land you live in are not the laws Paul is talking about. Sorry. Ok Time out over.

Onward with Paul’s discussion:

Galatians 5:19–21 NRSV

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

So here’s like how not to live. Here’s what the law existed to protect you from. But you shouldn’t even want to do these things if you are following Jesus and are led by the Spirit.

But here’s the tricky thing — these last words of the phrase: Those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

For a long time we’ve probably looked at this and read “these people aren’t going to heaven.” And like sure I can see how you might think that, because “Heaven” and The kingdom of God are things that we have grown to equate as one in the same.

But when Jesus introduced the Kingdom of God he wasn’t talking about the far off place that we go when we die. He said that it was something that was drawing near — aka “Swinging Low” — in particular what he was referring to was the reality that as he took the throne as king of the universe, that heaven was drawing closer to earth. What he meant was that heaven and earth intersecting with one another is the kingdom of God.

So by living in a way that gratifies the flesh, that is selfish, that spreads darkness rather than goodness in our world we are choosing to live outside of the potential that God has made possible and invited us to live in.

So if that’s all what it’s like to live outside of the kingdom of God, then what does it look like for us to live inside of the kingdom of God? Glad you asked

Galatians 5:22–25 NRSV

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.

Here it is. The answer to the age old question: How shall we then live?

Well live in a way that spreads the goodness of God. Lovingly, joyfully, peacefully, patiently, generously, faithfully, gently, and controlled.

Easy to say, harder to practice. Trust me. I know. But this is what the Kingdom of God offers us. This is what the Kingdom of God looks like. This is the Kingdom that we, as subjects of the one true king of this world, Jesus the Christ, are called to make a reality.

We won’t do it perfectly, but we do it to the best of our ability until the day that the king returns and completes this work in us and for us.

You see, the end goal of the Gospel is not simply escaping this world or escaping an eternity in hell. The end goal of the Gospel is that Heaven and Earth perfectly intersect once again, just like they did in Eden. But this time there will be no fall from grace.

However, we aren’t meant to sit on our hands and wait for that final victory to happen to us and for us. We are meant to live in a way that brings glimmers of this final hope to our broken and hurting world. We are meant to engage, transform, and spread goodness across this world so that our prayer “on earth as it is in heaven” can come more and more true each day.

When we revisit the haunting and beautiful words of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and read them in the context of the ancestors of our black and brown siblings I believe they point us to this truth. This was a song about escape, but not escape from this world. It was a song about escape from the world as they experienced it.

They are both a nod to the salvation of God as well as the hope found in the underground railroad and other efforts to bring enslaved persons into a promised land of freedom — a place where perhaps heaven and earth may be closer together for them than hell and earth were during their enslavement.

What lay on the other side of the Jordan? The Promised land of God, a place where God’s freedom and presence reside.

What’s this mean for you and I? Well I think it’s pretty obvious by now. But in case you missed it… the Gospel means we all have a job to do. The Gospel is not just something that God did to us and for us but it is something that God has invited us to be a part of.

Our original purpose is to spread God’s goodness across the world — to make it a place where heaven and earth collide. And our continued purpose is the same. Is it more difficult now that the world’s gone mad? Yes. But that hasn’t stopped God, and that means it shouldn’t stop us.

It’s so easy to look at all of the hurt, all of the pain, all of the suffering, and brokenness in our world and just want to ignore it, avoid it, say “somebody ought to do something about that.” But we aren’t given the luxury of ignoring and avoiding. Every time you think “somebody ought to do something about that” you’re darn right they should. And the somebody just might be you.

We are living in a time where we have really come to the realization that our attempts at placing the responsibility for the burden of our hurting world onto others has not worked out.

The institutions that promised to care for the vulnerable have fallen short. It’s time for the church to step up. We are the chariot, called to swing low and bring the kingdom of God near and carry those who are hurting, waiting, hoping, HOME.

Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home.