In our Epistle lesson this morning, St. Paul writes,

In 2 Enoch we read, "They took me to a place and led me up on to the Third Heaven." Isn't this our earliest conception of Heaven? It is a place which is up.

The learned Jewish doctors and elders of Jesus' time had worked this out to a fine degree of detail. It would have been impossible for us to learn of any of this had it not been for the destruction of the Zion Temple. Jewish learning and study proceeded through a process of oral teaching and disputation. We receive a glimpse of this when Jesus is discovered in the Temple disputing with the doctors. Nothing was written down. The repository of faith was a living repository constantly being transmitted according to imperatives issued in Deuteronomy:

But the Jewish lifeworld entered a political crisis in a the first century that changed that calculus radically. The Temple on Mt. Zion and all Jerusalem would be razed to the ground in 70 A.D. The people would be dispersed. Where might be that living repository of teachings and beliefs now? Reluctantly, therefore, the teachings of the Scribes, Pharisees, and other schools were distilled into documents collectively known as Talmud, which would become the basis for all Jewish belief and teaching until modernity and the emergence of the Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements.

By virtue of this series of calamities, we are able to take our seat silently in the Temple and listen to the teachings of the learned doctors as Jesus did. Understanding these deep backgrounds, we are able to picture Heaven as St. Paul did, as the Apostles did, as the multitudes did, and upon this mental map situate Jesus' all-important phrase, the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Talmud specifically sets out and names the Seven Heavens:

In it, we read of the Seventh Heaven, Araboth, also described in Ezekiel's vision (Ezek 1), which is the locus of the Ophanim (wheels of fire), the Seraphim (the highest rank of angels), and the Throne of God, held aloft by the four Living Creatures, the Hayyoth, or Throne-bearing Cherubim.

St. Paul is not assumed into Heaven as Enoch, Moses, and Elijah were. We might call his experience a foretaste of the Kingdom. He ascends briefly passing through the First Heaven, Vilon, defined in Hebrew as curtain. This realm, governed by Gabriel, reveals light to a world that otherwise would be in darkness. We read, for example, in Isaiah 40:22 that God stretches out the heavens like a curtain.

He passes on to the Second Heaven, Rakia', translated as firmament (Gen 1:17), where the planets and stars are fastened to a crystalline sphere.

Finally, he arrives to the Third Heaven, which represents the first-century conception of full union with God. Here is the locus of the Garden of Eden, or Paradise. St. John the Forerunner was depicted as the Man of Eden. And Jesus promised the good thief, "Today you will be with me in Paradise" (Lu 23:43).

The following describes Enoch's arrival to the Third Heaven:

Those of us who think of Heaven as being a place utterly unlike the world, a magical kingdom fundamentally different and apart, might insist on a perpetual divorce between dirt and God. Yet, we have this treasure here and now — though, unavoidably, it is surrounded by worldly grit and people who most certainly have divorced themselves from God. Moreover, St. Paul is taken to the Third Heaven where he is. "Whether in body or out of body," he cannot say. There does not seem to be a leave-taking nor a glorious return and reunion with the world. What he proposes is more like a Divine dimension that is present and with us even now. Does he break through into Heaven, or does Heaven break through into him? We cannot say.

To a Christian this is not news. Our Lord and Master, Jesus, our Christ and King, was fully man, yes, but also fully God. As He is a Person of the Holy Trinity, then that Holy Fellowship is shared with One who is fully human, the Son of God, Who continues mysteriously to be Jesus of Nazareth. That is, we humans, adopted sons and daughters of God the Father, have a real share in this Triune Divinity.

In this, we begin to appreciate the resurrection of the Body. As the Word of Creation is our exemplar and faultless pattern, our bodies and souls are joined in hypostatic union. We learn from Scripture that our body is the holy temple in which our soul reigns and has mastery .... if we would but let it. My wise spiritual mentor told me, "We will be resurrected in all of our beauty whatever that is." A teenager asks, "Will the paraplegic walk?" Yes, if that is part of her beauty. A husband wants to know, "Will my wife be sixty-five or sixteen when she ascends into the Greater Life?" She will be resurrected in the fullness of her beauty whatever that may be.

St. Paul writes,

Does not every woman and every man born into the world see this? Do we not look out on the world and see the perfection that underlies all that God made? Are not the ever-changing skies an impossibly perfect and living artwork which no earthly painter could ever rival? And river valleys and cataracts and the sublime sea crashing on our coasts? Is not the history of all arts a vain attempt to imitate the original Master? We describe art with the Greek word mimesis, "holding the mirror up to nature." And this has been the striving of every artist since the caveman: to create again what God has already created.

We live in the midst of His art, and we ourselves are part of this Divine Creation. We appreciate, both from within and without, that it is perfect .... and yet blighted by disease and death and betrayal. Our faith teaches us that these grave flaws go to the heart of human relationship with God.

If Heaven is different from our world, it is different not by addition, but by a process of subtraction. Is not this the recurring teaching of the Gospels? The branches that are not part of the true vine (by their own will) are pruned and thrown into the fire (Jn 15:6). A great net catches every kind of fish in the sea, and the angels remove the wicked from the just and cast them into the furnace (Mt 13:47-50). The harvest of wheat will be perfected by the removal of the weeds which will be bound, bundled, and burned (Mt 13:30).

The Seven Heavens also suggest a process of subtraction: no darkness, no ravages of time, but a pleasant land reminding us of everything we have ever loved from the time we were children .... and this treasure, which was ours from our birth, we continue to hold securely in gratitude .... if we only would.

"We have this treasure in clay jars," St. Paul exclaims with excitement. He teaches us and enjoins us and cajoles and even threatens us to protect and honor this treasure .... that it not die and devolve into a funeral urn of lifeless dust and worse. We have this treasure, and we gather as a spritely dust, even living stones, as individual temples (1 Cor 3:16) built into a vast spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5), united with God, which Jesus calls, "the Kingdom of Heaven."

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.