Heaven, Here

Recently, I had someone from my family come to our church. I was conscious she wasn’t a Christian per se, but she grew up in the church and so was able to slink into the rhythm without too much trouble. And when we travelled home together, I was struck by her reflection. She shared how her experience of church that day was nothing like what she had been exposed to growing up — a church in her youth where she was forced to believe a set of doctrines, where she had to name herself as Christian, and was made to feel bad if she didn’t show up every Sunday. Church, to her, was more a place where affirmation of belief defined the community but had little to do with her or her soul’s deepest desire. But when she came into our space, she shared how this worship service awakened something within her — a yearning, for the world and for herself, to enter into who we truly are beneath the noise. She spoke about the rituals of singing, of letting go, words of love spoken into our time and place, and prayers of hope, and how it all felt so deeply human. Rituals, she said, humans don’t get enough of — rituals made more powerful even among people she didn’t know and a community she wasn’t a part of. Rituals, she said, are needed in our world more than ever. Receiving this outside point-of-view was not only humbling and moving, but also challenging. It made me ask myself why we do this church thing at all — what keeps us coming back, week after week, and why it is that what we often label as holy or religious are, simply, what it means to be human. Because these rituals are embedded everywhere, even outside the walls of the church. Bearing witness to the Invasion Day Rally last week felt like walking into an outdoor church as thousands of people gathered around me in every direction. We heard testimonies of persecution, responses of sorrow and lament, and through it all sermons of love stronger than hate were repeated over and over again. As we walked together from Parliament House to Flinders Station, we sang songs of justice, peace, and hope. As someone who doesn’t normally like crowds or standing underneath a blazing sun, to say events like these are outside my comfort zone would be an understatement. But the more I attend these gatherings, the more I realise that even though I go to bear witness and to be a visible sign of Christ’s love, the truth is that I need these gatherings more than they need me. Because as much as I love facilitating these powerful rituals Sunday after Sunday, it has been a heavy start to the year — locally and globally — and I needed to mourn. I needed to cry. I needed to hear words of love spoken by people who have every reason not to love. I needed to sing songs of hope with neighbours and strangers, knowing that the same kind of space was being held all across the country at the same time. I needed a space where I could simply be part of the gathered and witness the presence of God. Because these rituals humans keep returning to — in churches and on streets, in sanctuaries and in public squares — are not anomalies. They arise from something we know instinctively: that we are not meant to grieve alone, that justice is too heavy to carry in isolation, that hope needs witnesses, and that love grows when it is shared. Which brings us to the scene we hear in Matthew’s Gospel today. Jesus begins by going up a mountain, and for those listening closely, that detail matters. Mountains are meeting places in the biblical imagination, always echoing back to the first mountaintop encounter where Moses met God on Sinai. In other words, mountains are the place where God meets humanity, where heaven and earth kiss. This is important for the author of Matthew’s Gospel because from the very beginning Jesus has been named Emmanuel — God with us — a name we sang through Advent and Christmas and a name Jesus embodies in this moment on a mountain at the beginning of his ministry. So as Jesus sits on this mountain, we are not simply watching a teacher deliver a sermon; we are witnessing God taking the posture of teacher, not to issue a list of rules, but to reveal God-with-us. And before a single word is spoken, people are already gathering — a crowd who have just heard Jesus proclaim the good news of the kingdom and seen with their own eyes the curing of disease and sickness among the people, from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan. These are the grieving, the poor in spirit, those hungry for something more than the world has offered them so far, including the disciples. Jesus does not separate them, correct them, or ask them to prove their faith. He sits, they gather, and then he speaks blessing. What he blesses is not strength as the world understands it — not certainty, not success, not a list of values to live by or doctrines to profess — but the very conditions of human life present among them: grief, vulnerability, longing, gentleness, hunger for justice, and the costly work of making peace. These Beatitudes are not morals to be mastered; they reveal God-with-us and what happens when people gather around this kind of God. Because something else is happening here that is easy to miss: Jesus is not merely describing them, he is transforming them. In speaking blessing over those the world names as lacking, failed, weak, and vulnerable, Jesus undoes the stories told about them — stories that equate worth with productivity, confuse blessing with comfort, and mistake power for domination. The Beatitudes do not deny suffering; they challenge the assumption that suffering disqualifies, that the long and hard work of peace, humility, grief, and compassion is weak. They do not glorify poverty or grief; they refuse to let these realities have the final word. What Jesus does, not just in these blessings but throughout his life, death, and resurrection, is form a different kind of imagination — a different sense of what counts as strength, a different vision of what kind of life is worth living, and a different hope that is unrattled by the waxing and waning of the world. Importantly, this is not information delivered to individuals; it is formation happening in community, among the crowds and the disciples. And it matters that the disciples haven’t done anything yet. They are not taking notes on how to be saved or compiling a list of moral behaviours to live by; they are being shaped by listening, by letting these words disrupt the inner logic they have inherited, and most of all by simply being with the one who chooses to be with them. Notice the tense Jesus uses: some blessings are spoken in the present, others lean toward the future, because hope is being trained. Jesus teaches them not only to live in the kingdom of heaven that is already theirs, but to let the future of God reach back into their present realities and rearrange how they understand their lives. This is not pie-in-the-sky optimism; it is grounded, costly hope that changes everything — the kind of hope that keeps people showing up, sustains gentleness in a brutal world, makes room for mourning without surrendering to despair, and refuses to accept violence and injustice as inevitable. These blessings come before the disciples achieve, confess, or profess anything; the only thing they do is show up. And in that being-together, with Jesus among the disciples and the crowds on the mountain, heaven kisses earth. We can still see this meeting happening here and now — when communities large and small gather in hope all over the world, in churches and mosques, in temples and in marches. And right at this very moment, on Fitzroy Street, it looks like bodies dancing, rainbow flags flying, and stories carried openly, celebrating identity hard-won and love no longer hidden. Different gatherings, different languages, different traditions, different identities — and yet the same human longing, a longing that refuses to die no matter the darkness or distress of our world. This reminds me of a line I read last week from someone living among the protests against unlawful raids and murders happening in plain sight in Minneapolis. They wrote, “I wondered if moving to Minneapolis last year had been a mistake. Now I know — it wasn’t a good idea. It was a great idea.” A line that speaks to what happens when we show up with the gathered in mourning, humility, peace, and defiant rejoicing — we participate in the human longing to be in the place, and to become the place, where heaven and earth meet. These places become a haven, their own kind of saving grace, despite the hatred, violence, and intimidation that may surround them. This is what Jesus reveals to us: that heaven is not a distant destination reserved for after death, earned through enough good deeds or correct beliefs. The only heaven Jesus ever speaks of — here and throughout the Gospels — is a heaven that is ours here and now, present tense, whenever we gather with the persecuted, whenever we gather in peace, mercy, and humility, and whenever we gather with the poor in spirit, the mourners, and those who thirst for justice. And perhaps that is why we keep coming back, week after week, month after month, year after year — in joy and in weariness, in certainty and in doubt — not just to churches but to gatherings like these, where we can mourn and cry, share testimonies of love, and hear words of hope. Because somewhere deep within us, deeper than right answers or perfect faith, we know that heaven is not above us, but has come to meet us where we are and as we are.