Open Doors into the Kingdom of God
by: Father Anthony Michaels
As beautifully as Judy Garland sang "Somewhere over the rainbow. . . .", this is not where we find our pot of gold. Heaven is not "pie in the sky when you die" either. We believe that the beautiful Kingdom of God or Heaven is already here in the Church if we have spiritual eyes to see it. The whole spiritual life of prayer and fasting and, especially, taking the sacraments, opens up Heaven to us. That is why we should prepare everyday to get ready for Heaven, for the Kingdom of God, by doing our morning and evening prayers.
Every morning we need to get into that bathroom and wash our face and clear our heads and open our eyes. We don't leave the house before we are ready to meet the everyday responsibilities of work and family. More than anything we should clean our soul and mind in the same way by prayer and by going to Church to take the sacraments of the Church. Then we can see into the Kingdom of God right here on earth!
When we go into the Church Heaven is all around us. On the walls are the icons of saints and of the scenes of Jesus' life on earth and of the great events in His life which saved us. On the icon screen which separates the altar from the body of the Church we see Christ's Icon, the Mother of God, St. John the Baptist, the archangels Michael and Gabriel, the patron saints of our Church. They are with us in the Liturgy and every time we pray in Church. They are there like windows for us to look through to see the Kingdom of God. So we don't just wait to get into Heaven after we die, we get a sight, taste, and feel for the Kingdom in the Church. We get used to it here before we receive it fully there, in Heaven!
The Church is the only place on earth where we can receive the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit which makes us immortal like God. If we have said that the Church is Heaven on earth and that the saints and angels who we see in the icons are with us always that is because we have the sacraments or mysteries of the Church: Baptism, Chrismation, holy communion or the Eucharist, holy anointing for the sick, confession, ordination, and marriage. But really everything is a mystery or sacrament of God's presence.
St. Paul writes that "what can be known about God is plain" to us because "God has made it known." "Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. (Rom. 1.19-20)" All we have to do is get up and look at the beauty all around us and think about the detailed arrangement of nature, as if God decorated the world with the finest and most appropriate things the way a matron would furnish her estate. The Prophet David said it gracefully: "When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established; .... O lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!" (Ps. 8. 3-4,9) "The heavens declare the glory of God."
When our first parents sinned by turning away from God's commandments in the Garden of Eden and deliberately rejected God's love, we lost the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, because that Spirit is what made us alive:" the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. (Gen. 2.7)"
The Church is a return to Eden and a resuscitation of the breath of life. When the paramedics put the paddles on a person whose heart is stopped they aim to restart the heart, when they do mouth to mouth resuscitation they try to put the breath back into the lungs. Spiritually, that is what the Holy Spirit does in the sacraments; He puts the breath back in us and gets us living eternally again. In this world you have to call 911 for such an emergency and that is the only number you can call to get immediate help. To get the life-saving help we need to be in Heaven we need the life-giving sacraments in the Church.
It is not enough just to believe in Jesus as the Savior. We must live the life of Jesus in our own lives. To be a member of His family, to be living with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we must be like God. We must carry in our hearts the spiritual treasures of God's character and thus be like Him: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; . . . (Gal. 5.22)" These qualities are all we take with us from this life. Jesus said: "If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will com to him and make our home with him. (Jn. 14.23)
The sacraments that the priest gives us in the Church are what produce these Christ like qualities in us and prepare us for the Kingdom of God and make us like God. Without these sacraments the fruits of the Holy Spirit will never be found in us.
There was an old commercial on T.V. when I was growing up on "Wonder Bread." In it a little boy was seen to grow up into a young man in thirty seconds! The picture was arranged to show growth stages in rapid speed. By comparison we have a spiritual body inside us that grows with the "Wonder Bread" of the Bread of Life, the Body and Blood of Christ in the holy communion. It was said in that commercial that "Wonder Bread" strengthens the body in twelve ways as l remember. Listen to what St. Paul says about the holy gifts of the sacraments entrusted to the clergy: "And his gifts ... were to equip the saints (all of us who take the sacraments in the Church) for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. (Eph. 4.11-13)" Through the sacraments, St. Paul says, the Father gives the "riches of his glory" or of His immortal life that believers may be "strengthened with might through his Holy Spirit in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Eph. 3.14-19)"
All of us know the contentment of resting after a big dinner. Being full we can do little else than rest and feel that comfort of being full - or that discomfort if we really indulge. Spiritual happiness and fullness comes through the nourishment of immortality in the Eucharist; through being a member of the Kingdom of God of God's family in holy Baptism; through the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit in Chrismation: through the teaching about the Kingdom of God that comes with holy ordination; through the healing of our physical and spiritual ills by holy oil; through the forgiveness of our sins that comes from holy confession; from the hospitality of God for us that comes to us through the generosity of families built on holy marriage.
May the blessings of the Lord be with you all.