Do Atheists Go to Heaven?

 Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church 

 

 A warm welcome to each worshipper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today. 

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation. 

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org 

 
 

Order of Worship 

August 7, 2022 

10:00 a.m. 

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit. 

  

Prelude Præludium III Clara Schumann 

Greeting and Announcements 

Mission Statement: 

We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ. 

  

Call to Worship: 

The mighty One summons us from sunrise to sunset. 

Out of perfect beauty, God shines forth. 

God calls to heaven and earth, 

"Gather to me my faithful ones, 

who made a covenant with me." 

The heavens declare the righteousness of God, 

the judge of people and nations. 

Let us not forget God, but with thanksgiving 

as our sacrifice, let us be a people of justice. 

We worship the God of our salvation. 

Hans Holznagel 

  

*Hymn Holy, Holy, Holy #64 

              

Prayer of Confession: 

O God, 

your call for justice is so clear 

that we are amazed at how easily 

we fail to hear you 

over the din of daily life. 

We want to cease to do evil. 

We want to learn to do good. 

Yet, we rarely do all we can 

to rescue, defend, and plead 

for those in need. 

As you have sought us out, 

so we seek your pardon. 

Grant us courage, we pray, 

as persons, as communities, and as nations, 

to bring about the justice you desire. Amen. 

  

Assurance: 

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, 

the conviction of things not seen. 

People of faith, God is not ashamed 

to be called your God. 

By God's grace we are forgiven. 

Let the church say amen. 

Amen. 

 
 

Scripture Reading John 14:1-7 

 

14 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe[a] in God; believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?[b] 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. 4 And you know the way to the place where I am going.”[c] 5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you know me, you will know[d] my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” 

 
 

Sermon Do Atheists Go to Heaven? 

 

Friends, as promised, today we begin Stump the Preacher 2022, aka sermon topics that you asked for, and that I researched and am now bringing you from up here. This has become an annual tradition since 2018 that I’ve shared with 4 different churches, and I’m delighted to share it now with you. 

We’re kicking off Stump the Preacher 2022 with a question that came from our friend Gary Hebert: Do atheists go to heaven? 

A few disclaimers before I get into this: my older sister, Cassie, and her husband Dave are atheists who belong to a UU congregation in Minneapolis, and either or both of them are invited and encouraged to read this sermon off of my blog. So, this isn’t a detached, emotionally neutral topic for me. Cassie and Dave often share how hard it can be to live as an atheist in a world built around Christians that expects some fashion of Abrahamic monotheism from its citizens, and how often they face scorn, accusations, and bullying for being themselves. None of that will happen here. Our church prides itself on the safe harbor we create for many—for our lgbtqia friends, for people of all ages, races, gender identities, nationalities, and backgrounds. We can, and must, create the same sanctuary for those who see God differently, or not at all. 

In fact, this question pokes at the core of why Cassie and Dave have found it hard to be themselves around Christians. It also touches on the tension that dwells between Christians and followers of most other world religions. By sitting here, worshipping how we do and believing what we do, are we destined for a future, an afterlife, a celestial reward that those who aren’t here won’t be part of? Do we follow Jesus, and do our due diligence by our church, to put our name on the list to enter the Pearly Gates someday?  

Is earning a place in heaven in life eternal the “goal” of our Christian faith? Is that the ultimate reason for our love and service? What is heaven? Where is it, how do you get there, when do you go there, and who will you see there when you arrive someday? 

You might have an answer for all of those questions based on your convictions and life experiences. Or you might not. I wager that if we asked each person in this room what they think heaven is like we’ll have some overlap, but also a huge amount of diversity of images, hopes, dreams, and faith. Some of you might be surprised that these are questions at all, because you might assume that our faith lays out detailed truths about heaven, and answers our questions for us. Our faith and Wesleyan heritage do, in fact, teach us a lot about eternal life and our home in that time and realm, but, in my opinion, once you start down that rabbit hole you end up with far more questions than answers. 

Our Methodist Articles of Religion, which you can find in our United Methodist Book of Discipline, as well as the notes we have preserved from the sermons of John Wesley, do, for the record, tell us some about heaven. Wesley believed that heaven exists for repentant believers in Jesus. Interestingly, Wesley didn’t believe that heaven is a place you instantly find yourself in after you die. He believed that only the second coming of Christ, and the New Creation of this world into the Kingdom of God that will happen when Jesus comes back, will make heaven a reality, and that once Jesus comes back here, does a clean sweep of this earth, turns it into the loving Kingdom he envisioned for it, and then opens the doors to heaven, all believers who have passed from this earthly life will all go there together. In the meantime, Wesley believed, none of us are going to heaven. Your loved ones who have passed on, he taught, are hanging out in a big waiting room in the sky with aeons of dead people. If this imagining of heaven is true, then maybe right now my Grandma G is kicking back and enjoying some water cooler talk with George Washington while they wait for Jesus to show up with the keys and the party favors. But I don’t know. 

I personally disagree with Wesley, I have to believe that heaven has been up and running since the dawn of time, and that those we’ve loved and lost have been there, in paradise, with our Creator. Important for the space of this sermon topic, I also believe in universal salvation, so my answer to the question at hand, “do atheists go to heaven?” is yes, of course they do, no one gets turned away. But that’s a much more radical belief than it may sound like on the surface, and it can be a hard one to maintain, so I totally understand if you can’t wrap your heads around that one. In my heart, heaven is a place where Hitler is just as welcome as Mother Teresa. I believe in a Divine Love, a Divine Grace, and a Divine Forgiveness that are inconceivable in this world. 

My scriptural passage of choice about heaven, which I picked for this morning’s Gospel reading, comes from John, and it’s a popular one among evangelical Christians. Our friends in those circles may be keen to pick out a few of those words, print them on a tract, and hand them to my sister Cassie as an explanation for why the doors of heaven will be closed to her unless she changes her mind about the divinity of Jesus. I find everything about that abusive. However, I also understand the logic that gets one to that conclusion. Let’s take a look. 

It strikes me every time I read this passage that Jesus begins by saying “do not let your hearts be troubled.” I will always take from that that these words are Good News for all people. He goes on to use one image for heaven, a house with many rooms. Notably, he never calls that place heaven. He says that’s where he’s going, and we’ll know how to get there by following him, and that he’s our connection to get in. But, he doesn’t actually say the word “heaven”, nor does he say we go to this place when we die. I bring this all up because our Wesleyan understanding of grace has frequently and famously been conceptualized by Methodist theologian and scholar Albert Outler as a house. Outler explains that we start out on the porch, experiencing “prevenient grace”, a state where God takes care of us and goes out before us without us having a relationship with the Sacred at all. The doorway into the house is “justifying grace”, what we receive when we declare ourselves followers of Christ and repent of our wrongdoing. The rooms of the house, where we’re invited to get comfy and live, are “sanctifying grace”, something we spend this whole life working toward, where knowing Jesus makes us more and more like him. So, in this passage, is Jesus describing heaven and how we only get there by being Christians? Or, is he inviting us to grace, right here and right now? Food for thought for sure. 

A major sticking point in this passage, fueling the question of this sermon, is what Jesus says in verse six: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” And still, he’s not overtly saying anything about heaven, now he’s talking about what it takes for us to know our Creator. The most traditional, conservative interpretation of that verse will teach us that Jesus is the only way to God, Jesus is the only way to heaven, Jesus is the only way to truth, or to a fulfilling life, Jesus is the only way, period. If you don’t have Jesus, you’ve got nuttin’. 

But what does it really mean to “have Jesus?” And do we all go where he does? This passage has been historically and notoriously troubling from an interfaith lens.  

When I was in college, after I abandoned my original plan of majoring in math and becoming a teacher, I ended up double majoring in psychology and religion. While going down that road, I was taught a proverb that comes to us from Hawaiian spirituality, that says “the mountain has many paths”. Whatever it is we see at the top, there’s a hundred equally valid ways to reach the summit. Once I got to seminary, I took a few different classes about interfaith studies, and one of my professors urged us to see that it’s a very Western idea that the goal of any religion, even Christianity, is to go to heaven. She also pushed us past the notion that we’re all climbing up the same mountain, and instead explained that we’re all on a journey in this life but we all do something completely different, and there’s no moral hierarchy to our paths. Some of us are at an airport preparing to take a plane, some of us are in an ocean in a boat, some of us are on the street in a car, some of us are walking down the sidewalk. The Sacred meets all of us somewhere on that sojourn, but we won’t all experience the Holy the same, and many of us will never describe that entity as “God”. And that’s ok. Some of us have no thoughts about heaven, don’t think anyone is going there, and don’t care what might be there if the place exists. Put very differently, Cassie has said to me on more than one occasion, after losing her temper with closed minded Christians, that if heaven is full of people who are all like that, no thanks, she’ll take her chances in hell. 

What I hold in my heart is that Jesus is the path to our Creator because he perfectly shows us God’s love. It’s our job to reflect that to the world. If you’ve seen any part of Jesus’ love in anyone, you have seen God. Jesus welcomes us into heaven, but he’s not border patrol standing there checking IDs. He’s the first hug of many that you get there before you’re greeted by everyone. 

More importantly, I don’t think “heaven” has to be some place that we only see when we’re dead. I think heaven, by definition, is total unity with God. If we embrace a life of love, selflessness, compassion, and justice, then we’re always in heaven, and we carry heaven with us everywhere we go. We show heaven in our eyes to the world. If we live that way, we’ve seen the house, a house of heaven, or a house of the Kingdom, or a house of grace—it's all the same in the end. And because we’ve seen how to get there, we can show the way for everyone. And no matter what we believe about the Sacred, we all must dwell in a house of love, compassion, selflessness, and justice. 

May it be so. 

Amen. 

 
 

*Hymn Freely, Freely #389 

 
 

Offering Bagatelle n. 4, op. 119 Ludwig von Beethoven 

 
 

Offertory  

 

*Doxology #94 

*Prayer of dedication             

  

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer 

 

Gracious God, bread of heaven, you feed us in the depths of grief, sin, and hostility.  Nourish us with your word through the long hours of darkness, and in the dawning awareness of our need for forgiveness.  Forgive us for what we have done and for what we have left undone.  Take our sin and fill us with your redeeming and steadfast love. 

Holy Father, Father of Christ, the bread of life, you taught us to put away grumbling and arguing, and with kindness to share the fruit of our labor with the needy.  Strengthen us by your grace, that in communion with you, we may transform the world.  Help us to lift up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things, care for the sick, visit the prisoner, and set the oppressed free. 

Sovereign Lord, Father of all in the power of the Holy Spirit, we pray for an end to violence and suffering.  We pray for the families of the victims in Aurora, Colorado.  We pray for those who are mourning from the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin.  We pray for all of those around the world who suffer at the hands of lunatics.  Inspire your church to lament with those who are mourning, comfort those who are suffering, and struggle with those who are working to transform the world for the good of your kingdom. 

We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever, as we continue to pray saying: 

Our Father, who art in heaven 

Hallowed be thy name 

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done 

On earth as it is in heaven 

Give us this day our daily bread 

And forgive us our trespasses 

As we forgive those who trespass against us 

Lead us not into temptation 

But deliver us from evil 

For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.  Amen. 

By Matt Rawle 

 
 

The Lord’s Supper 

 
 

*Hymn God of Grace and God of Glory #577 

 
 

Benediction 

 
Postlude Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise Traditional Welsh 

Larry Shackley, arr. 

 
 

 
 

Staff 

Natalie Bowerman Pastor 

Betsy Lehmann Music Director 

Joe White Custodian 

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant