BECOMING LIKE JESUS
6. Sacramental Life

I’m sitting in a rather funky neighborhood coffee shop in downtown Denver, eating ice cream while I write.  There’s no air-conditioning, so the door is open to let in some of the brisk late Fall air.  The sounds of the street outside drift in—passing traffic, a conversation on the other side of the road, a dog yapping in the distance.  A CD is playing behind the meandering conversations; the current track is Norman Greenbaum’s classic psychedelic number, Spirit in the Sky:

When I die and they lay me to rest,
Gonna go to the place that’s best;
When I lay me down to die
Goin’ up to the Spirit in the Sky.

The theology of the song is not all that great (many of us, at least, would raise an eyebrow at lines like “I’m not a sinner, I’ve never sinned ...”) but these opening lines pretty much sum up a belief held by many otherwise perfectly orthodox Christians today: our ultimate destination in life is heaven, where the Spirit of God dwells, and life in this world is only a brief transitional experience on the way to eternal bliss. . . . read more

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