Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Emma-Claire

**Heaven Is a Place on Earth**

Emma-Claire Martin

Day 1 of 4: Theology of the Platypus

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
-Genesis 1:1-5

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.*
-Galatians 3:28

Like any good Christian camper, I grew up with hits from the 90s. To be clear, I was a camper from 2008 to 2013, but our entire repertoire of worship songs were from the same tattered binder of old K-LOVE regulars that the camp had purchased before printing song lyrics from the internet was a thing. To this day, I can’t hear “Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble?” without remembering opening night worship — we were buzzing with the excitement of bunk assignments and activity sign-ups when suddenly, the gym would go quiet as the guitarist played those reliable opening chords. This was a gym surrounded by huge garage-style doors, so when the chorus arrived with “open up the gates and let the music play” and the counselors threw open those doors — the line between outdoor and indoor space was instantly blurred, and the magic of summer camp had officially begun.

Summer camp is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to heaven on earth. All the categories are thrown away. This bundle of sticks? It’s an arts and crafts project now. This worship service? It doesn’t have the pews and hymnals you’ve grown to expect. And anyone who’s ever been a camp counselor knows that when you’re tired enough, anything can be a bed. Camp is also a place of theologically rich imagination, where campers encounter the divine before they’ve learned what they’re “supposed” to believe.

One of those “supposed to” doctrines that doesn’t really vibe with the spirit of summer camp, at least how I’ve experienced it, is that of heaven and hell. These two eternal abodes are strict categories, with simultaneously clear and conflicting instructions for how to end up in either. The third category, also entirely separate, is earth. Through the lens of dominant and traditional theology, we find ourselves at a pretty rigid and apathetic eschatology.

For the next four days, we’re going to examine what happens to eschatology when viewed through the lens of queer theology instead. Eschatology is basically the study of what happens next? Where do we go when we go? One of the most important contributions of queer theology has been the examination and destruction of boundaries we’ve come to take for granted.

United Methodist deacon and trans nonbinary theologian M Barclay has given us one of the most beautiful Genesis 1 readings of our time. Genesis tells us God created night and day, and yet we also have dawn and dusk; Genesis tells of land and sea, yet we have marshes and estuaries; none of the binaries in Genesis, therefore, appear to be as descriptive as we’ve been told they are. If land and sea were truly strict categories, a creature like the platypus couldn’t exist.

The creation of male and female exists in the same text that has the creation of day and night. There is dawn and dusk to biological sex, a whole estuary of gender identity. When applied to eschatology, M Barclay’s insights encourage us to see heaven and earth as a false dichotomy as well. Liberating heaven from its pearly gates means deconstructing the boundary between this life and the next.

Just like how land meets sea at the shore, heaven meets earth when we live out the gospel and build the kingdom day by day. How would your life be different if you knew the earth was your eternal home, instead of a cosmic pit-stop on your way to heaven? How would your life be different if you knew that heaven was just on the other side of a big garage-style door, just waiting to be thrown open in song?

Day 1 of 4: Theology of the Platypus

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