Hope (2): Life After Religion

Revelation 21:10; 21:22-22:5

Reading Revelation affords us a new perspective.  This new perspective is a place where you can see more, and see differently.  You can discover new patterns you hadn’t seen before.  In ch. 4 John is invited up into the heavens – a new perspective.  In our reading today, he is taken “in the spirit” to a high mountain, from which point he can observe the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven.

 

As readers of Revelation, we are not meant to sit around waiting for an invitation up into the heavens or to be transported trance-like to a mountain.  Rather, we are welcomed into the worship and prayer of the angels, the living creatures, the elders, and all those who have suffered for their faith and come through a great ordeal.  This is a message for the church, for congregations who need a new perspective on life.  And that new perspective usually comes through attending to the voice and beauty of God in song, in prayer, in stillness, in Scripture, and in shared struggle.

This new perspective is available to us mainly in symbols and images.  Towards the end of the Revelation, attention shifts to the ways hope pulls us forward towards the fulfillment of God’s kingdom in a new heaven and a new earth. 

That image – a new heaven and a new earth – is immense.  When God makes things new, absolutely everything is included.  Not just a few people.  But everyone open to the love available in Jesus Christ.  Not just people, but all the ways those people connect and interact – a new economy and a new politics and a new culture.  And not just people, but animals and nature are included too.  And not just heaven, as if our souls are to fly away somewhere up in the sky.  There is a new heaven and a new earth, overlapping, intermixed, and at perfect peace.

But then the image gets more specific.  We see a city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God towards the earth.  It’s 1,500 miles square, with walls and gates and streets.  It’s foundations are expensive gems.  It’s streets are made of gold.  It is a beautiful city, full of light, and free from threat.

The image invites us to dream of the kind of place we’d love to live.  What would it look like for you?  I posted a link this morning to an article in The Atlantic on “11 Keys to a Successful City”.  When I was traveling to a retreat with people from our congregation in New York, we started talking about the ideal place to live.  Susan McFeatters, who lives on 81^st street right near the Museum of Natural History said she dreams of a farmhouse on top of a hill with great views and no neighbors in sight.  But down at the bottom of her long driveway there is a Barnes & Noble.

Now let’s zoom in further still.  Within the city there is a crystal clear river flowing from God’s throne and from the Lamb in the middle of the city.  There is not one tree of life as in the Garden of Eden.  Now it has doubled and appears on both sides of the river.  This doubled tree is well watered and flourishing.  It bears fruit each season and feeds the hungry.  Its leaves are medicinal – they are for the healing of the nations.  This is a politics of friendship and collaboration, not a politics of conflict over resources and borders.

The river speaks to all of us who are thirsty for life, wholeness, and meaning.  The tree speaks to those who are hungry and need healing.  The city itself speaks to all who hunger for peaceful collaboration with neighbors.  The open gates speak to our thirst for a community of radical openness and hospitality where absolutely everyone is welcome. 

And the most peculiar feature of all is the absence of the Temple.  There will be no need for religion, for religious institutions, for priests, even for faith and belief.  God’s throne is there.  The Lamb slain for the world is there.  And everything and every place is holy and sacred and full of light.

All of these images name a way of being human that has already begun in Jesus’ life.  And through the work of the Holy Spirit, this life is available to us right now. 

Jesus meets people who are possessed by demons.  He casts out the demons and restores them to health and to their community.  In this way he shows us that the God of love and healing is more powerful than all that threatens and harms us. 

Jesus meets people who need to be healed.  He heals their bodies.  He heals their emotional and psychological lives.  He heals their relationships and their priorities and their connections to the wider community.  In this way he shows us that God’s love takes the form of mercy and healing for wounded people.

The final book of the New Testament - Revelation - isn’t saying anything new.  It’s simply the church’s confession that what began in Jesus’ life and ministry is a way of life open to us all.  When God raises up the crucified Jesus, God declares that Jesus had it right.  And the way Jesus lived – freeing, forgiving, healing and blessing – now continues in us.  We carry that same hopeful way of life into the challenges of our own day.  We make Jesus’ way of healing and blessing real by what we do with our hands and our feet, our time, money, and energy.  And we can keep at it, we can stay in the fight, we don’t abandon the struggle, because we live with hope.  And because we do it together.

One of the highlights of our trip to Yellowstone was the afternoon we spent at a wide bend in the river.  We had scheduled the day, to do something here, then drive to another part of the park.  But in between, we rounded a bend beside a wide stream and saw several other families parked alongside the road.  A few of the kids were brave enough to wade in.  Pull over! The kids yelled.  They got out.  While we yelled “Don’t get wet,” they took off their shoes, then their clothes, and played in the river with lots of others.  It was a hot day.  And the water was a clear, cold stream, flowing down off the hills.

I spent a whole day once, wading in streams, catching crawdads.  Dr. Kerr had promised us that if we caught enough crawdads, that he would cook them for us.  We were imagining crawdads poured out on tables like lobsters, with corn and potatoes.  All of this the result of our own day of Tom Sawyering on the stream.  And so away we went.  Crawdads are difficult to catch, if you’ve never tried.  They have evolved to be the color of the creek bed.  So they are hard to even see.  And when you do find them, they do not sit there, waiting to crawl up into your hands.  They scram in a flurry of dirty water when you get close.  But we got better.  We had a whole bucketful.  And we proudly hauled them back to the house.  They were cooked in beer (the key, we were told).  We all ate one.  They tasted like mud.  And we threw them all out.  They gave their precious little lives for that!

Where do streams run through your memory and imagination?

There was a sycamore tree in my Grandmother Lela’s backyard.  It wasn’t a big back yard.  The tree was right in the middle, making playing anything difficult.  But it was a great tree for climbing.  I remember the thin, light brown bark peeling off the sycamore, leaving beautiful patches of white and brown all up and down the tree.

There are trees that you remember and love.  The tree outside your house that you climbed when you were young.  The fruit tree in the orchard.  The walnut tree.  The pecan trees that have to be bumped.  It is the oak tree whose leaves are all angular and pointed, feeding the squirrels with its acorns.  It is that cherry blossom that takes your breath away each spring with its pink.  Or that Bradford pear that dazzles with its profusion of white.  It is that big, sturdy tree that held up the tire swing for you.  The tree you jumped from into the river.  The tree that gives you shade on a hot day.

Every stream and every tree in our experience can become symbols of God’s new world of love, stealing in and taking over.  Every stream and every tree can dazzle us with the light that illumines the way forward.

What I have tried to communicate – and what Jane communicated last week – is that the Revelation isn’t a futuristic sci-fi apocalyptic Armageddon doomsday-prepper horror show.  This is an artfully crafted reflection on the victory that happened in Christ’s resurrection, and on what that victory means for God’s people who are still in the struggle.  It’s written, in a very specific way, for seven little congregations in Asia Minor.  But it was kept, treasured, read, and included in what we call the New Testament so that it would benefit congregations of God’s people everywhere.

It is meant to inspire hopeful action and new priorities for us today.  God’s vision for what the world can become is available to us right now.  Not completely and not fully.  But God’s kingdom is taking form in our midst.  Revelation is about the real world.  It’s about political power, about unjust economies, about misguided loyalties, and perverted dreams.  That’s the world we live in everyday.  And so let’s receive this invitation to become a sign, a parable, of what’s possible. 

What can we do?  What practices can we take up?  How can we organize our lives so that our community can catch a glimpse of the hope that grows in the soil of the resurrection?  We can love and care for each other, of course.  But this is a hope even larger than that.  It calls us to feed the hungry in our community.  It calls us to protect children.  To teach and inspire them to believe that God loves them.  It calls us to make beautiful things – music, food, poetry, gardens, homes, and public buildings.  It calls us to welcome new people into our lives, into our homes, into this congregation.  It calls us to be present in a healing way with those who are in pain – those lonely, sick, depressed, addicted, or grieving.  It calls us to engage in healing conversations about things that matter.   And maybe most important of all, this is a hope that creates in us the courage to keep going.  And when you keep going, the person next to you says, “I guess I can keep going too.”