Open Twenty-Four/Seven

Open Twenty-Four/Seven--October 5, 2017

"And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day--and there will be no night there." [Revelation 21:23-25]

You know the old brain-teaser/riddle that goes, "Why do 24-hour convenience stores have locks on their doors?" I want to ask that question about the promised future city where God and humanity dwell.

Of course, when it's about your local convenience store or gas station (here we have Sheetz--it's got everything!), that line meant to be as much a joke as it is a sincere question. 

But when it's about the final promised future where God dwells with humanity in a permanent interlocking of the human and the divine... well, I really do wonder: why does John, the writer sharing this vision he has been given, make the point of telling us that the "new Jerusalem" has gates (yes, the pearly ones, the ones described earlier in the same chapter as "a single pearl" each, for each of the twelve gate entrances to the city) and then saying that these gates are never shut?  John says the gates are never shut during the day... but there is no more night there any longer.  And so, it sounds like we are back to the riddle about the all-night convenience store that has locks on its doors--why have them, if the store is always to be open?

I can only guess about the construction choices that architects and contractors make when they are building a new gas station convenience store, but when it comes to the New Jerusalem, I am convinced the design feature is intentional... but also intentionally useless.  Because the city has these gates on the doors, you know the fact that they are kept open is a deliberate choice.  That is to say, God isn't sitting up in heaven going, "Oh, I wish I would have thought to put some locks on those gates in case I decide to keep the riff-raff out!  Too bad it's too late to add a lock, because the contractor has already sent the bill..."  God isn't biting divine fingernails worrying about what sort of unsavory characters might be trying to get in, or what mischief they could be up to, or how they might taint the pristine beauty of heaven.

All of that is to say that the divine Architect has deliberately created a vision of new creation that has intentionally useless gates: gates that are there, but are never used to keep people out.  Almost as if to say when you walk through them, "It's not because God didn't think of gates, or that there wasn't enough money in the budget to add gates... it is God's intentional choice always to keep the doors open.

That's it:  it is God's intentional choice always to keep the doors open.

That, dear ones, is the future we are told to look ahead toward.  That is the vision that the ancient dreamers, prophets, and poets were given: a place where God and humanity meet, and nobody is ruled by fear any longer, so nobody is driven to murder or theft or hatred or destruction or terrorism, and nobody needs to be "kept out."  That is the vision the living God offers us to look ahead toward.

Now, yes, it is most certainly true that we do not live in such a place presently.  It is true that we are indeed constantly in the presence of dangerous things, terrible hatred, grossly callous indifference to the value of human life, and awful violence.  We live in a world where the ones who leave their doors unlocked... get stuff taken from their cars.  We live in a world where people minding their own business have rapid fire ammunition rain down on them from the thirty-second floor, in such a way that nobody could disarm the shooter with a punch, or stop him with a well-placed shot to the leg, or negotiate a cease-fire, or any of the other things we all wish could have happened differently in Las Vegas... (or Sandy Hook, or Columbine, or Orlando, or...) It is certainly true that the world we inhabit is a place in which terrible things happen--sometimes by our choosing, and sometimes beyond our control; sometimes by our allowing of circumstances, and sometimes beyond every good intention to change things for the better. 

And we should be honest, too, that for a long time, respectable religious folks have used talk of "how good heaven will be" as a way of shutting down conversation of how to make things better, rather than doing whatever we can to make a good life for human beings.  "Just leave slavery alone--don't fight your 'masters,' and don't try and help slaves escape to the north--that's against the law!  They'll just have to wait until we all get to heaven, when it will be fine and dandy," preachers said in the 1800s.  "Just leave Europe alone--let the French and English fight the Nazis if they want to, but we need to keep to ourselves and just think about how nice heaven will be..." others said in the 1930s.  We have a way, we should be honest, of misusing the vision of the heavenly city, as the famous critique of another era put it, as an "opiate for the masses" to make people forget the drudgery and horror of daily life by just hoping for a happier day after death. 

The flip side is true, too--we can also make the mistake of assuming our sheer willpower and good intentions will bring about this city where there is no night and the gates are never shut by day.  We sometimes forget that there were lots of voices in the late 1800s and early 1900s all promising that the world was getting better and better, that human innovation and technology would solve all of our problems, and that we could all be trusted to just make the world a better place... and then The Great War broke out, and smashed all of those naïve wishes to dust.

Instead of using God's Promised Future as an excuse for indifference or apathy ("Don't do anything about it now, because it will all just be fixed in heaven--now, let's go round up those fugitive slaves!"), and instead of foolishly thinking that human technology and reason will bring paradise into being a la Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek--the people who listen to the visions like John's here in Revelation are called to live in a particular direction, because of the kind of future we are promised, so that we become a sort of "foretaste of the feast to come," as it were.  The church is called to be a sacrament of God's promised future--a lived embodiment in the present of where all creation will one day be brought.

What does that mean?  What does that look like?

Ok, well, how about this: during the days of slavery and abolition in the United States, the question to ask would have been, "In God's New City, will people be enslaved--will that be how humanity dwells with God, some free and some slave?  No!" And so people guided by, nurtured by, sustained by, that promised future aimed to live and work in ways that were "in tune with" or "in line with" the way things would be in the New Jerusalem.  You had Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher, William Wilberforce, and countless others who dared to let their actions in the present be a reflection of the rightful ordering of things in God's New Creation.  Whether it was legal by human laws or not, their actions were in line with the promised future God offered in the New City. Because there will be no slavery in the new creation, they could not be on the side of slavery in this life, which is the only life any of us can do anything about today.

History, of course, is easy to play Monday morning quarterback with. The real challenge for us is how to hold up these visions, like John's vision of a city with gates that are never closed, and to live in light of them now.  It is not to say that we are faithless apostates if we lock our cars or our houses at night.  It is not to say that there is never a place for gates in this life.  But it is to say that we should never quite feel at home in this world of gates and locks and guns.  It is to say that the ways we deal with the violence and hatred, the senseless horror of Las Vegas and Sandy Hook and the litany of others, the raw and nagging injustice of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, is always to be in light of how the world will be ordered on that day when the Lamb is our light and there is no more night. 

Because in the New City there will be no first-class and second-class access, because there will be no fear of ominous bad guys lurking in the shadows, because we believe that God has begun the victory over death and evil itself by dying, and not by killing, we dare to live now along those same lines: willing to offer our lives rather than taking them, willing to surrender our "stuff" because in the end our "stuff" doesn't matter, willing to speak for and act for now an world that reflects how things will be, not with the hubris that our sheer willpower and gadgetry will fix human greed and fear, but because we are daring to embody of foretaste--a presence now of what will be in all creation.

It's not ours to force other people into our vision of the future, but it is ours to live oriented toward that future, as opposed to any of the other alternative visions that are out there (the vision of getting-as-much-for-yourself-as-you-can, the vision of might-makes-right, the vision of endlessly escalating violence and technologically enhanced destruction).  And in the end, that promised future is more important than the current arrangement of laws, remembering that slavery was legal and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was illegal, or that lions in the Roman Colosseum were legal, but denying "Caesar is Lord" and "Rome First!" was illegal.  In the end, it is that vision of a city whose gates are always open that we walk toward, and it is that light in the distance from which we take our bearings.  We cannot build that City by our own sheer sweat and grit, but we can walk toward it rather than away from it.

So remember on this day where all creation, ourselves included, are headed--and then our question simply becomes, "How can I live today in line with a promised future in which the gates are there, but God chooses never to close or lock them?"

How will you live today with doors to your own heart, your own mind, your own arms, held open?

Lord Jesus, let us walk in the light of your promised future, and keep us picturing your City.