Watermarked--May 30, 2025

Watermarked--May 30, 2025

"Nothing accursed will be found there anymore. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads." (Revelation 22:4)

There is this through-line to the whole Christian faith that shows up over the course of our lifespans. We don't necessarily talk a lot about it, at least outside of those occasional moments when it appears again.  But right now seems like a good time to remind ourselves.

We are marked with the cross of Christ, like a seal on our foreheads that claims us forever as God's own.  It's true, even on the days you can't see it, and even at the times we forget about it.  Like the watermark portrait of Ulysses S. Grant on the right side of a genuine fifty-dollar bill that indicates you've got real legal tender rather than a counterfeit (go ahead and look the next time you see a $50 bill--it's there), we are marked with the image of Christ in a way that assures us we really do belong to him... and we really do have a place in the new creation.

It starts at the waters of baptism, when in the course of the liturgy the cross is traced on our foreheads, as if to say, "God says you belong; you are marked with the sign of Christ's cross as a mark of belonging in the family."  The oil with which we are anointed is basically clear, of course--you wouldn't necessarily even notice it's there. And it dries up before the last verse of the final hymn, but it is always there.  We tell the children in our congregation that even if you can't see that cross, it is always there, setting you apart to live the Jesus way of life, claiming you forever in God's family, marking you as God's beloved no matter what.

Over the course of our daily and weekly lives, we might not mention that cross much, but for many, every Sunday is a chance to dip their fingers in the water at the font, and to retrace that cross again, as another reminder that no matter what anybody else says about you or me, God says we belong.  The mark is there, and when you feel that cool water on your forehead again, you know that the promise is real.  We also have a practice in many branches of the Christian family tree of tracing that same cross in ashes every year--right there on our foreheads--as the season of Lent begins and we turn our attention to our journey as disciples to follow Jesus on the way of the cross.  The ash cross (which is the reason we call the first day of Lent "Ash Wednesday") is simultaneously a reminder of our mortality--that we are all dust and ashes, and these bodies of ours will return to dust and ashes in time--and also a reminder that even when we mess up, God's claim is still on us.  We are cross-marked, even when we are brought face to face with our sin.  The claim is still there, and the mark on our foreheads reminds us that it doesn't expire or come with fine print.

And then, there is another moment in our lives of faith when that same cross comes back--at our funerals.  In our tradition, that same cross is traced over the head of the casket, and at the cemetery, I'll typically trace it in a handful of sprinkled soil, right at the time of the committal to the ground.  And again, even though it is a somber and heavy moment, when we acknowledge that someone we love has died and we are no longer holding on to them, it is also a moment when we remember that the mark of Christ is still on them.  Even when it is being traced in the soil of the graveyard, the cross mark is still on us, and it assures us that God's claim on us still holds, even when death has done its worst.  It is a reminder that even when I cannot hold onto my own life, God still holds onto me.  Through life and through death, we keep coming back to that mark on our foreheads--the cross of Jesus inscribed on our very lives.

Of course, the writer of Revelation sees that mark on the forehead coming back one more time, at least figuratively.  There in the new creation, where God has come to dwell with us and Christ the Lamb is in our midst, the servants of God are gathered with the name of God marked on their foreheads.  And for John, that image is just as much about God's claim that we belong as our practice with the cross in baptism.  John wants his readers--from the first century through the twenty-first--to know that God has claimed us, and that claim is not up for renegotiation, not subject to probationary periods, and not going to expire.  God's claim on us lasts through our lives and holds onto us even into new creation.  We are God's forever.  The sign on our foreheads is a sort of watermark assuring us that the promise is genuine.

Knowing that does two things for us, right here and now:  one is simply that we have confidence that we will never be alone or abandoned. God's mark is on us, and there's no getting rid of it.  God's claim on us cannot be repealed, vetoed, cut from the budget, or cancelled. And second of all, our belonging to Christ will hold no matter what anybody else says, does or thinks about it.  Even if the rest of the world believes you're not good enough, attractive enough, wealthy enough, or important enough, to really belong, the mark on our foreheads tells us that the only One whose opinion matters on the subject already says we belong.  In other words, we face the world with deep confidence that we are beloved, and that will make us brave to stand out and risk looking foolish over the ways we live that love out for others. We will risk being called "weak" because we care about the well-being of others rather than getting as much for ourselves as possible.  We will dare to be labeled "losers" by the world because we don't need to make everything into some childish contest.  We will risk scandalizing the Respectable Religious Bystanders who are upset that we care about the ones on the margins and treated as outcasts. We will be brave enough to risk our time, our energy, and our resources for others, because we know that even if we lose it all, we will not be lost to God.  The mark will still be on us, as it always has been.

Today, step into the world as someone who knows the mark of God is on you.  Remember that it will be there when we all find each other in the great gathering of humanity in God's new creation, and remember that it is on you right now, no matter what.  You and I, we are watermarked: claimed in the name of Jesus to belong to God forever.

Now, live like that is true.

Lord Jesus, remind us of your claim on us, and let us believe your promise.

Wherever There Are Wounds--May 29, 2025

Wherever There Are Wounds--May 29, 2025

"Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." (Revelation 22:1-2)

It's for everybody--just to be clear.

I still remember an outing to the grocery store with my kids from back before they were in grade school. We were on a quest for basic household staples--new kitchen trash bags, boxes of macaroni and cheese, new children's shampoo, and the all-important fashion accessory/first-aid supply of four and five-year-olds: band-aids.

We got to the first aid aisle, and as I grabbed a box of the bandages, my daughter says, "Is this for me?" So I answered, "Well, it's for you, and your brother... and for me and for Mom... for whoever has a cut and will need a Band-Aid sometime." This question, it turns out, is a matter of no small importance to a pre-kindergartener, because like their choice of toothbrush or breakfast cereal, band-aids are an essential part of their artistic expression and personal style. If the band-aids are just for you, then logically, you get to pick whether the box has Hello Kitty or the Ninja Turtles, the Minions or an assortment of dinosaurs printed on it. So for my daughter, the question, and its answer, were imbued with great significance.

With a nod of understanding, she synthesized my list of names. "It's for everybody?"

"Yes," I nodded. "It's for everybody."

Pleasantly (and I must say, somewhat surprisingly), that seemed to settle the matter for her. There were no protests on that day that I had chosen plain band-aids, over cartoon characters that were designed and packaged to appeal to one person, one gender, or one age group in our family. There was no insistence from either child that "it wasn't fair," and there was no crying or pleading for superheroes or Dora the Explorer. Because, it seemed settled--could it really have been this easy?--that these band-aids were for everyone. No one person got to claim them all, and yet no one would be turned away who needed one. They were for everybody.

That meant, of course, that the only qualification, the only pre-requisite, for getting one of these band-aids from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom... is that you need healing. The band-aids are for healing, and the healing is for anybody who will need it when they come to our house. Even guests. Even visiting relatives or friends. Even next-door neighbor kids who scrape their knee when they come over to our house to play on the steps. The band-aids in the box are for the healing of anybody who is (a) at our house and (b) needs one.

My daughter understood that as a preschooler. She could be content with that. It is a simple enough idea, but it is also radical--these things are for healing, and therefore anybody who needs healing can have one.

The last chapter of the book we call the Revelation to John has a similarly simple but radical vision. There in the center of the new creation, when all things are made new, there is a tree--the ancient tree of life, like it was plucked up from Eden's untended garden and transplanted into better soil. The tree keeps producing fruit all year long, every month, so there is never a need to hoard or steal.

And its leaves? Well, those are for the healing of the nations.

Are they only for me? No... they are for me... and you... and for people who live in the city... and for people who live in the country... for people who live in red states, and for people who live in blue states.... for the people of Gaza, and for citizens of Israel... for people whose families look like yours, and for people whose families look quite different... for people who seem so Christ-like you'd almost swear they were Jesus' stunt doubles, and for people who seem to have never met Jesus at all... for people in liberal democracies, and for people living under dictators... for people whose skin looks like yours, and for people whose complexion is a different crayon from the crayon box. "The leaves on the tree of life are for the healing of the nations." That is to say, they are for everybody.

At the tail end of our Bibles, in a book full of visions of what we might simply call "the end of the world," there is a surprising twist. On the last page of the story, despite all the violence and bloodshed of human history, despite all the many ways we have divided ourselves from one another, ostracized and "othered" each other, and refused to listen to one another, yet on the last page of the story there is the tree from back in the first chapter, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations--wherever there are wounds. The wounds within us, as well as the wounds between us. The pain in my own heart, the scars that are left on yours, and the pain of the estrangement between you and me, too.

The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No one person got to claim them all, and yet no one will be turned away who needs one.

The healing is for the nations. It's for everybody.

Whatever else the Christian story means, it means that. Whatever else is a part of our belief about how human history goes from here, or when Jesus comes again, or what happens to the world on which we live, whatever divergence of opinions there are on any of those subjects, the story ends with "the healing of the nations" with aloe from the leaves of the tree of life. So if your own personal faith, your own personal worldview, or your own politics and priorities and values are missing that crucial truth--that in the end, all nations, all peoples, everybody gets healing for free--then it is time to re-examine your faith in light of the actual picture of the Scriptures. If my theology makes no room for a God who will just up and heal all the nations at the end, because I am more interested in wishing to see somebody get punished, or because I can see the history of nations only in terms of "winners" and "losers," then it is time for me to re-read my Bible and discover that God chooses to end the story with "Healing is coming for all the nations. It's for everybody."

Even very young children can understand that. It is time for us to take it seriously, too.

Lord Jesus, speak to us again your hopeful vision of healing for all the nations, and let our actions now reflect hope in that kind of future.

Doors Propped Open--May 28, 2025

Doors Propped Open--May 28, 2025

"Its gates will never be shut by day--and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations." (Revelation 21:25-26)

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--your Circle K, your 7-11, your Sheetz, or what-have-you--that line is 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.  God could have closed the gates, but has deliberately kept them open forever.  That's the promise of the New Creation: the doors are permanently propped open, by God's design and decree.

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 where drones fall down from the sky and blow up buildings, or neighboring nations invade, or innocent civilians get taken hostage. 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 here now, 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 Third Reich 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 drones and guns. It is to say that the ways we deal with the violence and hatred 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 Me-and-My-Group-First, or 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.  We can point people to the vision of God's City, and let it change the way we live in our own cities, towns, and neighborhoods today.

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.

All of Us All Along--May 27, 2025

All of Us All Along--May 27, 2025

"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." (Revelation 21:23-24)

This moment is the pay-off of countless generations of waiting.  At the last, God's powerful love will draw people from every nation, every language, and every culture into the light of God's presence. And when it does, we'll see that it was God's design all along.  The writer of the book of Revelation is tipping us off to it now, in these verses that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, but even John of Patmos will admit that this isn't his new bright idea.  John only affirms what the ancient prophets and poets of Israel once put into words long before him: that God's intention has always been to gather all of us, all along.

One of my favorite things about reading the Bible is just how often I'll find that one verse or passage calls to mind another, and how often the biblical writers intentionally riff on each other's ideas and visions.  Here's a case in point.  The scene that John describes, of God's new holy city being a place of welcome for all peoples, turns out to echo numerous passages from many centuries before John's time.  In the opening few chapters of Isaiah, the prophet offers us this picture: 

"In days to come the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, Come let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths...nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. O house of Jacob, come let us walk in the light of the LORD!" (See Isaiah 2:1-5.)

Micah, another prophet of ancient Judah, will quote almost word for word that same picture of nations being gathered together into the presence of God to learn God's ways and to beat their weapons into farm tools. (See Micah 4:1-3.) And then, by the end of the book we call Isaiah, we get this vision, which fleshes out the same idea:

"The LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you..." (See Isaiah 60:2-4.)

We could go on all day with this, but you can see a pattern emerging, right?  What John describes in the final scenes of the New Testament isn't a shocking plot-twist right before the last chapter of the Bible, but rather it is a continuation of the picture God had been painting all along.  John seems to be saying, "Don't forget--this is what God has been aiming for with all of creation!  God intends to bring all nations into God's own presence and light!" And as John tells it, it is not simply a long-held wish or pipe dream--before all is said and done, it will at last happen.  God's new creation is for every nation, every language, every culture, and every tribe.  Nobody gets to claim God or God's blessings as their private possessions, and nobody gets to say, "We are God's favored; tough luck for you all."  All throughout the Scriptures, God has been guiding the story in such a way that nobody ultimately gets to say, "Me and My Group First!" God has been telling us all along that the goal was always gather all of us, all along.

That is a countercultural position to take, honestly, since there are a lot of loud voices around who would have us believe that God intends for us to love our immediate circle of kinfolk first, and then to rank our care for other people based on how much they are "like" us, with the people from other groups, nations, and cultures down at the bottom of the list.  But here we have the Old and New Testament both insisting that's not how God operates, and it never has been.  The vision John of Patmos describes is simply a reaffirmation of what the ancient prophets from centuries before him had been saying, too.  If we are going to take the Scriptures seriously, then even now we will not let ourselves fall into the trap of "Me and My Group First" thinking.  We will seek the good of all people, and we will see God's light being extended in all directions, rather than just what is immediately good for me and my little clique or clan.  And when we do, in some small way, the people around us will get a glimpse of just how wide and deep and broad God's goodness really is.  They will see the ways we actively work for the common good of all people, not just "our own," and they'll see what God has been trying to tell us across the generations: God has been seeking all of us, all along.

Lord God, let us be a part today of how you gather all peoples to yourself.

A World of Difference--May 26, 2025

A World of Difference--May 26, 2025

"And in the spirit [one of the angels] carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God....I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb." (Revelation 21:10, 21)

Maybe it's the cynic in me (I am a product of my generation, after all), but just about any time I hear someone pitching a new idea, or product, or program, or agenda, I find myself skeptically asking, "What will make this any different from what has come before?" I've heard too many pundits, candidates, and sales reps all making their stump speeches and elevator pitches about how their platform or their product was going to "change everything," and how they alone could revolutionize the market, they alone could fix the problems of the moment, or they alone could rise to the challenges at hand.  And all too often, they turned out just to be peddling more of the same old, same old.

My guess is that you have had your share of disappointments like that, too--that you've heard big talk of something radically new, some quantum leap forward, only to see that the "new" wasn't really any different from the "old."  Lots of folks talk like they have a game-changer in their back pocket, but it turns out to be merely packaging for an old product.

So when I hear the visions of John of Patmos, the writer of the book we call Revelation, and he tells us that God is going to make "all things new," my inner pessimist can't help but ask, "Oh really?  What will make this new arrangement different from what has come before?"  How will God make things any different, and what would assure us that even if God can bring change to the world, that it will be good rather than bad?  Why should I hope for a new creation when John tells me about it, if so many other times I have been promised a new age or a new reality, it has been, as they say, "all hat and no cattle"?

Well, I'll tell you one thing that catches my attention here in this passage that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday.  And it's actually something that's missing from the new creation and new Jerusalem.  Apparently, in the new heaven and new earth, there's no temple.

Now, that might at first strike us as an odd admission for a religious text, right?  Why would one of the writers of the Bible think it's a good thing that there is no temple in the new creation?  Aren't we supposed to be in favor of going to church?  Isn't it a little embarrassing that John of Patmos is so excited that there is no temple in the New Jerusalem?

Maybe not--after all, throughout the Bible, God is actually rather ambivalent about having temples, since God knows how easily we turn spaces for worship into containers for God.  We don't realize we are doing it, but every time we build a sanctuary, shrine, cathedral, or chapel, we run the risk of turning into a gilded cage to try and keep God inside, or we end up thinking that God has to stay inside the buildings we erect.  And God has always insisted instead on being unabashedly free, refusing to stay confined inside the boxes we try to keep the divine inside of.  So maybe it's not a bad thing that there is no temple in the new creation, because we won't need one anymore.

John adds this helpful detail, too: there is no need for a human-built structure to be the temple at the last, because "its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb."  In other words, there is no need for a building to serve as a meeting place between us and God if we are actually in the immediate presence of God once and for all.  A building is at best a placeholder--a metaphor for coming into the presence of the divine.  But you don't need the metaphor if you've got the real McCoy sitting across the table from you, the same way you don't need to stare at a photograph of your One True Love if your One True Love is already looking you in the eye and holding your hand.  We don't need a Temple in the new creation because, at long last, God's presence with us will be immediate and unobscured.  That's what makes it different from the status quo.

For all of human history, our kind has had this tendency of trying to turn God into our possession, our good luck charm, or our personal mascot. We have allowed Respectable Religious Leaders to become gatekeepers for who has access to God, based on who we allow to have access to the "right" holy places. And we have deluded ourselves into thinking that if we performed the right rituals in the right religious sites, we would have God's favor... or God's guarantee of being right... or God's power to back up our agendas.  And all too often, that has led competing parties and groups to attack and kill each other, each utterly convinced of their righteousness as they did it, because they were convinced they had God on "their side" with their temples, their rightly performed rituals, or their proper prayers.  In other words, as soon as we start building steeple-topped boxes for God (call them temples, churches, or cathedrals), we start to tell ourselves we already have God in our back pocket. And it turns out that you can be quite distant from God even if you are standing inside the building you erected to hold God.  After all, you can set a birdhouse up in your yard, but there is no guarantee that any bird will actually take up residence there.  And God, not being a genie, is not required to fit inside the itty-bitty living space we set up for the divine, even if we put a cross on top of it.

But at the last, John says, God will choose to come to be with us, without the intermediate step of having a building or a shrine or even a stained-glass window.  There will be no "right building" to go inside of in order to be where God is, because God will be immediately present to us all.  And there will be no bickering about whose building is the right one, or going to war over whose side God is on, because God will at last be clearly seen to be there with all of us.  That really will be different--that is what will make the new creation more than just a flashy repackaging of the old arrangement of things.  At the last, we will finally see that we didn't need a building to meet God in, because God never needed one in the first place--and God was never confined to quarters anyway.

In our present moment, we still do so much fighting amongst ourselves over who has control of God--who is calling on God by the right name, who more accurately believes correct facts about God in their creeds and catechisms, and who can weaponize God to be on their "side." In the temple-less new creation, it will be clear that God was never anybody's dog on a chain, but rather God has chosen to be immediately present with the whole world full of us.  If we take this passage of Scripture seriously today, maybe we will let go of that illusion right now and stop pretending that God was ever our possession to be contained or controlled.

That might make a world of difference even right now.

Lord God, come be near us, and bring about that day when we can sense that you are so perfectly present that we no longer look for you in buildings.

God's Gift Economy--May 23, 2025

God's Gift Economy--May 23, 2025

"Then [the One who was seated on the throne] said to me, 'It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life'." (Revelation 21:6)

Not long ago, I saw a meme on social media that boldly asserted, "Everything that's free is paid for by someone who works," without any other context.  I've seen that same slogan before plenty of time, and I'll bet you have, too.  It's the sort of sentiment you see when people are advocating to have this or that government program ended, and it's also the same kind of thing parents often find themselves thinking when their children seem oblivious to where the money comes from that pays for their snacks, or clothes, or technology.  And sure, at some level, it's worth remembering that the things my children think of as "free" come because the adults in the family are working and earning money, just like it's worth remembering that the programs in our communities, from libraries to schools to Metroparks to roads to disaster relief to food assistance for the hungry, all gets paid for from the taxes taken out of our paychecks.  Fair point.

But it is also worth remembering that God seems to have no problem at all with giving away the things of life for free, and God doesn't seem to make a fuss over who pays or who worked for it.  God's ordering of the world has always been more of a gift economy than a ruthlessly competitive meat market, and God isn't ashamed to say it.  In fact, to hear the book of Revelation tell it, in these words many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, at the end of everything, God is only interested in giving away free gifts without charge, and without questions of who has "earned" it.  The only condition for receiving the water of life is to be thirsty.

Now, I know that the way God operates is always going to be different from the limitations of the present-day world and our various economies and governments.  I know that God, who is limitless and infinite, does not have to worry about how to pay for keeping the sun shining or keeping the rain cycle going.  And I know, too, that all human conversations about goods and services will inevitably have to deal with the unforgiving rules of math, where you have to stay within budgets and live within your means.  So there will always be limits to how much good any of us can do with our resources, whether we are talking about how I spend my personal paycheck, how a family balances income and grocery costs, how a church uses the offerings it receives, or how a country guards the common good of its people.  All of these are valid concerns.

But it is worth noting that those concerns are only one part of the conversation if we are shaped by the vision of the book of Revelation, or the Bible more broadly.  If we take these words from Scripture seriously, we cannot ignore that God ultimately runs the universe on the basis of grace--of generous giving beyond what is earned, achieved, or paid for--and that God does not seem to worry about what all those free handouts of good things will do to us.  God apparently is only interested in running the world as an unending cascade of giving that ripples out in widening generosity and mutual reciprocity, where each cares for the neighbor, and each is cared for in turn by the neighbor... because God is the source of all of it in the first place.  

After all, in this scene from Revelation 21, we have finally arrived at the point in the story where all the things that have resisted God's will are finally vanquished--even death itself, as we heard earlier this week.  So this verse is offered as a glimpse of what the world looks like when God really and truly gets what God wants--without any rebellious schemes, stubborn sinfulness, crooked institutions, or evil tyrants corrupting God's designs. And in this passage, God does not set the new creation up as a meritocracy where only the supposedly "worthy" get access to the necessary things of life, but rather as an unapologetic economy of grace, where the essentials of life are given "as a gift" simply on the basis of our need and our empty hands.  If God were only doling out good things to those who had "earned" them, we'd all die of hunger and thirst. Instead, God has decided to give the water of life to those whose only qualification is thirst for it.

I suppose, like our older brother in the faith Martin Luther famously wrote in his last hours, "We are beggars. This is true."  All of us in the end will find our hands filled with good things, not because we have earned them or worked for them or impressed God with our awesomeness, but because God is good and generous.  God does not see an economy of grace as a failure or a flaw in the great divine design--it is precisely how God intends for the new creation to work.

Now, like I say, I know that the nature of the present arrangement of things is different from God's promised future.  I know that when I go to the grocery story to get the food for tomorrow's dinner, it will require paying with money that came from work I have done.  And as a pastor, I know that the money that went into my paycheck was first made possible by the gifts of other people who gave it for the sake of God's work in this place.  I know that our city, state, and nation all have to balance budget priorities, too, and that invariably, someone will feel that their priorities have been shortchanged while other items get more funding.  That is the messy sausage-making of any kind of administration or government, from a congregational council to a city planner to a national budget.  But let us be done once and for all with any kind of nonsense that suggests God runs the universe on the basis of earning and merit, when the Bible insists from "In the beginning..." to Revelation's new creation scene that God is only giving away gifts on the basis of our need and God's mercy, without any pretense of meritocracy.  The new creation for which we are waiting, and which has begun in the resurrection of Jesus, is wholly an economy of grace.

When we take that seriously, it will change the way we see the world even now.  It might help us to see ourselves as empty-handed beggars like Luther saw. And it might help us to see the beauty of a world in which all have enough to feed their families, simply because God intends for everybody to get to eat. That might make us rethink how we want our resources spent now in the meantime, too.

O God of new creation, we are beggars for sure, and we depend on your grace. Enable us to extend grace and generosity to others around us, whom you love and provide for just as you do for us.

God's Open Secret--May 22, 2025

God's Open Secret--May 22, 2025

"And the one who was seated on the throne said, 'See, I am making all things new.' Also he said, 'Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true'." (Revelation 21:5)

There are some things about the future you just can't find out until you get there.

Everybody says you can't understand what it feels like to love your children until you hold them in your arms for the first time, and at the same time, that you don't really know what it means to be tired until you have to go work after being up all night with an infant needing bottles and diaper changes every few hours--and they're right.

They tell you that you don't know what it's like getting old until you wake up with joints that crack and feet that are sore from the moment they hit the floor in the morning; only then do you learn to have empathy for others with creaking knees and aching backs.

And of course, you don't really know what worry means until you send your child or grandchild out into the world without you in some new way--whether the first time they go to school by themselves, the first time they go out to play with friends in the neighborhood without you following right behind, or when they move out and go onto new adventures in adulthood.

There are all these nuggets of insight that others can say to us until they are blue in the face, but which we won't really "get" until we experience it for ourselves. We might think we understand what others are telling us based on their own lives and wisdom, but sometimes we simply cannot understand until we arrive in that future moment when their past experience becomes our present-tense reality. And maybe there's no way around that--we just have to live enough to get to the point where we can see for ourselves what others had been trying to tell us all along.

But then there are times when someone gives us a promise about the future, and it makes all the difference for how we face the moment right before us. When the person in front of your eyes commits to loving you "in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, as long as we both shall live," it is meant to change your life now. You respond in light of the promised future that your spouse-to-be is telling you about, even if all that person can tell you for sure about it is, "I will be there with you, through it all."  

When the person interviewing you says, "You're hired--you'll start on Monday!" and shows you around the office, it is a promise about the future that very much affects how you understand the present moment.  Or when the bank's loan officer tells you that you've been approved for the home loan and you'll be able to live in a house of your own, it changes your outlook right away--in ways that are both sobering (like the weight of monthly mortgage payments) and deeply hopeful (as you picture planting flowers in your own yard rather than renting an apartment).

So here's the question: when God tells John, the writer of Revelation, "See, I am making all things new," as many of us heard from this verse on this past Sunday, what are we to make of it?  Is this one of those "You won't really understand until you get there" kind of pronouncements, or is this a statement about the future that changes our present understanding immediately?  Is this a mysterious oracle, whose meaning is hidden until the end of time, or a public promise meant to give us assurance we can stake our lives on now, like a marriage vow?

Well, I think the cat's out of the bag with God's follow-up instruction to John: "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true."  That is, God doesn't intend this to be a cryptic or coded message like the nebulous predictions of Nostradamus, nor does it seem like God believes the information will be wasted on John until some future date.  It seems, rather, that God intends for John to trust the word that all things will be made new, and for John to tell everybody else the news.  If the rest of the waiting world thinks its future is a secret, it's an open secret--God has been telling us all along that at the last, all things will be made new.  God tells us so that we can count on it; God has John write it down so that we will live our present lives in light of that promise.

If that's true, then what difference will it make for us to take this promise seriously?  How do we live our lives differently now if God's promise is, "I am making all things new"?  

I don't think God's intention is that we can trash the world we are living in now, simply because we think God will replace it one day--that's not the sense you get from John here.  It's not said with a shrug, as if to say, "Don't bother taking care of the world you have, the soil you grow your crops in, the air you breathe, or the water cycle that sustains your lives, since God will make everything new one day."  Just the opposite, actually.  I am convinced that the thrust is more like, "Because God is committed to renewing and rejuvenating all of creation, we can participate in God's work in some small but real way every time we take action to restore creation, too, here and now."  I am convinced the promise is that God will not let all of our acts of waste, depletion, and destruction get the last word; but in the meantime, if we want to be on the same page with God's priorities, we'll spend our energy to cleanse and renew the world in our own ways right now.  

When I spill spaghetti sauce on my dress shirt out a restaurant and my wife says, "We can use that special spot treatment detergent when we get home," it doesn't mean I should dump more sauce on myself right now and justifying it by saying, "She'll take care of it for me later, I guess." Rather, I dab some ice water from my glass into my napkin and onto my shirt to try and at least get up some of the tomato sauce--I am, after all, still out at dinner right now, and I can at least try to prevent the stain from setting or becoming a bigger distraction while I finish my rigatoni.  The promise of future restoration doesn't lead me to ignore the problem in the present, but to attend to it now, even if in a small and partial way for the moment, in light of the assurance that there's a bottle of Shout! I can use to help get the shirt clean waiting at home later on.  The future is what keeps me from giving up on the present situation in that case, as a matter of fact.

I think maybe that's the bottom line here in Revelation 21, too.  God assures John, "I am making all things new," not to give an excuse for apathy to stop caring about the world or its suffering in the present, but just the opposite.  God's promised future is what keeps us from giving up hope in the present.  It is the very reason we find the nerve and courage and energy to keep caring, to keep restoring, to keep loving, and to keep working for the restoration of all things and the renewal of all creation.  If it seems like the message of new creation is a secret, it's an open one--and it's one that God invites us both to trust and to tell, so that all people will know where the universe is headed... and so that we can live our lives now in light of that future.

Today, then, don't give up hope.  Where there is good work to be done to heal... to mend... to do good... to build up... to love... and to serve, do it.  Do it, not because the universe is doomed if we don't do enough, but exactly because God has promised to renew this creation, and God isn't giving up on it. Or any of us.

Lord God, give us the hope and energy to care for the world you have made, because we believe you will renew all things in this world in your own good time.

But Not As We Know It--May 21, 2025

But Not As We Know It--May 21, 2025

"[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." (Revelation 21:4)

The first thing is for us to admit that we can scarcely imagine a world no longer in the grip of death. Once we dare to consider the Scriptures' vision of a new creation in which "death will be no more," we are in wholly uncharted territory, unlike anything we have ever known.  As Mr. Spock or Dr. McCoy on the original Star Trek might put it, it will be life... but not as we know it.

We need to start here, with that admission, because I truly don't think we realize just how much our experience of the world is tinged with the shadow of death.  We are used to death as an unavoidable danger--what do we say, after all, but that the only two sure things in life are death and taxes? And not only that, but we are so accustomed to the looming specter of death that we don't recognize how it makes us perpetually on edge, afraid and anxious at anything we perceive as a threat.  We are used to a world where war is just seen as inevitable--as though there is simply nothing to be done about the fact that humans will kill each other, bomb each other's villages, or starve each other's children as we squabble over resources or real estate.  Because we are so used to being afraid of death, we are used to collateral fears, without ever stopping to think that it doesn't have to be this way: we are inclined to see strangers as potential threats, to see other people outside of "our group" as competition for scarce resources... and therefore as dangers, and therefore to see every relationship as a zero-sum game where my success can only come as a result of your defeat.  The world as we have experienced it all our lives is powered by an engine that runs on death, all the way down to the food that we eat needing to come from the death of something else in order to keep our bellies full.  We do not have the categories or language to conceive of any other way of existing in the universe that does not take death as a given.  And therefore, our species conducts itself with knives out, ready to kill rather than be killed in an endless and exhausting game of King of the Hill. We simply cannot imagine otherwise.

And that, of course, is where the Scriptures offer a minority report.  Today's verse from Revelation 21, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, makes the impossible sounding claim that God intends to make all things new in such a way that "death will be no more." And therefore, all the other realities brought about by death's engine will come to an end as well: "mourning and crying and pain" will be no more. Their services will no longer be required.  And with them, there will no longer be the need to view others with immediate suspicion or fear, because we will no longer need to view them as competition for daily bread or enemies who can hurt us.  They will be rendered harmless, and we will be harmless to them as well.  God's new creation will both embrace and disarm us at the same time.  And it will call forth from us an entirely new way of understanding our existence, in which life is no longer fueled by the combustion of someone else's death.  

Now, again, I realize that the Scriptures don't give us a blueprint for how that would work.  I'll admit I can't imagine how a world without death would function, or even a world without war, grief, hatred, and violence.  But at least part of what it means to be people of faith is to have humility enough to admit that just because I cannot fathom how something might work, it does not mean it is impossible. For most of human history, no one could imagine how human beings could fly using heavier-than-air vehicles (airplanes), until along came the Wright brothers who stretched our collective imaginations by doing it.  For millennia, nobody could conceive of a means of communicating around the world in an instant, and yet now we live in the age of high-speed internet and satellite communications, and we complain when a work meeting is required to be held in person rather than with people joining in real time on screens from anywhere. And for as long as anyone could remember, no one could conceive of how space and time or matter and energy could all be entangled... until Albert Einstein offered a completely new way of understanding them as connected in relativity.  We could go on and on with examples, but I suspect the point is clear. There have been plenty of times when no one could see how a thing could be true or possible, only for a new voice to reframe the conversation or invent a new possibility, and it changed everything. Could we allow that God is capable of creating new possibilities, too--if we have already seen airplanes, the internet, and relativity?

Once we grant that God might well have ways of remaking creation without death that our minds just cannot comprehend yet, then it compels to see, even now, that death doesn't have to get the last word.  We don't have to let death and the fear it generates in us get a stranglehold on us.  We don't have to see everyone else in our lives as a threat to be fended off or attacked.  We don't have to be resigned to a world full of war-caused starvation or generations of endless killing between opposing groups.  And we do not have to accept that there always has to be war or killing somewhere.  We do not have to be that kind of people--we know it, because God has promised us that at the last, we will be made new and there will be no death to make us afraid of each other. We can begin to live that kind of new creation life now, because we know where all of the universe is headed.  

We are headed into life... even if it is not life as we know it.

Lord God, widen our imaginations now for the new creation you are preparing, so that we can trust your promise of a world beyond the grip of death and fear.

God Moves Into the Neighborhood--May 20, 2025

God Moves Into the Neighborhood--May 20, 2025

"And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'See the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them....'" (Revelation 21:3)

Ultimately, the Christian story is about a God who comes "down," rather than about us going "up."

That really is a startling realization if you give it a moment's thought, isn't it?  A lot of church folk are so used to picturing Christian hope as something we go "up" and "away" to attain that we almost miss that the Bible's last scene points in the opposite direction--of God coming to dwell where we are, rather than us abandoning the world to go somewhere else. Maybe you caught it when we heard this verse as part of our reading this past Sunday in worship, or maybe you never really noticed it before.  Church folks have been singing hymns like, "I'll Fly Away" and "When the Roll is Called up Yonder" for so long that many of us have forgotten the fact (or just never paid attention) that the book of Revelation doesn't frame the scene as some select group of "us" going "up" to wherever God is, but rather of God coming "down" to where we are. It's not about escaping to another place, but about God's renovation of this place to become a fitting dwelling for both God and all of us.

Now, if all of that is true (and again, this isn't me making this stuff up, but just reading the book of Revelation), then one thing it means is that we aren't looking for God to whisk us away to a different planet or to a city in the clouds, but rather for God's space (what we usually call "heaven") and our space (what we usually call "earth" or "the world") to coincide and to be made new.  Nobody in the Bible is suggesting that we abandon this world, or that we can trash it and leave it to burn while we move out to celestial suburbs. Rather, God is committed to rehabbing the whole neighborhood and coming to be where we are, dwelling among us like God did in the old stories of the tabernacle of God amid the tent city of the Israelites in the wilderness.

All too often, Christians have made our hope sound like urban flight--like we have discovered that Planet Earth was a decrepit house in a bad part of town, and that God has offered us a place in a gated development of cookie cutter houses where we could safely ignore the troubled streets we left behind.  But Revelation pictures it as just the opposite: God moving into the neighborhood to rehab everything, from fixing up the old broken porch steps to planting flowers in the tree lawns, to painting over old graffiti with murals in bright colors.  And if that is a truer picture, then one way we anticipate that promised future is by taking care of the world we live in now.

It's funny--or maybe, beautiful is the right word--how a neighborhood can change when somebody decides to stay, rather than leave, and to take care of the community.  When nobody feels like there's a reason to stay or take care of their houses, things go from bad to worse awfully quickly.  But when someone decides to do the hard work of sticking it out--providing hope for kids in the neighborhood; investing in their houses and helping their neighbors to repair their homes, too; planting fruit trees in the empty lot, or a rain garden by the bus stop--a bad neighborhood can become the kind of place that comes to life again.  It doesn't require turning every corner into a Starbucks or a trendy strip mall for hipsters--it just requires someone to stay in the community and to care enough not to leave it.  Well, that's the picture of what God will do at the last--not just for one city block, but for the universe.  God comes to dwell with us in a way that is somehow more complete and more real than ever before, and that choice renews the whole world.

For too long, Christians have helped to underwrite the incorrect notion that we could actively wreck the world or passively ignore the damage we have done to it because, we told ourselves, God was going to take us away to heaven later on anyway, so this world didn't matter.  And once we accept that kind of escapist thinking (not to mention that it's terrible theology), it becomes much easier to live all of our lives that same way--bailing out when things get difficult, leaving behind the messes of the past for someone else to clean up (or no one to clean up), and always looking for a new development to run away to, rather than caring about the places where we had put roots down.  Maybe it's time for us to hear the Scriptures rightly again (or for the first time) and to recall that God isn't taking us "up" somewhere else, so much as God has promised to come "down" to dwell among us in a way that renews the places where we are right now.  Maybe that change of mindset will also push us to reimagine how we could care for the people, the community, and, yes, also the soil and the trees and birds, of the places where we live right now, in advance of the way God renovates the whole neighborhood and moves in beside us.

Lord God, renew the world that you promise to share with us, and allow us now to take whatever small actions we can today to anticipate your moving into the neighborhood.

More Than the Good Old Days--May 19, 2025

More Than the Good Old Days--May 19, 2025

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." [Revelation 21:1-2]

I dare say we may well have missed the point.

I heard a poet on the radio some time ago, and he was asked to read a poem of his entitled, "Heaven." The poet, Patrick Phillips, shared that he grew up as the son of a Methodist minister, but he has since lost his faith... although he misses, he said, the comfort of the idea of a reunion in with those we have loved in this life one day in heaven. But the closest he could dare to imagine now is the idea that after we die, we live on in the memory of other people. So reflecting on all of that, and longing for the comfort of an idea he no longer believes in, he wrote this poem:

It will be the past

and we'll live there together.

Not as it was to live

but as it is remembered.

It will be the past.

We'll all go back together.

Everyone we ever loved,

and lost, and must remember.

It will be the past.

And it will last forever.

What saddened me as I heard these words spoken over the airwaves was that somehow, this minister's son had heard the Christian hope of resurrection as solely a looking-back, as though the Gospel's big promise were some future day we will all sit around a table drinking and wistfully remembering "the good old days." As much as the poet said he wished he could have the comfort of believing in heaven, even that hope he coveted strikes me as a misreading of what the Scriptures have really been promising. All the poem can envision is a rose-colored wistful living in the past.

Now, here's the really hard part of me: I don't blame the poet for that picture. I think by and large we Christians have done it to ourselves--or more accurately, we have done it to the Gospel. We have made our hope of resurrection sound like it is only a looking back--like it will just be an eternal greatest-hits album and a bittersweet (at best) remembering of stuff we used to do. We have made it sound, I fear, like we really just think heaven is the glorification of "the past."

And to be really honest, I fear that goes hand in hand with the way we Christians have of only looking back wistfully at some imagined past (like Phillips says, "not as it was to live, but as it is remembered," which is not quite the same) that we wish we could recreate. So we end up with religious folk who say things like how much they wish they could make society "like it used to be" and then envision an eternal afterlife in which all we will do is tell stories with the angels and our dead relatives about how great "it used to be."

But I will be very, very honest with you--that is not much of a hope. I have been in a number of conversations, some lately and some over the years, that were mostly wistful looking back at the "good times" of the past. And when there is no shared future to look ahead to as well, those are awfully painful conversations. You have to keep the silence at bay with another story from "the good old days," because if things get quiet you have to face the uncomfortable present--whether it is going separate ways, or the fear of death on the horizon, or the awareness that a relationship is drifting apart. You can bask in the afterglow of past good times together, but when the storytelling is done, if there is nothing ahead of you to look forward to, it starts to feel awfully dark. The elephant in the room is the awareness that you have only been looking back because you have nothing pleasant left to say about the present or the future. If "heaven" were just an everlasting high school reunion (perish the thought--that sounds more like hell!), we would never be able to escape the sadness that all our adventures were behind us and that we were all just dreading the moment when they closed the doors and we all had to go our separate ways again.... as if all that were real were behind us, and all that was left was to retell and rewatch movies of the real.  Maybe we don't want to admit it, but deep down inside of us we need a bigger hope--something more than the good old days, brought back, zombified, into the present.

That's what made me saddest as I heard this poem on the radio--I fear that we Christians have unwittingly broadcast that kind of message to the world, and that all the watching world sees from the outside is that Christians are reserving their seats now for an eternal high school reunion, something that is only "the past," and only remembered, no new adventures looking forward. Maybe it wasn't that the poet had misunderstood all those sermons from his childhood.   Maybe he had just been listening to a lot of Respectable Religious Voices who never talked about our hope as something wholly new, but only an eternal "greatest hits" compilation of the past.

See, one of the difficult parts about a picture of heaven that only looks backward, or a religion that only thinks about going back to some imagined time when things were "great" in the past, is that our past wasn't "great" for everybody. I was listening to a radio preacher yesterday (ok, there is my confession--it is like spiritual junk food that I don't even like the taste of, but I keep listening in every so often just to hear what is out there), and I was listening to him recap the last sixty or so years of history in the United States. And he waxed nostalgically about how great things were in the 1950s in his memory, and then began to lament that the world isn't like it was "back then." It was classic "Good Old Days" thinking... again.  And of course, you could surely say that there are some things that were more pleasant about 1950s America for some than the present day feels like. But at the same time, those were not the kind of days that everybody looks back on so fondly--those were the days of fear of nuclear war, drafts for multiple wars, segregation and Jim Crow, lynching and McCarthyism and missile drills in school. If all you can see when you look back--at any given moment in history--is the stuff that was good for you, it's worth asking if there were others who got the short end of the stick and on whose backs or shoulders your happy memories were built. If your childhood memories are full of times you got two popsicles for yourself, you had better double check and make sure you aren't misremembering taking your little brother's popsicle every time.

Well, all of this is to say that when it comes to the Christian hope we call "heaven," if we are just looking backward to some "great" time in the past, we are forgetting all the things that made that time in the past not-so-great, and we are failing to imagine a new kind of future that is good for everybody. And when the Bible does envision that promised future of the resurrection life, it doesn't just describe some glory days of our history--it envisions things that have never happened before. The Bible envisions life that is good for everybody, including the people who have been stepped on and forgotten during the times we thought were 'great.' When the Bible talks about that hope of life beyond the grip of death, it doesn't say, "Remember how great the 50s were? Well, it will be like that...," not for the 1950s and not for the AD 50s, either. The Bible doesn't idolize any moment from the past--rather the voices like today's from Revelation 21 looks forward. And instead of dwelling on details about what it will be like, the Bible focuses on the who question--who will we be with? God. None other than God. And if we are clear that God will be with us somehow more completely than we have ever known before, then all the other stuff is window dressing. We can head into whatever future awaits us as long as we know that the God who loves us will be there with us.

In some ways, this vision of a "new heaven and a new earth" from these verses in Revelation 21, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday morning, remind me of a poem of Langston Hughes, entitled, "Let American Be America Again," written back in 1935.  After describing some of the people who have suffered throughout the past of our nation's history, near the end, Hughes offers this powerful vision of the future:

"O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free."

I think the vision from Revelation 21 is like that, but not just for one country or territory, but for all creation.  It is a longing for all the universe to be what it was meant to be, but which we have not ever really experienced.  It is a hope for us to be truly at home with God and with one another, even though all we have ever known in this life is some level of estrangement from each other--what church folks often call "sin." Our hope is for a whole new creation, something that has never been yet, but which will be our truest home.

Think about this today: the Bible's many voices do not merely look back to recreating some "great" time in the Israelites' past, or the church's past, and to make everybody work to make Israel great again. Rather, the Bible seems to say, "That backward-looking kind of hope was always too small and too narrow--God has something better and bigger up the ol' divine sleeve--and you ain't seen nothing yet!" Whatever it is, it will be good for everybody there--there will be no groups left out because of the color of their skin or the language they speak, and there will be no fear of war against one group or another. That is unlike anything this world has ever known--our hope has to be a forward-looking one, one that always looks to the future, rather than trying in vain to duplicate the past... at least if it is going to be real Christian hope.  Our hope is for something more than the good old days... which weren't always so good after all.

Today, maybe we need to think about what kind of witness we have given to the watching world, and whether they think our hope is just for a celestial high school reunion or if there is something more to be said and hoped for. How can you witness to that future day when God dwells among us and wipes tears away... right now? How can we be sure not to miss the point of it all today?

Lord God, come and do your new thing, and keep us looking forward to what you will do for all.

The Resurrection of Real People--May 16, 2025

The Resurrection of Real People--May 16, 2025

"Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity. At that time she became ill and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in a room upstairs. Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the request, 'Please come to us without delay.' So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them. Peter put all of them outside, and then he knelt down and prayed. He turned to the body and said, 'Tabitha, get up.' Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. [Acts 9:36-40]

Sometimes even just seeing someone as a person with a face and a story is the beginning of what brings them back to life.

Like here... A curious detail from this passage that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday caught my attention, as we heard the story of a woman named Tabitha (whose Greek name is Dorcas) is brought back from death. Luke records such a strange detail in the scene when Peter walks in and finds the body lying on the bed that I first wondered what possessed him to include it. As Peter walks into the darkened room, he finds the widows of the community all weeping alongside the bed—so far, nothing strange. But then, Luke notes that these women are—apparently while they are weeping—showing Peter "tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them." At first, I thought this the worst possible timing for a round of show-and-tell. The woman is dead, and the rest of the community responds by displaying her handiwork to the traveling healer who has come to town? Is this really the moment for something like this?

But I wonder if, perhaps, this is exactly the right moment for showing Peter the clothes and wares that Tabitha had made. Not to be crude, but let's be honest—she cannot get any more dead than she is. There is no such thing as arriving too late when you have been summoned to raise the dead. That seems to be abundantly clear from the familiar story of Jesus raising Lazarus after four days when, as the King James Version so eloquently puts it, "he stinketh." So Peter is not going to have any less work if he prays for Tabitha to be restored to life right when he walks in the room compared with waiting for five minutes to see the clothing the deceased woman had made.

But consider what it does to the situation when Peter takes the time to see these tunics and other clothes as they are held up proudly in the wrinkled, toughened hands of the widows of the community. All of a sudden, Tabitha is not a faceless, anonymous corpse in the room—she is a person. She is a human being with a story, with a talent, with a face. She is not just "the body," and she is not merely the object for Peter's divinely given power, used to wow the rest of the people in the town. She is not an "it" (the way we talk about a corpse), and she is not even just "she" or "her" (a generic placeholder for Peter to do his magic on). She is Tabitha. She is Dorcas. She has a face now. Peter takes the time--or perhaps he can't help it with these eager widows pressing in on him—to see who Tabitha was. She was a seamstress, and she would have had her own style, her own signature way of finishing a garment, her own customary way of cutting the shape of a tunic, a way of hemming a robe. You got to know Tabitha, or at least something of who she was, by seeing these garments. Recovering Tabitha's particularity was the first step to restoring her life. Peter honors this woman, and the widows of the town honor her, by hearing her story and seeing her life's work. Those works and that craft do nothing to earn her resuscitation or win Peter's respect enough to pray for her, but they are a part of the personality and the person that is to be raised. God does not raise theoretical people or generic examples of humanity—God raises actual humans with actual lives and actual faces. What seems at first to be an odd detail or digression in the story is actual the moment at which the dead Tabitha has her unique self, her face, restored to her so that she can be restored fully to life.

Think about how this scene speaks to us on this day—perhaps it is not given to us to heal sickness with a single prayer today, or to command the dead to breathe again with the call, "Get up." It may be that God will use you or me in such wondrous ways today, but even if not, we are still given the ability to give people back their faces--of seeing them as people rather than as statistics, customers, or demographic data points. We may be a part of God's way of restoring the personality and the beautiful particularity of others who have had their faces taken away from them—we may be given the opportunity today to rescue someone from the all-consuming force of anonymity, of being lost in the crowd as a nobody. We are given the possibility to listen to someone else's story and to honor it; to take the time out of our oh-so-busy and oh-so-important schedules to look at someone else's life and to treat it with care and dignity. You may be stirred up today to visit those who are homebound--in your family, in the congregation, in the wider community, wherever—and to rescue them from being lost in a sea of anonymity and amnesia by letting them speak and treating them like human beings, not mere objects for our charity. We are so tempted to let the names prayed for in worship become meaningless and forgotten, or worse yet, to let them refer only to the work we have done—one more visit made and checked off the list, one more good deed done in the world. Or perhaps you will be stirred up to listen to someone and spend time with someone at work who would otherwise be consumed into a cubicle and treated like a number. Maybe you will be led to make sure that our outreach as a congregation and our giving to causes does not become a mere exercise in box-checking—you may be the one today who will call our attention to the faces of those going hungry in our community or world, or the hopeful futures of the students who will receive school supplies through a collection we take up. Maybe you will simply help to retell and remember and cherish the life stories of those who have already died and who are waiting for the authoritative call of the Lord to raise them up. All of those are little ways that we remind each other that the new creation we are hoping for is not about resuscitating us merely to be absorbed into a faceless crowd, but God's deliberate act of holding onto the you-ness of you and the me-ness of me from death into life.

Perhaps the first work that needs to be done before the dead are raised among us is to ensure that we see each other's faces again. We are called to treat all whom we meet as people rather than statistics; that is, as beloved children of God made in God's image, with names, with faces, and with stories worth cherishing, even when they are quite different from our own. From there, we can safely leave it to God to speak the life-giving call that begins with our name, "Tabitha..." or "Steve... get up."

Right here, right now, this God of ours looks at us in the face and says to you and to me, "Child, arise."

O God who has called to each of us by name, grant us the peace to stop, to pause in our well-intentioned good-deed-doing and busyness, to listen, to see, to love, and to recognize the faces and the names that would otherwise be lost in a crowd or an empty room. We ask it in the name of Jesus, who is your face for us.