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.