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.