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.

Until Every Eye Is Wiped Dry--May 15, 2025

Until Every Eye Is Wiped Dry--May 15, 2025

"For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." [Revelation 7:15-17]

At the end of everything, the Creator of the universe bends down to our wet cheeks and sniffling noses with a tender hand... and wipes our tears away.

Read that again. Go ahead. I'll wait.

The thing that gets me about that detail from the last book in the Bible, which we call Revelation, is that if I were in God's position, I would think I'd have more important-looking things to do. After all, this is a heavenly throne room. This is the culmination of God's cosmic victory over the powers of evil and death. This is the center point from which God's Reign of justice, mercy, and goodness radiates outward to fill all things. Surely, the Sovereign over all the universe is needed for more pressing matters than wiping the snotty tear-stained faces of humanity... right? Surely, God can get an archangel or a cherub or an apostle to be on tear-wiping duty?

And of course, the answer is that, of course, God could. But the fact that God doesn't delegate tear-wiping duty to any lesser being tells you everything you need to know about God.

And to tell you the truth, it is on this image that I hang all of my hope for this world. Terrible things happen in this world--they are happening right now in places where wars rage on and human-made famines make people starve for aid that cannot get through behind checkpoints to feed them, while we in this place pick petty fights about culture war issues that someone else has told us to get riled up about along with whatever ideological boogey-men the talking heads on TV have stoked up our fears over. And yet in a world where terrible tragedies happen, whether or not we are paying attention to them, God notices. God stops the procession in the heavenly throne room to attend to the one crying child. God bends down to eye level with us and shares our sorrow as well as offering comfort. God finds the ones who are overlooked and disregarded, and with the gentlest touch, lets them know they are safe in God's presence, even while their fellow human beings have been too distracted by background noise or too engrossed in their personal rectangles of technology to even notice they are there. At the end of everything, God is still there wiping tears. That is what love looks like, and that is the news we bring to the waiting world.

Maybe that's all that needs to be said today. These words from Revelation, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, assure us that there is comfort even for those we have overlooked and failed to hear weeping beside us.  For the folks who are hurting and wondering if anybody else sees them or cares about them, you can be the one to say, "God promises to wipe our tears, and I am here to walk with you in the mean time as someone who comes in God's name." And for the folks who are oblivious to the suffering of others and instead obsessed with whatever the latest tumult of the day promulgated by the Televised Outrage Machine, you and I can be the ones to say, "Hey, maybe the things we've been getting all fussy over are non-issues compared to life and death over here with the weeping ones," and we can awaken someone else to a bit of needed empathy and human decency." Today, let's simply point people to the God who is still wiping tears after the strife is over and the victory is won.

At the last, there will be our tears on God's fingers, from drying the eyes of those who received no comfort from others beside them in this world. Perhaps that image will stir us up to see those who have been weeping around us but whom we have not noticed or stopped to listen to. And if we can take to heart that God will not allow anyone at the last to go without comfort, we will be moved beyond our apathy to care for those who have been ignored around us--including those we have ignored ourselves--until every eye is wiped dry.

Who that you will encounter on this day might need the assurance of God's comfort by your action to make it real for them today?

Lord God, speak your comfort to all who need it while we wait for the day you wipe away every tear--not only from others' faces, but from our own.

What We Have in Common--May 14, 2025

 

What We Have in Common--May 14, 2025

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. (Revelation 7:13-14)

There's a song which, I can now admit, sometimes still gets stuck in my head once a snippet of the lyrics pops into my consciousness, even though it's been more than 30 years since its radio debut by a one-hit wonder named "Deep Blue Something." But something about the song, for all of its quintessentially mid-90s feel, still pulls me back to it.

It's a song about people on the verge of a break-up. The opening verse says,

"You'll say that we've got nothing in common

No common ground to start from,

And we're falling apart."

And despite the fact that the beloved in the song seem to think that they have no reason to stay together, the singer offers this reply in the refrain:

"And I said, 'What about Breakfast at Tiffany's?'

She said, 'I think I remember the film,

'And as I recall I think we both kind of like it.'

And I said, 'Well, that's the one thing we've got.'"

And so, the curious radio hit of 1995, "Breakfast at Tiffany's," goes. Even for people who have nothing else in common, there can be one thing that holds them together... or at least which has the possibility of holding them together. It's funny to me, that song, because I have seen that song catch on people's lips, too, when they hear it out in public. Others who can remember that song on the radio three decades ago (Yikes! I am old!) will join in mouthing the lyrics along if they catch it playing in the background of a restaurant or bar, or in the elevator somewhere or at a department store. Without anyone coming over the loudspeaker and saying, "We will now all sing mid-90s radio hits together," the words come back to us, and you will catch someone humming along, or singing, "Well, that's the one thing we've got," as Deep Blue Something plays over the air. Sometimes the song itself feels like the only thing I may have in common with the strangers at the store or in the restaurant.

I have been thinking about that song lately, because in a sense, we followers of Jesus can feel like we are often on the brink of coming unglued. There are so many ways we are different, so many different places we start from, and it can feel like, well, "like we're falling apart."

And I don't think I'm being overly dramatic here. Even in the New Testament itself, there is this stark admission that the people of Jesus are a hodge-podge of different ethnicities, classes, languages, and backgrounds, and from the beginning there has been a tension simmering, between "insider" and "outsider," "Jew" and "Gentile," and the many shades of humanity that have been gathered into this thing called "church."

After all, the people of Jesus come from everywhere. We come from every nation, every language, every culture, every place on earth. We are young and old, rich and poor, women and men, educated and uneducated, with every color, gender, size, and shape in the crowd. We are different in terms of where we come from, how we dress, who we love, and how we see the world.  And perhaps sometimes we wonder how this ragtag band of people ever decided to stay together in the first place.

Now, it is interesting to note that, in the same time as the community of Jesus was beginning, there was another massively diverse institution around--the Roman Empire. And Rome also had to deal with a population of different languages, cultures, classes, and nationalities in the conquered peoples it ruled. And Rome's way of trying to maintain some semblance of cohesion was to force it from the top down. Roman soldiers would keep people in line and silence any talk of rocking the boat. Roman crosses would keep any would be revolutionaries fearful and afraid. Roman propaganda would keep people distracted by gladiator battles and impressive parades of triumph through the streets, so they wouldn't think to question the empire's rule. And Rome's leader, Caesar himself, would insist on shows of allegiance and devotion to the Empire, and to the Emperor itself. Roman flags and banners announced the Empire's presence everywhere, and Caesar set up temples to his own worship across the empire, insisting that everybody recognize Rome's authority, along with images of the majestic and fierce symbols of Rome like the wolf and the eagle. With its insistence that everyone in the Empire give allegiance to Caesar and his rule, Rome attempted to force unity from above, with shows of strength and military might, required homage to Caesar, and a propaganda blitz of banners and symbols and even a unifying color scheme of Roman red capes, golden eagle totems, imperial flags, and insignias everywhere.

The people of Jesus, by stark contrast, had no such forced program of homogenous propaganda. We met, at first, in small groups scattered across different houses in a city, different towns within a region, all across the empire. We came from all sorts of different nationalities, languages, and backgrounds, and there was no one at the top threatening you with centurions. Something held the people of Jesus together that was even more powerful than Rome's weapons, threats, and waving imperial banners. Maybe it was only one thing that this diverse group called "church" had in common... but it was enough. All they had in common, of course, was Jesus.

And still, what binds the people of Jesus together, then, for all that immense diversity and otherness, is... Jesus.

Jesus, this One who is depicted as a Lamb in the throne room of heaven, this One who is somehow one with the God of the universe, is what all of those different faces "that no one could count" have in common. And because this Lamb, Christ, has saved us and claimed us and called us beloved, our voices can be brought together in praise and song. Jesus, the Lamb who seems precisely the opposite of the predatory Roman wolf and eagle, is the One who binds all these nations, all these languages, all these different backgrounds, together, without issuing a single threat and without a hint of propaganda to it.  And in the scene here from Revelation 7, which many of us heard this past Sunday and which we've been working our way through this week in these devotions, Jesus the Lamb becomes the source of "the one thing we've got" in common.  

As John the narrator watches the scene unfolding in the heavenly throne room, he's witnessed a gigantic crowd of people from every nation and background, all assembled there, and one of the heavenly elders asks him, "Do you know who all these people are?"  John wisely admits he doesn't know, but surely this elder must know the answer--and he receives the reply.  These people have all come through great suffering, but the one thing they have in common is that "they have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb."  In other words, what they have in common is what Jesus has done for them. His death has made them new and pure.  His blood has given them these white robes (surprising, given that they have been washed, poetically, in "blood," and yet these robes aren't the color of the Roman Empire's standard red garb...).  Jesus, in other words, is the source of the one thing we have in common.  And that is enough.  Jesus--and even our love for him so much as his love for us--is enough to hold us together, even for all the diverse places we have come from and the differences that can make us feel strained and separated.

And in a way, it's like the people of Jesus are a lived and enacted version of the Deep Blue Something song. Except, instead of an Audrey Hepburn movie as "the one thing we've got," the people of Jesus are bound together by the love of this One who has gone all the way to death for us and claims us all, across our various cultures and languages and places of origin.  It is his blood that washes the robes of that innumerable crowd of the redeemed, and that washing is given as a gift.  No forcing is necessary, no cajoling from the Emperor, and no distractions with "bread and circuses," either, as the Romans did. There is simply the love of this One who is the Slain-but-Living Lamb, and that love calls forth our response of thanks and praise.

It is love that leads the countless multitude there in the book of Revelation to cry out in praise, "Salvation belongs to our God, and to the Lamb!" It is love that leads them to fall on their faces in a posture of absolute adoration and to kneel before God in worship--not because it is commanded by a Caesar trying to enforce uniformity, but because when you have been first met with such self-giving love as the Lamb's, you cannot help but fall down in love.

And so because it is this Lamb, Jesus, and his love that binds us all together, the same song forms on the lips of this vast multitude. Nobody dictates from the heavenly throne room--no divine propaganda minister or angelic PR manager calls out, "Okay, everybody, we all have to sing it together now." None of Rome's antics to try and force an allegiance or love by fiat. There is simply the Love of the Lamb who has laid his life down, which binds all these beautifully different faces together, and then which puts the same song on their lips.

That is how it still is for the people of Jesus. There is an awful lot that is different about us, the people of Jesus through time and space. We come from different continents and languages, have different likes and dislikes, different opinions and customs, and Jesus does not compel uniformity of devotion--some pray with arms wide open and raised, while others kneel on padded kneelers in sanctuaries, while others sit in quiet silence praying without words. Jesus is the "one thing we've got," and his love calls forth our praise. And that is enough. That has always been enough.

Being the church in this day means recognizing who should, and should not, get our allegiance, and how such allegiance is called forth. Will it be the top-down decrees of a Caesar trying to fool himself into believing the masses are all behind him with mandated imperial worship? Or will it be the power of Love that lays down its life for us in all of our different-ness and other-ness, which proves enough to hold us together and call forth our praise?

And if we dare to allow Jesus the Lamb to hold us together simply with his love, then can we dare to accept that Jesus loves us in all of our diversity, too? It seems, after all, that even in the great climax of the heavenly throne room, we will still be from every nation and language and tribe and people. It seems, in fact, that this has been God's intention all along.

And it seems, as well, that the living Jesus himself believes that is enough, even if it feels like "that's the one thing we've got."

Lord Jesus, hold us in your love, and let our praise and allegiance come back to you in thankful devotion for all you have done to save this whole fractured world.

We Are Rivers--May 13, 2025

We Are Rivers--May 13, 2025

"And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing,
'Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honor
and power and might
be to our God forever and ever! Amen'.” (Revelation 7:11-12)

At the last, nobody needs to toot their own horns or stroke their own egos.  At the last, all creation finds its deepest fulfillment in giving glory to God, rather than needing to hog the attention for themselves.

I find that truly fascinating, and honestly rather refreshing.

As we continue taking a closer look at the passage that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, I'm struck at how effortlessly all these different beings break into song praising God, like it is the most natural thing in the world for them.  You don't get the sense that anyone there in the heavenly throne room feels slighted, unrecognized, underappreciated, or overlooked.  They worship God, not grudgingly or like they are in a trance and being manipulated, but like they are more fully alive themselves when they are pointing beyond themselves to God. That's the secret, which has been staring us in the face all along: we are most fully ourselves, not when we are puffing ourselves up to get more attention, but when we are naming God's goodness and recognizing God's glory.  And at the very same time, as an ancient father of the church named Irenaeus once put it, God is glorified in human beings who are fully alive.  God doesn't need to make us grovel or crawl on our knees over gravel and broken glass in order to feel important; rather, we are more joyful, more at peace, and more truly ourselves in those moments when we lift up the goodness of God--that is, when we worship.  The scene here in Revelation is not of some egocentric cosmic tyrant who feels big and powerful when he forces his creations to fawn over him; it's rather of God's creations realizing that the living God is worthy of their praise.  And I am convinced that John, the writer of Revelation, might well say the same of each of us, as well: we are more fully who we were made to be when we are offering up ourselves to point to God's goodness.

If that notion seems strange to you, let me propose a thought experiment.  Picture a river that flows into a larger body of water--a lake, a sea, or an ocean.  Right here in my own back yard is the Maumee River, flowing up and out to Lake Erie, for example.  The river is most fully being what a river is meant to be when it is pouring itself out into the Lake.  A river that holds onto all of its water, or refuses to pass it along to the lake or the sea, well, it's become a very long pond, or maybe it's dried up altogether.  But a river is most truly a river when it allows its water to flow outward toward its destination.  The missing water that "goes away" into the lake doesn't lessen the river, but in fact, it is the very act of giving up that water toward the larger body that makes it what it is meant to be.  

I want to suggest that our meaning and purpose are very much the same: we are made for pouring ourselves out in love toward God--and because of who God is, toward our neighbors.  We don't become less ourselves when we glorify God or offer our praise, but rather we are more ourselves.  We don't feel belittled or diminished by naming God's goodness or singing of God's love, generosity, and justice--rather, we are somehow more truly what we were meant to be.  In fact, I would suggest that when we do turn inward to toot our own horns, brag about our own "greatness," or feed our own egos, that's when we are actually settling for less than full life.  When our own sense of self-importance turns us inward, we end up wasting our time, energy, and love trying to get other people to compliment us or praise us, and it feels empty, doesn't it?  

So in this new day, hear this passage from Revelation as an invitation to be more fully alive.  The insecure loudmouths will keep wanting to puff themselves up and talk about their own (imagined) greatness, but we don't have to waste our breath tooting our own horns. We can find ourselves more fully ourselves when we are offering our lives completely to God--like the old hymn says it, "lost in wonder, love, and praise."  We are meant to be rivers, not stagnant ponds, after all.

All praise to you, God, for you are good--and you have shared your goodness with us to give us life. For this we give you thanks, and in this, we receive our fulfillment.