May 2, 2010 Des Moines

Revelation 21:1-6

 

Heaven Down Here

When you close your eyes and dream, what kind of world do you imagine?  There isn't, after all, one single universal answer.  The Buddhists, for example, look forward to “Nirvana”; the Greeks imagined the Elysian Fields; Native Americans talked about the Happy Hunting Grounds.  For the most part we have simply talked of Heaven – the great “pie in the sky, by and by” – and the soundtrack of our vision has been the abundance of Negro spirituals generated in the agony of slavery. 

There is one thing you might notice that those visions have in common:  they are all talking about somewhere else.  Religion through the generations has tended to focus on escape – on graduating from the mess of this world to the bliss of some other one – literally leaving this one and successfully arriving at that one. 

That isn't surprising for some of those aspirants.  If the definition of “power” is the capacity to act, then slaves, for example, can be forgiven for focusing on some other world since they were for all practical purposes powerless to effect any change in the Hell they were living through. 

But can the same be said of us – that we have no capacity to act?  That we are powerless to make any difference?  And are we as ready as they to give up on this world? 

John doesn't seem to be.  When he closed his eyes, he saw a very different picture.  And he doesn't claim to be speaking from his own imagination; he has  the audacity to assert that what he is describing is the very mind of God – God’s power in the world, and God’s intention for the world:

“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. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he 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.' ”

His, of course, is not the first time a biblical writer had tried to paint that ultimate picture. 

“On this mountain…” the prophet Isaiah had imagined centuries before, “the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. 7And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. 8Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken” (Isaiah 25:6-10). 

In other places he wrote about the wolf living with the lamb, the leopard laying down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, with a little child leading them all; t7he cow and the bear he pictured grazing side by side, their young laying down together; and the lion eating straw just like the ox. He envisioned babies playing with poisonous snakes and no one hurting or destroying anywhere on God’s holy mountain because  “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (8Isaiah 11, 65:17-25). 

Just to name a few.  Think, for a moment, about that biblical innuendo:  that when we really know God and let the knowledge of God wash over us like a tidal wave, our life together looks very, very different from how we currently experience it.

            How so?  For one thing, I notice that in all of those descriptions the dynamic nature of peace is experienced not in the absence, but in the very context of diversity – lions and lambs, snakes and babies, wolves and bears, weak and strong all living together in mutual well-being.

And through them all notice the amazing earthiness of it all.   The participants in these visions are not angels or ethereal beings, they are people and animals – the very things among whom we already live.  And the setting is not celestial – up in the clouds at the end of the beanstalk – but profoundly earthy.  Mountains.  Rivers.  Gardens.  Neighborhoods.  “I saw the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven…  And the insight that grounds it all perhaps most surprisingly is the dawning that the “home of God is among mortals.”  Here.  Down here, not up there.  “Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” 

      Which is to say that the biblical writers seemed to have little or no interest in thinking too much about “Heaven” as someplace else we might be lucky or blessed enough to go, but rather as this life on different terms – life in which all of creation’s disparate parts live and work together in mutual interdependence.  Because those first things had passed away.

That last thought reminds me of Paul’s conversation with the Corinthians about “love”, and how when he was a child he spoke and thought and acted like a child; but when he became an adult, he put an end to childish ways.  Those “first things,” in other words, had passed away.  “First things”; “childish ways.”  Like our jealousy and suspicion of others not like ourselves; like our propensity for greed and violence and our apparently unlimited capacity to inflict pain on others.  First things -- the kind of things that characterize the way kids behave towards one another -- passing away once the knowledge of God engulfs us. 

            I used to assume that church folk generally shared some hunger for this ultimate aspiration. Sure, we have certainly recognized the difficulty of it – maybe even confessed the ultimate elusiveness of it apart from God’s intervention – but it never occurred to me that that image of the “peaceable kingdom” might represent – even within the church – little more than a cute painting on the wall of the nursery. 

            Then I read a recent book that chronicles the way our country is increasingly segregating itself into pockets of like-mindedness – homogenous communities that only get their news from, go to church with, and even live among people with whom they already agree.  The chapter on religion described how the now-accepted recipe for growing churches is to focus on developing those very same homogenous communities – churches in which everyone is essentially the same; that “like” attracts “like”; that working to build a diverse community is first of all too much work, and secondly therefore generally unsuccessful. 

            I certainly understand that, because God knows discipleship is supposed to be fun and easy.  And comfortable.  Jesus was no doubt of the mind that comfortable enjoyment was one of the paramount virtues of missional communities.  I mean, he of all people knew that life is hard enough as it is, so needs more hassle in their life?  Let’s scrap all that talk about the cross and just enjoy the pride we feel at all our generous “good-doing.”  I mean, don’t we let all kinds of people use our building?  And don’t we support all kinds of helpful initiatives?  Surely that’s enough!  We don’t really have to go through all the discomfort of actually having to meet these people, do we?  And relate to them and possibly expand our circle and – dare we even say it? – change?

            Or is it possible that our perhaps-instinctual xenophobia – fear of otherness – might just be one of those childish “first things” that has to pass away in order for God’s reign to live among us?  The “holy city, the new Jerusalem, wildly diverse, coming down out of heaven from God” bearing witness to the fact that the “the home of God is here, among mortals.”

            If you read on in the description you’ll see that the “holy city” is not a small, rural village, but a vast city; with trees, the vision goes on to reveal, whose leaves are not for the decoration of our like-minded family, but for the “healing of the nations”. 

            So, what are we trying to do here?  What is our understanding of the meaning and mission of being “church”?  If the point of it all is just trying to be popular and get big then let’s face it:  we are embarrassing failures. 

If, on the other hand, we believe that God is calling us to help the world grow up and leave its childish ways behind, then we might just be on the right track.

 Guitarist Tuck Andress singer Patti Cathcart, respective halves of an inter-racial marriage and recording duo, have a song that might add a clarifying exclamation mark to this conversation:

Let's bring Heaven down here
Let's bring Heaven on down
I don't want to wait for the angels
Let's bring Heaven down here

            Listening to them sing, I suspect John might exclaim, “That’s what I’m talking about.  Don’t wait for angels.  And don’t wait until you’re dead.  With God’s help, let’s bring heaven down here.”