MAY 16, 2010 Des Moines

Revelation 21:22 - 22:5

TO GATHER AT THE RIVER

I grew up going to church camp at Lake Brownwood Christian Retreat, the church owned retreat center for the Central Area of the Christian Church in the Southwest. Located about 90 miles from my hometown, it became so much the center of powerful and transforming spiritual experiences that we used to sing about it. A popular camp song at the time, called “Jesus my Lord,” begins by asking “Have you seen Jesus my Lord? He’s here in plain view.” Only we used to sing it “Have you seen Jesus My Lord? He’s here in Brownwood.”

It was, growing up, that kind of place; the kind of place from which it was hard to go home at the end of the week because what you had experienced there in the vespers area on the shores of that lake; or in the evening sing-alongs on the lawn by the dining room; or in the small groups; or on your pillow at night listening to the serenade of the darkened outdoors had been so overwhelming and so “right.” What we had come to know in those life-changing days was ourselves in a different way; a genuine and rare experience with Christian community, and the intimate, almost palpable presence of God. We had been together there, with God and each other, in a way that we somehow intuitively knew would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate back home. Those were extraordinary experiences, and that was an extraordinary place where it had, indeed, been right.

All of which made it hard to go back several years later to find the camp in general disrepair. The walk ways were overgrown, the buildings were run down, and the lawns, always so attentively encouraged, now brittled across the acreage brown, thinned and dying. Management had changed in both personnel and style. Someone that week urged the resident manager to please water the grass. “Well,” he responded. “If I watered the grass, it would grow, and that would mean I would have to mow, and that would mean I would have to fix the mower.”

A parable, almost, of the human condition -- birthed in oneness and naked community and placed in a garden, the grass has long since grown as stiff and brittle as our community. Dying from neglect but also malicious inattention. Drying up into a hardened, sedimented wasteland of social disinterest and personal preoccupation. Some of the problems that now beset us we have no idea how to address, and much of what we do know how to fix we often pass over as too much trouble with which to bother.

And when we aren't careful we turn against each other -- jealously, suspiciously, defensively. I mentioned a couple weeks ago a book I recently read that demonstrates how we as a country have been re-sorting ourselves into communities of like mind – sometimes literally picking up and moving to neighborhoods filled with people of like mind; other times just filling our minds and activities with political and philosophical sameness. The result, as the authors point out, is the phenomenon that psychologists have demonstrated for a long time: that members of such homogeneous groups adopt more extreme positions than they otherwise would, and view those outside their circle as more extreme than they really are. The results are predictably explosive.

This philosophical tribalism paradoxically coincides with the escalating reverence for the individual as the primary unit of civilization. Each to and for him/herself, indignantly resentful of anyone who gets something for free. “Going Rogue,” as the popular book title puts it, but in a way that appeals to the tribe. Life as a warehouse of shared parallel experiences received in isolation. It is a culture observed by author Robert Putnam in his book from a few years back titled Bowling Alone. Bowling as a pastime, he documents, is on the rise. More and more people are going to the alleys and knocking down the pins. But fewer and fewer of them are doing it on teams in leagues. In the old days, he remembers, two teams, eight people, would join each other on the bench at the head of the lane, and they would compete. But only one person bowls at a time, which left seven others to watch, eat pizza, and more to the point: talk. Talk about everything -- the weather, work, families, politics -- anything that seemed entertaining or worthwhile. But less and less talking is going on these days because though more and more people are bowling, they are bowling, Putnam writes, alone (Simon and Schuster, 2000)).

It is interesting to me how John describes the heaven that he sees. I don’t have any trouble conjuring up images of my own. You have heard me extol the virtues of Vermont, where the air is cool, the mountains are enveloping, the trees whisper grace, and the air revives. I know what heaven looks like. But according to John, this ultimate destiny of humankind is not Vermont; it isn’t, with all due respect to the T-shirts and the bumper stickers, even Iowa; it isn't some bucolic rural scene. Heaven, according to John, is a city! (Boring, p. 219).

That, I think, is a staggering image! The city, bustling and crowded as the symbol for the realization of human community, the concrete living out of interdependence as the essential nature of human life” (ibid). Community. New Testament scholar Eugene Boring writes that “In the individualistic ideal, each person is independent, self-reliant, doing everything for himself/herself. In a city the tasks of life are divided up, each one does a part, and the beauty of life is not a solo but a symphony” (ibid).

In this heavenly city, not even the city itself lives in isolation. It is open for the nations; open for the very breadth of humankind. In a kind of progressive logic that sounds like the very antithesis of the one explaining my church camp’s dying lawn, the author notes that the gates of the city only close at night. But here there is no night because there is no sun nor moon, because the glory of God is its continuous source of light, therefore the gates are always open.

And much to my professional disadvantage, there are no churches there -- there is no temple -- because every moment and every place is an occasion, a setting for the worship of the God who is intimately, imminently, accessibly present.

And contrary to the dry and dusty wasteland that our self-absorption creates, that our jealousy hardens, and that our estrangement petrifies, through the center of this city -- this realized human community -- there flows a river whose mouth is the very throne of God. And on either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit the year around; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations -- for the good and the life of, not the one, but the many. And the talk of the town -- the conversation around bowling lanes crowded and raucous -- is worship and glory and honor and praise.

As I recently noted when we began this perusal of “real life” as John foretells it, this vision is not one for which we are to sit back and patiently wait to come true. The verb tense in God’s declaration is not future, but present. “Look and see: I am making all things new.” It is happening, even now. The only question is how long we will tolerate the desert. Do you remember those three guiding words that have focused our ministries these past several years: that we are called to be a “sign” a “foretaste” and an “instrument” of God's coming reign? Those are languid adjectives of passive waiting, but active, pulsing prods.

Let me illustrate this by borrowing from a blog I wrote yesterday in the airport flying home from Tarrytown, NY where the cohort I am working with had been learning about the taste of place. Among other things our path led to the historic Union Church of Pocantico Hills, founded by the Rockefellers where we visited with the pastor about the shape and character of their ministry, and he had unambiguously narrowed the focus to worship. Deep worship and good preaching. When I asked about other programming he mentioned a Wednesday night Bible study, but "we don't expect people to live here" he retorted. As to activities or involvements with the community, he dismissed the notion. "I don't much care for other preachers, and we're not here to be a community center." They don't, he went to amplify, make the building available for birthday parties or the like. "Let them mess up their own houses," he chortled.

Recently, as church savings had begun to accrue, someone had suggested they help fund a Habitat for Humanity project in the area, but the pastor had quashed the idea. They were concentrating on getting their own house in order, he explained, which involved endowing the pastoral position.

Finishing our conversation, he handed us off to one of the docents to interpret for us the famous Matisse and Chagall stained-glass windows that illuminate the sanctuary. The Matisse is a colorful rose window behind the altar. Facing it from the back wall is an immense design by Marc Chagall depicting the parable of the Good Samaritan. That window struck us as ironic. In this edifice made famous by its depiction of the one who went out of his way to help, apparently worships a congregation who routinely passes by on the other side of the road.

In the church that I imagine, the trees are growing and the fruit is ripening; the nations are sick and dying but there are leaves for their healing. There is this city in the making whose gates need never close. God is, in fact, intimately, imminently, accessibly present, and from God’s throne the water is already flowing. I’m hot and I’m tired, and in this land of disinterested selfishness and greed I’m lonely and I’m thirsty. Maybe you are, too. Come, let’s gather by the river.