Another Sermon

Not much to say beyond that.

Here it is. Enjoy!

The lectionary can be found here:

http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Easter/CEaster6_RCL.html

“May God be merciful to us and bless us, show us the light of his countenance and come to us.” God blesses us: in the glory of creation, in the joy of relationship, in the power of faith come alive through worship. And we bless each other in the name of God--a reminder of the binding love we all share as God’s people. The giving and receiving of blessing is a basic component of the bible’s narrative and standard vocabulary for all Christians.

I would argue that some of the best language of blessing in the New Testament can be found in the book of Revelation. Though it bears a reputation as one of the more harsh and violent books in the bible, it also contains some of the more  transcendent passages in all of scripture. Verses of reverence and praise as well as some of the most powerful and well-crafted symbols are the basis of Revelation’s best known chapters. The culmination of John’s vision is the arrival of a New Jerusalem: a place, where there is no darkness, where God is among us, where songs of blessing and praise can be heard unceasing. 

And yet for most of us this seems like a distant possibility. The painful reality of everyday life makes the blessings of New Jerusalem seem like the shell of a promise--theoretically attainable but so far from our experience as to ring false. This comparison, of God’s kingdom to our own world becomes particularly harsh when we line up our cities next to God’s own. Even as we have moved beyond a Dickensian sense of the city as a den of vice and immorality; even as a majority of humans now live in urban areas; even as we have made enormous strides (among the world’s wealthiest cities) with the inclusion of green spaces and the improvement of infrastructure enabling cities to be the healthiest and cleanest that they have ever been in human history, we do not pretend that we have created any concrete and steel idyll. Even as city life appeals to more and more people, whether for economic reasons or general disposition, we cannot convince ourselves that paradise is readily found among the roads and buildings of human ingenuity. Cities have reached a peak yet unseen in human history but no one is promoting that God’s home is in the midst of our modern-day Jerusalems. Churches can be safe spaces, sanctuaries, a respite of calm and quiet amidst the chaos of a 21st century life, but if we wish to “find God” we go further afield. If we are searching out thin places, it is to far off retreats--like this--that we find ourselves.

And yet New Jerusalem is a city. A city unlike any other before. In dimensions too vast to comprehend and with some of the most magical, and gaudy features ever conceived by a city planner. Gold, glass, and jewels compose the walls and its buildings. The ever-flowing stream of life runs through the middle of its avenues. The tree of life towers in the town center. And divine illumination has preempted any possible power outages. But the most significant feature to be found in New Jerusalem, the most tantalizing and dreamt of quality, is that of God’s permanent and unending presence. There is no temple, “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” We need no priests to bear our offerings aloft. We need no class of divine intercessor to make ourselves known to the Lord. God is among us, and with it his light, healing, and hope. As we were assured last week’s epistle: “mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” God is with is us and everything has changed.

From this glory--this image beyond our wildest imaginings, this promise of God’s love and eternal presence--we must eventually come down, for we know we are not yet near. We are nowhere close to the New Jerusalem so we must fall from that ecstatic high, from that wondrous imagining of John’s Revelation to the more mundane reality of our own, painfully familiar, home. Was it all a dream? Was it all an illusion? How can we ever expect to close that gap?

And so we now turn to John’s gospel passage today and Jesus’ promise of peace and love in the form of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit. We have God in the third part of the trinity to guide us along this path, Christ is incorporeal form to teach us how we should live. No, we do not have the triumphant, blinding, indisputable presence of “the Glory of God and the Lamb” shining forth on all of our city. We do not have the inescapable knowledge that comes from God’s throne centrally placed in all civic life. We cannot and will not feel/sense/know God’s awesome power and permanence in our lives as the New Jerusalem promises will one day occur. But we have the Holy Spirit. We have the promise of God’s presence in our everyday lives. A God as small and subdued as Revelation’s God is massive and earth-rending. That “still small voice” which spoke to the prophet Elijah is the God we can know and pursue. The God who is always near and will not abandon. The God we can find, readily and consistently, should we merely focus on our seeking.

And yet...so what? The promise of a New Jerusalem feels as fanciful as an assurance of the Holy Spirit’s ministrations. Because the New Jerusalem feels impossible and unreachable, because it seems a fantasy born of John’s poetry rather than an achievable promise we must rely on that token Christian response: love. It can feel like a cop out. An answer as all-encompassing as it is vague. We trust in the Holy Spirit to bridge the gap between our reality and God’s future one but what to do in the mean time?

Martin Luther King once famously uttered “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” The truth of this is debatable--though I am inclined to agree with him--but what is harder to argue is how different our daily, lived experience feels from that. Yes, we may be bending in the right direction, we may be approaching a new and indisputable Truth but as humans trudging along, concerned with survival above all else, the bend of moral universe can feel, at best, irrelevant. When we look at all the harm and damage we are still spectacularly capable of, that long arc feels to have numerous divots and cracks along the way; that long arc seems dangerously close to crumbling, collapsing into a morass of human woe and ill.

And yet...we have God’s peace. We have Christ’s promise of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to walk along with us and guide us. We have the love of the Lord to rely on, to believe in, to rejoice over. “[Christ] does not give as the world gives”. The peace of Jesus isn’t in exchange for something. The Holy Spirit was not sent forth because we had met the right criteria. God’s gifts are different than our own. There is no tit for tat, no  scratch my back, I scratch yours. Jesus gives without expectation of receiving; there is no understanding that the favor will one day be returned. In fact, Jesus doesn’t want our back scratch. Jesus wants us to pursue love not because it is a moral good but because it is a behavior that will bring us contentment beyond our wildest imaginings. He wants us to seek peace because he knows it will fulfill us and the very core of our being. He knows that the true joy of New Jerusalem lies not in the “problem solved” nature of God’s descent but in the continuing absence of our previous woes. The old things have passed away, let us rejoice. And though we are not there, cannot be there, the call still remains; God’s peace is still available. It will never be as climactic and permanent as God’s final presence here among us--the New Jerusalem is not achievable on our own. But that peace which passes all understanding, that peace of Christ, is searchable and knowable, in our daily lives. It will slip away, regularly, and we may always feel as if we are grasping at shadows. But occasionally God’s peace will rest upon us; occasionally we will hear the Advocate and settle in God’s love for the moment. Occasionally we will find the promise of the New Jerusalem in ourselves. We have the Holy Spirit--let us rejoice and bless the Lord.