SunMay22010
REVELATION 21:1-6
It’s worth saying right from the start that no one really knows. No one knows what happens when we die. Yes, people have near-death experiences and those may be a kind of foretaste of death. But the fact is that even those who have such experiences aren’t really and completely dead when it happens. And yes, we have the testimony of scripture, but its images, too, are spare and incomplete. No one has yet given us factual and incontrovertible evidence about our final destination. All our musings are but imaginative explorations of a realm that’s ultimately steeped in mystery.
That doesn’t stop us from being curious, though, does it—sometimes intensely so. Is there something that follows this life? Will I still, in some sense, be me? Will I be with the people and animals and places I love? “Heaven” is the catch-all word we use for what happens to us at death. When we die, we think, we hope to go to heaven.
And that may be precisely what happens. It’s certainly an appealing and possible notion. And other biblical passages allude to just such a future. The book of Revelation, though, presents us with a different and intriguing image. The Bible’s last book is understandably concerned with last things. It gets dismissed by many because of its over-the-top images of battles and inscrutable numerical symbols and strange beasts. It comes across as a drug-induced hallucination, kind of a precursor to today’s graphic novels. It can seem, frankly, somewhat distant and obtuse.
At the same time, though, it’s filled with these radiant images that grab you and don’t let go. Today’s passage is among the most arresting in all of scripture. It’s one I often read at funeral services. Because it says: this world is not all there is. Children dying in car accidents and people losing jobs and massive oil spills and workplace friction that induces ulcers is not all there is.
It’s striking, though, that, for all its beauty, this picture of the end doesn’t provide much in the way of details. It doesn’t say that when we die, we’ll go to a place with lush and gorgeous fields, or that we’ll be able to get a tee time at Pebble Beach any time we want, or that the cutest kid in class is going to find us irresistibly adorable. Revelation doesn’t tell us what will be there when we die. It says only what won’t be there. In this captivating next chapter, we will be spared all the awful things that rip us apart and do us in. Tears and mourning and crying and pain will all be gone.
What will be there, you ask? Harder to say. The only thing our writer offers on that score is this: that “the home of God [will be] among mortals” (21:3). That God will be right here among us. That, in Eugene Peterson’s memorable phrase, “God [will move] into the neighborhood” (The Message). I have this great image of Two Men and a Truck pulling up to the house next door, and unloading a few of God’s things. And God will just be there, hanging out on the back porch, mowing the lawn, hosting fabulous (and always well-behaved) parties.
And I don’t mean this sacrilegiously. This is dead serious. The end of time, the culmination of everything, says Revelation, is God living right here with us. It’s not, in other words, that we go to heaven to be with God. It’s that God comes to earth to be with us. We so often think of death as the occasion of our traveling to some distant heaven. The visionary who penned Revelation, though, pictures God as coming, instead, to us. The road trip is God’s, not ours. The guest is God, not us.
When we think of God as coming to us, it has a way of shifting things just a tad. First, and maybe most crucial: this is a way of saying that our eternal destination is not dependent on something we do to earn a place at God’s banquet table. This isn’t about us and our accomplishments at all. We so easily fall into that trap of thinking that our standing with God has to do with our being good little boys and girls and obeying the rules and passing the tests. It doesn’t. When I die, I hope you’ll say about me, “Well, he was an OK pastor, but he was a bit repetitive about one thing. He just kept saying over and over that our destiny is not about our successes and failures. It’s purely about the grace of God.” This will be just one of the many times you hear such testimony from this pulpit. It’s not about what we do to earn a trip to “bountiful.” No. God’s home is here, among all of us. God has moved into our neighborhood.
So that’s one facet of this image: God lives with all of us, no matter what we do or who we are. Secondly, this image of God coming to us is a jolting reminder that this world is not some awful, God-forsaken place to be jettisoned as soon as possible. Cleveland, Kabul, Rio; the Cuyahoga National Forest, Progressive Field, Imperial Avenue; Manorbrook, the village, yes even Lake Lucerne (?): that’s where God lives. Not in some far off heaven, but right here, in the house next door, in our house. God comes to earth because this is a good place. It needs some help. But it’s still a good place.
Christians have been accused, and often rightly so, of being far more concerned with chasing a “pie-in-the-sky when we die by-and-by” than of caring for this spectacular home we’ve been given. We’ve been accused of escapism, of forsaking the pain and sorrow of this world and getting lost in some dreamy fantasy.
Revelation says no to all that. It declares that there’s something good and beautiful and true about this sometimes messy home we share. Not because the mess itself is beautiful, but because God is in the middle of it. God has called this home.
Philosophers and theologians distinguish between two technical terms, pantheism and panentheism. Pantheism means that everything is God, that the whole world is God. That’s not Revelation’s take on things. It’s got, instead, a panentheist perspective: not that God is everything, but that God is in everything. It’s not so much that you and I are God, in other words. It’s that God is in us.
The other day, I happened to hear some of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” being read on the radio. It’s a book-length poem, and the snippet I heard sent me to read the whole thing. I was struck by the ways in which Whitman makes this same point:
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, . . .
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d
by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever (St. 48).
Which has a kind of amazing effect. That means that there’s something holy about me, about you, about all of us—about avaricious Goldman Sachs executives and illegal immigrants in Arizona and brutish and nasty Democrats or Republicans or fill in the blank. If God is in us, then we are manifestations of God. Whitman puts it beautifully, if somewhat idiosyncratically:
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me
is a miracle.
[Divinely touched is all of it, including, he says,]
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer (St. 24).
Not only, though, is this passage about the Spirit dwelling in us. It’s also, in a strange way, a call to action. I have heard intense arguments about the meaning of passages such as this. “This is simply about what happens at death,” say some. “It’s saying that, when we die, God will do something entirely new. We will find ourselves made whole.” And those who say that are, in a sense, right: this is what God will do at the end.
“No,” say others, “this passage isn’t primarily about death. It so affirms the goodness of this world that it’s really about what we need to do to improve it, to move it toward its proper destiny. It’s not about some far off fantasy future. It’s about what we can do to respond to the needs and hopes and challenges of this world right now.” And those who say that are, in a sense, right, as well: there’s an urgent call for us to be lovers and improvers of this world.
Or maybe what we should say is that neither of them has it quite right, after all. Revelation isn’t really about some fantasy future, for which all we can do is wait. And it isn’t really about what we need to do, with all our might, to make things right. Instead, it’s about God. God’s love for this world is so extravagant that God simply moves into the neighborhood. Into that place of impossible personal debt God comes. Into that place of bottomless grief God comes. Into that place of confusion and doubt God comes. It’s future. But it’s also present. It’s not one or the other. In God’s time, it all blends together. Past is present is future. And if God so loved and loves and will love this world, then that’s what we’re to be about, as well. There may indeed be a perfect peaceful home waiting for us in the future. But that home may also be right here, where God lives and will live. And if that’s the case, then perhaps in the moments we’re given now, together God and we can improve the neighborhood. Because this world is so cool. And it’s worth saving.
A woman said to me just this week, after watching her husband almost die: “Death shows you life. Usually death is at a distance. But when it’s right there in front of you, you really see life.” Our job is to really see and love this life, and to live into the wholeness God has planned for us all: to tend to those for whom the luck has been cruel, to extend a hand to those whose ways seem so different from our own, to forgive those who have hurt us deeply.
When we share communion, we act out that wholeness. We share in this life a foretaste of that final and perfect consummation we await. Here, we eat together. We share a meal. We become the family God invites us to be. And here, as a prelude to that culminating victory, all are welcome. Here’s the way Whitman puts it, and we can hear in these words the voice of God:
This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just [the] same as the righteous, I make appointments
with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest (St. 19).
So come to this table as an expression of your willingness to be part of God’s new world. Now. It’s coming. And at the same time it’s here. So let’s get on board that just and loving and luxurious train and ride it to the fabulous place it takes us.