Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Easter 6: May 13, 2007
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
In the spirit the angel carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.
I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day-- and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
From the Revelation to John: “In the spirit the angel carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.”
I will never forget the day I took my 10-year-old son, Evan, to the shores of Lake Michigan to get a glimpse of the Chicago skyline from Hyde Park. We had just moved to the city from suburban Maryland and were feeling disoriented and threatened by the urban environs we found ourselves in.
Chicago was different from what we had known. Instead of living in a house surrounded by a lawn and bordered by perky boxwoods, we lived in an apartment building that smelled of Indian food and echoed with voices of that spoke Spanish or Arabic. Instead of driving in the car everywhere insulated from others we found ourselves on foot walking past homeless people or on the “el” the elevated train momentarily looking into the eyes of strangers.
All of this overwhelmed us, and so one day as a distraction, I suggested to Evan that we walk to the lake and look north to see what the city looked like from Hyde Park.
Evan went along as 10-year old boys do when they feel powerless in the face of their mother’s wishes, but he let me know he was not going to enjoy it. And so he walked, head down, scowling, fists jammed in his pockets.
We made our way along unfamiliar streets and across one very large avenue until we saw what we thought was the lake ahead. It did not look the way a lake is supposed to look. It was neither surrounded by greenery nor appeared to be the kind of place where wildlife might gather.
Once we got to the water’s edge both of us turned and looked north toward the city. When we did this, I let out a gasp for what I saw was shocking. I saw a thing of wonder—a city sitting wide and standing tall on the horizon, a city, unreal in its archetypal perfection, the city of my imagination, looking as if it had floated down from heaven or someone had placed it on the horizon for my pleasure.
I was so stunned that for a moment I forgot all about Evan standing behind me. I turned to see his reaction and to my surprise, found that he was neither standing there agog nor turned away bored as he often did at that age. He wasn’t doing either of these things. He was dancing.
And so the city, its reality and its image, can inspire in us feelings of fear, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, feelings of deep longing and elation. We see this mixed response all through our faith tradition, beginning with the Hebrew people’s historic suspicion of and antipathy for cities along with their inspired attachment to the Holy City of Jerusalem. Likewise in the later Christian tradition, the city is the place Jesus weeps over before his triumphal entry and is the place where he is crucified. It is also the place where the disciples receive the Holy Spirit after Jesus’ ascension, making it the place where the early Christian Church begins, something we hear about in our readings from Acts during Easter season.
In today’s reading from Revelation we see the most exalted image of the city in all of Scripture: the New Jerusalem, our true home, coming down out of heaven from God. The New Jerusalem is the image of redeemed humanity in community described by John as a city of open gates and perpetual day, a city where nothing is accursed, a city flowing with the healing water of life, a city that needs no temple because there human beings see God face-to-face.
And so our Biblical tradition both acknowledges the failure of “city” life, communal economic and political life with other people, some of whom are strange to us, and acknowledges our deep longing for it to be fully realized as God would have it be—whether what we are talking about are actual cities or organizations or companies or churches. We yearn for all these places to be places of light not darkness, to be places where power is used for good and no one is accursed, to be places where life-giving energy flows like a river out of the center.
We know this experience in our bones—know what it’s like to yearn for cities, organizations, companies, and churches in our lives to be places of light and life-giving water and we know the disappointment, the disenchantment that can come when they are not.
Yesterday I sat in the convention in which we elected our new diocesan bishop, clear in my own mind and heart about who I thought had the gifts of oversight and pastoral leadership needed to be our next bishop. Amazingly, he was the person I had nominated months ago. As the ballots were taken and the movement toward him became clearer, I wiped tears from my eyes: not tears of joy, but tears that came both from getting in touch with my own disenchantment with the broader institutional church and from experiencing my own perplexity at what it might mean for me to move past my disenchantment and put on the kind of hope in spirit and action that the image of the New Jerusalem touches on and inspires in us.
In his essay entitled “The City in Biblical Perspective: Failed and Possible” Walter Brueggemann describes the way that the Hebrew people dealt with the failure of their great city. They dealt with it through the public poetry of loss, grief and rage. This was the only way they were able to move forward.
Out of their experience Brueggemann writes: “I believe church and synagogue must practice the liturgy of loss, grief, and rage, in order to relinquish a city that has failed. Israel knew that loss unacknowledged is paralyzing. Conversely, loss voiced emancipates from ancient anger, liberates from cherished rage, and permits new waves of God-given constructive energy. The city cannot afford a loss ungrieved, because loss un-grieved produces fatigue and brutality. He goes on: “Suffering produces hope, but not just any suffering. Suffering that is recognized, admitted, voiced, and enacted produces hope. We do not know why, but it is so. Suffering denied and unarticulated produces numbness and rage irrational. Israel knew that. And so, I propose a second response to the failed city of Jerusalem, second not first. It is a season of rich, exuberant, imaginative hope for a restored, new Jerusalem. But the new one requires the complete relinquishment of the one that is gone.”
This then is the challenge for you and for me when cities, organizations, companies or churches fall short of all they should be in our eyes and all that they should be in God’s eyes: the challenge of acknowledging the disappointment and grieving the loss, the challenge of relinquishing the thing that is gone in order to hope for and take some small action toward our new Jerusalem, the redeemed community, the beautiful city that brings tears to our eyes and may even bring a bit of a dance to our feet.
We do not face this challenge alone, for going before us is the one whose healing power comes of himself having been a victim of a city’s violent and unjust ways and who, in relinquishing his own life opened for us a way of life, justice and peace.
Brueggemann ends his article with the story of a man whose father had a shop next to one of those grand old downtown department stores that used to serve as the anchor for downtown life. Times changed, the department store left downtown and sold its building to a bank. Without the vibrancy of the store, his father’s shop went under and life in the city as he knew it changed forever.
Brueggmann then describes what the man did years later with his grief over his loss:
“Out of much thought and prayer, he told me, one day he drove down and parked across the street from where (the department store) and his father’s shop had been. He sat in the car and cried. Cried long, cried bitterly, cried for what was and is not, cried over a city now re-duced to banks and exploitative labor, cried a lost shop and a lost family and a lost
world. And then, he told me, he started his car. He drove to his church.
And for the first time, he signed up to work the soup kitchen”
One small and hopeful step toward the New Jerusalem.
