Reconnecting the Grace-full Body: Streets of Gold Need More than Wax (Revelation 21:10-21)
Ordinary Time
He took me in a Spirit-inspired trance to a great,
high mountain, and he showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of
heaven from God. 11 The city had God’s glory. Its
brilliance was like a priceless jewel, like jasper that was as clear as
crystal. 12 It had a great high wall with twelve
gates. By the gates were twelve angels, and on the gates were written the names
of the twelve tribes of Israel’s sons. 13 There
were three gates on the east, three gates on the north, three gates on the
south, and three gates on the west. 14 The city
wall had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the Lamb’s
twelve apostles.
15 The angel who spoke
to me had a gold measuring rod with which to measure the city, its gates, and
its wall. 16 Now the city was laid out as a square.
Its length was the same as its width. He measured the city with the rod, and it
was fifteen hundred miles. Its length and width and height were
equal. 17 He also measured the thickness of its
wall. It was two hundred sixteen feet thick, as a person—or rather, an
angel—measures things. 18 The wall was built of
jasper, and the city was pure gold, like pure glass. 19 The
city wall’s foundations were decorated with every kind of jewel. The first
foundation was jasper, the second was sapphire, the third was chalcedony, and
the fourth was emerald. 20 The fifth was sardonyx,
the sixth was carnelian, the seventh was chrysolite, and the eighth was beryl.
The ninth was topaz, the tenth was chrysoprase, the eleventh was jacinth, and
the twelfth was amethyst. 21 The twelve gates were
twelve pearls; each one of the gates was made from a single pearl. And the
city’s main street was pure gold, as transparent as glass. (CEB)
When
I was in elementary school, my mother took on a patchwork quilt of part-time jobs,
one of which was as an event janitor at a United Methodist church. For lack of a better option, she would often
take my brother and I along, giving us part of her duties to make the work more
manageable and also to keep us out of trouble.
I spent quite a few Saturday nights sweeping up rice—and, when rice was
banned, flower petals—after various weddings, or setting the rows of chairs
back in place while my mother wiped down the bathrooms and bridal rooms for the
services the following morning. It wasn’t
exactly my favorite way to spend time, but there is something intense about a
darkened church—especially one as large as that one, which was slightly bigger
than the building here downtown.
Like
any building that is only slightly familiar, the edges of it blurred in the twilight;
the streetlamps that flicked on at dusk and poured through the blue
stained-glass windows suddenly felt so much older than they did when I stood in
the parking lot, and the various closets and classrooms belonged to a world
that was so much different than my school or our apartment. There was an internal courtyard in the center
of the slightly-rectangular building and I have never heard the story of Jesus
in Gethsemane in the same way I would have before seeing that garden with its
July-lazy lightning bugs drifting over the stone benches and under the weary
crabapple tree.
I
learned, in those afternoons and evenings, that the line between holy spaces
and ordinary spaces is extremely thin. Vacuums
were just as loud in Sunday school classrooms as in my grandparents’ living
room, and picking up discarded bulletins from the narthex was just as annoying as
having to clean up my schoolwork when I’d spread it all out to study. The sacred and the stolid bumped against each
other, keeping me company as my mother wiped down the sinks while I played hide
and seek in the light of the windows with a God I couldn’t see.
We
continue our series this week on the gifts we are given to give back to the
kingdom of God, talking through the ways we can serve the sprawling, messy
wonder that is the Church. Today, we
come to the physical reality of church—to our buildings, and how we care for
them. Online folks, this one is going to
be rather out of context for you, although I certainly invite you to stay for
the Scripture if not the anchoring application.
John’s
Revelation—singular, not plural, since that’s a pet peeve of mine I picked up
in divinity school—is a letter to seven area churches about what it looks like
to live in one empire and proclaim an entirely different kind. Revelation gets a lot of flak, not least
because there’s a contingent of Christianity that takes it literally and is
waiting for blood rivers and the satisfaction of watching everyone they dislike
die gruesomely, but also because it’s just a weird book of the Bible. This is layers and layers of symbolism keyed
to the audience of a time and place we do not inhabit, and as such we need to
take care in our reading. It is easy to
take today’s passage at face value: after the earth has gone through some seriously
unpleasant plagues and earthquakes and massive changes, the new Jerusalem shows
up and it’s shiny and clean. Of course
it would be, we who have thousands of years of paintings of gold-laden streets say;
Heaven is of course startingly lush.
But
we miss John’s true wonder if we stay there.
“He took me in a trance,” writes John of his angel guide in this vision,
this revelation, “and showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of
heaven.” This new Jerusalem, this
marvelous city of God, isn’t in heaven light years away, as the song points
out; it comes here, here to earth, here to the place where humans and animals
and plants live, here where God walked as a man, here where we fight and cry and
laugh with each other. The sacred and
the stolid bump against each other and it makes everything holy, everything God’s—it
was good, very good, which is what God said about all of creation back in
Genesis 2. John’s vision reconsecrates
the world, a living temple in its entirety to the God Who made it.
We
then get a description of that city and I know, this is a part that seems dull
to most people except for, perhaps, civil engineers. This is where we toss around words like “cubits”
and check out until there are speaking roles again, but John was not describing
a city just to be pedantic. He was
taking a vision of a temple from the prophet Ezekiel, actually, and ripping it
wide open. Professor Vernard Eller
writes that, “John seems to have two main purposes behind this scene. One
is to highlight the beauty of the redeemed church. He
resorts to the most impressive physical imagery he knows to describe a reality
and a glory that are far more than and quite different from the merely
physical. Therefore, no one is to get literal and start asking questions like: ‘Who'd
want to live in that kind of a city?’ or, ‘Would pure gold even stand up as a
construction material?’ What John is saying here is, ‘Beautiful, beautiful,
beautiful!’”[1] John covers the city in gemstones of every
color of the rainbow that all had meaning.
Sardonyx was used for protection talismans carved with heroic gods as
well as signet rings to seal official documents;[2]
carnelians were thought to spur true love and protect mental health;[3] emeralds
brought peace to those who rested their eyes there;[4] a
subset of Judaism believed the Ten Commandments had been carved into sapphire
tablets.[5]
And
John makes them the bricks in the wall.
Not
to make an inadvertent Pink Floyd reference, but the whole point of the new Jerusalem
being covered in gems is that they don’t matter. The point of the city is not to proclaim its overindulgence
in wealth but for John to say that this city is the most luxurious one in
history and none of it is even a tenth as important as the fact that God is
there, that God has flung open every single one of those twelve gorgeous gates
and said, “Come walk on gold, come ignore jasper, come see the new world I have
created where all are welcome and no one is separated from My holiness, from My
presence, from My love.” Everything is
made sacred not because it is beautiful but because it is, because God
has made it.
Professor
Barbara Rossing writes, “Revelation makes important changes along the way that
open up Ezekiel’s priestly vision to everyone. One striking modification is
that New Jerusalem has ‘no temple’ (21:22). God’s presence now extends to the
entire city’s landscape, with all of God’s people serving and reigning with
Christ as priests (Revelation1:6; 5:10; 20:6; 22:3, 5).
“New
Jerusalem is a welcoming city, not a gated community. Whereas Ezekiel’s temple
gate was shut so that ‘no one shall enter by it’ (Ezekiel 44:1-2), the gates
into New Jerusalem are perpetually open — they are ‘never shut by day and there
will be no night there’ (Revelation 21:26). Even foreigners are invited to
enter into this radiant city, whose lamp is the Lamb, Jesus. Nations will walk
by its light, streaming in through its open gates (21:24, 26). In our time when
nations and neighborhoods seek to secure themselves against outsiders, the
church can claim Revelation’s vision of openness and multicultural welcome for
all our cities.”[6]
First United
Methodist, we’ve been having a lot of conversations about buildings of late,
and everybody has an opinion about what to do with ours; I certainly do. But we are simply talking in circles if we
don’t remember what the building is for, what the city is for,
why it matters that the pearly gates never close. The empty sanctuaries and classrooms my family
and I cleaned where the streetlamps danced through the blue-stained windows and
the lightning bugs bobbled over swept stone pathways were mere shadows of how
marvelous a vision John has of a city where everything is sacred and where all
are welcome to come and enjoy that.
Do you see,
Church? Do you see what we are called to
be, we who call these “sanctuaries” and forget that it comes from “sanctus,”
holy? This is holy ground, this
deliberate awareness of a city that is not yet and a God Who is right now; this
building is an outpost of a place where gold and pearls are nothing compared to
the pricelessness of being in God’s presence, a testament to our calling to
shut no one out and call everyone into the wonder of God’s grace. We so readily care for the obviously holy,
the beautiful and shiny, the cathedrals of faraway Jerusalem real and imagined,
but John offers us gold paving stones plunked down in a sheep’s meadow so that
we learn we are to care for all of creation as holy, welcome all of creation as
sacred. Our buildings aren’t sanctuaries
because we built them in multiples of twelve and covered them in emeralds but
because God dwells within them among us, reminding us that this is a place to
breathe before we are sent out into the world that needs to hear it, too, is beloved.
How will it
change us, change our conversations, if we think about our buildings not as places
where we are made comfortable but as places where the whole world finds rest,
wholeness, peace, grace, love, God?
Buildings
are a lot—anyone who’s had to pay rent or mortgages or fix a leaky sink knows
that. And we don’t have a lot of formal
people; we have two staff for our two buildings. Henry, our building manager, is in charge of
contracts and the regular things like clearing the parking lot and maintaining
the boiler. Robert, our custodian, is in
charge of keeping these places clean so that we can welcome folks into a safe
environment. Say hey to them, and thank
them, and preferably don’t point out all the things you think they aren’t aware
of that need to be done. Say hi to the
trustees committee, who are in charge of remembering when to replace the roof
and how to best care for the external stairs at Green Wood and whether this will
be the year we figure out air conditioning.
And know,
Church, that if we’re serious about our buildings being holy spaces in which people
are invited to come be in God’s presence, it is also ours to care for them. It may seem absurd, especially in an era when
the idea of church buildings may seem outdated—and to be sure, there’s a lot
about how we deal with our church buildings that is outdated. Sometimes we think of the golden streets and
forget the God Who walks them; sometimes we forget that these churches are
places we go to spend deliberate time in community and communion with God and
instead make the spaces into gods themselves.
We must take care that we do not worship the temple instead of the One
for Whom it was built.
But if we
are to keep these sanctuaries, these holy places, these reminders of a jewel-laden
city made beautiful by and for the God Who invites everyone, everyone in,
then we are called to treat them as though they are places we are inviting our
God. Why would we not care for the
thing that anchors us to the God Who calls us by name? So do the little things: pick up trash when
you see it on the lawn, or lend your skills with a hammer if needed, or take a
sweep around the cobwebs of Green Wood if you have a moment, or sign up for a
work day; there will likely be one coming up as we get into the holidays. If building work is absolutely not for you, consider
whether giving to the building funds is feasible for you, or help brainstorm how
we can best use our space to be a city open to all; John Kaczor had tons of
listening sessions this summer about what we can do in the future as we think
about these holy spaces of ours and we are still dreaming and praying for what
kinds of gates God invites us to be part of opening.
The
elementary schooler who picked up wedding rice could never have dreamed of one
day standing in an entirely different sanctuary and preaching there, but I am
glad not to have forgotten the holy mundanity of those nights. With my vacuum in hand I walked the streets
of gold; playing tag with God, I danced through sapphires. The sacred and the stolid bump against each
other in these spaces we build to know that God is here, marvelous and
grace-filled. May we love them as the
gifts they are, and work from them toward that city as beautiful and diverse as
we are where God invites everyone to come and be holy, to come and be. Amen.
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