Wednesday after Last Sunday of Pentecost
November 28, 2001
Lutheran Theological Seminary Chapel
Dr. Jon Pahl

Rev. 21: 5-27

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had vanished, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready like a bride adorned for her husband. I heard a loud voice proclaiming from the throne: ‘Now at last God has taken dwelling among people! God will dwell with them, and will wipe every tear from their eyes; Death shall be no more; there shall be no more mourning or crying or pain; for the old order has passed away!’

Then the one who sat on the throne said: "Behold! I am making all things new!" (Then that one said to me, ‘Write this down; for these words are trustworthy and true. Indeed they are already fulfilled.’) "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To all who are thirsty I will give living water to drink as a free gift. All this is the victor’s heritage; and I will be their God, and they will be my people. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, and the vile, murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and liars of every kind, their lot will be the second death, in the lake that burns with sulphurous flames."

Then one of the seven angels that held the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and spoke to me and said, ‘Come, and I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.’ So in the Spirit he carried me away to a great high mountain, and showed me the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. It shone with the glory of God; it had the radiance of some priceless jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great high wall, with twelve gates, at which there were twelve angels; and on the gates were inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. There were three gates to the east, three to the north, three to the south, and three to the west. The city wall had twelve foundation-stones, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

The angel who spoke with me carried a gold measuring-rod, to measure the city, its wall, and its gates. The city was built as a square, and was as wide as it was long. It measured by his rod twelve thousand furlongs, its length and its breadth and height being equal. Its wall was one hundred and forty-four cubits high, that is, by human measurements, which the angel was using. The wall was built of jasper, while the city itself was of pure gold, jewels of every kind: the first of the foundation-stones being jasper, the second lapis lazuli, the third chalcedony, the fourth emerald, the fifth sardonyx, the sixth cornelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh turquoise, and the twelfth amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate being made from a single pearl. The streets of the city were of pure gold, like translucent glass.

I saw no temple in the city; for its temple was the sovereign Lord God and the Lamb. And the city had no need of sun or moon to shine upon it; for the glory of God gave it light, and its lamp was the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk, and the kings of the earth shall bring into it all their splendour. The gates of the city shall never be shut by day—and there will be no night. The wealth and splendour of the nations shall be brought into it; but nothing unclean shall enter, nor anyone whose ways are false or foul, but only those who are inscribed in the Lamb’s roll of the living.

Holy Wisdom, Holy Word.

The Rev. Paula Strong was tired but happy. She leaned back from her computer keyboard, and shook the cramps out of her fingers, reflecting on the last few lines of her sermon for that Sunday. It would be her first at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Troy, Pennsylvania, the congregation she was called to serve after finally graduating from seminary. The text for the day was the beautiful but strange vision of the city of God in the Apocalypse of John. Paula smiled as she thought back to the work she’d done to prepare the sermon. Her seminary education, she thought, might just have been worth something after all.

In fact, in her preparation she had actually gone back and retrieved some of her notes and texts from a couple of classes. In her first year, in a class on "Early Christianity," she’d worked with Dr. Crabb (that’s Cra double b, of course). There, she read Augustine, including the entire 1091 pages of tiny, tiny print in the Penguin edition of The City of God. At the time, she had been filled with resentment and frustration at the assignment. Now, it seemed like a boon, because her notes had given her a clue to unlock the complexity of the apocalypticist’s vision.

Paula thought back to the class discussion of Augustine’s classic. The class had met in the hideous old red room of the library. Paula read from her notes the following words she remembered another student saying: "Augustine must have been suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after the sack of Rome by the barbarians in 410. In the absence of a protective empire in the real world, he imagined a holy and eternal city where people sat around on clouds with harps and sang boring hymns and didn’t desire anything, since desire, for Augustine, was the source of all evil. Haven’t we suffered," this student had asked, "with a backlash to the sack of Rome long enough?" At that point in the discussion, Paula remembered, she had looked at Professor Crabb, who had simply leaned back in his chair, nodded sadly, and let out a deep sigh.

Before he could speak, however, which he was sure to do, Paula remembered that another student had chimed in, responding to the first. Her notes read: "Don’t discount the importance of what Augustine was doing for people living in the aftermath of trauma. The City of God brought comfort to people who were terrified. Augustine was living in Africa, where the Pax Romana was at its most fragile. He and the Christians he served as Bishop has good reason to be frightened, and to find hope in God’s promises—no matter how otherworldly."

"You’re both right," Paula remembered that Dr. Crabb had then offered. But then, as usual, he went on to add: "and you’re both wrong." Also as usual, then, he turned the class to the text: "Listen to this," he said, quoting from page 967: "Desire automatically entails the possibility of pain; for frustrated desire, when it either fails to attain its object or loses it after the attainment, turns into pain." The professor continued: "Augustine’s work, like the vision of the prophet Isaiah, upon which the seer who wrote Revelation based his vision, is an extended meditation on the nature of holy desire. Augustine is asking: what’s worth desiring? Which desires bring lasting happiness and peace? How can human desires, bounded and limited as they are by time, be in harmony with the gracious and eternal and pure desire of God? How do collective human desires—call them cities and empires, relate to God’s presence and pure desire?" It was that little phrase from her notes—"pure desire," that Paula had remembered, and that opened up the text for her as she prepared her sermon.

Paula also had gone back to a text from another class, "Apocalypse, Alienation, and Alternative Music," taught by the biblical scholar Dr. Kuhl—that’s K-U-H-L, of course. Dr. Kuhl made it her mission in teaching to challenge the dominant docetic understanding of Jesus that disembodied God in the interest of legitimating greed and systems of domination. Feminist, womanist, liberationist, and radical to the core, Dr. Kuhl nevertheless had every student read the entire book of Revelation, and several commentaries on it, including one entitled Unveiling Empire, by Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther. Paula found in her notes the following: "Revelation’s worldview is not . . . a world hating polemic against the natural order or material universe." Rather, the author of Revelation uses earthy and specific metaphors to build on the traditions of the prophets. These earthy and vivid metaphors describe New Jerusalem as a territory encompassing and going beyond the glory of empire to the glory of a new and alternative social reality. Indeed, for the author of Revelation: "wherever the truth of God is believed and practiced—there is heaven." The author of Revelation, Dr. Kuhl had asserted, was a political poet. The metaphor of a new Jerusalem was intended as both comfort and protest for Christians, as ways to identify the presence of God in their oppressive present, as well to motivate them to act boldly to build a better future.

So, when Paula preached on Sunday to her small congregation of believers there in Troy, Pennsylvania, she drew in both Augustine and liberation hermeneutics, both Dr. Crabb and Dr. Kuhl, to preach to her people. She said:

Lots of people have been reading that Left Behind series lately. But that series gets it completely backward, according to the text for today. That series scares people, just as the events of recent history have scared people. The authors of Left Behind imagine that we can be frightened into faith, or they ask us to drop our brains at the door and suppose that faith is some magic pill that will beam us out of trouble. That’s not the vision of this text, where the world is clearly a frightening enough place all by itself, filled as it is with the cowardly, faithless, murderers, idolaters, liars, and so on. Right now, for instance, we’re at war. Awesome weapons of destruction have been unleashed, including in our midst, and people are dying. In such a time, it’s tempting to retreat into our little enclaves, or to lash out with violence against those we hold responsible for our pain. We have at our disposal the forces of empire, and we imagine that if we only exert our muscle enough the world will once again be safe and secure—that we won’t be left behind.

But we know, Christians, that true security is found elsewhere, neither in war and weapons, nor in mystical fantasies, but in the Word and the wonder of our common faith and life. The text is so clear and beautiful on this point: God is the one left behind. The Lamb—the one who is pure desire; the one who has felt all the frustration and all the dashed hopes of every living thing—that Lamb is the one left behind—the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the End.

This isn’t just a vision of the future, but is also a fact about the past and the promise of the present. "Now at last God has taken dwelling among people." What other power need we desire? God’s power is pure desire—and for that reason God suffers with us in our frustrations and fears. God is the one left behind. Here is the protest against those who imagine that power is only force and domination. The living presence who is the pure desire of Love—the love we all crave and for which creation itself groans--is with us, now and forever. Or as the text puts it: "We shall be God’s people, and God will be with us"--as the Light of the World advances on its inexorable advent—Immanuel.

The metaphors of comfort roll on in the text, and become specific and vivid, reveling in the diversity of this beautiful city of God. "A stream of living water will be my free gift to the thirsty." God gives us what we need, and that amply. God’s gracious spirit mingles with the waters in creation, through the waters of the baptism which washes us, quenches our thirsts, and carries us across the river into life eternal. Such waters are also rivers of justice, rolling down to make mountains flat and to lift up valleys. Indeed, we incarnate living waters in our bodies that flow with water hot and red and so easily spilled. And such waters are also the waters of human lovemaking; the Lamb does have a bride, after all.

The metaphors are vivid. "The City … shone with the glory of God; it had the radiance of some priceless jewel. It had no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God gave it light, and its lamp was the Lamb." This is no vision of a thousand points of light, blinking feebly in the overwhelming darkness. No, this is a horizon-defining vision, encompassing all the colors of the spectrum. This is a vision of a light so bright, as if refracted through precious jewels, that it possesses the scope and power of the sun. It appears as the red-golden cream of jasper, the deep blues of lapis lazuli, the shimmering blacks and tans of tiger-eye chalcedony, the greens of emeralds, the purples of amethyst, and on and on through all the bejeweled colors the eye can envision. This city is place of warmth and comfort and hospitality for all the living: "the wealth and splendor of the nations shall be brought into it; by its light shall the nations walk."

For the gates of this city, those pearly gates, are always open. There is nothing defensive here; nothing to protect, for it is all a free gift. And we have that gift here, my fellow citizens of this city. We have that gift in the hospitality we extend to each other, and to all who enter our gates; for such hospitality springs from a pure desire to be with others, to sing with them songs of joy. We have that gift in the light we see that beams among us this day—a light showing us the way of pure desire, reflected in the mingling of the blues and browns and greens of our eyes, and in the blacks and tans and reds of our skin. We have that gift in the crystalline water in which we are baptized, the same water that flows through our veins, and through which we are united in holy desire as we march together, led by Immanuel, toward Zion.

Amen.