The Home of God

Note: The following resources center around the readings for All Saints in the Revised Common Lectionary, found here.

As John concludes his amazing story, he wants us to hear the echoes all the way back to the beginning of the saga of the people of God. Our Bible begins with God saying, “Let there be...” and there was, and God said, “It is good.” And now we end with a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth, and it is good. Starting over, or returning to what was intended from the beginning? Who knows? John doesn’t and isn’t given to philosophize about it here. His task is merely descriptive. A new Jerusalem, adorned like a bride. Beautiful, presenting the best that could be, dazzling in glory and wonder. And that is us! Well, our home, our community, our part in the new creation.

A city, and a holy and beautiful city to be sure, but a city. “Why a city,” some ask? If you are of a more rural bent, if your idea of paradise is escape, wilderness, get out and get away, then you are forgiven a small disappointment when John presents paradise as a city. Where are the rolling hills and the vast expanse? Where is the seclusion, the privacy, the separateness? Why a city, for heaven’s sake?

Because the kingdom of God is almost always more about connection than it is about separation. The picture that Jesus draws in a hundred stories and images is about community more than it is about individualism. So, of course, the culmination of history is a city. In a city, we have to learn to live together. In a city, we are dependent on one another for even the basic things of life. In a city, we find it harder to fool ourselves into thinking that it is all about us and only us.

And it is a dry city! The sea will be no more. The sea is both that which separates us, a divider between people into us and them, and that which harbors the unknown. The sea is the place of chaos, the source of evil - the beast rises from the sea in Revelation. The new city, the dry city, is a place of safety and community. That which separates is gone; that which terrorizes has been removed. So, there are no more tears, no more death and grief, no more pain.

It is more than the removal of the sea, however, that gives us this sense of wholeness and security. It is because of our new neighbor. God, John points out, has moved into the empty house on your cul-de-sac. And there goes the neighborhood! When God moves in, everything changes. When God takes up residence, our sense of aloneness, even when surrounded by people who are also alone in their thoughts and fears, is transformed into hope and joy. What we discover first when God moves in is our desire to be connected, to be in relationship. We discover that our neverending search for self has been misdirected from the beginning. Instead of moving inward to discover who we really are apart from anything and everything, we should have been moving outward. We find out who we really are in relationship with one another. We find ourselves when we lose ourselves.

That sounds like something Jesus said, doesn’t it? That brings me to the other echoes in this passage. John stands at the end of history and reaches back to the beginning of this new age. Revelation is primarily a Christological work. It is the culmination of the work that was begun in Christ. And John points to the watershed moment upon which history turned. John looks back at the cross as he stands here at the end.

Verse six begins “It is done,” thus fulfilling that which was proclaimed from the cross, as with his dying words Jesus declared, “It is finished.” It was never a statement of despair, of giving up, of surrender. It was a shout of triumph through bloody, cracked lips and pushed out from lungs struggling for a last breath. Finished. It is done. And this is what was done: a new creation where death will be no more.

But it was the next to the last thing that Jesus said from the cross that becomes the invitation to enter this kingdom. With parched throat, Jesus whispers, “I am thirsty.” And now the voice from the throne declares, “To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.” The Revelation question is, “Are you thirsty?”

The question from John’s Gospel for this All Saints observance, even though it comes before the assigned text, is, “Do you believe this?” (John 11:26 NRSV.) “Do you believe,” Jesus asks Martha, “that death as commonly understood is not a part of God’s design for eternity? Do you believe that what seems to be the end is not the end? Do you believe that separation and abandonment and aloneness is not what God had in mind for creation? Do you believe that Jesus’ tears are about the grief that surrounds him and limits the vision of those who are left behind when a loved one dies?”

There are so many theories about why Jesus wept before the tomb of Lazarus. We don’t suggest that there is a simple explanation. But certainly, in those tears, we find the freedom, the permission if you will, to weep for our own losses. All Saints is a sad occasion on a profoundly human level. We need to give space for that as we worship. But those tears and that sadness are not to be seen as a denial of faith in eternity or the hope of reunion in a heaven beyond description. We can hold both things together, grief and hope. Joy and sadness often sit side by side in our hearts and in our communities. Indeed, we grieve not only for the loss of our named loved ones on this day, but for all the saints of the church, and for the innocents who are being lost every day in our broken world. At the same time, we hold out hope for the vision of kin-dom described by Jesus where faith bubbles up in surprising places and binds us together around this shared vision.

All Saints is not, in the end, an individual experience but a corporate one. Even though we all have our pantheon of saints whom we miss and reach for on our own journeys, we are bound together in this celebration to this common vision. In part, we long for and seek the home of God as we walk in faith. In larger part, we are seeking to become the home of God in our relationships, in our communities, and in the world we are striving to make. That is the world we pray for each time we say the Lord’s Prayer and ask for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. That’s the reunion, the hope, the cloud of witnesses we lean into on this day. The home of God is among us. Thanks be to God.