To
You Who Are Beloved of our Lord Jesus Christ,
This
Sunday, our Scripture passage is from the Book of Revelations, verses from Chapter
21 and 22:
22 I
saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the
Lamb. 23 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. 24 The
nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their
glory into it. 25 Its gates will never be shut by
day—and there will be no night there. 26 People
will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. 27 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.
22 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 2 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. 3 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; 4 they
will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 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.
6 And
he said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true, for the Lord, the God of
the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must
soon take place.”
In the leadup to our passage, the New
Jerusalem is described as a cube, with each length some 12,000 stadia. That means, according to a rough estimate on
my GPS, that one edge of the New Jerusalem would run from our church to Dallas,
Texas.
The angels
are showing this to John. It is beyond
creation itself. No day or night,
because God’s glory is the light, and the Lamb (Jesus) is the lamp that bears
that light. No temple or church or
anything because God is there. The one
connection point to the creation story is the Tree of Life to be found in the
City.
The Tree of
Life was planted in the Garden of Eden, and to take of its fruit was to live
forever. When humanity fell into sin, we
were separated from the Tree. But now,
it is not just a Tree, but twelve, with 12 different types of fruit, one for
each month, bordering the river that runs down the main drag in the New
Jerusalem.
That’s the
final Neighborhood that is the Kingdom of God.
The descriptions are angel-driven, but its place is firmly
established. Humanity and God are
brought together. As it says in Chapter
21:4, a verse I remember in the King James, “And God shall wipe away all
tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor
crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things have passed
away.”
This
Neighborhood, the New Jerusalem, it stands before us as the latter things, that
which comes after Jesus returns to us.
We continue to live in the time of ‘former things’. But within these former things, we share our
service of healing, a foreshadowing of that which is to come in Jesus, as
described here in the book of Revelations.
It is the
model, it is the blueprint, it is the revelation by the angels to John of what
is to come. It is what we are working
for as we seek to build our Neighborhood in the Kingdom of God. Here, John tells us that it is going to work,
“These words are trustworthy and true,
for the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to
show his servants what must soon take place.”
Our place, our work, our church, these all serve
to bring forward God’s love as a bridge from where we are to what is to
come. We have the beginnings, a taste of
God’s healing now. Then, we shall live
in it completely and eternally.
Pastor pete
