“The New Journey: Jerusalem”

Revelation 21:1-2, 9-27

A sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

Earth Day

April 24, 2005

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            Many years ago, I led a group of teenagers on a backpacking trip in the West Virginia Mountains.  This was a part of the program sponsored by my home church.  It was the late 70’s and early 80’s.  Programs like Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School were very popular.  Our church’s youth program based on the stress-challenge model of Outward Bound became so popular that it incorporated into its own nonprofit that still exists today called the Institute for creative Living or ICL. A few of us teenagers, needing an outlet for our rowdiness and our budding nature-based spiritualities became intern leaders for ICL.  I led a group of delinquent youth on a three-week adventure which substituted for six months in a group home.  A week into the program, the group home was looking real good to some of them.  

            As we arrived in camp one afternoon, the natives were again restless.  Their restlessness made me restless.  I had heard a bit too much whining from the ranks.  So another leader and I decided to take off our backpacks and do a bit of a run to clear our heads.  We knew that there was a ridge just a few hundred vertical feet above us.  We headed for it.  I remember running through waist-deep feathery ferns, which felt oddly erotic to my bare legs.  These gave way to fresh blueberry patches, which we vowed to visit on our way back down.  Soon we were on the ridge, legs and lungs pumping for all they were worth.  Up on the ridge we got hit by the wind and it nearly knocked us over.  My friend Steve and I made it to the end of the ridge, which was a small outcropping, dodging rock and blueberry patches along the way and trying to maintain our balance against the increasing wind. 

            When we finally got to the point, we could no longer hear the bickering of the teenagers below.  We could look to the west and we could see the way that we had traveled over the past week.  We looked to the south and say Breathed Mountain and knew the rock climbing that would be on the other side of that mountain in a few days.  We looked to the east and saw the outlines of Seneca Rocks.  From a mountaintop, or at least a ridge you could see so much so clearly.

            You get a picture of the grand scheme of things.  The bickering really does seem petty when you glimpse a larger reality.  To this day, when I want to clear my head and connect with a higher power, I find a serenity and power out in the woods.  Maybe that’s why I like running and biking so much.  Being up on the mountain, even if we don’t get there much, helps us to better deal with the valleys of our lives. 

Moses went up to a mountain to talk to God.  Jesus went off by himself to a valley or at least a garden to commune with God.  Adam and Eve celebrated God’s great gifts in a garden.  God told the first creatures to take care of the garden.  I have to think that part of our task is to save the earth, not only for us and for our children, but for God.  For when we preserve that garden, we are preserving something about God, too.

Steve and I shared some secret tang and a half-melted bar of chocolate on our mountain retreat.  It was as perfect an afternoon as it could have been.  If I had just not looked north.  For to the north was a huge belching coal power plant dominating the countryside and invading the serenity of Dolly Sods Wilderness.  I found myself wondering how the place would have looked different, or our world would look different if we found a way to harvest the plentiful and continually renewing wind instead of ripping and raping the countryside in search of coal that would eventually pollute the very air we breathe.  I haven’t been back there for decades.  I wonder what it looks like now.  I wonder how much “progress” has encroached on our serene way of life.  We returned to camp renewed, refreshed with water bottles full of blueberries and hearts filled with the hope of the ridge, even though it was grounded in the reality of powers and principalities.

On this earth day Sunday, while we are walking on our blue boat home, we might find things that jar us out of our complacency.  They might inspire us and ground us in reality. 

And if they jar us into doing something or at least recognizing the beauty and the gift that is the earth, then we have take a step in the right direction. 

After church today, we will have a chance to talk about how to live in a much greener way at our adult forum.  But for now, I want to ground our care for the earth in a little bit of theology.  And in order to get this, you will need to figuratively climb a mountain and run along a ridge fighting against and being buoyed by the wind of the Spirit. 

The Mountain is called Jerusalem.  Our new journey needs to take us there and beyond. 

Jerusalem is built on a mountain.  It is actually built upon a peak of Mount Moriah where Genesis says that Isaac was to be sacrificed by his father Abraham and where the Koran tells the same story about Isaac’s brother Ishmael.  On this mountain, God sent a ram to be caught in the thicket so that neither Isaac nor Ishmael would be killed.

Years later, the Hebrew people came back to this mountian and made it into their capital city, placing the temple of YHWH on its peak.  This temple was destroyed and the people sent into exile a few hundred years later but when they returned, the rebuilt the temple on the same spot.  Five hundred plus years later, Herod the Great rebuilt the temple and leveled off the top of the mountain to make a temple mount tat still exists today. 

Jesus climbed the steps of this temple mount and turned over the tables of the moneychangers who were ripping the people off.  In the shadow to this mountaintop, just outside the city of Jerusalem, Jesus was crucified.  About forty years later, the temple was destroyed and the final rebellion was squashed by the Roman powers.

600 years later, the prophet Mohammed would ascend this same temple mount and ascend into heaven.  Today, there is a shrine on that spot called the Dome of the Rock.  This is no ordinary mountain.

When the writer of Revelation was weaving his story about the destruction of the Roman empire, all along telling the people that they needed to keep the faithful witness, persistently resist the seductive powers of empire and be not afraid, he concluded it by putting the redemption where else but on the sacred mountain: Jerusalem.

After all of the ways of the world have run their course, with all of their conspiratorial evil, after all of the death and destruction, there will appear a new heaven and a new earth.  A new Jerusalem.  That’s the promise of Revelation. 

The new Jerusalem will come down from heaven replacing Babylon, or Rome, or the United States, or the Russian Federation, or Iraq, or the World Trade Organization or the International Monetary Fund , or the oil industry, or whatever country or false gods we put our allegiance more into than the true living God. 

For those of us not marked on the head or hand with the sign of the beast,

Those of us who trust more in God than in the sword,

More in Christ than in money

More in love than in hate,

More in reconciliation than in revenge,

More in hope than in fear. 

We will see this new Jerusalem.  IF we bear the faithful witness with persistent resistance.

I would be a different kind of Christian if it weren’t for Revelation.  Reading it and getting rid of all of the baggage of the misinterpretation of its offensive reality makes me want to be a still a different kind of Christian.

In the vision of Revelation, a voice from God declares:

“Behold, the dwelling of God is with all people.  God will dwell with them and they shall be God’s people.  God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”  Hallelujah!

The city of the new Jerusalem is even paced off in extravagant ways.  It’s 1500 cubic miles.  It’s cubic like the holy of holies inside the old temple was cubic.  This is a serious city.  It is no longer one small city like Rome ruling the rest of the world.  But this city on this mountain will be a huge place.  The place is so big and so tall that there is no longer a distinction between heaven and earth.  The city itself reaches up to heaven and heaven reaches down to us. 

It almost seems ridiculous, except that something like it actually did happen.  In the 200 years after the writing of Revelation, the Jesus movement grew—calling for freedom for slaves and other causes of justice. 

Finally after the great emperor Diocletian failed to stamp out this cult, Emperor Constantine legalized it.  It was perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to Christianity.

For once the movement for the outcast became the dominant religion of the empire, the line between empire and religion blurred.  Power tempted the people.  What followed were things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Heritage Village USA., CBN, Focus on the Family and televangelism.  But in the midst of this there has always been the outsiders on the fringes speaking truth to power—longing for that day when the people are no longer seduced by the beast.

The people who saw through this were the Jesuits,

the Anabaptists,

the Catholic Worker Movement,

the third world Latin American Liberation theologians,

the abolitionists,

the suffragists,

the womanists,

the feminists,

the union organizers,

the environmentalists,

the glbt activists

the Sojourners community

the University Baptists. 

All of them saw through the masks of empire and kept their eyes on the prize.  The true prize.  The New Jerusalem.

You see, it’s not something that’s out there for us to receive in the end times if we have been good and righteous and holy enough.  It is something that we need to work toward.  It takes work to tend the soil.  It takes work to advocate for this world of ours so that it might be truly new once again.  It takes commitment to actively oppose empire and to actively support the new Jerusalem.

Sisters and brothers, we have the new Jerusalem as close as our eyes can see—especially if we can look at our own hands and our own feet and our own hearts and our own minds and our own lips.  When we can see this as God’s appendages, then we are truly on our way to the new Jerusalem. 

So on this earth day Sunday, let us use our hands.  Let us use our feet.  Let us use our minds and hearts and lips and prayers.  And work toward a new earth.  When we do, I think we will find something that approaches a new heaven.

And when we have a concept of a new heaven and a new earth in our minds and hearts and on our lips and in our prayers, then we are renewed.  Renewed people who renew the earth who renew still others all the while building a new Jerusalem.  Sounds like heaven to me.