by Clint Schnekloth
New Testament Reading: Revelations 21:1-6
For Sunday, April 28, 2013: Year B—Easter 5
We do not go to heaven; heaven comes to us.
This bears repeating.
We do not go to heaven; heaven comes to us.
Belinda Carlisle may not have intended it as a gloss on Revelation, but her song does nicely: "Ooh heaven is a place on earth/they say in heaven love comes first/We'll make heaven a place on earth.” It could be the duet sung between Christ and his bride. It might also be the basis for a great bible study.
See, for example, Rev. Janelle Hooper's resource in the Book of Faith series, Heaven on Earth, a study of Matthew that delves deeper into what it means for heaven to come to earth: studying Jesus' words, his way of life, and the manner in which he loved, and focuses on how we are the change agents Jesus is calling forth to make the Kingdom of Heaven a reality on earth.
God's Home is Among Mortals
Much of popular Christian music seems to indicate this place, this earth, is not our home, and we are just passing through, awaiting life in our eternal home with God. The Book of Revelation, however, radicalizes and reverses these here-ever-after lyrics with its own hymn, "See the home of God is among mortals" (Revelation 21:3).
This is patently already the case inasmuch as we confess that God has already lived among and been a mortal in Jesus Christ. But it is also an anticipated truth, the truth anticipated by John of Patmos' vision—God will live even more with God's people, and this earth, at some future, hoped for, moment.
In Revelation, we do not go to make our home with God when we die. Instead, God comes to make God's home among us, and even drops a city down to make it magnificent. Revelation models this by making it an actual song in the text, a counter-testimony to the regular hymnic testimonies of the world.
But God is not Renting or Camping
God is not just paying for space for a time among mortals, or camping out. It is not a temporary thing—a 1000 year “hihowareya” on the cusp of Doomsday. No, when God arrives, nothing stays the same.
"See, I am making all things new" (Revelation 21:5). God does more than a little re-decorating. This is not merely re-arranging the furniture. The very earth God comes down to becomes a new earth. The city in which God dwells in is the new Jerusalem. Everything about life in this new is different than the old, even while remaining the same.
In fact it remains the same by becoming new. Death is no more. Mourning is no more. The water of life is freely administered. Philip Pullman, in his His Dark Materials trilogy imagines parallel universes where rifts between universes can impinge on and mutually transform each other, often to ill effect, but also into imaginative possibility. Might it be that by coming to live with us, God as open future comes not to occupy and fill up, but to lighten (in all the senses of that word) and make space?
The Hardest Question
What the heck does it even mean for God to come live with us?
It is one thing to think that God is preparing a place for us, hopefully the very kind of place we would prepare for ourselves if we had the opportunity, a nice little home next to the golf course with a pool out back and a luxurious bed. It is an entirely other thing to look around at the very place in which we live, the injustices, improprieties, and problems, and get ready for God to come here, transforming all of it into the new beginning and end that God is.
How can a text like Revelation open our imaginations to the possibility that God's occupying our space actually makes more space?
Clint Schnekloth is the Lead Pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas. He has written extensively for Augsburg Fortress, including the Seasonal Essays for Sundays and Seasons and the baptismal resource Washed and Welcome. Visit Clint at www.clintschnekloth.com .
