Who's Your God?

Text: John 14:6-17, 25-27

Who is God?  That would seem an odd question to stand before a Christian congregation and ask.  Yet, it is one of the two most pressing questions churches must struggle with at the very core to remain vibrant.  The second question is what has God done for his creation in, through, and as Jesus Christ.  Who is God?  In the 4^th Century during the councils that gave the church the Nicene Creed one of the authors of the Creed Gregory of Nazianzus quite emphatically proclaimed: “When I say God I mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”  God is Trinity.  God is the loving communion of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  If God is love as John said at 1 John 4:8, then God is relationship for love requires relationship.  Therefore, the Trinity is three relational beings who love and give themselves to and for one another so utterly that they form each others person-hood and are one in being.  In the same way that I am who I am as the result of all the relationships I have in my life the Father cannot be who he is without the Son and the Spirit nor the Son who he is without the Father and the Spirit nor the Spirit who he is without the Father and the Son.  God is not God without the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Back to Gregory, why was he so emphatic in stating this?  Well, in the days of Nicaea Christianity was in a bitter dispute, and bitterly divided over who God is.  There were those who were saying that God is just God, an unknowable Creator with a moral will who must be obeyed by his creation.  They themselves were emphatically declaring that Jesus was in no way God and that he was just a man who showed us how to live according to the will of the Creator who would never in anyway dirty his hands with human being.  These folks, and they were good, faithful to the church Christians, were followers of a man named Arius and they were in the majority back then, evidence to the historical fact that at any given time over the centuries most Christians are being swept away by errant understandings of who God is.  This is indeed true for today and therefore we must answer who is God? But momentarily, we need to hear more about the 4^th Century church.

Gregory of Nazianzus was bishop of Constantinople and he had a friend named Athanasius who was Bishop of Alexandria.  Incidentally, both these men now saints of the church spent quite a bit of time in exile during this controversy for the majority labelled them heretics.  In response to the Arians and their denial of Jesus' divinity Athanasius is famous for declaring “the unassumed is the unhealed.”  He meant that if Jesus was not God then humanity is not healed of sin and death.  If Jesus was not God the Son become human, then the Trinity has not taken humanity unto and into himself to heal it of sin and death with the Trinity's own indestructible life.  For Gregory and Athanasius what the Trinity had down for us in, through, and as Jesus Christ was to reconcile us to himself (2 Cor. 5:20), heal us of Sin and Death (1 Cor. 15), and make us to be partakers of his very own nature.  Peter says as much at 2 Peter 1:3-4: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.”

Gregory and Athanasius believed along with the Apostle Paul (not to mention all the Apostles and Jesus himself) that the Trinity had adopted us and not only a legal adoption but indeed has made us to be blood family with himself and each other by Jesus God the Son becoming human and the Holy Spirit freely given to us to make adoption effectual.  Paul says this at Romans 8:12-17 “So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh-- for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.  For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.  For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.  When we cry, "Abba! Father!" it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ--if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” 

Paul again says as much at Galatians 4:4-7: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.  And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!'  So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.”  To Gregory and Athanasius the followers of Arius and his unitarian idea of God were simply still living according to the flesh as they dutifully went about living according to the moral will of the unknowable Creator they called God.  They were not living by the Spirit.  They were dreadfully unhealed in their hearts all the while thinking themselves to be the ones who had it right. 

The Arian controversy revolved around whether or not God who is holy, pure, and unchanging would get his hands dirty by really getting involved with us.  The Arians said no and that the Christian faith was all about knowing the Creator God's moral will and being obedient to it.  Gregory and Athanasius on the other hand emphatically said yes and more so that the Trinity had indeed taken human being into his own being and healed it.  For the Arians Jesus was only a man, a very special God-empowered man, who only showed us what the moral will of God was that we might live accordingly so as to not suffer the Creator God's wrath.  But, for Gregory and Athanasius by God the Son becoming Jesus the man and taking human being into the Trinity's Being the Trinity had indeed gotten his hands dirty with humans and it changed actual human being.  In that act of new creation humanity is healed of sin and death in the same way that Adam's disobedience caused humanity to sin and suffer death. 

Paul writes of this in Romans 5:10-19  “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.  More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.  Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned - for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.  Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.  But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.  And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin.  For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.  If, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.  Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.  For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.” 

To sum up the answer to question two: by God the Son becoming human as Jesus of Nazareth living, dying, rising, ascending, and yet to return humanity has been and will be healed of sin and death and the Holy Spirit is working now in and through you and me to make this evidently effectual.  We are blessed to partake now of the life of the Trinity that we might be a blessing to the community in which we live and beyond.

To make this somewhat practical, we must say that what the Trinity has done by Jesus and the Holy Spirit is restore his image in humanity.  The Trinity is a communion of persons working in us to create community in his image.  Therefore, Jesus one and only commandment that we love one another is of the utmost importance for who we are as a congregation and why we are here.  As the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom the Father has given us, we bear the family resemblance.  By the way we love one another we proclaim not only that Jesus is Lord and Saviour, but also that the one true God is Trinity – the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This means that our primary task is to build community among ourselves and with the community around us according to Jesus command to love.  It means that the sincere giving of oneself in Christian community is not optional.  Being able to give loving community to the community beyond ourselves expecting nothing in return – no money in the plate, no bums in the pews – is our way of being in the world.  The Trinity has called us to be community in his image in the world.  We have to be that community and we will if indeed we have been by Christ Jesus included in the fellowship of the Trinity and their love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.  It is up to the Trinity in his will and wisdom whether to add to this community or to take away from it for Jesus said “no one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14:6) and “no one can come to me unless the Father draws him” (John 6:44).

So who is your God?  Is it the Triune God of grace who through no will or whim of your own has bought you, adopted you, and brought you into his own life where nothing can separate you from the love of God in Jesus Christ? Who has chosen you each and brought you together that you might love and support one another as the living testimony that Jesus Christ and he alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life?  Amen.

The Spiritual Blessing

Text: Ephesians 1:3-14

There once was a high school science teacher who wanted to teach her class the difference between apples and oranges.  So, she divided the class into two groups and gave each group a bag of apples and a bag of oranges and told them to take some time and figure out the difference between them.  Group One took their “specimens” and measured and weighed them noting differences in the colours and textures and especially that the orange had a strikingly stronger fragrance particularly if you scratched the skin.  They even sliced one of each open to observe the innards.  They wrote it all down having thoroughly observed everything they could possibly know about the differences between apples and oranges.  Group Two, well, with it being nearly lunchtime simply ate their apples and oranges.  So, at the end of the class the teacher called them back together and asked them to tell her the difference between apples and oranges.  Group One dutifully reported the details of their most scientific investigation.  Group two, well, not seeing anything wrong with what they had done in a collaborative effort said, “Some of us liked the oranges.  Some of us liked the apples.  But, they both were quite good.  Thank you.”

So, which of these two groups would you give the higher mark and why?  I presume Group One and here's why.  Years ago when I was coming through school I was taught the scientific method given to us by the scientists of Modernity who believed that reality and meaning exist outside of oneself so that through proper investigative techniques we can know everything about anything.  Truth, therefore, was the sum total of what could be determined by investigation and it must to be repeatable; so you don't eat the specimens.

Things are different now.  We live in the post-Modern world in which we have come to realize that we all have preconceived ideas of the truth that we bring to our investigations of reality and which bias our methods and interpretations of the data so that the truth which we determine is nothing more than the truth according to me and you may see it differently.  Therefore, we need to be aware of our biases.   

This change in world-views is having a profound effect on matters of faith.  No longer is it enough simply to say that we believe something because it is "the Truth".  We can only claim something as true for me realizing that it may not be true for you.  Oddly and based on conversations that I have had (and this is truth according to me so take it for what its worth), people outside the church are having valid religious experiences.  Yet, instead of coming to church to sort it out and find the truth they are ploughing through the beliefs of the religions out there to build their own belief systems and thus shielding themselves from the Truth as it is in Jesus Christ and attested to in the church.  Similarly and this is to the church's bad, I've conversed with people who said they came to church seeking answers for their experiences, "did their time", and moved on to something else more “spiritual”.  The churches they went to were dealing in the religion of how to keep a culture Christian rather than the living faith and faithfulness of Jesus Christ, who was crucified and raised from the dead that we may live in him. 

So, here is some truth that we the church need to hear about our truth.  God the Holy Spirit is at work out there in the world.  People out there are having experiences of our living God.  We, the church, are then the ones whom the Triune God of grace has chosen and called to go into the world to disciple them, to teach them what is true about their experiences.  Yet, to do this credibly we must ourselves be living not just faithful lives which entails simple duty, but more so faith-filled lives before them so that by our lifestyles we teach the cruciform way of Jesus the risen one.  His living Truth can only be found in following him in the way of the cross, the way of unconditional, self-giving, and so often self-wasting love that brings forth healing in the world.  it is at the cross of Christ that any religious experience must bow if it is indeed of the truth.  Therefore, it is important we not be those dealing in religion other than the living faith of Jesus Christ. 

So, to communicate the faith of Jesus Christ in this post-Modern world we must be able to say it in a post-Modern way.  When the opportunity presents, and it will, we must be able to say “this is how I have experienced the living Lord Jesus Christ and therefore have come to faith in him as my Lord and Saviour” all the while respecting that others may and will see it differently.  This entails that we Christians have to know our Lord, not just have opinions about him.  We must know him and we must live authentically in his image.  The role of authenticity in lifestyle cannot be emphasized enough in communicating the faith of Jesus Christ to the post-Modern world.  So having said all that, allow me to take a moment and try to say who we Christians believe God to be and reflect a bit about our experience of God using Paul's expressions of it in Ephesians 1. 

We Christians know something unique about God.  First, we say that God is Trinity, the loving communion of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  Next, we say that as Jesus, a first century Jew of Nazareth, whom we call the Christ, God the Son became human, lived, died, was raised, ascended, and will return to put his world to rights.  In the early days of the church this belief was blasphemy to the Jews and ridiculous to most everybody else.  The only proof they had was that the Holy Spirit was making people able to hear and actually believe the proclamation of the Gospel that as Jesus Christ the Trinity is reconciling the world to himself. 

This reconciliation entails that in, with, through, and as Jesus the Trinity has given humans access to his very self.  Since as Jesus God the Son became human, humanity can now be partakers of the life of the Trinity, no conditions to be met, no contracts to keep, no bargains to be made.  That's that way things are now.  In union with Jesus by the gift of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit God has chosen us to experience the loving communion of God the Father and God the Son and this relationship transforms everything about us.  This blessing or inheritance is the love of God the Father for the Son and the love of God the Son for the Father extended to us through the Holy Spirit so as to include us in their relationship, their communion of love, which is the very life of God.  Saying this less abstractly, because of the gift of the Holy Spirit we indeed do experience in the actual events of our lives the same steadfast love and unyielding faithfulness that God the Father has for Jesus the Son.  We are God's children now, brothers and sisters with Jesus.  Moreover, we share with Jesus his own adoration and desire to be faithful to His Father.  God the Father’s pleasure in and good will towards Jesus his Son, which is his blessing/inheritance, is our blessing, our inheritance with Jesus in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.  The indwelling gift of the Holy Spirit confirms that we are adopted into the relationship of the God the Father and Jesus the Son.  Adoption into the family life of the Trinity is at the core of Christian experience.

Add to this now a sense of chosenness.  We feel uniquely chosen by the Trinity to be part of something he’s had planned since before anything existed.  Over 13.7 billion years ago the Trinity chose us each to come into his presence to receive his favour, which is the blessing of the inheritance of the Holy Spirit.  We also have a sense of being in the Trinity's will for history, a part in his plan to unite everything in Jesus.  To play our part, the Holy Spirit renews us in the very deepest parts of ourselves making us to want to and be able to live so that others see God's grace flowing forth from us and want to experience what we have.

Moving on, the Holy Spirit is the personable presence of the relationship building love of the Trinity.  He is the power of God's self by which the Father in love raised Jesus his Son from the dead and he is the same power at work in us now changing us, making real the saving, healing change that God has wrought in all humanity simply by becoming human as Jesus of Nazareth.  Thus, as Paul says we experience redemption.  Redemption is a word from the slave trade.  It means bought back from some form of slavery.  Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of his Father by the giving of his life over to death by which death is defeated sets us free from everything that oppresses us, everything that enslaves us.  Follow him and see if this does indeed become your truth. 

Boiling it all down.  This means that God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit really loves us each from since forever ago.  For no reason of anything we have done or could ever do to gain it, the Trinity simply loves us all and acts accordingly towards us.  He watches over our lives working his good pleasure in us to free us and to heal us.  It may feel like Hell sometimes but when the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has done saving work in us we find we’ve been healed of pains that have been with us all our lives and set free to be a part of his ministry of healing to others.  Through this working of the Holy Spirit we learn to trust that love of the Father for the Son is what we have and are also enabled to live accordingly and that is the truth of the faith of Jesus Christ.  Follow him and see if this does indeed become your truth.  Amen.

Participators Not Simply Imitators

Text: Ephesians 1:15-23

I often advise people in the wake of death that the primary focus of their life for the next little while will be learning how to live with the presence of someone who is now absent. It really is like that. Everywhere you look are reminders. You feel like they are there. They show up in dreams, glimpses out of the corner of your eye, and sometimes it’s more real than that like standing at the foot of the bed smiling a smile of assurance. I read once that 80% of people who have lost somebody say they have had an experience of encountering the deceased, an experience that was oddly communicative and reassuring. You feel like they are around. Yet, they are gone. Present, yet absent. At first it is really difficult, gut-wrenching actually, to come to grips with but, after awhile and it may take years, this present absence that used to make you cry your eyes out can actually be comforting.

Well, I said all that because I think it is a good analogy for what many would say is the task of the church. We are called to learn how to live with the very real presence of this man Jesus even though it is obvious he is not physically here. Let me say it again because this is important. We must learn to live with the real and personal presence of Jesus though he is not here. This is a difficult thing to do. It would be so easy if we could just say, “Jesus is dead. Gone. He was a good man, indeed God. But, he ain’t here no more.” If it were the case that he was dead and gone and no longer present, then being the church is simply living according to a memory. Jesus came and showed us what God required of us and all we have to do is imitate him. Be the community that lives like Jesus. We do what they think God wants us to do. We’re good people, actually some of the best people you’ll ever meet, but just going through the motions of what we think God wants us to do. Doing our duty for God, faithful because God wants us to be faithful. It really becomes evident on Sundays when the Lord’s Supper is shared. The meal is simply a re-enactment of the last supper where we remember what Jesus did for us and maybe be thankful, maybe feel guilty, maybe recommit to do better. If this is the case, then Jesus might as well be dead.

Permit me a bit more time to rant further on this imitative way of being Christian. If all Jesus did was come and show us how to live and die a sacrificial death to appease an angry God and pay our death penalty for our sin and then in turn our response is to live in imitation of him, then all we really are doing is continuing to keep ourselves in the God-seat pretending to be gods ourselves. We do things that we have determined to be something that Jesus would and hope he blesses it. Seeking simply to imitate Jesus is in the end just a backdoor attempt of our trying to be God ourselves. The last time I checked that's one of the consequences of sin, just one more way of living out alienation from the Trinity when in fact what Jesus did was make it so we can participate in the life of the Trinity. There is an eternity's worth of difference between participating in the life of the Trinity and simply trying to imitate its image, noble though that effort be.

I mention these things not to step on anybody’s toes. For really, I have probably just described 60% of the churches in North America and 85% of the churches of Western Europe. Our common problem, we just haven’t figured out how to live with the presence of the one who is absent, so we just do what we think he expects of us as if he was dead and gone. Paul writes here in Ephesians that we are Christ's body and that Jesus is our head. Our problem is that we, the church, decapitate ourselves. We run around with sudden bursts of energy like a chicken that’s just had its head cut off until the body falls over giving up the ghost with a few good twitches.

Well, I’ve good news. This problem is fixable, but you have to answer three questions and answer them correctly. The first question: Where’s Jesus? The answer Paul gives us is that God has “seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:20).” This blatantly entails that Jesus is not dead and gone but rather that he is alive. He has ascended into heaven and enjoys the position of being the Father’s right hand man, so to speak, the one who does the Father’s wishes. It is helpful to think of heaven as relationship, a relational dimension where the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit permeates and is unveiled and where our relationship to, with, and in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is unhindered. To die and go to heaven (or Paradise as Jesus called it at Luke 23:43) to await resurrection (life after life after death as N. T. Wright says) is to go to this relational dimension. The Kingdom of Heaven come to earth is an opening up of this relational dimension into our broken one. Indeed, Einstein has shone us that all of reality as we know it is a relational dimension. Would it be too much of a stretch to throw heaven, the relational dimension of relationship in as part of a Theory of Everything as well as what makes for life and consciousness?

Question number two: If Jesus is in the heavenly places (the relational dimension of relationship), then what’s his body like? Is he ghost? is another way of putting it. The answer is that he is still fully physically human yet resurrected, resurrected yet scarred. Today, which is Ascension Sunday we celebrate Christ’s ascension into heaven. Today is every bit as important as Christmas when we celebrate the Son, the Word of God becoming human. We call that the Incarnation or the infleshment of God the Son. The Son came from the heavenly places here to earth and became human taking to himself physical reality and our broken nature. With the Ascension, the reverse happens. Jesus the Christ, Son of God and son of Mary takes humanity in the form of resurrected human flesh back into heaven and back into the inner life of the Trinity.

The end result is that we now participate in the life of Trinity by means of Jesus, our union with him in his humanity. We are participators in Christ’s life in the Triune life of God not simply imitators of him.   The Father and the Son make this real in us by sending the Holy Spirit to live in us now as a “pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people (Eph. 1:14).”

Now I know this sounds crazy, just as crazy as God the Son becoming human. We are not accustomed to think that Jesus with a resurrected yet scared human body is seated in the heavenly places with the Father. We like to think he was somehow changed into a spiritual Jesus because everybody knows that the human body doesn’t go into the heavens. But, believing that Jesus has somehow changed from human flesh to ascend into heaven is one of the key theological misbeliefs that is killing the church in North America. Jesus having a human body is crucial to our faith for just as Jesus is God the Son in a real human body in heaven giving humanity place in the life of God so are we real human bodies here on earth indwelt by the Holy Spirit participating in the life of Christ our head doing here as he does in heaven.

That leads us to our third question: if we participate in Christ’s life, doing what he is doing, then what is he doing? For part of the answer to this question we have to go to the book of Hebrews where we find that Jesus is our great High Priest who in continual worship of the Father intercedes on our behalf. He by his death has made us holy and he takes us before the Father and says, speaking summuratively, “these are my brothers and sisters whom you’ve given me, my life lives in them (Heb. 2:11-18).” He constantly pleads the case of our needs before the Father who in his love for his Son and his children is more than willing to grant (Heb. 4:14-5:10).

The other part of Jesus’ work as High Priest is to bless us with the blessing of the Father, which is that he blesses us with the Holy Spirit. He sends the Holy Spirit to make us participants in the life of God and to make real in us the saving work he accomplished in being faithful and obedient unto death. His faith, not our own, is the only faith we can count on. His obedience, not our own, is the only obedience we can hope in. Doesn’t that take the pressure off? The power of the Father’s love for his Son by which he raised Jesus from the dead and seated him in the heavenly places by his side is the same power at work in us by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit opens the eyes of our hearts so that we can know the hope to which he has called us, the hope of eternal life in communion with God (Jn. 17:3). The Holy Spirit makes known to us now Jesus' own glorious inheritance, which is the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Being made by the Spirit into his Body we share in the communion of love that the Father and the Son share.

As I said a moment ago, what Jesus does in heaven before the Father is what we do here on earth empowered by the Spirit. In the Ascended Christ we find our true worship, which is rooted in the Son’s love of the Father coupled with gratitude and praise of the Father for what he has done for us through giving us his Son, and drawing us into the Trinity’s very being through the Holy Spirit. We don’t just attend worship because that’s what good Christians do to learn how to be better Christians. We attend worship to adore the Father through Jesus the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. In Jesus' worship we praise, thank, and love the Father who has made us his own and the Father pours his love out on us.

In Christ we pray interceding for the needs of the world as Jesus ceaselessly does. As Jesus is ever praying for us so are we to strive to pray without ceasing. To pray in the name of Jesus is to pray to the Father empowered by the Spirit because we are in Christ. We pray in him and when we don’t know what to pray Romans 8:26 tells us that the Holy Spirit still is praying in us always. It should give us great comfort to know that in the inner life of the Trinity even the Trinity is praying for us. Ponder on that. Ever wonder if anyone is praying for you? Well, the Trinity in his very self is praying for you.

So, we worship and we pray. One more thing; as the Father sent the Son into the world with a mission of reconciliation so the Son send us into the world empowered by the Holy Spirit with that same mission. He in us and we in him, we are to carry out the mission of the suffering Servant who came to restore us to eternal life now in the loving communion of the Trinity, the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This means that in the relational network of our lives the Trinity is molding us by the loving communion of his very self into a fellowship that images that loving communion and thereby proclaims and invites all people to it. No one is excluded. Everyone is included. Because Jesus has ascended into heaven and has sent the Holy Spirit into us we are unioned into the life of the Trinity in him, we worship in him, we pray in him, and in him we reach out proclaiming and inviting all people into the loving communion of the Triune God of grace.

Walking in the Light

Text: Revelation 21:9-22:5

The Book of Revelation is a letter written to real churches at a real time with a specific message to them. Therefore, the appropriate way to read the Revelation is to determine what it said to those churches in their real historical context and then apply that message to us today. Thus, it is helpful to know the historical contexts of the the Christians to whom John sent the letters containing the Book of Revelation and why.

Who were they? In chapters two and three Jesus asks John to write to the seven churches in the Roman province of Asia which today would be western Turkey. Given the meaning of the number seven in the Revelation (completeness, entirety), the letter was to go to the all the church. And I bet you didn’t know it but in the first couple of centuries of the church the Revelation was the most widely circulated book of the New Testament. The early church apparently knew full well back them what all the images in these visions represented and understood its message was for them rather than some future church. The seven churches were in seven cities that were connected together by a major postal route. Indeed, the Romans had a very developed postal system which was nigh as fast as Canada Post. John was in exile on a small island off the shore of Turkey and would have sent seven copies by means of a courier first to Ephesus, then to Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and finally Laodicea. The letters would have been read aloud when Christians gathered together to worship not in church buildings but in homes and most likely in the home of the wealthiest patrons for they had the big houses. Once one church read it, the letter would have gone to the next church in the area until all the small house churches had heard it. It was also likely copied as frequently as possible.

The Revelation was given to John to encourage Christians to remain faithful to Jesus in a wave of persecution that was beginning or soon to come. Persecution? Well, what typically happened in the early church was that either synagogue authorities or pagan religious authorities turned Christians over to the Roman authorities because they would not burn incense to Caesar as part of their civic responsibility. The synagogue authorities considered Christians to be heretics and pagans were offended by Christian monotheism. This refusal to burn incense was in fact an act of treason. Christians who would not worship Caesar as Lord and Saviour (two imperial titles) were arrested and usually made to fight wild animals or gladiators in the civic games at the coliseum. Persecution of Christians became a serious problem in the mid-90’s AD under the reign of Emperor Domitian who was insane enough to require that he be worshipped as a living god, the incarnation of the son of Jupiter. Typically, Romans believed that their emperors became gods after they died, but Domitian got a bit ahead things.

It was not easy to be the Church back then. They had problems that were very similar to the problems churches have today. In Chapters two and three of the Revelation John is instructed to write something specific to each of the Seven Churches addressing particular problems they each had. Ephesus had lost its first love meaning their Christian fellowship had fallen second place to doctrinal witch hunts. The Christians in Smyrna were already facing intense persecution and impoverishment because the synagogue authorities were very persistent in hunting out Christians. Pergamum was a capitol city and for that reason the Imperial Cult was strong, but that wasn’t the problem with the church there. They were tolerating among themselves a group of Christians who taught that it was okay to feast with pagan worshippers and participate in their orgies. In Thyatira, you could not work unless you were a member of a trade guild and each trade guild had their own god to worship. Therefore, Christians couldn’t work unless they participated in their trade guild’s pagan feasts. The problem in Thyatira was not being unable to work for reasons of faith but that there was a woman leader who claimed to have had a word from Jesus saying that it was okay for them to participate in the trade guild feasts and thus a large portion of the Christians there followed her. The church at Sardis was a perfect model of inoffensive Christianity in much the same way as Oprah-anity is today. There apparently was nothing that distinguished the Christians there in belief and practice from any other religion. Philadelphia was the only church to receive no correction. They had recently been through a wave of persecution and remained faithful. Finally Laodicea; their wealth had blinded them to their need for God. That’s a snapshot of the church on earth back in that day and I would say even in our day. A snapshot of the inner life of every Christian congregation today can be found in the letters to those seven churches.

In our passage today we find the church as it is in heaven and is coming to be on earth. It is the church of the faithful, the church of those who remain faithful amidst the persecutions and temptations to cultural compromise that we Christians face. The New Jerusalem is what we are at heart as the church, the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ. It is humanity, humans, you and me in community and the Trinity, in whom “we live and move and have our being," is in our midst. The New Jerusalem is Holy Spirit-filled human community. People in union with Jesus, the Son bound to one another in his resurrected humanity. Our congregational communion with one another in and with Christ Jesus by means of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is community in which the image of the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is growing like fruit on the branches of the Tree of Life. Our leafing, our visibly being New Life, is for the healing of the nations.

This leafing is important to note. The church transcends the boundaries of the nations and thus we, you and I and our congregations, are part of a grassroots kingdom of priests, a holy nation set apart by the Trinity for his purpose of blessing and healing the nations. We are a trans-national entity to which national, ethical, cultural, economic, and racial boundaries do not apply and therefore we should not use them as excuses among ourselves preventing us from being bond in unconditional love with one another globally and acting towards one another accordingly. We do globally among ourselves the healing work that the nations do not, will not, and indeed cannot do among and between themselves for love of power and greed. Our New Life leafs forth as peace, truth, justice, equality, equitablility, and reconciliation globally among ourselves which effects the nations now prophetically and indeed will one day heal the nations. Our work in the Lord is not in vain nor should we consider ourselves to be or let ourselves be consigned to the realms of "religious", "private", or "spiritual". We are"prophetic". We are "public". "Religion" has nothing to do with us. We are in Christ being the new humanity of his resurrection. Our life in communion derives from his resurrected human being. Its orientation is the future uninhibited reign of the Lord Jesus Christ breaking forth into our present through us. Because the Holy Spirit is with and in us we are living in the presence of the communion of the Trinity and thriving on it. (At moments I catch a glimpse of the staggering enormity of what we are as the Church, the Bride of Christ, and what we are here to do and how beautiful we could be. And yet in the same breath I find myself stepping back and scratching my head in disbelief and saying to myself, “What a whore” because of the way we go at one another over styles of worship, the sex and sexual orientation of ministers, whether a minister should wear a robe, whether AA should be allowed a room because they smell like stale cigarettes, whether we should be involved with international ministries of peace and justice because they don't preach the old time religion and aren't supported by the conservative regime, and the way we go about personally pursuing wealth and power at the expense of the poor, and the list could go on.)

In the world of the early church Christians used to have to gather at night and secretly. They were not safe in the cities in which they lived. Yet, when they gathered for worship the light of the glory of God was with them and in the New Jerusalem they were safe. Darkness was no more. In the early church they had to meet behind closed doors, but in the New Jerusalem the gates are always open. The Holy Spirit-filled worship behind those closed doors then as it is today for us is the New Jerusalem breaking through from heaven into earth. When we gather for worship the breaking through of the New Jerusalem is what’s going on. The loving community that is being created in our midst by the Holy Spirit’s work on our hearts and by our own efforts to love one another as Jesus has commanded us is the fruit and the leaves on the Tree of Life which is for the healing of the nations. It is here. It is coming. And it will come to its fruition on the day when all things are made new. To say it again plainly, the New Jerusalem is what is happening in each of us and in this fellowship when we are at worship both here together and then as we walk each step of the way through our day because the Holy Spirit, the River of Life, is at work in us preparing us to be the Bride of Christ.

I feel as if I’m blubbering a bit here in trying to describe this metaphor of the New Jerusalem. So maybe I should just finish. The New Jerusalem shows us what the church at heart is and ought to be and what humanity will one day become. The church is humanity indwelt by the God the Holy Spirit who unites us to and together in Christ Jesus and thus we are partakers of the living and loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; a life/way of life and a love/way of love which never die and thus the church is and ought to be a community that is safe and secure for all peoples, a community whose doors and gates do not exclude people, a community where people are healed. A river of life flows forth from the church. The Tree of Life grows here. The Trinity has chosen us, called us, and by the blood of Christ redeemed us to be a kingdom of priests set about on the work of healing the nations through prayer and the proclamation of forgiveness and reconciliation, and challenging people to forgive and to risk being wastefully compassionate. As a church on earth if we are faithful about our task we will be persecuted. We walk the way of the cross after all don't we?. On the other hand, if we compromise with the idolatries inherent in our culture we will only be ineffective in the work we’ve been called to and there will be no light of the glory of God shining on earth. The stakes are high, my friends. The stakes are high. Amen.