SERMON Ups

Easter 5(C): Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

We all have up days, and for me, days, like today, leading up to Mothers' Day are particularly up days.

It was on Mothers' Day eleven years ago that I first visited Wicker Park Lutheran Church. My daughter Amie came with me. She was then very pregnant. And it was on that day, eleven years ago, that I fell in love with Wicker Park Lutheran Church. In love during the greeting of peace. In live with the look homeward angel that is our baptismal font. It was a very up day.

And last Sunday in Indiana I was reminded of another "up" day nine years ago this weekend when our then twenty-month old granddaughter spent her first sleep away with us in Indiana after church. It was a particularly up time for Beatrice.

Beatrice was truly the perfect house guest. No crying, no fussing. Every request prefaced with "Pa Lee" or "Grandma Ruth" and appended with "please." By far her most frequent request was some form of "up, please." "Up please" from the port-a-crib was the most frequent request. The "please," of course, made it hard to ignore. But there was also up please (by herself) from the beach, up please into the high chair. Even when she wanted to get down from the high chair or out of the stroller she would ask for help "up please" (the logic being that she would have to be lifted up to get down). Up. Up. Up.

It was an up twenty-four hours. And a very up Bea.

There is also at first blush something very up and upward moving about the two visions we just heard described. We have Peter's account of his vision from Acts, and the vision of the New Jerusalem from Revelation.

Now Peter's vision is one that some of us at Wicker Park Lutheran know personally. My first Easter here, we read the initial account of Peter's vision and the Gentile Pentecost from chapter 10. And inspired by Peter's vision, the reader, Joel Klaff, envisioned a canopy of discarded afghans sown together and hanging in the nave of this sanctuary.

And for two months after the Around the Coyote festival that fall we all looked up at the breathtaking and beautiful jewel-like canopy above us that those afghans had become -- just as, until today , we looked up at the elegant canopy made for a synod assembly by our members in 2004 -- a canopy that we hung in our nave for Easter and (especially) today. We were to have looked up at it today but it fell down.

And like those canopy visions above us, the New Jerusalem vision from Revelation comes from above. Take a look at the illustration on page 11 of this morning's bulletin (it is from a large French website devoted to La Nouvelle Jérusalem). The city hovers above the earth. And not just a few Christians associate that vision with rapture and escape. And they think up. And up, up and away. Another world. The end of time.

And visions like that, or ones that hang innocuously above us, are easy to dismiss. And even harder to relate to.

But are they visions we just heard? Take a look.

Peter's vision is of a large sheet that comes down from heaven. It is completely and fully in his face. And in this sheet is every kind of four footed animal and as well as reptiles and birds. Three times a voice tells Peter, "Get up, Peter, kill and eat." And Peter says, "Not on your life, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean."

If you have ever read the lists in the 11th chapter of Leviticus, you know what Peter is talking about. Animals that cannot be eaten (or even touched once dead) are carefully identified (the list is long) and are called unclean. Animals that gentiles ate and that were unclean for Jews were called common or "profane." Peter has eaten neither unclean nor profane animals. But the voice persists: "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." After the third time the sheet and the animals, reptiles, and birds are taken into heaven.

As described by Peter, Cornelius' slaves and soldier arrive in Joppa at that very moment, and the Holy Spirit tells Peter to go with these gentiles to Caesarea -- to go and to incur defilement by traveling with gentiles and further defilement by entering the ritually unclean house of a gentile.

Peter does it. And sometimes I think we overlook what Peter has to overcome in order to make that trip from Joppa to Caesarea. All his life, he has been told that certain animals (pigs and rabbits to name two) are unclean. Once in graduate school, we brought a large paper bag to a friend's house filled with fresh oysters from Cape Cod. My father-in-law was into oysters and had harvested them the day before. We brought them to the friend's house forgetting that his wife's Jewish Orthodox mother was staying with them. We did remember, too late, when she walked into the kitchen just as we were opening the bag to display its contents. Thousands of years ingrained revulsion arose, and she immediately turned and left the room. It would be as if someone brought us, as North Americans, a freshly slaughtered domestic cat or dog to cook.

Peter's vision is his worse in-your-face nightmare -- and it is about the down-to-earth reality of this world and about gentiles being made equal members of the new community. And Peter gets down and deals with it -- and with the Jewish members of the Jerusalem church who cannot at first fathom the ritual impurity that Peter has incurred in traveling, staying with, and eating with gentiles.

And the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation is no less down to earth. Like Peter's canopy, the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven. It is this earth and reality, not another earth or reality, that is made new. It is God who comes down to dwell or tabernacle with us. It is God who is raptured, raptured down to earth, in this reality -- not Christians snatched away to another world. Barbara Rossing in her book calls this "a rapture in reverse." (Rossing 2004, 147). And it is. And it is also now.

 David Buttrick, the Vanderbilt Divinity School homiletics professor writes:

Now do you want to know a secret? Making new; that's what's going on in the world; that's what's happening. The Holy City is not future perfect, it's present tense. (Check out the Greek verbs in the text!) Now the Holy City is descending. Now God is making all things new. Right now God is wiping tears and easing pain and overcoming the power of death in the world.

Now, there is nothing otherworldly about the vision; it's happening now in the midst of our worn, torn, broken world. And with the eyes of faith [we] can see it happening. (David Buttrick 1992, 162)

Not only is the New Jerusalem not otherworldly or pie-in-the-sky, but it is also "a profoundly urban vision." (Rossing, 2001, 43) As Kathleen Norris has observed, "[The New Jerusalem] is a city, not a solitude, an important distinction in the narcissistic din of American culture."

The New Jerusalem is what we at Wicker Park Lutheran are about. As a community of faith, we are called to be the Body of Christ in our larger urban community. Like Peter, we are called to deal with very real issues of discrimination of all kinds in Wicker and Humboldt Parks locally as well as in the city and state. And just as some of the members of Jerusalem church challenged Peter for initiating a gentile mission, others may challenge us to defend what the gospel compels. And, like Peter, we must be prepared to do that. All this means that, by God's grace and because of God's grace, we are called to be here, feet planted firmly on the ground of God's good creation and not, in the words of the hymn, "in some heaven light years away."

And the why is not hard to grasp. When the "up please" Beatrice visited us this weekend nine years ago, she asked her grandfather to please sit down on the floor. At first Lee was puzzled. He asked why, but she only repeated her request, "Pa Lee down please." The "please" was impossible to ignore, so he sat down on the floor. Once he was seated, she threw out her arms, and cried, "Hug?" He immediately held out his arms, she ran to him, and the two of them hugged.

Hugs can only happen when you are in a position to be hugged. And the love, the agape, that Jesus tells his disciples will identify them as his presence when he is gone -- that love can only happen in community. And community happens here and now. In Word and Sacrament. In the exchange of peace. And it happens when we meet with one another and our neighbors to plant a sustainable garden or go on The Night Ministry bus or build houses or tend our worms or do any of the many and numerous things we do together and with others.

Up is fun and Mothers' Day is great, but down to earth is where it's at. Thanks be to God!

Amen

May 2, 2010

Ruth VanDemark, pastor

Wicker Park Lutheran Church