Thomas Kleinert
I have seen beauty to make my heart sing. I have seen it along the river, in the woods, by the side of the road and even in the parking lot at Target. I have seen hornbeams and maples with their crowns on fire, blazing red, yellow and gold against the bluest blue of the October sky. I have walked, driven and paddled in this beauty, and I have wished I could fly in its glory like a dancing sparrow, singing my thank yous.
But unfailingly, a heavy reluctance takes hold of me. More sudden, heavy, deadly flooding, this time in Spain. War in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan, no end in sight. And the grave uncertainty what kind of country this will be after this week. I often think about the German writer and verse smith Bert Brecht who fled in 1933 when the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag, the German parliament, and accused the communists of arson. Brecht wrote in 1939, in exile in Denmark,
Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing![1]
How can you talk about trees on November 3, 2024, I ask myself — and a couple of breaths later I ask, “How can I not speak of the glory of trees, when ugliness, violence, grief and foreboding are creeping in from all sides? How can I not sing of the beauty and wisdom of God’s creation when chaos is seeping up from the ground?” I’m grateful I’m not alone in resisting the pull of despair. I’m grateful for voices affirming the faithfulness of God in dark times.
“In broad sweep, the story told in the book of Isaiah is the long account of Israel’s life in the midst of a demanding sequence of imperial powers,” Walter Brueggemann writes, a sequence stretching from the 8th to the 4th century B.C.E. First the Assyrian Empire, then the Babylonian Empire, and eventually the Persian Empire. But Isaiah has no interest in telling the story of the rise and fall of empires. Isaiah draws our attention to what we might not see at first glance: how, amid the whirl of history, perceived and redescribed in the prophet’s heart and mind, the purposes of God unfold. In the prophet’s vision, any human decision – whether by Judean kings or by imperial overlords or by any other powerful figures – is always penultimate. What is ultimate is the holy resolve and the capacity of God to do something utterly new. God is the creator of heaven and earth, and God is faithful.
At the center of God’s faithful attentiveness, according to Isaiah, is a city. Jerusalem is the seat of the world’s best hope for well-being, and the site of the most profound disobedience and recalcitrance. And so Jerusalem is the recipient of God’s judgment and of God’s renewing comfort and mercy.[2] In the prophet’s vision all of heaven and earth can be and will be undone, except Jerusalem. The moon will be abashed and the sun ashamed, but the Lord of hosts will reign on Mount Zion.[3] And on this mountain the Lord of hosts will make a great feast for all peoples.
And the Lord will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the covering that is spread over all nations; the Lord will swallow up death forever.
I am powerfully drawn to this image of God consuming and thus eliminating for good the deathly shroud cast over all peoples. More than anytime before I am drawn to it in this season when ugliness, violence, grief and foreboding are creeping in from all sides. It does feel like a pall to me, like a dark, chilling blanket, smothering life and joy and hope. It is Death with a capital D. Death that doesn’t make room for new life, but only moves to counter and cancel and prevent fullness of life, leaving nothing but absence in its wake. And Isaiah declares, and the way I hear these words, he sings and shouts them, “The Lord will swallow up death forever.” Anything that wants to bring creation to a standstill, anything that wants to unleash chaos and formless void, anything that wants to swallow life, will be swallowed up by God the creator of heaven and earth. It’s not just the actions of those who hold imperial power that are penultimate; anything that keeps life from flourishing is penultimate. What is ultimate are the purposes of God. What is ultimate is the mountain feast for all peoples. What is ultimate is their joy, our joy, in God’s salvation.
John, of course, knew that tune very well. He was a Christian leader, banned by order of Rome, yet another empire, to the island of Patmos. Jerusalem was gone. The Romans, tired of the protests and revolts in the volatile province of Judaea, had destroyed the city and demolished the temple — a pile of rubble was all that was left. They had finally succeeded in bringing peace to the troubled region, their variety of peace, that is, PAX ROMANA. To those peacemakers, followers of Jesus were suspect, because of their reluctance or outright refusal to honor the gods of the empire. Violent persecution of the church wasn’t the norm, but many Christian leaders were being executed or imprisoned, or, as in John’s case, banned.
He found himself far from home, a prisoner on the small island of Patmos, off the coast of Turkey, in the Aegean Sea. The world around him was falling to pieces, and he knew that in the cities of Asia Minor, arrests and executions were continuing. His friends were losing hope. Roman imperial culture made demands on them that turned their acts of faithfulness to the risen Lord into acts of rebellion. How could they possibly acclaim the emperor as “Lord and Son of God” when they had come to know Jesus as Lord? How could they praise the emperor as “Savior of the World” when that honor belonged to God alone?
John wrote them a pastoral letter to tell them what he saw amid the whirl of violent tensions, oppression, and immobilizing fear. Much like the prophets whose imagery and language shaped his own, John looked beyond the horizon defined by Rome’s imperial reach, and he saw a city coming down out of heaven from God. He saw a city for all peoples, a city of peace.
Biblical scholar John Barton has noted, that “apocalyptic poetry and historical prose are usually not commensurate. When Scripture says, ‘The stars will fall from heaven and the sun will cease its shining; the moon will be turned to blood and fire mingled with hail will fall from the heavens,’ we don’t expect the next phrase to be ‘the rest of the country will be partly cloudy with scattered showers.’”[4] When John speaks of the holy city descending from heaven, we don’t expect the next paragraph to give us GPS coordinates or driving directions. We are given a vision of life when all that is penultimate is past. The deathly powers that have kept life from flourishing are no more: injustice and oppression are gone, terror and fear have passed away, death has been swallowed up.
John reminds his first hearers, that even Rome’s considerable power will not be able to stand against the purposes of God. And he reminds us that no project of ultimate domination will ever prevent the coming of God’s reign.
Our hope is not for the solitary bliss of some home-delivery paradise, or for acceptance to a small, exclusive club of the faithful few, or however insular we might imagine fullness of life in this culture steeped in individualism. The church of the saints hopes for an inclusive city for all peoples where God is at home.
During exile in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel had spoken of the new Jerusalem. He declared that the name of the city would be, The Lord is There.[5] “My dwelling place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”[6] John picks up the ancient theme, but the vision is no longer for a single people, but for a community of peoples: “He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.” The ultimate future is not one tribe’s final triumph over all the others. Nor is it the fulfillment of any nation’s or any individual’s imperial aspirations — the ultimate horizon of the world’s hope, according to John, is a city for all peoples, where God is at home; a city where death is no more, where mourning, crying, and pain are no more — because the old order has passed away. And the one seated on the throne says, “See, I am making all things new.”
What are we to do with such a vision? Neither Isaiah nor John offer us a program for realizing these ancient hopes. But they offer us their inspired attempts to imagine all things made new, hoping that we too might yield in our present, as they did in theirs, “to the assurances given for God’s future,”[7] and that we might seek this peace and pursue it with our every breath, thought, word, and deed. What we do with such a vision, is lean into it. We let it shape our own inspired attempts at faithful living in response to God’s life-giving and hope-sustaining work.
The late William Stringfellow described saints as “those men and women who relish the event of life as a gift and who realize that the only way to honor such a gift is to give it away” — much like the trees that, just when we think they have given all they can give over a long, hot summer, give themselves to shorter days and longer nights — and to us — with such glorious beauty.[8]
Keep alert; stand firm in the faith; be courageous.[9] Our God is faithful.
[1] An die Nachgeborenen, translated by Scott Horton https://harpers.org/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/
[2] See Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 1-39, WBC, 1998, 1-2.
[3] Isaiah 24:21-23
[4] Cited in Thomas G. Long, “Imagine There’s No Heaven: The Loss of Eschatology in American Preaching,” Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXX, No. 1, Advent 2006, 23.
[5] Ezekiel 48:35
[6] Ezekiel 37:27
[7] Brueggemann, 200.
[8] For the Stringfellow quote see F. Dean Lueking, “Saints in the Making,” The Christian Century, October 21, 1998, 965. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-03/saints-making
[9] 1 Corinthians 16:13