The home of God is among mortals ... the home of the Episcopal Church is among the poor

Easter 5-C May 2, 2010
Acts 11:1-18 Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35

These are lessons from dreams: strange, powerful, hallucinatory, disturbing dreams. The Spirit is alive and active in a peculiar and subversive way in today’s lessons: what can these dreams possibly mean? And how can they hang together?

What could be a better dream than this part of the Revelation of St. John the Divine? This is God’s dream for us, this new heaven and new earth, this holy city, this new Jerusalem, and we are all in it, bedecked in our finest clothes, bejeweled and adorned. And in our dream a loud voice finally tells us just what is going on. “The home of God is among mortals,” the voice says. “God will be with them and wipe every tear from their eyes.”

It’s the same dream we have been having since before Christmas, when we were dreaming of Emmanuel, God with us, and woke up to find a little baby, born to a poor mother who had no where to sleep but barn. From the moment we woke up on that Christmas morning, we found a God here with us, among us who are poor and downtrodden and longing for a better life in a better place. A God who was just as poor and downtrodden and hope-filled as we were. “See,” says the voice of this same God, this God who lived and walked among us, this God who started out his human life as a poor baby. “See, I am making all things new. Write this. This is trustworthy and true.”

What can this dream mean to us, we who live in this poor neighborhood where people live when they have no where else to go?

Listen again to Peter’s dream, from the first lesson. Jews in those days, remember, were not supposed to eat certain kinds of food, and certainly not supposed to eat that food with certain kinds of people – people who were not Jews. Jews, after much persecution and violence, wanted to keep to themselves, to live the lives God wanted them to live, which included rules about what food to eat, and with whom one could eat it.

But in this dream, God seems to be telling Peter to cast those rules aside – to eat food that had been forbidden, food that Peter says has long been considered unclean, unfit to eat. And, perhaps more importantly, to eat this food with people Peter would not have been caught dead with. It’s like Peter came to the Table one day, Peter who had been so high and mighty and self-righteous, and so proud that he had never had to eat in a soup kitchen, that he had never been so hungry that he had had to wait in line in all kinds of weather just to get lunch. It’s like God said to Peter, go down there to Brockton, wait in line and have some lunch – maybe even some pork sausage – with people you didn’t think you would ever be caught dead with. “What God has made clean,” the voice told him, “you must not call profane.”

This may be a shabby place, this St. Paul’s, Brockton, but maybe this is the beginning of the new heavens and the new earth. God certainly makes God’s home among these mortals, and eats lunch downstairs. Open the doors, God tells us. Put on the coffee. Turn on the heat when it’s cold, and the fans when it’s hot. “To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life,” the voice of God tells us. “Love one another.”

You would think the Episcopal Church would be the last church in the world to stay in a neighborhood like this. The Episcopal Church, “the church of wealth and culture” – surely Episcopalians dream of castles in Spain, cruises on the Riviera, financial deals on Wall Street, or copper mines in Chile. And I will say that many of the people who have had oversight of this parish have lived in a world quite out of touch with our daily reality.

But I was reminded last week that the same God who sent St. Peter downstairs to the Table for lunch speaks to Episcopalians, too. Two years ago our Presiding Bishop announced a commitment to be in places like this neighborhood, and for the church to do what it can to end the poverty that plagues so many of our friends and neighbors. I’ve had her announcement on my blog ever since.

Do you remember these challenges? I posted them in the chapel when we worshiped there two winters ago. We left them up all of Lent, and now we will leave them up in church for the rest of the Easter season, and all through the season of Pentecost. “See,” these challenges say to us, “the home of God is among mortals.” These challenges to the church are also promises to us. The Episcopal Church says it believes these things; will Episcopalians make good on them? Will they stand with us in this God-filled place? Will they carry out the dream of God to make even this new?