This past week, we lost Patrick Wedd, a musician who has touched innumerable lives, and a man who has personally touched the lives of three generations of Murray’s family. Less well known, this week in my own family, we also lost my Uncle Austin, who died on Thursday morning at 11. He and I were both named for my great grandfather Austin, and my Uncle was one of the people in my life who not only modeled God’s kingdom to me through the generosity of his hospitality, faith, and love, but also kept me laughing for over forty years with his incredible sense of humor.
As a young man, Austin had fallen off the grain silo—about a forty foot fall. When my grandmother heard the news, she thought he had been killed and asked where he was. She found out that he had landed on his feet and had walked home with nothing more to show for the fall than black and blue feet for a few days. Every day of the seventy years of his life since were a gift, and he died at 95 surrounded by his wife and his six children. He got to hold fourteen grandchildren, twenty-four great grandchildren, and three great-great grandchildren before his time with us was over.
There are people in our lives who love us, who make us feel safe, and in whose company, we feel like our best selves. These are the people who bring God’s kingdom alive for us, giving us a glimpse of what John describes in his vision of the heavenly city.
John’s people were a people occupied and dominated by Rome. They lived in a climate of uncertainty, scarcity, danger, and fear. They, like many we serve and many more who serve us here in Santa Cruz, were a marginalized minority group outside of the mainstream of roman culture.
The Vision of the heavenly Jerusalem was everything that their lives under Roman rule wasn’t. There was clean water readily available, security without the need to lock the gates, the promise of food throughout the year, no darkness, no sickness, no death, no tears, no competing temples dedicated to strange gods. Not only is there no Roman Empire there, but there is no place for it or any of its corruption.
This is the vision of the fullness of god’s kingdom, but the breaking through of that kingdom in the here and now is the kind of security and safety we feel when we are in a community of care where there is no scarcity, no insecurity, no lack or want for anything. This is the kind of community Christ surrounded himself with while he was with us, and that we are supposed to be striving for in our Christian communities as well as seeking to provide to all of those with whom we come into contact.
The Good news that Paul preached that so touched Lydia’s heart was this kind of kingdom of heaven as it might be right here and right now, and it is the same kingdom that we are still called to bring alive in our own world.
Today’s gospel taps into this same sentiment. When we keep Jesus’ teachings, God’s home truly is with us—we spiritually experience the holy city overlaid onto our own lives and communities.
The countless times throughout my life when I have visited my Uncle Austin on the farm in South Dakota, it has always felt like a homecoming. His strong and capable arms wrapped me up in hugs as a child and wrapped up my own children when we visited just a few years ago. The fresh corn from his fields always accompanied the ample feast that would grace his table as we were met with a hospitality that made us feel warm, loved, supported, and cared for.
Two-hundred yards across the lawn and past the orchard, my grandmother’s house is still kept up as well as if she still lived in it. There was another place on the farm that always felt safe, warm, and filled with love when I was growing up.
As an adult, I realize how blessed I continue to be by the communities that have drawn me into breakthrough moments of God’s kingdom throughout my life. It is the kind of community that so many of us have come to feel in this place, and it is the kind of community that I hope to provide for my children and their children’s children’s children should I enjoy the gift of meeting my own great-great grandchildren, like my Uncle Austin did.
The Holy Spirit, the promised Advocate, is the indwelling of God’s own breath of life within us, reminding us of the kind of love and community into which Christ called us to live. The Peace that Christ leaves us with is truly a peace that is beyond any physical peace we experience in our world. It is a peace that reaches through the depths of our physical bodies and resonates to the core of our very souls. It is the peace of knowing ourselves to be loved as God’s own children.
This sixth Sunday of Easter, we are invited to allow Christ’s resurrection to become our own resurrection—to find ourselves renewed in God’s peace, reconnected to the eternal love that is greater than death, and that brings us not only hope in John’s vision, but sparks in us the passion to live that vision in our own lives and to bring it alive in our own world.
With Patrick Wedd, Austin Risty, and the countless others whose lives have enriched our own, may we too become for those whose lives we impact the safety and love that allows the heavenly city to come alive for them as we love as Christ loved us.
And may Patrick and Austin both rest in God’s eternal love and light.
Amen.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.