(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Apr 24, 2016, Easter V)
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To Fall Means to Get Back Up
Ever since I can remember, I have loved soccer. Growing up, the highlight of my week was soccer practice. It was the one time in the week when I truly felt free: no walls, no desks, no teachers, no tests. Just an open field of grass, dozens of soccer balls, and my friends. Freed from the shackles of social pressures and second guessing and critical thinking, I lived in the moment: running, sliding, kicking, playing without restraint. At soccer practice, I entered that hallowed zone of time and space where no life worry or problem could follow.
And yet soccer practice could also be the lowlight of my week. Because on the other side of the field was a group of girls. And sometimes we would scrimmage each other. Now you might think that this would be the dream of any adolescent boy. How could it go wrong? We would ask the opposite question: How could it not go wrong? It was a lose-lose. If you play hard, you look like the villain, tackling girls with no mercy. But if you play easy and lose out to a girl…well, you’d never hear the end of it. Especially if you ended up on the ground.
In the event that you fell under a girl’s challenge, your reaction had to be immediate. To fall meant to get back up, to climb to your feet. You would shake off the fall like it was nothing—no matter the cuts and bruises, no matter the wounded pride.
It’s a human tendency that goes back as far as the beginning of time. Ever since Adam and Eve—ever since “the Fall,” when humanity disobeyed God and fell from paradise—humanity has been trying to get back up. In theology as in life, to fall means to get back up, to climb to your feet. It’s no surprise that, shortly after “the Fall,” all of humanity joined together to build a big tower into the heavens. It was only natural. They had taken a fall. What else would come next, but to get back up?
“The Fall” and Theological Double Vision
While the story of “the Fall” seems simple enough, it has unfortunately contributed to a widespread case of what I would diagnose as theological diplopia—or “double vision.” In other words, the story of “the Fall” has led many believers to see double: they see an imperfect world, this earth to which we have fallen, but they also see its perfect counterpart, heaven, the place from which we fell. They see earthly bodies flawed from the fall and saintly souls flawlessly flitting about heaven.
One of the tragic symptoms of this “double vision” is the rejection of this life, the rejection of this earth and this body. Not too long ago, I shared conversation with a homeless man. Frustrated with his plight here, he said, “When this life is over, I’m leaving this earth. I’m going someplace much better.” I share my friend’s hope for a better future. A better future is the good news that Christ promises. A better future is the gospel of today’s scripture, which dreams of God personally wiping away every tear from our eyes, which imagines a world free of pain and weeping.
But neither Christ nor today’s scripture nor any other scripture in the Bible promises an escape from this earthly life—not now, not ever. On the contrary, we hear time and time again that the earth is good, bodies are good, that this life is not something to escape but something to be enjoyed. We hear it at the very beginning, where at the end of each day of creation, there is that familiar, dependable benediction, “And God saw that it was good,” where after the creation of our human bodies, “God saw everything…and indeed, it was very good.” We hear the goodness of this life in the prayer of Jesus, who desires not that we climb back up to heaven, but rather that the kingdom of God come down here on earth as it is in heaven. And we hear it in today’s scripture, where heaven comes down to earth, where God makes God’s home on earth.
The Bible is not a lecture on how to get into heaven. It is an epic ballad that weeps and croons and cries out about this earth of ours, these bodies of ours. The idea that we will one day leave behind our bodies and this wonderfully crumbly earth of ours, is not a biblical idea. It is a Greek idea, a Platonic idea, an idea that thoughts are better than things.[1] But as we remember especially in this season of Easter, the substance of our hope is not some immaterial world where we will float like ghosts. It is in the scarred body of the resurrected Christ. Which is to say, our hope is in skin that has been sanctified and dirt that has been dignified and rivers that have been purified, in all the goodness and beauty and truth that we taste, touch, smell, hear, and see on earth, even now.
How Hope Takes Root in This Earth: The Fall
But even as I say this, I can almost hear my friend responding—and he has a very good point: How can we possibly hope in this world—in this earth and in these bodies? How can our hope take root in an earth as broken as ours, where some people sleep in houses you could get lost in while others sleep under a bridge or in the woods, where a body endures so much pain? Forget what God said at creation, what Jesus prayed in his prayer, what John envisioned in Revelation: maybe this life isn’t so good. Maybe this earth and these bodies are irredeemable. Maybe those Babelites had it right when they tried to build a tower into heaven, when they forsook this earth in favor of something higher.
The tragic irony is that this approach to life is precisely the one that makes this earth and these bodies so broken. In other words, when we take it upon ourselves to get back up, to climb back up, to rise up again, we have a tendency to make things worse. We try to achieve our goals through brunt force, through sheer power. Like the Babelites, we set upon our plan single-mindedly and demand that everyone do what we do. But in the process, we scratch and cut and hurt each other.
Our scripture today, though, suggests a startling alternative. The writer, John, knows just as well as anyone how broken our earth and our bodies are. But he nonetheless has hope—not for an escape from earth but rather for a redemption of the earth. Because he’s had a vision, he says, of “a new earth” (21:1). And it’s not new because of anything we’ve done to it. The change ultimately comes from somewhere else. Listen to his vision: “I saw the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (21:2).
As I hear these words, I cannot help but think of the folk tale of Chicken Little, who is hit on the head by an acorn and runs around, crying, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” In his own way, Chicken Little is proclaiming the same revelation that John is, for John says that the heavenly city of Jerusalem will come down—or literally in the Greek, “fall”—out of heaven. In other words, heaven will fall onto earth.
Open to the Fall
Chances are, if you pulled a stranger off the street and asked him or her about “the Fall,” they’d tell you how sinful we are, how we messed up in the garden and as punishment are walking in these mortal bodies on this ruined earth. While there’s a kernel of truth in this—we are sinful, which is to say, we’re full of mistakes and brokenness—it’s mostly a bucket of theological hogwash, if I could be so facetiously bold. Genesis never mentions “the Fall.” The Bible never says that the earth is bad, that this life is punishment, that real life will happen later, at a time and place to be announced. The only “fall” worth talking about is the fall of heaven onto earth. The only “fall” worth our time as Christ-followers is the time when, as John says delightfully in the Greek, God will set up God’s “tent” among us (21:3).[2]
Which shouldn’t mean that all we do is twiddle our thumbs and wait patiently. It’s revealing that when heaven falls to earth, it’s not in the shape of a garden but rather a city. Remember that when God created the world and saw that it was good, very good, there were no cities. Paradise was a garden. Cities, which were a human creation, only showed how broken humanity had become. Just think of the first cities: Babel, Sodom, Gomorrah. And yet heaven falls to earth in the shape of the city, which suggests that like a parent who tenderly involves herself in a child’s work, helping to put right any error, God “adopts the work of humanity” and redeems it.[3]
Which is to say, we should not just kill time until heaven falls out of the sky. God isn’t going to just reboot, to hit the restart button. God will work through our work, play in our play, and if we live lives that are open to the fall of heaven—if we don’t enclose ourselves in bunkers that shut out the light of God’s new day—then our bodies might just experience what God so desires to give us: heaven on earth.
Prayer
God of gardens and tents and cities,
Of scarred bodies and tear-stained faces—
Come and make your home among us,
Healing us through our scars, wiping away our tears.
Help us to let go of our willful ways,
That we might welcome heaven on earth, even today.
Amen.
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[1] My thought and understanding of the conventional “two-worlds” thinking that has infiltrated theological thinking is indebted to John D. Caputo. See, e.g., his discussion of two-worlds thinking in his chapter, “Two Types of Continental Philosophy” in The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 87-116.
[2] One could more literally translate the beginning of this verse: “See, the tent of God is among mortals. He will dwell in a tent with them as their God.”
[3] Richard A. Davis, “The Politics of the City and the Sea—Revelation 21:1-6,” http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/the-politics-of-the-city-and-the-sea-revelation-211-6/, accessed April 19, 2016. Much of Davis’ reflection derives from the thought of French philosopher and lay theologian, Jacques Ellul, as expressed in Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation (trans. George W. Schreiner; New York: Seabury, 1977).
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