Fifth Sunday Of Easter
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VII, Cycle C
Object:
Theme For The Day
Revelation's vision of the New Jerusalem speaks hope to urban dwellers, country folks, and suburbanites alike.
First Lesson
Acts 11:1-18
Who Was I To Hinder God?
Having received his vision in Joppa of radical inclusion, and having had some success bringing Cornelius and other Gentiles into the faith, Peter is now called before the apostolic council in Jerusalem to account for what he has been up to. He recounts for them the details of his vision, and also how an angel directed Cornelius to reach out to him (vv. 5-14). Then Peter describes how the Holy Spirit fell upon this group of Gentiles, "just as it had upon us at the beginning" (v. 15). "Who was I," Peter asks, "that I could hinder God?" (v. 17). Having heard this slam dunk testimony, the members of the council have nothing more to say by way of objection. From start to finish, Peter's activity has been the work of God. Who can object to that? There are times, of course, when church folk -- especially those who have been around for a while -- tend to be skeptical about changes. New mission initiatives are often met with either active or passive opposition. This is a story for such situations: It reminds us that God is the agent of the church's outreach, not we ourselves.
New Testament Lesson
Revelation 21:1-6
A New Heaven And A New Earth
With Satan having been defeated forever, the poetic vision of Revelation moves toward its climax. John sees "a new heaven and a new earth" (v. 1). Even the sea -- that place of chaos, to the Hebrew mind, that preceded even creation itself -- is no more. Not incidentally, the sea is also what separated John, in exile on the Isle of Patmos, from his churches. As baffling as this metaphor is, he sees the New Jerusalem, "coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (v. 2). God will dwell forever, not impossibly high and lifted up in heaven, but among human beings: "he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away" (v. 4). "See, I am making all things new," says the one seated upon the throne; "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end" (v. 6). John's triumphant vision of the future is not a return to the idyllic pastoral landscape of Eden, but is rather a city -- but not just any city, a renewed and purified city. The Greco-Roman world is a place in which cities have a principal place -- and the mightiest city of all is Rome. Here, Jerusalem, the city of God -- the same city the Romans have all but destroyed, in their brutal suppression of the revolt of A.D. 70, replaces even mighty Rome as the nexus of the creation's future.
The Gospel
John 13:31-35
The Greatest Commandment
(See Maundy Thursday.) Having washed the disciples' feet, and having identified Judas as his betrayer and seen him storm out, Jesus now gives his followers "the greatest commandment": that they love one another. That love originates not with human beings, but with Jesus: "Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another" (v. 34). This love is the sign by which others will know who is a genuine disciple. While this commandment is not literally new (the command to love one's neighbor as oneself is found in the Old Testament), there is evidently a new quality of love amongst Jesus' flock. The world tends to value "nice" people -- those who are pleasant, polite, cordial, of "good stock." This is something different. This is love: a total giving of oneself for the good of the other.
Preaching Possibilities
From the beginnings of history, cities have embodied the best and the worst of the human condition. Cities are places where immigrants settle, where aspiring hopefuls try their hand at fulfilling their dreams, and where new inventions are first tried out. They are citadels of commerce and the arts. Yet they also attract more than their share of those who would prey on or abuse others. They can become gathering places for society's outcasts, rejects, and criminals.
Modern cities remind us that the great social problems of our day -- racism, poverty, lack of opportunity for the underclass -- are still with us. The sin of the cities is the sin of us all.
There is an icon of opportunity in American pop culture. It is nine white letters, larger than life, marching across a Los Angeles hillside. Those letters spell "Hollywood." Once, a young woman -- an aspiring actress -- climbed to the top of the "H" and leapt to her death. For her, California had become no longer the land of opportunity, the place where never-say-die optimism meets the Pacific waters. It had become the place where American dreams are broken.
Yet that's the way it was in the beginning with cities, is now and ever shall be. They are places of dreams, yet places that also have the power to smash dreams.
The book of Revelation, from which we read this morning, is very much concerned with cities. Its early chapters contain messages from Jesus Christ to seven cities: to communities that are troubled in various ways, yet which also carry within them a spark of faithfulness. In today's passage, we hear of a different sort of city: "And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (21:2). The city of God. New Jerusalem. The place where dreams are not only made, but fulfilled. This is one city that will never disappoint us.
In The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum tells of an Emerald City: a place of pilgrimage, a city where all human problems seem to have a solution. The scarecrow goes there for a brain, the tin man for a heart, the lion for courage -- and Dorothy to get back to Kansas. When the members of this intrepid trio finally reach the Emerald City, though, they discover it to be a fraud. The emerald glow comes not from the buildings, but from the green sunglasses everyone is directed to wear (to protect their eyes, the story goes). Deep in the palace of Oz, "the great and terrible," is the secret of the city's wonders: a mundane machine, manipulated by a paunchy medicine-show salesman in a curtained booth, pulling his levers and twisting his dials. How many of our human hopes are focused on emerald cities?
The people of the first century knew an Emerald City. It was called Rome, "the Eternal City." No city in the world was greater than this one. Yet no city was so fallen, so depraved. The city of Rome had extended its influence across the known world. Its legions drilled in marketplaces from London to Alexandria.
Roman legions marched even in Jerusalem, that holy city for Jews and Christians. At the time John was writing Revelation, Domitian was emperor. Domitian demanded that all citizens of Rome, and of its conquered territories, worship him. For those who refused to bow to the emperor's image, there was the point of the sword.
The early Christians were among those who refused to bow down. Many of them died for it. It is to these defiant -- but wavering -- Christians that John writes the book of Revelation. He fills his book with strange, dreamlike images: messages in code for those who have ears to hear, bright glimpses of hope for a world sheathed in darkness.
That's the reason for the fantastic images of Revelation. They're not "signs of the times" for the twenty-first century, secret clues buried in a biblical time capsule for us to dig up and interpret only in the present day. If that had been the case, the early Christians never would have paid this strange book the time of day. They would have thrown the scroll away.
No, Revelation speaks to its own time. The book speaks hope to a church grown weary of persecution. Yet, once we realize this essential fact about Revelation, our ears are unstopped and we can hear it speaking to our day as well. As we read its signs of hope, we discover hope even for our troubled cities.
One of the most compelling images in Revelation is John's vision of a New Jerusalem. It is God's city, the apotheosis of human hopes. There are three things worth noting about it:
1. The first is that we cannot achieve it. The New Jerusalem, John says, "comes down out of heaven from God." We cannot build it, nor can we hasten its coming.
The sheer dimensions of the holy city show that to be impossible. Imagine a city 1,500-miles square -- that would stretch from New York to Denver. Not only that, its walls are as high as they are wide. Its foundations are adorned with every known jewel. Its gates are pearls, its sidewalks solid gold. That gold is so pure, it's transparent as glass (who can say how that's possible, but it's part and parcel of John's miraculous vision).
No nation on earth could aspire to build such a city. Capitalism will never build it; nor will communism. All the prayers of all the Christians on this globe cannot bring it in. The holy city, New Jerusalem, comes when -- and only when -- God sends it.
2. The very fact that the holy city descends to earth bears witness to a second truth: to God's deep caring about this planet and all its inhabitants. "The home of God is among mortals," John says (21:3).
God is not about the business of destroying the earth, but of redeeming it. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...." That point is often lost on some of the more far-out interpreters of Revelation, who take perverse glee in images of judgment and divine retribution.
3. The third hopeful sign is that at the very center of the city is Jesus Christ. As Bible scholar G. B. Caird says, "The end is not an event, but a person."
At the center of the holy city is a throne, and from the throne comes a voice: "See, I am making all things new" (21:5). The city has no temple, "for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb" (21:22). It "has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb" (21:23).
"See, I am making all things new," the Lamb says. Not "will make" -- some distant, unattainable prediction -- but "am making." The work of renewal has already begun. Its fruits are all around us, if we have eyes to see.
The vision of Revelation challenges us to believe that God is renewing this fallen world -- that all around us are hidden forces of growth, unseen powers of new life, pushing up ponderous concrete slabs of despair with the irresistible life force of growing grass. To those who despair that the world is coming undone, the vision of the New Jerusalem shouts back that the reservoir of hope is constantly being replenished, that every bucket dipped out of it is poured back in somewhere else -- that "new things" are happening everywhere.
Prayer For The Day
We confess, O God,
that we can scarcely imagine
the glories of your New Jerusalem.
Why, we find it hard to envision
what our own distressed and hurting cities could become,
by the power of your Holy Spirit!
As your Son walked the pathways and alleys
of old Jerusalem,
so may he walk our city streets again.
May we glimpse him there,
ministering to the castoff, the lonely, the disconsolate;
and may we be bold to follow where he leads. Amen.
To Illustrate
Many of John's original readers had visited Jerusalem. A few short years before he wrote this book, the Romans had pulled down the temple, leaving but one wall standing. It is known, to this day, as "the Wailing Wall." When John tells of a New Jerusalem, descending out of heaven, he is assuring his readers that they no longer need to focus on the past, on the glories of days gone by -- that God is capable of working new wonders, even out of the rubble of broken dreams.
***
There is a longing for the new that's especially powerful in our society. In advertising, the single word "New," followed by an exclamation mark, signifies something worth buying. Yet this is not the sort of newness the author of Revelation is talking about. This newness is more than mere novelty. It is a return of the old -- but of the old made glorious, beautiful, and true.
Sometimes it's only later in life -- when we realize we cannot achieve our dreams by sheer force of will, when we admit we're not going to make it to the pinnacle of personal achievement, when we look around ourselves and see, in family and friends, what wonders life has wrought -- that we know true thankfulness, in great measure. "How can a man be born again when he is old?" Nicodemus asks Jesus. "Why," says the spiritual writer Robert Raines, "that's precisely when it happens" -- when we're old! Rebirth knows no age limits.
Growth is gain and loss at the same time. We make choices in life, and each door opened means a hundred more we can never pass through. Many of us struggle to break free of the home of our youth, but once we do, we're perplexed that "we can never go home again." We choose a career, and find that some choices once open to us in youth are no longer available. The question, "What if...?" haunts us. In certain seasons of our lives, that can be a deadly question: "What if...?"
The vision of New Jerusalem in Revelation assures us that old dreams never die. They live on, in the hands of a loving God. And one day, the Bible promises, we will discover the joy of exploring roads not taken.
***
Bruce Main, director of Urban Promise Ministries in Camden, New Jersey, tells of showing a film about Jesus to a group of inner-city children.
As I started the film, the kids were still making their little quips; the words of Jesus could barely be heard over the laughter and jokes.
Then something strange happened. As Jesus was being flogged by the Roman guards, a silence came over the room. Jesus was nailed to the cross; the teens remained speechless. All eyes were on the television. And then, to my amazement and surprise, tears began to flow. I could not believe what I was seeing. Both boys and girls began to drop their guard and experience grief.
After Jesus uttered the words "It is finished," I walked to the front of the room and turned down the volume. I asked the kids to bow their heads and reflect on what they had seen. I explained the rest of the story -- that Jesus had died, then victoriously, triumphantly came back to life. With their heads bowed, I prayed for the group, then dismissed them all to go.
To my surprise, nobody moved. Silence. Forty kids sitting silent as if they wanted more. I couldn't figure out what was going on. From the back of the room came a voice that shattered the silence. "Yo, Bruce, ain't ya gonna show the rest of the flick?" The others chimed in with agreement. So there we sat, huddled around the television for the next forty minutes, watching the end of the movie.
A few years ago I did the same club. In a suburban community in southern California, I showed the same film to a group about the same size. The reaction of the affluent students was totally different. There were no tears. There was not the same fascination with the character of Jesus, nor the same identification with his pain.
Inner-city kids see slasher movies all the time. People are killed in their communities frequently and they talk about it casually, candidly. Death and suffering are part of their life. So why all the tears when Jesus is put on the cross? Wasn't this just another movie? Wasn't this just another person who lost his life? No. The cruel death of God in the flesh struck a responsive chord. For a moment the children saw a man who felt the hurt and some of the victimization they have experienced. That man was God. For children who live in a broken city, seeing anguish and pain on the face of God touches something deep within their souls.
Christ's story continues to be a story for those who hurt. It is this story, and this story alone, that is always the story for the poor and oppressed -- not only because the Bible "tells us so," but because the children who sat in a room that night, watching their Savior being crucified 2,000 years ago, tell us so.
-- Excerpted from Revolution and Renewal: How Churches Are Saving Our Cities, by Tony Campolo, (Westminster John Knox Press, 2000)
***
While we deliberate, God reigns; when we decide wisely, God reigns; when we decide foolishly, God reigns; when we serve God in humble loyalty, God reigns; when we serve God self-assertively, God reigns; when we rebel and seek to withhold our service, God reigns -- the Alpha and the Omega, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.
-- Archbishop William Temple
Revelation's vision of the New Jerusalem speaks hope to urban dwellers, country folks, and suburbanites alike.
First Lesson
Acts 11:1-18
Who Was I To Hinder God?
Having received his vision in Joppa of radical inclusion, and having had some success bringing Cornelius and other Gentiles into the faith, Peter is now called before the apostolic council in Jerusalem to account for what he has been up to. He recounts for them the details of his vision, and also how an angel directed Cornelius to reach out to him (vv. 5-14). Then Peter describes how the Holy Spirit fell upon this group of Gentiles, "just as it had upon us at the beginning" (v. 15). "Who was I," Peter asks, "that I could hinder God?" (v. 17). Having heard this slam dunk testimony, the members of the council have nothing more to say by way of objection. From start to finish, Peter's activity has been the work of God. Who can object to that? There are times, of course, when church folk -- especially those who have been around for a while -- tend to be skeptical about changes. New mission initiatives are often met with either active or passive opposition. This is a story for such situations: It reminds us that God is the agent of the church's outreach, not we ourselves.
New Testament Lesson
Revelation 21:1-6
A New Heaven And A New Earth
With Satan having been defeated forever, the poetic vision of Revelation moves toward its climax. John sees "a new heaven and a new earth" (v. 1). Even the sea -- that place of chaos, to the Hebrew mind, that preceded even creation itself -- is no more. Not incidentally, the sea is also what separated John, in exile on the Isle of Patmos, from his churches. As baffling as this metaphor is, he sees the New Jerusalem, "coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (v. 2). God will dwell forever, not impossibly high and lifted up in heaven, but among human beings: "he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away" (v. 4). "See, I am making all things new," says the one seated upon the throne; "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end" (v. 6). John's triumphant vision of the future is not a return to the idyllic pastoral landscape of Eden, but is rather a city -- but not just any city, a renewed and purified city. The Greco-Roman world is a place in which cities have a principal place -- and the mightiest city of all is Rome. Here, Jerusalem, the city of God -- the same city the Romans have all but destroyed, in their brutal suppression of the revolt of A.D. 70, replaces even mighty Rome as the nexus of the creation's future.
The Gospel
John 13:31-35
The Greatest Commandment
(See Maundy Thursday.) Having washed the disciples' feet, and having identified Judas as his betrayer and seen him storm out, Jesus now gives his followers "the greatest commandment": that they love one another. That love originates not with human beings, but with Jesus: "Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another" (v. 34). This love is the sign by which others will know who is a genuine disciple. While this commandment is not literally new (the command to love one's neighbor as oneself is found in the Old Testament), there is evidently a new quality of love amongst Jesus' flock. The world tends to value "nice" people -- those who are pleasant, polite, cordial, of "good stock." This is something different. This is love: a total giving of oneself for the good of the other.
Preaching Possibilities
From the beginnings of history, cities have embodied the best and the worst of the human condition. Cities are places where immigrants settle, where aspiring hopefuls try their hand at fulfilling their dreams, and where new inventions are first tried out. They are citadels of commerce and the arts. Yet they also attract more than their share of those who would prey on or abuse others. They can become gathering places for society's outcasts, rejects, and criminals.
Modern cities remind us that the great social problems of our day -- racism, poverty, lack of opportunity for the underclass -- are still with us. The sin of the cities is the sin of us all.
There is an icon of opportunity in American pop culture. It is nine white letters, larger than life, marching across a Los Angeles hillside. Those letters spell "Hollywood." Once, a young woman -- an aspiring actress -- climbed to the top of the "H" and leapt to her death. For her, California had become no longer the land of opportunity, the place where never-say-die optimism meets the Pacific waters. It had become the place where American dreams are broken.
Yet that's the way it was in the beginning with cities, is now and ever shall be. They are places of dreams, yet places that also have the power to smash dreams.
The book of Revelation, from which we read this morning, is very much concerned with cities. Its early chapters contain messages from Jesus Christ to seven cities: to communities that are troubled in various ways, yet which also carry within them a spark of faithfulness. In today's passage, we hear of a different sort of city: "And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (21:2). The city of God. New Jerusalem. The place where dreams are not only made, but fulfilled. This is one city that will never disappoint us.
In The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum tells of an Emerald City: a place of pilgrimage, a city where all human problems seem to have a solution. The scarecrow goes there for a brain, the tin man for a heart, the lion for courage -- and Dorothy to get back to Kansas. When the members of this intrepid trio finally reach the Emerald City, though, they discover it to be a fraud. The emerald glow comes not from the buildings, but from the green sunglasses everyone is directed to wear (to protect their eyes, the story goes). Deep in the palace of Oz, "the great and terrible," is the secret of the city's wonders: a mundane machine, manipulated by a paunchy medicine-show salesman in a curtained booth, pulling his levers and twisting his dials. How many of our human hopes are focused on emerald cities?
The people of the first century knew an Emerald City. It was called Rome, "the Eternal City." No city in the world was greater than this one. Yet no city was so fallen, so depraved. The city of Rome had extended its influence across the known world. Its legions drilled in marketplaces from London to Alexandria.
Roman legions marched even in Jerusalem, that holy city for Jews and Christians. At the time John was writing Revelation, Domitian was emperor. Domitian demanded that all citizens of Rome, and of its conquered territories, worship him. For those who refused to bow to the emperor's image, there was the point of the sword.
The early Christians were among those who refused to bow down. Many of them died for it. It is to these defiant -- but wavering -- Christians that John writes the book of Revelation. He fills his book with strange, dreamlike images: messages in code for those who have ears to hear, bright glimpses of hope for a world sheathed in darkness.
That's the reason for the fantastic images of Revelation. They're not "signs of the times" for the twenty-first century, secret clues buried in a biblical time capsule for us to dig up and interpret only in the present day. If that had been the case, the early Christians never would have paid this strange book the time of day. They would have thrown the scroll away.
No, Revelation speaks to its own time. The book speaks hope to a church grown weary of persecution. Yet, once we realize this essential fact about Revelation, our ears are unstopped and we can hear it speaking to our day as well. As we read its signs of hope, we discover hope even for our troubled cities.
One of the most compelling images in Revelation is John's vision of a New Jerusalem. It is God's city, the apotheosis of human hopes. There are three things worth noting about it:
1. The first is that we cannot achieve it. The New Jerusalem, John says, "comes down out of heaven from God." We cannot build it, nor can we hasten its coming.
The sheer dimensions of the holy city show that to be impossible. Imagine a city 1,500-miles square -- that would stretch from New York to Denver. Not only that, its walls are as high as they are wide. Its foundations are adorned with every known jewel. Its gates are pearls, its sidewalks solid gold. That gold is so pure, it's transparent as glass (who can say how that's possible, but it's part and parcel of John's miraculous vision).
No nation on earth could aspire to build such a city. Capitalism will never build it; nor will communism. All the prayers of all the Christians on this globe cannot bring it in. The holy city, New Jerusalem, comes when -- and only when -- God sends it.
2. The very fact that the holy city descends to earth bears witness to a second truth: to God's deep caring about this planet and all its inhabitants. "The home of God is among mortals," John says (21:3).
God is not about the business of destroying the earth, but of redeeming it. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...." That point is often lost on some of the more far-out interpreters of Revelation, who take perverse glee in images of judgment and divine retribution.
3. The third hopeful sign is that at the very center of the city is Jesus Christ. As Bible scholar G. B. Caird says, "The end is not an event, but a person."
At the center of the holy city is a throne, and from the throne comes a voice: "See, I am making all things new" (21:5). The city has no temple, "for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb" (21:22). It "has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb" (21:23).
"See, I am making all things new," the Lamb says. Not "will make" -- some distant, unattainable prediction -- but "am making." The work of renewal has already begun. Its fruits are all around us, if we have eyes to see.
The vision of Revelation challenges us to believe that God is renewing this fallen world -- that all around us are hidden forces of growth, unseen powers of new life, pushing up ponderous concrete slabs of despair with the irresistible life force of growing grass. To those who despair that the world is coming undone, the vision of the New Jerusalem shouts back that the reservoir of hope is constantly being replenished, that every bucket dipped out of it is poured back in somewhere else -- that "new things" are happening everywhere.
Prayer For The Day
We confess, O God,
that we can scarcely imagine
the glories of your New Jerusalem.
Why, we find it hard to envision
what our own distressed and hurting cities could become,
by the power of your Holy Spirit!
As your Son walked the pathways and alleys
of old Jerusalem,
so may he walk our city streets again.
May we glimpse him there,
ministering to the castoff, the lonely, the disconsolate;
and may we be bold to follow where he leads. Amen.
To Illustrate
Many of John's original readers had visited Jerusalem. A few short years before he wrote this book, the Romans had pulled down the temple, leaving but one wall standing. It is known, to this day, as "the Wailing Wall." When John tells of a New Jerusalem, descending out of heaven, he is assuring his readers that they no longer need to focus on the past, on the glories of days gone by -- that God is capable of working new wonders, even out of the rubble of broken dreams.
***
There is a longing for the new that's especially powerful in our society. In advertising, the single word "New," followed by an exclamation mark, signifies something worth buying. Yet this is not the sort of newness the author of Revelation is talking about. This newness is more than mere novelty. It is a return of the old -- but of the old made glorious, beautiful, and true.
Sometimes it's only later in life -- when we realize we cannot achieve our dreams by sheer force of will, when we admit we're not going to make it to the pinnacle of personal achievement, when we look around ourselves and see, in family and friends, what wonders life has wrought -- that we know true thankfulness, in great measure. "How can a man be born again when he is old?" Nicodemus asks Jesus. "Why," says the spiritual writer Robert Raines, "that's precisely when it happens" -- when we're old! Rebirth knows no age limits.
Growth is gain and loss at the same time. We make choices in life, and each door opened means a hundred more we can never pass through. Many of us struggle to break free of the home of our youth, but once we do, we're perplexed that "we can never go home again." We choose a career, and find that some choices once open to us in youth are no longer available. The question, "What if...?" haunts us. In certain seasons of our lives, that can be a deadly question: "What if...?"
The vision of New Jerusalem in Revelation assures us that old dreams never die. They live on, in the hands of a loving God. And one day, the Bible promises, we will discover the joy of exploring roads not taken.
***
Bruce Main, director of Urban Promise Ministries in Camden, New Jersey, tells of showing a film about Jesus to a group of inner-city children.
As I started the film, the kids were still making their little quips; the words of Jesus could barely be heard over the laughter and jokes.
Then something strange happened. As Jesus was being flogged by the Roman guards, a silence came over the room. Jesus was nailed to the cross; the teens remained speechless. All eyes were on the television. And then, to my amazement and surprise, tears began to flow. I could not believe what I was seeing. Both boys and girls began to drop their guard and experience grief.
After Jesus uttered the words "It is finished," I walked to the front of the room and turned down the volume. I asked the kids to bow their heads and reflect on what they had seen. I explained the rest of the story -- that Jesus had died, then victoriously, triumphantly came back to life. With their heads bowed, I prayed for the group, then dismissed them all to go.
To my surprise, nobody moved. Silence. Forty kids sitting silent as if they wanted more. I couldn't figure out what was going on. From the back of the room came a voice that shattered the silence. "Yo, Bruce, ain't ya gonna show the rest of the flick?" The others chimed in with agreement. So there we sat, huddled around the television for the next forty minutes, watching the end of the movie.
A few years ago I did the same club. In a suburban community in southern California, I showed the same film to a group about the same size. The reaction of the affluent students was totally different. There were no tears. There was not the same fascination with the character of Jesus, nor the same identification with his pain.
Inner-city kids see slasher movies all the time. People are killed in their communities frequently and they talk about it casually, candidly. Death and suffering are part of their life. So why all the tears when Jesus is put on the cross? Wasn't this just another movie? Wasn't this just another person who lost his life? No. The cruel death of God in the flesh struck a responsive chord. For a moment the children saw a man who felt the hurt and some of the victimization they have experienced. That man was God. For children who live in a broken city, seeing anguish and pain on the face of God touches something deep within their souls.
Christ's story continues to be a story for those who hurt. It is this story, and this story alone, that is always the story for the poor and oppressed -- not only because the Bible "tells us so," but because the children who sat in a room that night, watching their Savior being crucified 2,000 years ago, tell us so.
-- Excerpted from Revolution and Renewal: How Churches Are Saving Our Cities, by Tony Campolo, (Westminster John Knox Press, 2000)
***
While we deliberate, God reigns; when we decide wisely, God reigns; when we decide foolishly, God reigns; when we serve God in humble loyalty, God reigns; when we serve God self-assertively, God reigns; when we rebel and seek to withhold our service, God reigns -- the Alpha and the Omega, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.
-- Archbishop William Temple
