My selfie in front of the Colorado State Capitol, May 16, 2022.
Last week I was in Denver for a conference, and my Lyft driver was taking me back from a Catholic cemetery outside of town. I had gone there to visit the graves of relatives on my mother’s side. I hadn’t been to Denver since my childhood summers, when we would pile into our family’s un-air-conditioned van and make the 670-mile trip. I remembered that hot van as my driver took me east and south, back into the city: Denver seems to be surrounded by a vast nothingness, an unforgiving, semi-arid, high-desert landscape. I know there are horse ranches, and I recalled that Denver’s football team is the Broncos. (Denver just acquired a fabulous quarterback, much to the disappointment of his former city, but that doesn’t come into this story.)
The cemetery trip was part two of a three-part pilgrimage I made in Denver, carefully scheduled around the conference, to pay my respects to my family. The first stop, on day one of my visit, was a selfie in front of the Colorado capitol building, the scene of a memorable 1970s family photo. Back then, the capitol grounds featured huge flower beds, and the differently-colored flowers spelled out words, like “Colorado,” and perhaps the state flag. Now, the grounds are just grass. Unhoused people camp around the perimeter. Everything looks a bit tired and worn.
The third part of my pilgrimage took me to my grandparents’ old house on Vine Street, just south of Cheesman Park, east-southeast of downtown Denver. My grandfather was an accountant, and his comfortable salary allowed the family to live in a leafy neighborhood, in a large brick house. This was the Denver I remembered: colorful, quiet, comfortable.
But earlier that day, on the ride back into town from the cemetery, the driver reflected on his life in Denver, and mentioned the difficulties downtown. “You won’t want to go out at night,” he said. “It’s too bad. It used to be nice.” I said that Seattle isn’t all that different. The pandemic was hard on downtown Seattle, which is still recovering economically, and our housing crisis pre-dates the pandemic. But I was not gloomy in my conversation with the driver. For all their problems, neither Denver nor Seattle is uniformly terrible. These are not uninhabitable cities. I stayed in downtown Denver for five nights and five days, and it was okay. I guess I don’t startle easily. Cities aren’t perfect, but neither am I. Cities aren’t safe, but neither am I: I lead a fairly conventional life and take care not to harm my neighbor, but I have my bad days, as we all do. Cities can have bad years, bad decades.
But I am also white, male, educated, financially secure, and ambulatory. I can hire cars. I can step into restaurants and order food. I can post selfies and call for help and attend conferences. Not everyone has these privileges, and so for many, many people, our cities are dreadful and dangerous, even lethal.
Like Seattle, Denver is organized unequally, and sometimes cruelly. My grandparents lived comfortably, but not everyone did, and the “American Dream” of bootstrap-pulling, can-do individualism ignores systems and structures that preserve some lives and destroy others.
Incidentally, Minneapolis is like Denver and Seattle. Most of my family lives in the Twin Cities, and on a recent trip to see them, I visited George Floyd Square on 38th and Chicago. If you’re in Minneapolis, after you visit George Floyd Square you could drive for just a few minutes and see the house that CBS used as the exterior for Mary’s apartment on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It’s a handsome mansion, complete with a turret, in the tony Kenwood neighborhood. All of our cities are like this: wealthy neighborhoods, impoverished neighborhoods; safety, danger; beauty, blight.
But this is not the city we just heard about, in the Revelation to John. In John’s vision, he was taken to a high mountain where he saw the city of God descending from heaven, to earth. In God’s city, a crystal-bright river is straddled by a super-abundant fruit tree whose leaves offer the healing of every illness. In that city, there is no temple and there isn’t even a sun or moon, because God dwells there, with the people, and God’s glory shines brightly, casting out all shadows. Gates are not closed; doors are not locked. There are no viruses; there are no guns. All of the nations, and all of their sovereign leaders, are there: all of the nations. This city is not a monocultural white space, with ghettos outside the wall for undesirables. Everyone is together. And God’s name is on every forehead.
If you were here five weeks ago, on Easter Day, you may remember the anointing of foreheads. We had baptized four people, and after giving them lit candles – symbols of God’s light, blazing in the city – and after they sprinkled all the people with baptismal water, and after we prayed over them for the gifts of the Spirit, then they were anointed. As I made the sign of the cross with chrism oil on their foreheads, I said, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.”
That’s a City of God kind of thing to do. Except in God’s city, it isn’t just four people, or forty million for that matter: it’s everyone. There are no ghettos because everyone has full citizenship. God’s light shines on everyone. Everyone rests; everyone is fed; everyone is healed.
Our mission, then, is straightforward: we are called by God to labor in this city as God’s justice and peace descends down from heaven onto this good earth. John’s vision is not about an afterlife heaven; it is about this earth, this city, this community. It is about us. And it is about everyone else.
I was in yet another city some years ago, Jerusalem itself, the city we immediately think of when John tells us his vision of the City of God. Christians sometimes call God’s city the “new Jerusalem,” and yes I like Carly Simon’s song about it very much. In 2015, on my first trip to the Holy Land, I stood on the Haas Promenade, which overlooks the Old City of Jerusalem from the south. You can see the Mount of Olives on the right, and the Dome of the Rock on the left. You can just make out the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, probably the true site of Christ’s death and resurrection. One of our group’s leaders was an orthodox rabbi, Yehiel Poupko, a prominent scholar of Judaism.
Rabbi Poupko told us that he had stood on this same overlook many years before when the Dalai Lama visited Jerusalem. The Dalai Lama gazed at the glistening city, and then turned to the rabbi and asked him, “Rabbi Poupko, what is the most important verse in your scripture?” This is a fairly expectable question, from one faith leader to another. The rabbi thought for a moment. “I thought maybe I should tell him it’s the Shema,” he said. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” But Rabbi Poupko thought some more. Then he said to the Dalai Lama, “Oh, well I think the most important verse in all of Jewish scripture is in Deuteronomy, where it says:
“You shall have a designated area outside the camp to which you shall go. With your tools you shall have a trowel; when you relieve yourself outside, you shall dig a hole with it and then cover up your excrement.”
As you can imagine, the Dalai Lama expressed surprise. Rabbi Poupko explained his answer: he told the Dalai Lama that non-Jewish people think of Jerusalem in various ways: for Christians it is a heavenly city, an utopian image of God’s presence. For the passing empires of history, it is a treasure to plunder, or an obstacle to overcome. But for the Jews, the city itself is what they take care of, what they care about, what they are charged by God to maintain and protect. So this little passage in Deuteronomy is essentially Jewish: it stresses the importance of taking care of the place where God’s people dwell. I remember Rabbi Poupko saying something like, “We Jews fix the plumbing in Jerusalem. We clean the streets. We repair the houses. We take care of the city, while everyone else comes and goes.”
But this Jewish spiritual practice is not necessarily foreign to Christianity. I wasn’t ready that day on the promenade to respond to the rabbi, but if he were here now I would tell him that we Christians have received this Jewish wisdom, with humble gratitude: the City of God is not just a dream, something to hope for beyond our lifetimes, or even beyond today. Our faith tells us to take care of one another, this building, this island, this region, and ever outward to the planet itself. The City of God descends here. Whenever we take care of each other and all the blessings of God that surround and support us, we help bring that city down out of heaven from God.
We have a long way to go. Denver, Minneapolis, Seattle: they all need work. This island does too. And I do; all of us do. There is much to do before God’s City descends, splendid with diversity, its crystal river flowing, its tree bearing astonishing fruit to nourish everyone.
Will you lend a hand?
One of us will need to dig that hole.
***
Preached on the Sixth Sunday of Easter (Year C), May 22, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Acts 16:9-15
Psalm 67
Revelation 21:10, 22:1-5
John 14:23-29