Building a vision for the common good

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

20^th November 2016 11.00am

Revelation 21.1-11, 22-26; 22.17

Jeremiah 29.1-14

Listen to this sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/simon-woodman-building-a-vision-for-the-common-good#t=6:34

The question I’d like us to hold before us this morning,

          and which I hope our engagement with scripture will shed some light on,

is the question of:

          ‘what, in the world, are we here for?’

‘What, in the world, are we here for?’

And as with all interesting and important questions,

          I think it bears a little unpacking.

Specifically, I wonder who we think is the ‘we’ here?

          Do we hear this as applying to us as a collection of individuals?

                   Perhaps asking us why we are here, at this church, this morning?

          Or do we hear it as applying to us as a congregation,

                   asking us collectively why we exist here,

                   in this building, in this city?

          Or maybe we should hear it in a wider sense than this,

                   perhaps as applicable to the church universal,

                   asking us what the point of Christian churches are in general?

          Or maybe we should hear it at an existential level,

                   applying to all of humanity,

                   asking us what, if anything, is the point of human life itself?

All of which are valid questions,

          and subsumed within them we have whole disciplines

                   of philosophy, ethics, ecclesiology, and theology.

So perhaps we might need to narrow it down,

          for our focus of enquiry this morning?

I’m going to suggest that we hear it as being directed

          primarily at the church in its universal sense

                   – why is there a church in the world? –

          and then secondarily as applying to us as a congregation.

We may need to put aside our own existential anxieties

          for another sermon on another day.

So, ‘what, in the world, are we here for?’

We’re coming to the end of our series of sermons on biblical buildings,

          which we’ve been working our way through over the last month or so.

We started with the Tower of Babel,

          and then we looked at the tabernacle,

                   then the temples of Solomon and Ezra,

          then Jesus’ prophecy of the destruction of the temple,

and in today’s sermon we come to the vision of the new Jerusalem

          from the end of the Bible.

It’s often said that the Bible starts with a vision of a garden,

          and ends with a vision of a city,

and this can be a helpful way to think of the trajectory

          that scripture take us on

with its rollercoaster journey

          from a one vision of perfection to another,

encompassing the vast sweep of human experience along the way.

But another way of thinking about the Bible

          is that it is an attempt to explore,

                   through story and history, through poetry and parable,

          what the purpose might be

                   for God having called some people to be his people.

It’s there, of course,

          in the moment of revelation given to Abraham,

                   the father of the Jewish people,

                   and the spiritual ancestor of Jews, Muslims, and Christians.

The covenant that God made with Abraham,

          was that his descendants would be the people of God,

          and that they would be a blessing to the whole earth.

The purpose of calling one group of humans

          into a relationship with God

has always been that the blessing will go beyond that group.

The outworking of this, then, is that any form of religion

          that seeks to keep the blessings of their relationship with God

                   to themselves and those like them

          is a betrayal of the covenant that God made with Abraham.

So, the first part of an answer

          to our question of, ‘What, in the world, are we here for?’,

surely has to be that, at the very least,

          we are here to be good news

          to those who live beyond our own community.

We are here to be good news

          to the lost, the lonely, and the least,

to be good news to those who not like us.

And here we come to my main point for this morning,

          which I’ll give away now so that we can think about it as we go through.

It’s this: I think we’re here, in this world,

          to build a vision for the common good.

Those who built the Tower of Babel

          were trying to build their way to heaven,

while those who built the tabernacle

          were trying to build a home for God on earth.

Solomon built his temple

          to keep God close to the seat of royal power,

and Ezra rebuilt it as a symbol of ethnic exclusivity.

But all these attempts to build the kingdom of God on earth ultimately failed,

          because God cannot be reached by human efforts,

          and neither can he be contained by human buildings.

The good news of the New Testament witness

          is that God is encountered on earth,

                   not through a sacred building or a tower of strength,

          but through the person of Jesus himself,

                   as he is revealed by his Spirit

                   through the people that bear his name.

And I want to suggest that if we are those people,

          then the reason we’re here

                   is not to build God a house,

                   or to build power or strength,

          but to build a vision for the common good.

We’re here to be a blessing to those who are not part of us,

          we’re here to be good news to all people.

And so we come to the fascinating vision of the church on the earth,

          which we meet in the biblical image of the New Jerusalem.

Many readers of this image take it as a vision of the future,

          something that will happen at some point far from now

                   as a mysterious celestial city bangs down from the heavens

                   and settles on the earth.

          I have to say that this approach has never seemed all that persuasive to me,

                   after all, what earthly use today is a vision of the distant future?

          I think it’s much more likely

                   that what we’ve got going on here is a metaphor,

                   a compelling picture which invites further reflection

                             as to what it might mean for us to be the church

                             in our own time and place.

So, in this way, I think that the New Jerusalem

          is one of the images that the Bible uses

          for the church in the here-and-now.

It’s a picture of the people of God on the earth.

And I think it helps us address our question

          of what, on earth, we are here for.

Bear with me for a moment on this,

          but I’d like us to think about the utility supplies in the New Jerusalem.

Specifically, the supply of light and water.

The text clearly tells us that the city has no need

          for either the natural lights of the sun and the moon,

          or for the artificial light that comes from lamps.

Rather, the glory of God is its light,

          and its lamp is the Lamb of God.

In fact, it has so much light

          that it shines brightly enough for all the nations to walk by its light.

And similarly, it seems to have a never-ending supply of fresh water,

          enough not only for its own citizens,

but to quench the thirst of anyone who wishes to come

          and take the water of life as a gift.

And this super-abundance of light and water

          is in stark contrast to all other human cities.

The city of Jerusalem itself, the one that still sits on a hill in Israel,

          actually has no natural water supply at all;

                   until very recent times, it was entirely dependent on a water tunnel

                   bringing water in from outside the city.

And the supply of light to keep city streets safe at night was,

          until the invention of electricity and gas supplies,

dependent on lamps and oil,

          as we see reflected in Jesus’ famous parable

          about the virgins and their oil lamps.

And here, considering light and water,

          we find ourselves in the world

          of the economics of the common good.

In any city, and in any society,

          there are certain things that it makes more sense to enact collectively.

The lighting of the streets is a great example,

          although the principle can be extrapolated

          across many areas of need and provision.

The thing about street lights is that

          no one street light exclusively benefits any one individual.

The system only works

          when all the lights are working

          for the benefit of all the inhabitants.

It makes no sense for someone to arrange to light

          only for the part of the pavement that they are walking along.

This, in a nutshell, is the economics of the common good.

The same is true of water supplies,

          sewage systems, public transport, and health care provision.

From the Roman aqueducts, to the National Health Service, to Obamacare,

          enlightened rulers have sought to implement policies

          for the common good.

And I think the image of the New Jerusalem

          as the city with enough light to shine across all the nations,

          and with enough water to supply the thirst of any who need it,

invites us to reflect on a vision of the church:

          in the world, for the common good.

What, in the world, are we here for?

          We’re here for the good of all;

          in fulfilment of the covenant between God and Abraham.

This is a spiritual vision,

          but it is a vision with some very practical out-workings.

All too often churches have come to see themselves

          as existing in the world for their own benefit,

with the church in effect functioning as a closed-set club,

          with admission upon request.

The purpose of such club-churches varies,

          from the basic Christian social club church,

                   to groups drawn together around a particular understanding

                             of a theological issue,

          to single-issue churches focusing on anything

                   from a specific style of music to a distinctive architectural style.

And at one level there’s nothing wrong with any of these;

          social interaction is a gift of grace,

                   theological issues do matter,

                   as do music and architecture.

But the problem with closed-set club churches

          is that they primarily exist for the benefit of their own members.

They build for themselves,

          rather than for the common good.

Many of the buildings that house churches today

          are there because churches decided to build themselves a home.

They offer somewhere for the people of God

          to come and worship their God.

We think of them as ‘our church’, where we come to meet with God,

          encountering him in the sanctuary we have built for him.

However, this is not true of all church buildings.

Think of the great Methodist Mission churches of the London suburbs,

          built to offer transformation in the poorest

                   and most deprived areas of the Victorian city;

          promoting the temperance movement

                   in the face of the evils of alcohol addiction,

          and supporting the suffragette cause for the emancipation of women.

They were built for the common good.

And I want to say, also, think of this building in which we now sit,

          built not just to house a congregation

                   who come to worship God on the Lord’s day,

          but to be a place of Baptist mission to the centre of the city,

                   strategically placed on the boundary between wealth and poverty

                   with the express intention of bringing the two together

                   in ways that transform the city for good.

We are the heirs of a vision to build for the common good,

          just as we are the spiritual descendants of Abraham

                   and his vision of the people of God in the world

                   for the blessing of all peoples.

We are called to be the new Jerusalem,

          offering light and water to the city outside those doors.

The question, of course, is what offering light and water

          might look like in our complex, technological, 24 hour city?

What does it mean for us to build a vision for the common good?

          Where is the need in our city?

What would it mean for us, as the people of God,

          to shine light into the darkest corners of London,

                   exposing the oppressive systems and practices

                   that enslave people’s souls and bodies?

What would it mean for us, as the people of God,

          to offer refreshing water to those who are being poisoned

          by the polluted atmosphere of hatred and cynicism and despair?

Here, I think, we need to hear the word of Jeremiah to the exiles in Babylon.

You may remember the story:

          The Babylonians invaded Jerusalem,

                   about six hundred years before the time of Jesus,

          sacked the city and destroyed the temple,

                   before carrying a swathe of the Jewish population into exile in Babylon.

It was to these exiles, far from home,

          with no buildings of their own and no temple in which to worship,

that Jeremiah wrote:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel,

          to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:

⁵ Build houses and live in them;

          plant gardens and eat what they produce. 

⁶ Take wives and have sons and daughters;

          take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage,

          that they may bear sons and daughters;

                   multiply there, and do not decrease. 

⁷ But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,

          and pray to the LORD on its behalf,

          for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

The call of God to those in exile in Babylon

          is to seek the welfare of the city of Babylon.

In the book of Revelation, where we meet our image

          of the church as the New Jerusalem,

the name Babylon is used as a codename for the Roman empire,

          and the picture it paints is of the people of God

                   there, in the midst of the empire, for good, and for the common good.

The gates of the new Jerusalem are open,

          its light shines brightly beyond its own walls,

          and its pure water is available for all.

This is not a vision of the church battened down,

          defensively protecting itself while entering survival mode.

It is a vision of the church militant,

          in the world for the good of all,

          courageously seeking the welfare of the city.

For Babylon, read Rome, read London.

We are not here to build a temple in which we can worship our God.

          We are not here to build a tower of strength.

                   We are not here to build political power.

          We are not here to build walls around our communities.

We are here, in the world, to throw open the doors,

          to shine brightly, and to build a vision for the common good,

          to seek the welfare of the city to which we have been sent.

We’re not building a building,

          we’re building a new world.

We’re here to learn, together, to see the world differently,

          to see the world as God sees it,

and to speak and live into being

          an alternative way of being human before God

          which is light and water

                   to those whose lives are in darkness

                   and whose souls are parched.

Pope Francis has said,

“Indifference to our neighbor and to God …

          represents a real temptation for us Christians.

Usually, when we are healthy and comfortable,

          we forget about others (something God the Father never does):

we are unconcerned with their problems,

          their sufferings and the injustices they endure…

Our heart grows cold.

As long as I am relatively healthy and comfortable,

          I don’t think about those less well off.

Today, this selfish attitude of indifference has taken on global proportions,

          to the extent that we can speak of a globalization of indifference.

It is a problem which we, as Christians, need to confront.”

We are here, on the earth, to be good news for all,

          to build a vision for the common good,

because if we don’t articulate Heaven’s perspective on the earthly situation,

          who on earth is going to do it?

So as we live in a world of growing fear,

          with the whiff of fascism in the air,

          with growing suspicion of the other,

                   and fear of the foreigner,

          with poverty and homelessness literally on our doorstep

          with mental health services in crisis

                   at the very point where they are most needed

          with social care and security facing cuts of catastrophic levels…

Maybe this is what, in the world, we’re here for.

And so we are called to look beyond ourselves,

          to take into action our conviction that in Christ every life matters,

                   and that Christ always has a bias

                   to the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized.

We are called to build alliances with others,

          and to speak truth to power,

          as we hold to account those who hold power.

We are called to engage politics and charity,

          to build communities of reciprocity,

to run night shelters and day centres,

          to use our resources to see the marginalized included,

          the poor lifted up,

          and the vulnerable made strong.

We are called to build a vision for the common good,

          where the absolute love of God for each and every person

          is at the heart of all that we do.

Because it will be in and through us

                   that utopian religion finds its pragmatic reality,

          we are where dreams become real and visions get built.

We are the outpost on the earth of the new world that that is coming.

          As we live into being in our midst the reality for which we pray:

                   That the kingdom will come,

                   on earth as it is in heaven.