Life In The Big City

(Scriptures: Acts 11:1-18
Revelations 21:1-6 John 13:31-35)

Most of us here today grew up in Philadelphia or nearby, and so it may be hard for many here to imagine what it is like for a small-town country bumpkin, a hick like myself, who would have been right at home on the set of the old TV show Hee Haw, to experience the city of Philadelphia for the first time – but I'll try to describe it to you. When I was in Cub Scouts – I don’t know how old I was, but I don’t think I was 10 yet - our Cub Scout leaders took us on a trip to the Philadelphia Mint. Of course, it was fascinating to walk through the Mint Building and see pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters being created. But at least as fascinating – and much more intimidating – for me was just being in the big city – remember that I was a little kid, not 10 years old, whose hometown – Hamburg, PA, located north of Reading – had a population of all of about 3500 or so. And this was back around 1970 or so, when Philadelphia had a larger population and a much stronger manufacturing base. As we were riding down the Schuylkill Expressway – a scary prospect all by itself, in which all the drivers around us seemed bent on killing themselves and each other – I remember we got to about Manayunk when we started to wrinkle our noses and ask each other, “Eww! What is that smell?” Not that farms don’t have their own unique and powerful odors, but in those days, what came out of the Philadelphia’s smokestacks was pretty ripe. The air seemed heavier, hazier, sometimes so much so that I coughed and wheezed. When we parked the cars – you could park near the Mint in those days, long years before the Oklahoma City bombing and 9-11 – it was a strange experience to see so many people, so many different kinds of people – white, black, Asian, various shades of brown - many hurrying by quickly on their way to various places. And they all talked funny. (Remember that I grew up in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and it wouldn’t be until I left my hometown to go to college that I realized that people outside Berks County found our Dutchified English a bit strange.) After our trip to the Mint, we went to a nearby restaurant for lunch. The heavily chlorinated water – good old Schuylkill punch, circa 1970 - nearly made me gag – I took one swig from my glass and spewed half of it across the table - and while the food on the menu was familiar – spaghetti, pizza – it tasted different from the way we made it back home – and I certainly wasn’t going to find any pot pie or potato filling or shoo fly pie like we had back home. By the time we piled into our cars and wearily rode back home, I felt like I had visited some alien alternative universe, and while I was glad to have had the chance to visit, I was very sure I didn’t want to live there. And as things worked out, I spent 20 years active at Old First Reformed UCC, right next to – guess where - the Mint, lived in South Philly for most of the 1990’s, and have worked for ten years for Temple Health, spending lots of time in struggling Philadelphia neighborhoods that would scare 20 years off the life of a lot of folks in my hometown of Hamburg. Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor.

In recent weeks we’ve had a fascinating series of readings from Acts and from Revelations. In Acts, we’ve read about the growth of the early church, as the saving message of Christ was embraced not only by Jews but also by Gentiles. Today’s reading marks a pivotal moment, in Peter was called on the carpet and made to explain his willingness to share Christian fellowship with Gentiles. At the same time, in the book of Revelation, we are given a vision of the New Jerusalem, where the saints will dwell, with God in their midst.

It is striking that John, the writer of Revelation, envisioned our eternal home with God as a city. We remember how the author of Genesis saw the beginnings of the world and of the human race – Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. When we think of a new heaven and a new earth, it would not be unreasonable to think of God starting over, putting redeemed humanity in a new Garden of Eden, but that’s not the vision John, the writer of the book of Revelation, gives us. Last week’s reading from Revelation chapter 7 envisioned a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, all robed in white. We are to understand that these are the redeemed, those who have come out of the great ordeal of earthly life to spend eternity in God’s presence. And today’s reading explicitly speaks of the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven. While the Bible begins in a garden, John says that we will spend eternity, not in a garden, but in a city.

Now we who are city folk – and while I surely didn’t grow up in the city, at this point in my life I’m more comfortable in downtown Philadelphia than I am in my rural hometown – know that part of life in the big city is learning to get along with many different kinds of people. People travel from all over the state, all over the country, in fact all over the world – remember my Liberian friend who visits us at Emanuel from time to time - to make their home in Philadelphia. And these people dress differently, sometimes speak different languages, organize their families in different ways – and in order to get along, we learn quickly that not everyone is like us, and that we sometimes have to cut one another some slack and agree to disagree, to become comfortable with the idea that people who dress and eat and behave differently from us are not necessarily “bad” or “wrong” – just “different”.

This was the challenge faced by the early church when Gentiles – non-Jews – responded to the message of salvation in Jesus Christ that was proclaimed by the early church. Part of how the Jews maintained their identity through the centuries, and through traumas such as the exile in Babylon and being occupied by the Romans, was to maintain their own distinct customs – not only distinct ways of worshipping God, but distinct ways of eating and dressing, which were seen as commanded by God. Those who were not circumcised and did not follow the dietary and other purity codes of Leviticus were seen as not just different, but wrong, as unclean, as dirty. To eat dinner with a Gentile would have been about as appetizing for them as sticking our hand into a toilet bowl would be for us. But Peter had been given a striking vision – the same vision three times, no less – with the message not to call unclean what God has made clean. While Peter’s vision was at the most literal level about food, Peter’s visit from Cornelius the centurion quickly made clear that God was really talking about people. Had Peter turned away from this vision, Christianity could very easily have been just a small movement within Judaism, nothing that would not have turned the world upside down for God. And there was resistance – Peter’s hospitality to Cornelius and his family was a sort of a Biblical version of “guess who’s coming to dinner”, if you remember that 1967 movie about racial integration. It was because of Peter’s willingness to embrace the heavenly vision, and Paul’s willingness to become Apostle to the Gentiles, that ultimately we are gathered here today to praise and worship God.

Our United Church of Christ congregations in the Philadelphia area have had many “guess who’s coming to dinner” moments. While many longtime UCC congregations, like First Church in Hamburg, where I was confirmed, like Emanuel Church, were founded by German immigrants, others who are now coming to dinner, many of our newer and most dynamic, rapidly growing congregations, come out of different traditions – African American and Hispanic Baptists and Pentecostals, immigrants from India, and most recently, a diverse Methodist church in Chestnut Hill, many of whose members look like us, but who come out of a different theological tradition.

The national United Church of Christ has recently released an internet ad called “The Language of God.” You can find it on the national UCC website, or on the Penn Southeast Conference website. Accompanied by a series of fast guitar notes and interspersed with words like “Faith, Love, Justice, Community, Praise” are many kinds of images, representing not only who the UCC was in the past and is now, but who we hope to be, in our embrace of young and old alike, rich and poor, a wide, wide variety of cultures and languages and family configurations. Some of the images are heartwarming – there’s one really cute frame where a little kid’s eyes are focused on a ladybug at the tip of his nose – and others may be unsettling. Do we really want people like that in worship, at the coffee hour? Who invited them to dinner?

Peter’s vision reminds us that, ultimately, it’s not you nor I nor the national offices of the UCC – important as these invitations are – but God who invites a whole variety of people to dinner, to our coffee hour, and ultimately to the heavenly banquet, the feast of the Lamb. God commands us to share the Good News that others have shared with us, but ultimately it is God that opens the hearts of those around us to the message we proclaim. Whom God invites to our church, to our sanctuary, to worship, to coffee hour, we dare not turn away. And I think we can testify that the life of our congregation has become richer because of those whom God has sent our way in recent years.

Today we sit in the city of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. At some times – when we read about gun violence and drug dealing – our city’s name may seem like some sick warped joke. At other times – when we have a neighborhood cleanup or when our neighbors help us – we may get a glimpse of the ideals that prompted our city’s founders to choose the name, Philadelphia. But all we experience here – the joys and sorrows, times of tragedy and times of celebration, times when we join hand in hand and times when we work each others’ last nerve – all that we experience here, God uses to prepare us for life in that other big city – the eternal city, the new Jerusalem, where there will not only be no smokestacks belching pollution and nor traffic jams on I-95, but no sorrow, no sighing, no pain nor death nor mourning, for God himself will dwell in our midst and wipe away every tear, where the thirsty will not gag on chlorine-laden Schuylkill punch, but receive water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Amen.

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Come refresh yourself at the wellspring of faith that is Emanuel United Church of Christ, 2628 Fillmore Street (off Thompson), Sundays at 10 a.m. www.emanuelphila.org