December 21st

Every Tribe and Nation

           For I know their works and their thoughts, and I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and shall see my glory, and I will set a sign among them. From them I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish, Put, and Lud—which draw the bow—to Tubal and Javan, to the coastlands far away that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the nations.  They shall bring all your kindred from all the nations as an offering to the Lord, on horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and on mules, and on dromedaries, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, says the Lord, just as the Israelites bring a grain offering in a clean vessel to the house of the Lord.  And I will also take some of them as priests and as Levites, says the Lord.

                ^“For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make shall remain before me, says the Lord; so shall your descendants and your name remain.   From new moon to new moon, and from sabbath to sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me,” says the Lord.

Isaiah 66:18-23

             There are two parts of this passage that I find fascinating.  The first one is that God is planning on making a new heaven and a new earth.  In the fullness of time…when the end has arrived…when God says, “It is finished,” He has already planned that He will create again.  Eternity is not dancing among the clouds with harps and halos.  It will be a new earth where God lives among His children and life is as it was supposed to be.  No sin.  No suffering.  No death.  No disability.  Simply God’s children living free of the burdens that they carried in this life, complete and unencumbered.

            Which leads us to the second part.  When we say, “God’s Children,” we do not refer to just the Jews.  We do not refer to Evangelical Christians.  We do not refer to Americans.  We do not simply refer to people who look like us and sound like us and think like us.  Isaiah says that God is gathering people from all nations and all tongues.  His children will be gathered from all over the globe and all throughout history.  Some of them will look and sound like us.  Some of them will have followed the same traditions.  Some of them will have pursued God for their entire lives while some will have come to faith on their deathbed.  A few will have been rich.  Most will have been poor.  Some will have been crippled.   It will look and sound like no church service we have ever been a part of.  God’s children will come together from every race and every culture and celebrate God through the unique ways that they lived.

            One of the most challenging things that the church has dealt with since the beginning has been culture.  The early church believed that in order to become a Christian, first you had to become a Jew.  Eventually that was shown to be false, but the church still wrestles with that today.  We love all people and we don’t see color and all are welcome to our faith…as long as you worship like us and take on the other pieces of our culture that we have intermingled with our belief in Jesus.

            The American church has decided that following Jesus also needs to include the worship of capitalism, nationalism and military might.  Sundays are the most segregated day of the week as churches of different cultures have not been able to figure out how to worship the same God together.  When people assure me that their church does not have a culture, they simply follow the word of God, I just laugh to myself.  Of course their gatherings have a culture.  We know because whenever we go to one of their services, my family breaks the unwritten cultural norms and gets dirty looks.

            My son is loud when he is supposed to be quiet.  He does not stand at the right times and does not show the proper nonverbal respect to the proper people.  He says the wrong things at the wrong times and those who dare sit by us are always uneasy about what he is going to do next.  Those are all pieces of culture that an insider takes for granted while an outsider recognizes right away.

            A new heaven and a new earth is coming and, with them, all the followers of Jesus will be able to come together, without their baggage, and worship their God together.  No suspicious looks.  No words of “Love the Man. Hate the Indian.”  No fear driving us apart.  That will be the day when the true church is revealed and sings in one voice as all creation rejoices.

           

A moment to reflect:

What are the highest priorities in your culture?  Where does Jesus fit into that?