I Saw No Temple in the City

I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
(Revelation 21:22-27, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

I’ve just come back from the Festival of Homiletics in Atlanta, Georgia, spending four days with hundreds of pastors as we took in advice and inspiration from some truly outstanding preachers and lecturers. Many of the speakers focused on how we can—and should—speak God’s truth to the powers and principalities gathering force in the United States and around the world.

“The future is already here,” the science fiction author William Gibson once said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.” As abrupt as the escalating crisis may feel to some U.S. citizens, marginalized individuals and communities have long endured these attacks on their rights and dignity—we’ve just started to observe it more clearly. As a society, we could have seen it earlier. Many people did see it earlier; some, more than we might care to admit, chose to look away.

And so the seeds planted by the gods of this world blossomed.

“We did not arrive here by the election,” Otis Moss III, the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, reminded his listeners. “We arrived here by the silence of the Church.” Other speakers throughout the week touched on this theme, emphasizing the necessity of recognizing and confronting evil, even when doing so might jeopardize our standing in the dominant culture. As Melva Sampson, an ordained minister and professor of practical theology at Wake Forest University, put it, “We have to refuse to trade the thunder of the prophets for the hush of respectability.”  

Ted Smith, a theologian and associate dean at Emory University, described the current historical moment as literally apocalyptic: “a time of unveiling, a time of revelation.” In the face of rising authoritarianism, the words and actions of our society’s institutions, of our elected officials, and of our neighbors reveal their true colors—the same, of course, holds true for us and our faith communities. Smith turned to the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich as a template for how we might face these polarized times with contrition, compassion, and longing for God, and called upon churches to recommit to serving as communities that help people repent and transform themselves toward these ideals, instead of institutions willing to compromise their values to attract and retain high membership. 

What does this have to do with the city without a temple?

As I read it, the Beloved Community described in Revelation doesn’t require a temple because the covenantal relationship with God informs every inch of its territory. The people have no need of a “steeple-house,” as George Fox would call it, to show their love for God and their neighbors.

Too often, I fear, people treat their churches—even their meetinghouses—as fortresses where they can hide from the wickedness of the world and reassure themselves of their sanctity and their safety. They despair at what society has become—but, as Ted Smith said in his lecture, embracing despair enables us to reassure ourselves that we don’t need to change. Everything wrong with the world comes from somewhere else, somebody else. We can’t fix things, but we can still show up for worship every First Day, and surely God will notice that we meant well.

Or maybe we don’t even believe in God, but just want to take comfort in the company of others who, while we wish things had turned out better, agree that we can’t do anything to turn the situation around, so we might as well keep our heads down for the duration. Who knows? Maybe the bad guys will lose momentum, and we’ll get another chance to do something… if conditions improve enough.

And so the future desired by the gods of this world distributes itself that much more evenly over everything.

But we never had to accept that future. We never had to obey the demands of Capital and Empire—and, even to the extent that we have already obeyed in advance, we can always turn back and embrace a different future. Some of us might not see the resurrected Christ at the center of that future as George Fox and his comrades did, as just about everybody I met in Atlanta last week did. Most Quakers I’ve met, however, don’t worry about that detail. They just focus on getting the work done—whether they’re walking to Washington to confront Congress or maintaining an infrastructure of support for their neighbors. (Or both!)

“What would you have done in Weimar Germany?” goes an increasingly popular rhetorical question. “Exactly what you’re doing right now.” So: When future generations ask what we did in these times, what canst Friends say? Did we try to ride out the storm in our meetinghouses? Or did we lay the groundwork for a city without a temple, its gates open to all?