A reflection on Isaiah 65.17-25
For five years, Brenda and I lived in Los Angeles, California. It’s where our two children were born. They were good years.
Though Los Angeles literally means ‘city of the angels’, in American mythology it’s more commonly called the city of dreams. That said, as you fly in over Los Angeles, the place can look more nightmare than dream. The air is thick almost year round and the freeways clogged. Even more, the ‘placelessness’ of LA is overwhelming. As you drive the city’s freeways from one point to another, you rarely have a sense of arriving, anywhere. To quote urbanist James Howard Kunstler, LA’s endless sprawl is one “where every place looks like no place in particular.” It took two years into the five we lived there before I caught my first glimpse of the dream.
It happened early in the morning, mid-winter. I was returning from dropping friends at the airport. It had rained heavily through the night. The morning air was crystal clear and the sky picture-book blue. As I drove along the 405 and looked out toward the city skyline with the snow covered Santa Monica Mountains behind, the view was extraordinary. For the first time I saw the city of dreams and it was breathtaking.
For thousands of years, the city has been part of human society. Its beginning dates back to around 5000BCE. And for almost that long it has captured our imagination. Historically, we’ve imagined the city in one of two ways: first as nightmare, a religious and cultural nightmare, the embodiment of all that is wrong with the world. From this perspective, the city is a place where evil and depravity are concentrated and where the gifts of beauty and peace are almost non-existent. For those who’ve imagined the city in this way, salvation is found in the escape from the urban and our return to the garden, to the idyllic rural where true virtue resides.
At the other end of the spectrum the city is imagined as a place of dreams — an idealized place, imagined in its perfect form as the ultimate expression of human achievement. From this perspective the city is a utopian home to humankind in its most developed, intelligent and sophisticated state. In this dream, salvation is found in our movement toward the urban. We walk our own yellow brick road toward the alluring promise of the city.
In religious terms, one perspective paints the city as heaven and the other as hell. It is, in fact, neither. For those of us gathered here this morning, the city is simply where we live. Before it’s a cultural category, a spiritual metaphor, a demon or an angel, the city is a place—a place of footpaths and light poles, of streets and skyscrapers, of coffee and car horns. It’s a place of transit and busyness, of buying and selling, a place of struggle and loneliness. For us here at Collins Street, the city and its surrounding neighbourhoods is where we live and worship. It’s our home.
The question I want to raise with you these three weeks is this: what is the role of a church in the city? What part do we play at the heart of the one of the great cities of our nation? Clearly we do not subscribe to the city-as-hell philosophy. As those who choose to worship here, this is not for us a God-forsaken place. But neither do we subscribe to the city-as-heaven ideal. We know it too well to be beguiled by it. Neither heaven nor hell, the city is simply our place, the place in which we are called to live out our faith. Because of that, we are obliged to take this place seriously, asking ourselves what it means to be the people of God here.
This is not a new question. Indeed, we’ve been wrestling with the question since 1843 when this church first began, but it’s one never squared away because the answers to it change as the city itself changes. The question of what it means to be the people of God in this city is as pressing today as it has been for our 181 years.
The text
We have read today from the prophet Isaiah. These are God’s words to the people of Judah. After decades of exile in Babylon, the people have finally returned to their homeland and their beloved Jerusalem. But all is not well. Upon their arrival they find their city in ruins, their surrounding farms desolate, their homes and neighbourhoods destroyed and their enemies circling like vultures. A terrible drought grips the land. The children are hungry and dying. What’s more, lawlessness now permeates this fragile and aching place. These are not happy days. After their songs of lament in Isaiah chapters 63 and 64, songs in which the people of Judah cry out to God for mercy and help, God’s response comes in chapter 65.
God’s promise in these verses is that he will rebuild their lives. But this is no promise of a return to Eden, a return to the idyllic rural. No, God’s promise is of a city. But neither is this a promise of some other-worldly city, a celestial nirvana with streets of gold. No, this is God’s promise to rebuild this city, to renew the city that lays in ruins around them. It’s a place of bricks and mortar, of pavements and houses, temples and marketplaces in the here and now of their lives. What will be different is that this city, rebuilt, will be one where the values of love and justice flourish, a place of genuine human delight and divine joy.
The challenge
It is to this very business of city renewal to which we are called as the church. This city, today! During the pandemic, we committed ourselves to a process of discernment about our church’s future. As a consequence, we recommitted ourselves to what we understand to be the enduring priorities of this church. The third of those priorities was this:
As a church in the CBD, we are committed to participating in the flourishing of Melbourne and the neighbourhoods in which we live. We work to see goodness, justice and love prevail in our city.
You see, we already know that our calling as people of faith involves the city in which we live. God’s call to love our neighbours, a calling central to our Christian faith, assumes a neighbourhood. Our call is not to hunker down until we’re ready for glory, but to embrace what is around us as the place of God’s presence and plan. This city of ours may not be heaven, and it is certainly not hell. What it is is our place to live out the faith God has invested in us.
For the past fifteen of so years that I have served as your pastor, I have sat on numerous advisory boards to the city of Melbourne and have been a part of resident’s groups and neighbourhood associations. I have sat in tense and angry meetings between proprietors of nightclubs, construction companies and residents. I’ve watched competing arts and cultural groups vie for the city’s backing and I have seen providers of social services competing fiercely for financial support. I’ve watched multiple proposals come before Council vying for the affirmation of Melbourne as an international city, a residential city, a 24-‐hour city, a city of literature and the arts, a child-friendly city, a world-class city of fashion and food, and more. Each proposal carries with it an implicit critique of competing visions for the city. More recently I have been part of conversations around the establishment of a safe injecting facility in the city and experienced first-hand the anger that people feel about this, both for and against. There is perhaps no more contested space than this 6.5 square kilometres of the CBD. And it’s little wonder. Every day the centre of Melbourne enfolds some 1 million people, workers, residents and visitors, and we all want it to be different things.
So within this conflicted and competitive environment, where does the church fit? The retired Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has reflected intelligently on the role of the church in the city. Williams discourages the city church from seeing itself as just one interest group among many bidding competitively for scarce resources or seeking to determine how the city’s community is defined. He writes:
“The contribution of the Church must always be something on another level from that of the various bodies struggling for dominance and access. It must simply offer a radically different imaginative landscape — one in which people can discover possibilities of change, and perhaps of ‘conversion’ in the most important sense — a ‘turning around’ of values and priorities that grows from trust in God.”
As we wrestle with the question of the church’s role in the city of Melbourne, it seems to me this provides a helpful place to begin. It may not get us all the way, but it does give us a starting point. The possibility of our vocation as a city church is to offer the city a ‘different imaginative landscape,’ one in which people can discover life and hope. This possibility arises out of two important perspectives that we bring to the table. The first relates to our self-understanding, and the second to the nature of the city itself.
- The church has a distinctive identity in the city, and we embrace it. We are not a commercial business — we are not driven by profit or by securing market advantage over our competitors. We are not a political organisation with a particular barrow to push, left or right. We might be engaged in political issues, and that is appropriate, but the church enfolds people of many convictions. We are not a cultural institution nor a venue for the arts. We are not simply a provider of social services. We are first and foremost a community of faith and belonging in the heart of the city. Whatever else we do, whatever else we provide, we are called to stay true to this identity. The church is an open community of belonging in which the questions of faith and life are held and explored. We are shaped by that faith, called by that faith. And because of this, our invitation to belonging knows no boundaries.
- The church has a distinctive perspective on what the city is. Before it is anything else — commercial, political, cultural or residential — we believe the city is sacred. We view the city as a place holy from its beginning, one filled with the goodness and the beauty of life for all of those who inhabit it. It is because of this that we refuse to allow the city to be defined purely as contested, commercial or competitive space. Part of our vocation is to call others to imagine this city with us as the city of God — that is, one marked by the values of justice, hospitality and inclusion.
As I said, this does not get us all the way there, but it’s a good beginning. For us, this city of ours is not heaven, nor is it hell. But what it is this: the dwelling place of God, and the place in which we are called to live our identity and vocation as the people of God in the world. So as we grapple with this question through the month of April, may God grant us the courage to embrace that calling.
Amen.
SIMPLY SIMON 