Preacher: Dana Cassell

Scripture: Revelation 21:1-6

A few years ago, I started working for Brethren Volunteer Service on a very specific project: to start new BVS intentional community houses. These would be places around the country, connected with local congregations, where volunteers would work in the community at volunteer projects, but also agree to spend intentional energy working at their life together in Christian community. They would live together, eat together, pray together, and be in service together.

BVS had a long history of empowering people to serve, but running community houses was something sort of new (I’ve since learned that there were various experiments in community living in BVS’s history, but this was the first time it had been a sustained, programmatic effort.) So, BVS sent me down to rural Georgia, to a place called Koinonia Farm, where people have been living in intentional Christian community since the 1940s, to learn some basics for setting up community houses. It was an incredible weekend.

Koinonia Farm was founded in 1942 by Clarence and Florence Jordan and Martin and Mabel England. Clarence had recently finished seminary and a PhD, and had heard a specific call. He told his soon-to-be wife, Florence, “If you want to be the wife of a pastor of the First Baptist Church, you don’t want to marry me. I’m going back to Georgia and farm and do something for the poor.” And that is what they did. The big evil in 1940s Georgia was segregation, and Jordan had a clear sense that he was called to return to his home to work at ending racial strife through what the people there knew – farming. So Koinonia (a Greek word that means “community” or “fellowship”) began as a farm where men and women, white and black, rich and poor lived together following four very simple, biblical principles: 

1. Treat all human beings with dignity and justice
2. Choose love over violence
3. Share all possessions and live simply
4. Be stewards of the land and its natural resources

Jordan called what they were doing on the farm a “demonstration plot” for the Kingdom of God. If you’re familiar with farming techniques, maybe you know what a demonstration plot is. I am not a farmer, and I had no clue. But the people at Koinonia taught me about it. 

A demonstration plot is exactly what it sounds like: when you’re testing out something new, a new crop or a new seed or a new growing technique, you plant a demonstration plot. That way, you can watch its growth, and you can easily show others what you’re doing. Koinonia was an experiment in multiracial Christian living in a time and place where white people living and working alongside Black people was not just unheard of; it was an active threat to many, many people. At Koinonia, God’s new world was interrupting the old world in real time.

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I don’t usually choose texts from Revelation from the lectionary for preaching, because Revelation is WEIRD, and hard to interpret, and easily manipulated into some off-the-wall theologies that lead people to be disconnected, fearful and detached from the immediate realities of the world around us. There are plenty of eschatologies – theories of how the world will end – that make us think that humans are just irrelevant pawns in God’s plan, waiting around for this world to die off and God to come rescue us and take us up to heaven. Revelation is, to say the least, tricky.

But THIS passage, from the 21st chapter, highlights a beautiful eschatological vision AND carves out a different way of thinking about how heaven and earth end and begin again. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” John writes, “for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” Biblical scholar Anna Bowden points out that the Greek verb used in this sentence is aperchomai. It is translated in English as “passed away,” which we use as a euphemism for “died,”  but which in Greek actually just means “went away.” The first heaven and the first earth haven’t been blown up or spectacularly destroyed; they’ve just cleared out, left the scene, departed.

And in their place, arriving from on high, is a new heaven and a new earth. I see, in my imagination, a theater stage with one set being tugged off-stage to the right, with a rope pulley system, while the new set descends like a curtain from up above. The scene is changing. A new world is arriving, here and now.

And in this vision from John’s revelation, there is no dispensationalist series of catastrophes that bring this transition about, and humans are not required to hasten along the end of the world in order to get to the new heaven. We aren’t commanded or invited to take an active role in helping the old scene setting out or bringing the new one down. God does that. John makes this clear right here in the passage: 

“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them”

If we go back to some Greek lessons, we learn that the verb translated as “home” and “dwell” in that sentence are translated as “tent.” God will set up his tent here among mortals, she will tent with us, camp with us wherever we find ourselves. The verb reminds us, intentionally, of the Exodus, when God led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and into the wilderness, the desert, the journey that lasted for generations toward the promised land.

God shows up here, with us. God chooses to dwell here. God comes down to us; we don’t have to worry about finding our way up to Her. This passage from Revelation invites us to consider that perhaps God is already here, pitching her tent right around the corner, already in our neighborhoods, already at work spreading the realities of the new heaven and the new earth before our very eyes.

Anna Bowden says it this way: “John reminds us that we are not heaven bound. Heaven is bound for us. God has come to dwell among God’s people, even in our moments of pain and suffering. So, yes, it might be tempting to destroy it all and rebuild from the ground up, but that is not the work God calls us to do. God calls us to join God in the good work of redemption, the work of radical care. We don’t have to burn it all down. We don’t have to escape to some new world. God meets us right here on earth. This is what dispensationalist theology misses. God is not waiting for us to join God in heaven. God is waiting for us to join God in the good work right here on earth.”

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Koinonia Farm has been, for 80 years, an attempt to join God in the good work of a new heaven right here on earth. As you might imagine, a demonstration plot for racial integration in rural Georgian in the 1940s was not met with overwhelming enthusiasm. The people around town were not too excited about this weird group of people who lived together, farmed together, shared their money and spent time across the tried and true racial dividing lines that had defined their world for so many decades. In the 1950s, the local Chamber of Commerce attempted to force the Farm to disband and sell its property. The Ku Klux Klan attacked the farm regularly, burning crosses in the farm’s yard and telling its residents that they would be killed if they didn’t leave town immediately. 

The farm had been sustaining itself by selling locally produced goods – honey, chickens, vegetables and pecans. Their fruit stand was firebombed. Machine gun fire was sprayed nightly from the highway. People salted their fields, cut down their trees, and destroyed their tractors. But the people of Koinonia were committed to non-violent resistance and response. They endured the violence, posting unarmed sentries at the entrance, writing letters to the paper to explain what they were doing, and other creative responses.

Since they couldn’t make profit locally, Koinonia started a mail-order business, selling pecans and other goods around the country. Making a nod to the racist community surrounding the farm, Clarence’s slogan for the catalog was tongue in cheek: “Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia!” The catalog worked. You can, to this day, order Koinonia pecans and other goods from their website. I recommend their granola.

When I visited Koinonia Farm, the community was emerging from a time of lying fallow – there had been conflict, dispersion and the intentional community part of the farm had simply ceased to function for a while. The folks there were under no illusions that living as a demonstration plot was easy or devoid of suffering. They knew the difficulties that the founders of the place started, and they had endured their own difficulties, decades later. But the pull of living this tiny piece of heaven on earth, being a part of the demonstration plot for God’s new world, participating in what God is already doing, everywhere and always, was too powerful to ignore. They have worked hard, in the last twenty years, to rebuild, rejuvenate, and continue the hard work of being a demonstration plot.

I wonder where the demonstration plots for the kingdom are in *our* neighborhoods, right here and right now. What communities are already living like the new heaven and the new earth are here? How can we open our eyes to God’s work in real time, be open to the invitation to see and join in, make decisions that orient our lives around this kind of conviction that even in the midst of deep horror, tyranny, fascism, violence, ethnic cleansing – even in the midst of everything evil happening around us, there are also tiny demonstration plots where committed followers of Jesus are planting and tending demonstration plots of mercy, justice, collaboration, integration, joy and peace?

In a viral article titled “10 Ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won,” Daniel Hunter outlined 4 pathways to resistance. The pathways are “Protecting People,” “Defending Civic Institutions,” “Disrupt and Disobey,” and “Building Alternatives.” All the pathways are critically important. I know that many of you all here at Washington City have been doing some tireless work, particularly around protecting people and disrupting and disobeying tyrannical policies and practices. The bystander training you’re holding here this afternoon is in line with those pathways.

And I confess that in the last six months, I have been most drawn to that last pathway, which Hunter spends the least time on in his article: building alternatives. What does a society filled with mercy, justice and equity look like, here and now? It’s easy to dismiss this pathway as less immediate, less critical during this chaotic and dangerous time – people need to be protected RIGHT NOW. Civic institutions are being blown to smithereens as we speak. But things were very, very bad in Georgia in the 1940s, too. There was plenty of good work to be done in protecting people and disobeying horrendous laws then, too. And still, Clarence Jordan and his friends were powerfully called to building and living an alternative reality, the reality of the new heaven on earth, the reality that is always available to us, because of what we learn from the book of Revelation:

This is how our story ends. In a shining, shimmering new city of love and equity, where God has wiped away every tear from our eyes, where death is no more; where mourning and crying and pain are no more, for the first things have already been tugged off-stage and the new set-piece is on its way down.

“See,” God is saying to us, right here and right now: “I am making all things new.”

May we have the eyes to see it and the energy to join in.