Rhythms Of Grace: Worship- Ian Graham

Pastor Ian Graham looks at worship as time travel as it transports us to the mountain of God and we meet with him face to face.

Transcript

Framing A Fresh Teaching

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everyone. How are we doing today? There are times where as a church plant we really punch above our weight, and it's like, man, we just have everything together. There are other times where it's just like, hey, we have an announcement. Oh, this is happening over here. And so wherever you are, take a deep breath. It's good to be here this morning. I uh I have about two more sermons to give here at Ecclesia this year. Uh I had some time off during the summer, and then I have now preached like a lot of weeks in a row, which is not good for you guys. So I'm gonna do the right thing and have some other folks up here the next several weeks. And I had this thought, I was like, I could just kind of put my feet up, you know, reheat the mana a little bit, pull something that we've already done before, or I could really lean in and give something that just feels very fresh and new. So I went the ladder, but the danger with that is this could be this could either be great or it could be a convoluted mess. All right. So yes, amen. Right? Okay, good. So that's where we are, that's where we're starting. We're finishing our series where we're talking about why we do the things we do when we gather. So those things include things like sermons, of which we are now participating in, worship, which is the kind of the whole of our time here together. Usually in our evangelical tradition, we tend to define worship as the singing portion. But today, what I want to do is just unpack and hopefully unveil a little bit of what's happening when we gather together for worship and what God is doing in our midst as we take the undertake the no small effort to get here this morning. You're here. Well done. You got up on this uh holiday week, on a week before many of you will be departing, on a week where many of us are have already departed, mentally or physically. We are here. And God is doing something so unique and so powerful as we gather here. In John chapter 4, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at the well and begins a sort of winding conversation. He takes up most of the chapter with her. And as he begins to get to the tender parts of her story, she diverts their discussion to a broader discussion about theology. John 4, verse 19. The woman said to him, Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem. Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me. The hour is coming when you will worship the Father, neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you know. We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming, who is called Christ. When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us. Jesus said to her, I am he. So this woman's having a conversation with Jesus, and she is a Samaritan. They have a specific location, Mount Gerizim, that is holy and sacred to them. And from their cultural story, that is where proper worship will take place. Jesus is a Jewish man, a first century Jewish rabbi. And from the Jewish cultural story, the proper place of worship is Mount Zion, the Temple Mount. And you see that there's this almost diverging narrative, this collision of different stories that are taking place. Jesus is saying, hey, listen, the point is not about the specific mountain that you're worshiping on, the point is that God is spirit, and the true worshipers will worship him in spirit and in truth. I want to talk to you today about some of the implications of this, of worshiping in spirit and in truth. In Acts 17, verse 28, Paul says to those assembled on Mars Hill that in him, in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the triune God, we live and we move and we have our very being. That's a stunning claim. That the atmosphere, the world that we walk in, our very existence, the breath in our lungs, all of it is done within the confines of God's love. The ground of existence is in God. Now we tend to think of the preposition in as defining spatial physical realities. You are in the house. You are in this room right now. You are in the car. You are inside of something physical. But we all know that in can define a wider spatial range, that we can inhabit not just a place, but we inhabit stories. We live in stories and we live out of stories. It determines a lot of what we do in our lives, the decisions that we make. We are a part of a wider context, a culture. For many of us, we've had to see the differences in a culture in a place like Princeton as we've moved here, and understanding where we've come from and how that story both is similar and different to the place where we now are. For others of us, this is all we've ever known. This culture, this place. And it can be jarring for us to see that people have different assumptions, people have different ways of living. In God's love, Paul is saying, we live and we move and we have our being. It doesn't mean that God is somehow confined to the universe that we inhabit, like some pantheistic accounts, but that in God's design, in his will, in his joy, our lives unfold. In God, we have a universe to dwell in, and we move through time. Albert Einstein was a scientist who was local to Princeton for a good part of his life. You can go visit his house over there a couple miles from here. And Einstein integrated the world of three-dimensional space, height, length, and width, with a fourth dimension, or what some quantum physicists have called a half dimension. Einstein called this space-time or time. And Einstein said, an event is an object's location in space and in time. So if you ask where is something, you could identify that by its geographic coordinates, latitude, longitude, how high something up is, but you also have to define when something is, when it's taking place. Einstein says this time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live. The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Now, Einstein also says this, which I think is much clearer. When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That's relativity. See, Einstein, because he was a master, could make things simple as well as complex. Space-time. True worshipers will worship in spirit and in truth. In him we live and we move and we have our being. Today, as I have referenced, we are reverse engineering what we do when we gather here, our liturgy. We're talking about worship. It's only appropriate this in the liturgical calendar, for those of you who are from more liturgical traditions who follow the church calendar, today marks the last Sunday of what is called ordinary time. This is Christ the King's Sunday, a feast that was instituted some 100 years ago as a way of acknowledging in the worship and liturgy of the church that though there are so many pretenders and pretensions of rulers all over the world, there is one true King of the entire cosmos, and he is reigning right now. And even there, we have this question of time. Jesus in Acts chapter 1 ascends to the right hand of the Father. He is ruling and reigning right now, but I guarantee you, if you've opened up your phone, or even if you've just walked around town this morning, you've seen things that would suggest that Jesus is not, in fact, on the throne. You've seen things that would call his reign, that shalom, that peace into question. And so we exist in this paradox of time. We are an already, Jesus is already reigning people and a not yet people. Time for Christians is in every way a crisis. The earliest Christians wanted and thought that Jesus would come quickly. And even the last prayer in the book of Revelation, Maranatha, come, Lord. And so we exist in this crisis of time. And everything that we do when we gather here is trying to gather up these questions of time into something coherent, into a story that can make sense of all the chaos of our lives, that can call us to the heart of God, as the high and lofty one dwells with those who are poor and lowly. God has brought Himself into our time, which is what we celebrate as we mark the end of ordinary time, Christ the King Sunday, and we transition to the first week of the Christian calendar next week, the Advent season. When we gather here, we gather for worship. What does it mean to worship? We sang together. So beautiful. I mean, I again I my my standard acknowledgement. There is not music this good at churches this size. It just doesn't happen. So thanks be to God, right? We bless you, Lord. We thank you for that. We sing in Spanish, we sing in other languages, declaring that Jesus' kingdom is a borderless kingdom, that we are a part of a new humanity. That Jesus came in a specific story, the Jewish cultural story, in order to fulfill the promise that was given to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, that through the descendants of Abraham, every nation on the earth would find its place and would find the blessing of God. When we gather here, we worship. You worship by singing, yes. We worship by setting out chairs, we worship by the way that we greet one another. All of this is an offering to God. And today I want to capture something that I think is happening when we worship. Something that bears witness to the whole of the scriptural story. Throughout this series, talking about liturgy, we have not been able to escape the notion of time. For the earliest Christians, Sunday was the Lord's Day, the beginning of the new creation. Because Sunday, the day after the Sabbath day, was forever the day that Jesus rose from the dead. Eventually, culture was so impacted by the witness of these Christians that culture shifted. Our calendar starts on Sunday because of the witness of the earliest Christians. And each week when we gather here, we express worship together. It is a form of worship that we cannot express on our own. It's something that we can't do alone, what we do in here. Sure, you could put on some worship music in your earbuds, or you could spend time in nature and in quiet, but there's something that happens here that you cannot do alone. Church begins when we don't get to choose who shows up. And we gather with our neighbors, joining our voices together as a part of a choir here that is a small-scale incarnation of the choir that, as we saw last week, worships around the throne of Jesus for all of time. Revelation 4 and 5 gives you insight into what's happening around the throne room of God at every moment. We bring the scars of our lives. From deeper in the past or this past week, we bring our hurts, our pains, our questions, our confusions, our joys, our triumphs, our expectations into this present moment to hear a fresh word from God through spirit, song, word, table. And today I want to look at worship as this fourth space-time dimension that Einstein points out. In worship, we transcend time, we time travel. It's an amazing thing that happens here when we gather here. You didn't know you were walking into a time machine this morning. The way we inhabit time by the miraculous provision of our God holding past, present, and future together in a way that is transfigured by the power and the presence and the grace of God. Oh, cool. We have that. Thank you. There is an outline. If you want to put up that QR code, I realized that this had all the potential to be a convoluted mess. So what I tried to do was to draw out some threads that those of you who definitely are a little bit type A might be able to hold on to. Because I know sometimes I'm leaning on the type B folks, and I'm like, please come on. So if you need that, please follow that. The uh other slides will be here behind me on the screen. When we worship, we hold past, present, and future together. Blessing God in spirit and in truth, and we enter into God's space time. One of the consistent images of God's space-time, where everything is as it should be, everything is in its right place, what the Bible has a shorthand for called shalom throughout the scriptures is the mountain of God. Now, I don't know how many of you, I know some of you really just like for me to tell you what to do. What's the next thing we should do? What's the next step in the equation, the next step in the process. But so often when we look at the scriptures, what we find is not a map for how to get from here to there, but what we find is a story. And from the earliest days of our encountering of story, we have been taught how to read story looking for themes. The mountain of God is one of those beautiful, consistent themes that begins in the beginning and is brought to fulfillment and flourishing in the end that defines the whole of the story. God meets Moses on Mount Horeb. The temple is built on Mount Zion. The image of the mountain looms large in the prophetic imagery of Isaiah and Ezekiel. The great culmination of the prophetic tradition, John and Revelation. In Mark 9, Jesus takes his closest friends up a mountain, and they see his face transfigured before him. And they just want to stay there. This is good for us to be here, Peter says. Let us build shelters and just stay here. So much of the revelation of what God is up to in the world takes place on mountains. And I want to survey a few of these mountains today: past, present, and future. As we see how worship folds the time and space continuum into God's story by ushering us into God's sanctified time and space. Alright, first, past. Traditionally, the Garden of Eden is planted in a high mountain. Genesis 2 tells us that there was a river that flowed out of Eden, which was the headwaters of the major rivers of the civilized world at the time. Gravity would dictate that water flows downward from high to low. Ezekiel 28, and speaking prophetically of the king of Tyre, and what many have taken to be the origin story of the accuser of the Satan says, You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, verse 13, the garden of God. Every precious stone was your covering, carnelian, chrysalite, moonstone, barrel, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, turquoise, and emerald, and worked gold were your settings and your engravings. On that day you were created, they were prepared. You were a cherub. I placed you on the holy mountain of God. You walked among the stones of fire. The holy mountain of God, the Garden of Eden in the beginning. When we read Genesis 2, we get insight into the story that is not just a story that has taken place, but it is a story that's inscribed into our very bones. The Bible is trying to say, this is the story that you were made for. When we talk about the past, we talk not only about the stories that we carry around. We could go around the room in this place, and we could talk about the moments in our lives, the decisions sometimes made by us, other times made by others on our behalf or to our disadvantage, that mark our story, that mark our past. But you are not just defined by the confines of your life and the wider orbit, the wider constellation of what it brought you to this moment. You are defined by a story that precedes you, a calling that is given by the grace of God, a stamp that is pronounced over you. You are made in the image of God. And Genesis 2 spells out a little bit of what it means to be made in the image of God. What are you here for? Genesis 2 takes us to the garden mountain of God to show us what our purpose is. I want to turn over there. Genesis chapter 2, beginning in verse 8. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east. There he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There's a few interesting notes that we don't have a ton of time to highlight here today, but I want to just point out some details that are easy to miss. First, we just saw there are trees that are good for food. That makes sense to us, right? As people, we get hungry. Hopefully you got a donut when you walked in. But if we let that go for too long, you'll be hungry again. We need trees that are good for food. But notice, within the same breath, there are another type of trees that are listed. What are those trees for? Well, they're just nice to look at. Huh. Isn't that interesting? In the shalom, in the goodness of the world that God calls good and very good, he not only gives us trees that are good for food, he is telling us that beauty is not this extracurricular activity. That just as much as you need food to live, you need beauty to live. There are trees that are just nice to look at. And we have been called to steward both of them. Stewarding the trees that are good for food means that in God's good world everybody has enough to eat. And stewarding the trees that are beautiful to look at means that our God is a beautiful God. And that we were made to delight in his beauty and to see it reflected and to create it alongside of him. The text goes on in verse 10: A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is the Pishon, it is one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there was gold. And the gold of that land is good, badelium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon. It is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria, and the fourth is the Euphrates. Your fertile crescent geography from third grade is coming back to you now. You're like, yes, I know those two. Makoto Fujimura points out how the seemingly random details, the gold, the bedelium, the onyx, are not in fact random at all. How many of you have grown up reading this, Genesis 2, and you're just like, I have no idea why that's in there? Just like, what is happening here? What's the point? I thought that forever. I'm reading this book about art in the church, and I come across this little line from a local painter, actually, named Fujimira. And he's saying that these elements here are not random at all, but they are signifiers and emblematic of the kind of world that God has made. And again, for so many of us, we look at this Genesis 2 garden and we think it was just static perfection. Which honestly sounds kind of boring. You know? And there's so many cultural stories that sort of suggest that those who took from the tree that was forbidden by God are kind of doing that sort of attractive, rebellious thing where God said, I want to keep you in the dark, I don't want you to know anything. And they're like, actually, we want to know some stuff. We want a story to unfold here. But Fujimiro points out that all of these elements, part of God's world, are not obvious on the surface. They have to be excavated, which would suggest that perhaps that God's original design of the world was that it would be a world to explore. They have to be experimented with, which would suggest that you take the stuff of creation and you try to make something with it. I know that at times there are people that feel a little fidgety in church, a little ADHD, a little bored. Because so often we conceive of worship in such a narrow frame, and you don't like to sing, and you think, I must not like the whole church thing. But I bet you like to make stuff. I bet you have some hobbies. And what if, in God's beautiful economy, what if those things are no less participation in worship? What if those things can be offered back to God in the goodness of the world that He has made? Genesis 2, verse 18. Then the Lord God said, It is not good, this is the first thing that is not good in the scriptural account, that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper as his partner. So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field, every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called, every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle and all the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field, but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. And he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman, and brought her to the man. At the end of Genesis 2, we see Shalom take its full shape. In the goodness of this world there is still something that is not good, that the man should be alone. None of the animals will serve as a suitable companion for the man. So the Lord causes the man to fall into a deep sleep so that he can make an Azair connecda, which is a designation that is used throughout the scriptures for God's saving help. This is no like little partner that the man somehow patronizes by letting her come along. This is a woman who joins alongside, made in the image of God, co-cultivator, co-steward, a co-regent, different but equally tasked with stewardship of this mountain garden. He makes woman. And here for the first time, we see those made in the image of God speak. Now, I want to just give you, in any story you are reading, if the author is capable and good, the first word that a character speaks will have a lot to say about the destiny of that character, about insight into their character, about what has transpired. The author is not wasting the first words that a character speaks. Alright, we cool with that? Let's notice the first words that the human speaks. When you read the scriptures, the editors of the scriptures want you to know when you're reading poetry. And this is important because we don't want to ask questions of poetry that should be asked of mathematics or science. This is really important when we read Genesis 1 and 2. Notice that the first words that humankind speaks in the Bible are indented. What do we have here? Poetry. We have a song. The first words that a human speaks are poetic? That's not nothing. Notice the content of what the human says. This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. Can I translate that for you? The man is saying thank you. Wow. It was not good that I was alone. No suitable companion. Thank you, God. At last, bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, Azer connecda. The first words that the man speaks, emblematic of all of humanity, is praise to God. And again, sometimes the most articulate praise to God we can utter is thank you. For the presence of his neighbor. What is the greatest commandment? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and strength. Oh, and the second is like it love your neighbor as yourself. The whole of the greatest commandment encapsulated into this one phrase. Thank you, God, for the presence of my neighbor. Worship Ecclesiah is our native tongue. It is the word that we were inscribed to speak. And at the end of Genesis 2, we see this shalom, this goodness, taking its full shape. Now, we know that the story doesn't end in Genesis 2. It has a Genesis 3. That God endows this world with such possibility and such blessing, and it gets distorted and skewed. And that's not something that just happens in the past as if we are hopeless inheritors of it, but it's something that we participate in. We participate in the ways of sin and death and brokenness. And that marks our past and our present often. We start here in this past mountain of God, the garden mountain of Eden. We see that we were called to worship, we were called to be priests of this creation. And yes, we know that that, in many ways, is skewed and broken and fallen. I'm curious for you if you could just kind of be present with yourself today. What story did you carry in here today? What are you carrying around? What brought you in here this morning? Is it heaviness? Is it joy? I think sometimes we only think we come to church when it's broken, and sometimes I know people come with just profound and immense joy. Is it confusion? Is it long-suffering waiting? Or you're just like, God, I feel like you want this for my life, and I have just been standing on the precipice of it and never quite getting to participate. When we gather here on a Sunday morning, we carry those stories into this room. And God meets us here in a special way. He didn't just show up here, he's not confined to the arts council. But he meets you here in a powerful way. But we also carry that story which is our birthright, our vocation, our calling, our inheritance. In some way, we return to this garden mountain of the Lord together, and we carry the specifics of our past with all their glory and sadness to this mountain together. And we remember what Jesus has done for us, the way that Jesus carried our story, our vocation, our shame up the mountain hill called Calvary. The scriptures call it Golgotha. I am just so stuck in my ways with Calvary. It's a Latin translation. So if you read in the gospel accounts, you'll see that Jesus went to a place called the skull. And there they crucified him. We, as those made in God's image, were called to steward trees that are good for food and trees that are pleasing to the eye, for blessing. And instead, we see the depths of what we have turned that vocation into. We have mangled those trees into trees for execution, for shame, for cursing. When God, in the fullness of his love, shows up, we take the stuff of human culture, the stuff that he made, and we nail them to it. This small hill outside of Jerusalem stands in Isaiah's vision as the highest of all mountains. Isaiah chapter 2. In the days to come, the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of mountains, and shall be raised above the hills, and all the nations shall stream to it. Jesus takes all of our story, all that we have wrought in the world, and he takes it up that hill called. Calvary or Golgotha. Jesus, as the high priest of a new creation, offers his body broken, his blood shed, heart, soul, mind, and strength, his spirit entrusted to the Father. He takes all the entropy and brokenness and shame and guilt that have stratified over generations, accumulating onto his very shoulders. And he makes all things new. Jesus carries the echoes of the human vocation and the broken fragments of our shame up the holy mountain of God. Meaning the past is no longer haunted by loss, by regret, by shame, but is transformed into blessing and mercy. See, I don't know what story you carried in here today, but what I can tell you is the story that meets you here today is the Lord abounding in steadfast mercy. The Lord, his face shining upon you, the Lord whose love is patient and kind and not self-seeking. That is the mercy that greets you here today. I hope it has greeted you in the face of somebody sitting to your left and your right. But I am certain that the Spirit of God is present here among us, telling you that your worst moments are not definitive. That the places that you feel like you just don't have it all together, Jesus is holding it all together. That in him all things are being held together. Jesus carries us. And because of what Jesus has done on that mountain, that mountain which is just really a hill, a trash heap outside of Jerusalem, a place where the Son of God was cast aside, that hill has been raised above all the mountains on the earth. And when we gather here for worship, to sing, to be with God, together, to hear the word of God, to come to the table, past, present, and future are all converging upon us in this moment. It's magic. Jesus comes to us and he brings us the truth of God's past, Jesus on the cross, God's presence, the reality of the Holy Spirit, and the promise of God's future that we taste in a way that is both enticingly fleeting and certain. Thomas Merton says this. He says, in every liturgical mystery, we have this telescoping of time. That's a very beautiful image. And eternity of the universal and the personal, what is common to all ages, what is above and beyond all time and place, and what is most particular and most immediate to our own time and place. Christ in his infinite greatness embraces all things. The divine and the human, the spiritual and the material, the old and the new, the great and the small, and in the liturgy makes himself all things to all people and becomes all in all. A little bit more. This is good for Merton. The works which Christ accomplished in time and eternity. By the liturgy, while remaining in time, we enter into the great celebration that takes place before the Lamb in heaven and eternity. Time is baptized and sanctified by the infusion of the divine light hidden in the liturgical mysteries, a light which flows forth to penetrate our living and our actions and to fill them with the Lord Jesus Christ. In worship, Ecclesia, we ascend the mountain of God's holy space and enter into God's holy time. Past, present, and future converge together and they heal. It is often said that time will heal all wounds, but this isn't true. The gospel truth, Ecclesia, is that by his wounds, time itself is healed. He will return the years that the locust has eaten. He will destroy the shroud of death that threatens us. This is what it means for God to give us freedom in this fourth dimension that Einstein is sort of glimpsing, that quantum physicists are kind of saying, maybe so. Is that Jesus is healing time by what he has undertaken in time. In worship, we glimpse the future. Quantum physicists from the University of Surrey recently published a study that presented time reversal symmetry, demonstrating that equations worked, whether time moved forward in a linear way, which is how we all experience time, right? We experience time as just, you know, one thing happens, the next thing happens. But from a scientific quantum perspective, there is a time that can move backwards, and they can factor that into equations in ways that are well beyond anything I could tell you. Whether time worked forward or backward, the equations balance the same. The image that they use is of time folding in on itself so that a moment in time, past, present, and future, can fold together. Known in physics as the temporal entanglement theory. To put it simply, this is some of the underlying science behind the Avengers movies. And I love that I, as I was researching this, scientists have undertaken to study whether Back to the Future tells a better time travel story in the butterfly effect or the Avengers. And they have concluded that the Avengers actually gets closer to what might be possible in time travel. So take that for what you will. Revelation 21, verse 9. Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came to me and said, Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb. And in the Spirit he carried me away to a great high mountain. Mountains in the beginning, mountains in the end. Showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It has the glory of God and radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal. It has great high twelve or high wall with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates are inscribed the names that are the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites, on the east three gates, and on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates, and the wall of the city has twelve foundations, and on them are the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. The city of God comes down from heaven to earth. Mountains have long been held in just about every culture to be a meeting place between humanity and the divine, a meeting place between heaven and earth. And now we see this fully and finally in the consummation of this new Jerusalem. On the gates are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, and on the foundations of the walls the twelve apostles. Verse 15, it goes on. The city has four equal sides, its length the same as its width. He measured the city with its rod. Twelve thousand stadia. Its length and width and height are equal. What is a three-dimensional square? It's a cube. I think the question sort of dictated the answer. Sorry about that. Geometry was a really tough time for me. John is saying that the city itself is shaped like a cube. We see in 2 Chronicles that the Holy of Holies, the place where only the high priest could enter once a year, the place of divine meeting between humanity and the presence of God, was shaped like a cube. What's going on? He also measured its wall, 140 cubits by human measurement, which the angel was using. The wall is built of jasper, while the city is pure gold, clear as glass. There's just gold that's clear as glass. This is like wicked on steroids here. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every jewel. The first was jasper, the second, sapphire, the third, Agate, the fourth, emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth Carnelian, the seventh chrysalite, the eighth, the barrel, the ninth Topath, the tenth Chrysoproz, the eleventh Jacinth, the twelfth Amethyst, and the twelve gates are twelve pearls. Each of the gates is a single pearl, and the street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass. The angel measures the city and it's cubic in shape. In John's imagery, the entire city is now a holy of holies. I'm certain this is far from the point that John is making here, but if the city is cubic in shape, also the measurements that John uses would suggest that this city is not just expansive width wise. I'm from Oklahoma. Okay, so we just have space. So that's why housing is cheap. Because you guess what? You want to build some more houses? We can just keep moving outward. We'll just keep going. Now, here in New Jersey, there are limited spaces and there are things that have long preceded us. So it's like, ah, you can't build a house there. That's been there for 250 years. You can't move that. So the city not only expands from an urban sprawl scenario, but what John is saying is that the city goes upward. What kind of physics are required to live in a city that not only is horizontally expansive but vertically expansive? Ecclesia, what I'm telling you is in the New Jerusalem you'll be able to fly. The measurements that the angel uses are foreign to us, but the biblical scholars tell us that this city is taller than Everest. In the way that John sees it measured. The precious stones that are listed there, I know they kind of wash over us. It's like I don't even know what chrysalite is, are the same stones used in the breastplate of the high priest. And we see the gold here is crystal clear. Again, what kind of physics are we talking about here? John says in verse 22, 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 the Lord is its light, and its lamb 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, there will be no more night there. People will bring into it the glory and 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. There is no temple in the city, because the city itself is like the center of the temple of old, holy, devoted, joyful. The city has no need of sun or moon to light it, for the glory of the Lord and the Lamb illuminates the city. The kings of the earth bring their glory into it in offerings of worship. Scientists have confirmed Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. The time moves slower in proximity to a mass with significant gravitational force. They've measured stars passing close to black holes. How slow will time move in proximity to the mass of God's infinite love that relieves our burdens and gives us unending joy. The Bible's measure for that is eternity. We will never grow old in that place. Love is the distance between us in our relationships. Love is the gravity of our being, a world defined by the blessing and the face of God, not the curse. And the kings of the earth bring their treasures as emblematic of cultures and nations and stories. The stuff of this world will be brought in worship again, anew, into the new Jerusalem. It's not that we go off to this disembodied heaven. We are taught to love and steward this world rightly and to offer it all back to God. Verse 20, or chapter 22, a couple more verse. I'm going to invite the worship team forward. Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, brightest crystal flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. Through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there anymore, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it. And his servants will worship him, they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads, and there will be no more night, they will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. We are brought back to where we started. A river of life flowing from the presence of God. But now this garden has flourished into a city. The tree of life folds time. It is not dependent upon the seasons or upon rain or upon harvest, but it is fruitful through each month. And the leaves of the tree heal the nations. And I love the way that the filmmaker Christopher Nolan captures this sort of cubic, infinite space. He discovers that this place is not just a place, but a medium to traverse time. It's actually a technology where time folds in on itself. He's completed his mission having to gather data that would salvage and save the earth from the ravages of devastation, but he now needs a way to communicate to his daughter, to pass along this information. He can't simply travel back. By the time he would travel back in the film's economy, the whole world would have perished because of the time it took him to reach this far expanse of the universe. And so he goes, he figures out that this space that he inhabits is a way not just to see what's going on, but a way to communicate. And he goes to a specific time in the library where his daughter is there. And he starts to encode the data that he's learned from his travels through the cosmos into a watch that he gave her. Matthew McConaughey's character says this. He says they have access to infinite time and space, but they're not bound by anything. They can find any place in time and they can communicate. That's why I'm here. I'm gonna find a way to tell my daughter just like I found this moment. And the question that sort of rings out in his head, how? How will you do this? And the answer, love. My connection with my daughter, it is quantifiable. Love is the key. And when we gather here in worship, we are immersed in God's time and space. The love of God meets us in power. The true story of the world meets us and tells us the truth about past, about present, about future. And then we, in response and in resonance, say, Yes, Lord. Heart, soul, mind, and strength. Everything I have is a gift from you, and I give it back to you. To whatever extent I'm able in this moment. And God, by his presence and his power, is healing time. By the blood of the Lamb and the word of his testimony. We pray, Lord Jesus, come. Holy Spirit, come. God, we may we rest in your time here this morning. God, I want to pray for those for whom the present feels so just heavy and burdensome, God. Lord, that in your time and in your rest, Lord, we hear your words, that your burden is easy, your yoke is light, God. I pray, Lord, lifter of burdens, God, that you would lift our heads, Jesus, to see your face. The psalmist says, Who can descend the hill of the Lord? Those with clean hands and pure hearts, Lord. And we don't have to despair that we are not those who can somehow conjure up clean hands and pure hearts of our own designs, Lord, because you, by the power of your blood, God, by the power of your spirit, God, are making us new. Lord, our spirits, our souls, our minds, and eventually our bodies are aging in reverse, God, because of your love. And we will stand in eternity, delighting in who you are. Because of who you are, Jesus. So God, meet us here in power, Lord. Tell us the truth about who you are. And let us let that seep into the bones of our souls, Lord, as we hear the truth about who we are, Lord God. Or we pray these things in your name. We pray in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit we pray. Amen. Equosia, each week we gather and we respond with a time of worship, paying attention to the Holy Spirit. I invite you to do that here this morning. The Spirit is ministering to you where you are, telling you the truth. Pay attention. As we shift postures, I'm going to invite you to stand. And just in that attitude, that attitude of reverence, of devotion, of attention, allow the Spirit to minister to you here this morning.