What an incredible couple of weeks this has been!  Last Sunday we not only initiated a new tradition with the Heritage Club, honoring all those who have been members of our church for fifty years or more, we also received over $103,000 for our spring Thank Offering.  One specific benefit of your generosity is that, with a $20,000 matching grant now in hand, we now have the funds in the bank to start an after school ministry this fall for kids in our neighborhood.  Then, Friday night, we had our first ever Challenger banquet honoring all the Adamson High School athletes.  It was just Cliff Temple’s gift to Adamson and over 300 students crowded our fellowship hall while our youth, Cliff Temple Adamson alumni and others decorated the hall, prepared and served the food.  You need to know that our Adamson friends were deeply touched and that we made significant inroads in showing those students, teachers and administrators just how much this church honors and cares for them.  We demonstrated to them in a very tangible way that, in Cliff Temple, they have a place to belong.

We all need that, don’t we?  A place to belong.  Where would you and I be without it?  That has to be one of the things that made the sitcom, Friends, last for ten years.  Every week, for thirty minutes, people could escape into a Manhattan apartment or Central Perk and, if nothing else, vicariously feel like they had a place to belong where people loved each other and stood by each other come rain or shine or adultery or career deadlock or out of wedlock pregnancy or whatever.

Whatever else the church is or should be, isn’t that at the heart of it, a place to belong, no matter what comes our way in life or even what we bring on ourselves?  A place of community, of being in each others’ presence in the presence of God.  Don’t you think that one reason many people do not go to church at all is because, for them, church has always been just another time-consuming institutional obligation or, worse, a place to only be reminded of how they haven’t ever been good enough?  So that, even if they come, they only go through the motions but rarely reach a level of intimacy with others in which they feel free to confess their greatest needs or fears or weaknesses in a place where love holds them accountable but never judges them as unworthy of being loved. 

Yet, when we look ahead to God’s ultimate vision for his relationship with mankind, we get a different picture.  A picture that ought to work its way back to this moment and reshape the way we think about and live out what it means to be a part of God’s family now.  Too often, people turn to the book of Revelation looking only for time lines or sign charts that give clues about when the world will come to an end when, in fact, its message is much more significant.  As it turns out, what we are tempted to think of as “the end” will be just the beginning of something altogether new! 

This is John’s version.  “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.”  He describes what he envisioned in the language of renewal, not destruction.  This is the promise of the book of Revelation, as I understand it.  God’s intention is to renew, not do away with or destroy his good creation.  A renewed world, as John wrote, in which the “‘home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.’” 

The scripture is quite clear about what God believed about his original creation.  He loved it!  In the very beginning, when he surveyed his work in creation, “God saw that it was good (Genesis 1:10).”  Even after sin entered the picture, nothing changed.  It was still God’s plan all along to renew what sin had destroyed, as John also wrote in his gospel, “For God so loved the world that he gave his son . . . (John 3:16).”  Revelation tells us that nothing has or ever will change what God believes about his creation, including you and me, or his ultimate intention for it and us.  When it’s all said and done, in eternity, God will make his home with you and me.  Have you ever thought about the gospel in those terms, not just that God did come in Christ, but that God still so loves the world, this world, the one you and I live in right now, this world, that he will come to make his home here?  In the simplest terms, God never has and never will give up on us.

For some reason, this Mother’s Day brings to mind a story that happened years ago.  When I was in college, I called home one night to talk to my parents.  I don’t know what I said, but my dad told me later that it made my mother so angry that she took the picture of me that she kept at her bedside and turned it face down.  Of course, we laugh about it now.  Dad assures me that the picture didn’t stay turned over very long.  I laugh, too, because I always knew that there was nothing I could ever do that would make my mother ever permanently give up on me. 

Please understand that I know that not everyone has that kind of Mother’s Day assurance though, do they?  Some of the most heartbroken people I’ve ever known have no memory of a mother or a father who loved them.  When your mother doesn’t love you, in some ways, you go through life feeling as though you were never loved at all.  The absence of a mother’s love leaves a bottomless pit void in a human heart.  All of which can make the gospel even harder to accept or believe.  People who were not loved by one of those people who were responsible for bringing them into the world often stumble through life as emotional, spiritual orphans.  That experience can make the gospel mean even more if it ever gets through.  From cover to cover in the Bible, this is the assurance of God to us.  We are his good creation and he will never, ever forsake us.

Of course, all of this is contrary to the plotline of one of the hottest selling Christian book series ever.  Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have co-authored the twelve-volume Left Behind series that has sold over fifty million copies worldwide, not counting the accompanying kids’ books, board game, web site and two spin off movies.  The main plotline of the Left Behind series is built around what is popularly known as the “rapture.”  There are many different versions of this theory.  But, fundamentally, according to some, the “rapture” will be a time when Jesus will return to earth to remove all true Christians, and all unbelievers will be “left behind” just before the world enters into a time of tribulation and suffering beyond belief after which the world as we know it, God’s good creation, will be utterly destroyed.  There are a number of problems with this whole theory, not least among them the fact that, not only does the word “rapture” not even appear in scripture, the whole concept of God abandoning his good creation flies in the face of what we’ve just read in the Revelation.  Let me just say it bluntly.  If the only information you have about the second coming of Jesus is based on what you’ve read in Left Behind, then you’ve been left behind.  For that matter, so has scripture. 

Listen again to John’s vision of how God will ultimately deal with this world.  “I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” and the “‘home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.’”  The message of Revelation does include the fact that those who trust in Christ will certainly face many trials and tribulations.  It also includes the promise that they will not face them alone.

Some years ago I had lunch with an acquaintance whose pastor had just confessed to committing adultery.  As those things always do, the story had a tragic ending for both families involved and for the church family as well.  Part of the problem was that this pastor, even after he was exposed, wasn’t totally forthcoming and his dishonesty only further complicated a very desperate situation.  Nonetheless, even though most had turned their back on the pastor, this man told me that he was going to stick around.  He was going to do so, he said, because he figured that when the whole thing was over, whatever his former pastor was going to need, he was going to need a friend.  Do you have a friend like that?  As it turns out, you do.

It is not that we won’t have to pay a horrible price for our sins.  Depending on the sin, the price can be very, very expensive and we can find ourselves make installment payments the rest of our lives.  Yet, none of that changes the fact God loved this world enough to send his son to die for it will not abandon his good creation, he will come to walk with us in all of our trials and tribulations.  Simply put, “the Bible’s message is not that ‘God so loved the world that he sent World War III . . . God will judge evil . . . Whatever future events await the earth,” however, “the biblical message is that God comes down to earth to live on it with us.”  When all hope was lost 2,000 years ago just as God’s people were suffering under Rome’s rule, the “‘the word became flesh and dwelt among’” them.  And, when time as we know it is no more, the promise of God’s word is that “God loves the world enough to live in it” with us when time is no more.  (Barbara R. Rossing, The Rapture Exposed, Westview Press, 2004, pp. 10-11).” 

There is more than just a message of hope here.  There is a model of hope here, too.  In his gospel, the same John who wrote his vision in the book of Revelation also recorded these words of Jesus, “‘Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34-35).’”  Jesus was not only commanding us to love each other but to also let the way he loved us model the way we love each other. 

That means so many things.  It means proactively seeking out those who need to be loved and doing something concrete about it, just as the word became flesh and dwelt among us.  It means reacting to injustice with prayer for our enemies.  Jesus does more than just command love, he models perfect love. 

What does that mean for each of us today?  Carving out more time to work in the Care Center?  Carving out more of our income for others?  Maybe on Mother’s Day, it means something else.  Maybe following Jesus’ model means praying for those who wounded us most deeply.  Today is a day that recalls warm memories of love for many when they think of their mother.  For many others, this day only aggravates a deep wound created by the absence of a mother’s love.  If that is true for you, let Jesus be your model.  Pray for those who most deeply disappoint you, even if that includes your mother.  

Sometimes, especially in the case of those who are emotionally abusive or even physically abusive in dangerous ways, the only way we can be present in a loving way in the lives of those we are commanded to love is to pray for them.  Whatever form it takes, Jesus’ model is that of a friend who never abandons. 

News broke just this week of a proposal being considered for recommendation to the Southern Baptist Convention this summer encouraging all Christian parents to withdraw their children from public schools and either private or home school them.  The fear is that our public schools are reaching such a point of moral decay that they will only indoctrinate our Christian children with anti-Christian worldviews.   The proposal would actually “label it a Christian duty to abandon public schools (Bob Allen, “SBC may consider resolution to pull students from public schools,” The Baptist Standard, On line edition, May 5, 2005).” 

Now, whether or not a family chooses to home or private school its children is a very personal and private matter.  But, what does it say to the world we’re responsible for loving if an entire convention of believers publicly declares it their Christian duty to “abandon” public schools?  What does it say to lower income families or, to minority families when an almost exclusively white, middle and upper middle income body of people abandons them in the name of Jesus?  Is abandonment the model of Jesus?

This is the message of the gospel.  We all have a place to belong. It’s a place of eternal hope and hope in this moment.  We have a place to belong not because we are geniuses at church growth, but because God has not abandoned us.  He has chosen to be with us, to belong to us.  We have a place to belong because God has, the scripture literally says, camped out and pitched his tent right here among us in the person of Christ and will, in Christ, return someday to pitch his tent once and for all among us, forever and forever.  God will not leave his world behind.  He will not abandon it; he will come to live in it, forever.

In Christ, God has given us a place to belong. 

What will we do about that?