Sixth Sunday of Easter - May 22, 2022
Into the midst of our anxiety and alarm we are offered a vision of a glorious future filled with promise—the promise that God will make a home with us. This is a promise of an ultimate future home—a New Jerusalem!—but also a promise of God’s daily home-making presence in the hearts of all who believe. Paul has a vision of a cry for help from Macedonia, and his beloved church at Philippi is founded in the home and household of Lydia. In Revelation, John, turning from the lake of fire, is carried up in a vision and sees the New Jerusalem coming down, centered on the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. But no longer is there separation from God, weeping, or mourning, but now a restored creation where God and God’s people are at home together. Jesus promises that though he is going away, he will come to his disciples in the power of an advocate, the Holy Spirit, and that both he and the Father will make their home in all who believe. The gathering of the faithful assembly to receive Christ’s word and sacrament is a foretaste of that New Jerusalem, where God will finally and ultimately be at home with us, even as the Holy Trinity makes a home now in the hearts of all who believe. Into the anxieties and uncertainties of our everyday life we are offered both a vision of a glorious future when God will be at home with us and we will be at home with God, and a living foretaste of that same future: “We will come to them and make our home with them. . . . Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you” (John 14:23b, 27a).
