Menu

A faithful presence of love in the absences of our city.

The Now and Not Yet of Sunday Worship

The Now and Not yet of sunday worship

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” ~ Revelation 7

 In Revelation, John receives a vision of the beginning of the new age.  In this age, the veil between heaven and earth has been removed.  God will dwell with man again.  Heaven and earth remade.  Sin, Death and the Devil have been done away with and removed to the Lake of Fire.  Here John sees the end, and this scene begins with a call to worship.  The angel of the Lord calls and gathers a complete chorus of worshippers from every tribe, people, nation and tongue.  And these white-robbed worshippers declare their boast.  Their boast is in God.  Their boast is in God, because God has brought them salvation.  They wave their palm branches and declare the worth of the Lamb, because the Lamb of God, Jesus has won for them salvation by His broken body and shed blood.  By the Father’s and Son’s plan before all things, salvation has been bought and secured for people from every people group on earth. 

This scene is a scene rehearsed every Sunday around the world.  As 2 billion Christians are gathered and called to worship Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  The church makes Her boast in response to the wonder of this God who saves and delivers His people.  In Africa, Asia, North, Central and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Austral-Asia and the islands, and all around the globe, people are called and gathered and declaring their boast is God and God alone.  It is amazing.  Something that when we gather, driving to church, fussing with our selves and our families, we often forget.

The scene in John’s revelation is meant to be an anchor of hope for us, as we gather.  It provides the lines for us to reenact each week.  Every week others gather at another place.  There is a ‘now and not yet’ to our worship.  The ‘now’ is the gathering — the response to God’s call that happens all over the globe.  The ‘not-yet’ is the reality that perhaps our church looks different from our neighbor’s church. They have large representations of different ages, or maybe they have an age of worshippers we don’t have, and that’s all they have.  Maybe they have more racial diversity, or a different racial singularity.  That church has many nations represented, and this other church has 3 distinct people groups.  If you are an ex-pat for instance in Dubai and go to Redeemer, you will see people called and gathered from many people groups from across the globe, seemingly every group represented.  And yet if you are in China, there may be only one socio-socio-linguistic people group.  But either way, every week God gathers  us and every week others gather at another place.  There is a ‘now’’ and there is a 'not-yet.’  This ‘not-yet’ is every people group, which no one can count, worshipping together before God and the Lamb. 

The ‘now’ of City Pres is our church looks like us, and some of our neighboring churches look different.  Iglesia Ciudad de Gracia looks different from us, and they are a half mile from us.  And yet we are called and gather just like them.  And the vision of Revelation 7 is their hope, as it is ours.  They are currently  gathering a different slice of our city than we ourselves our currently gathering.  There is a ‘now and a not-yet’ to our gatherings.  This doesn’t mean that we both don’t strive to be a multi-ethnic, multi-age, multi-socio-economic churches.  We do.  We think about it.  We go about practicing our faith in our corner of the International District and Nob Hill in light of it.  We don’t do this perfectly and most Sundays even very well.  But we are still gathered by our gracious Lord.  And when we gather at City Pres we sing about this gathering in the future that will be different.  We don’t look like it yet, but we still sing of it in confession and hope.  In our ‘not-yet gatherings’ we confess our failures.  We are a broken communion of called out ones in a broken world.  But we also confess our hope.  Our hope that this will be different.  In the ‘not yet’ of 2019 and in confidence in the ‘now’ of the new heavens and new earth. 

Jamie Smith the writer and theologian says the following about this hope:  The gathering is bound up in hope and our hope is a kind of defiance, while the faces and the hearts of this gathered congregation remind us that the kingdom remains to come, the Spirit invites us to over come, reminding us that despite the failures, our own and our community, the worldwide chorus looks like the kingdom choir, prompting us to become more and more like the great multitude which no one could count.

At City Pres, this is our hope both for the ‘now and the not yet.’ We still very much have work to do.  We continue to strive to be this welcoming community, making room for all those God will gather — gathering, living, speaking and serving as the faithful presence of Jesus at the corner of San Mateo and Cooper in ABQ. 

~Justin Edgar