“Seek the welfare of the city, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Readings:
Ps. 55.4-11, 22,
Luke 19.41-44,
Revelation 21.1-5.
Hymns:
'God is our strength and refuge',
'Dear Lord and Father',
'We cannot measure how you heal',
'Glorious things thee are spoken'
Homily
“As Jesus came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognised on this day the things that make for peace!”
There has been much to weep over this last week. The death of six men, the wanton destruction of homes and livelihoods and the seeming implosion of society in parts of our cities. As I have walked round the parish this week, I have been surprised by how many people have wanted to come up and share their outrage at what has happened, their confusion about what has caused it and their fear at what may come. Friends in Croydon have spoken to me about going to sleep with the smell of burning from the riots and friends in Brixton asked to stay with us on Tuesday night. And now in the aftermath we are left to clear-up, to rebuild and to ask how this could have happened in our city just a few miles to the north and south of where we now sit?
Biblical Cities
Cities do not get a good press in the Bible, as our readings this morning suggest. The problems seemed to start with the city of Babel where they acted like Gods and decided to build a tower to reach the heavens. Meanwhile, Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for their failure to welcome strangers. Jonah was sent to preach to Nineveh to see if it might turn from its violence and sin. And then there is Jerusalem; the holy city which too often failed to be faithful to God. The city over which Jesus wept, as it failed to recognise its saviour.
We are left to wonder what it is about cities that the Bible disapproves of? Well, at one level, they are places where humanity congregates and so do both our gifts and flaws. These take on social dimensions, allowing us to achieve greatness and to create misery. Despite our proximity, or maybe because of it, cities are also places where we can lose our sense of relationship.
So, in our reading from Psalm 55 we hear of violent speech causing fear, we hear of strife at night time, we hear of sin and ruin and we hear of oppression and fraud in the marketplace. Tellingly, a similar role call of woe has filled our papers this past week. But as commentators try to pinpoint the one key cause, we may miss the truth that the personal, social, moral and economic are inextricably linked. And that together love, justice and truth are what make for the peace of this or any other city.
The New Jerusalem
But this is not all that the Bible has to say about cities. For, in its final chapters the Book of Revelation offers us a vision of the city to which we are called. A heavenly city that descends to earth. A fantasy city that becomes a reality. The new Jerusalem is a city where God dwells with his people- wiping the tears from our eyes and making all things new. This is a city built on relationships, a place of healing and of hope. This is a city centred on the God of love in which all of our relationships have been renewed.
I wonder what such a city would look like? Perhaps there would be no rush hour, perhaps cyclists would be safe on its streets- and would stop at traffic lights, perhaps morning coffee would be free and the parks might go on for ever? I imagine it would be a place of peace and security, of laughter and joy, where great things were achieved. And I think this vision, or something like it, is what inspired people last week to pick up their brooms and clean up their streets. But building the new Jerusalem will take more than brooms.
To build the new Jerusalem, out of the rubble of this past week will require us to be a people of hope. It will require us to be healers of what is broken in our city and to live our daily lives as if each person we meet is related to us. So this morning, I want to invite us to share our hopes and prayers for London. We will do this by writing down hopes, dreams and prayers for our city on post-it notes. We will then share them with one another as we place them on our cityscape at the back of church. For these post-it notes, these tentative and fragile hopes and prayers for the future of our city, are the building blocks of the new Jerusalem. Amen.
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