God's City: Far-Off but Very Real

PORT ORCHARD, Wash., Sept. 28

From a café-patio in this seaside town in Kitsap County, there’s an object-lesson in being able to see a place without being able to get there without considerable effort.  From where I write just now, at a coffee shop on the town’s northwestern waterfront, I can see across to the Bremerton shipyards and the Seattle-bound ferry staging to leave on its one-hour journey to the Emerald City.

But even though I can see Bremerton from here, to get there would take some doing.  The seagulls can fly a mile or so and arrive at the sunlit shipyards across Sinclair Inlet, and there’s a pedestrian ferry nearby—but it’s ten miles around by car.

That may not seem like much, so consider this: from the other coast of the town’s peninsula, such as the house where I lodged in the South Colby neighborhood last night, one can see all the way across to Seattle.  But this presents an even larger conundrum.  Seattle is only about 10 miles away in a straight line.  But to get there, you must either take a Washington State Ferry (the most direct route is via the Southworth–Fauntleroy ferry, for a door-to-door trip of about 15 miles and an added toll) or labor through Tacoma and I-5 traffic, which also requires a toll on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, for a total of 65 miles.  Either way, it’s often either a whole lot of traffic or a whole lot of money, so it’s good to keep your plans flexible with whomever you’re meeting on the other end.

It’s an adventure in being so close and yet so far, of seeing a destination but being unable to get there just yet.  The Scriptures are full of imagery of something grand, something extremely good just on the horizon—a new heaven and a new earth, the New Jerusalem.  At least one of our forebears even caught glimpses of what’s coming.  We may not know for sure just what John of Patmos was trying his hardest to describe in Revelation—the strange creatures, trumpets, and all the other weird imagery—but what he was able to see was that there’s no more sorrow or death, and there’s a new city with God as king, it’s on an actual planet earth (not in the clouds), and it’s where the party’s at (see Rev. 21:1–4).

From here in Port Orchard—a pleasant town in itself—you can see a city: but you can’t reach it.  Yet.  You have to travel a bit first, and it’s a long way around.

That’s how it is for us, too, on the shore of a fallen world which has started to be remade, but which isn’t quite yet reborn into the place God intends: a new earth, an earth without injustice, sorrow, oppression, starvation, or any of the other darknesses that plague us and cause untold suffering and misery.  Sometimes churchpeople talk about “the already-but-not-yet”: the very presence of Jesus as God-in-the-flesh, walking as God on our planet, means that the restored, justice-filled, liberated kingdom of God has already started to come among us even now.

But it’s not completely here.  The rich continue to spend opulently while the masses die of preventable diseases.  Oppression is still around.  Ferguson still happens.  Ebola outbreaks still happen.  Kids continue to die of malaria.  Entire people-groups continue to be disenfranchised.  If there’s a new city coming, it’s not here yet, and we have a ton of work cut out for us to build it.

But we can glimpse it; we might even hear from people who have glimpsed it and came back on the ferry, so to speak: people like John of Patmos, or modern-day visionaries like Dr. King.  But the best we can do, from this vantage on the shore, is to ask the Lord for direction and take the first steps in boldness, justice, and love, and thereby move, at God’s invitation and in God’s power alone, one step at a time closer on the road to a restored Jerusalem, the city that we can see in the distance, and which will get closer with every act of love in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The analogy to Port Orchard is imperfect, of course, in that I’ve found it to be very pleasant, populated with kind people, full of stunning scenery.  In a way, I feel strange comparing the town to a fallen world—and I hope my readers from there will understand my intention with the metaphor.

Because it’s still a helpful one.  From the Kitsap County side of Puget Sound, it would be just as erroneous to say that there is no Seattle as it would be to say that I am already there.  The same is true with the world: the Scriptures tell us that there is hope for a better, restored order of things.  It’s just not finished being remade yet.  But given enough time, and enough trust in the God who is ready to show us the way, it will be.