Dear fellow Migrants:
Thomas Wolfe once wrote, “You can’t go home again.” For most of us Arizonans (73%+), we can return and visit home, but it is the the same home it once was. And we are not the same people we once were when we lived there.
You and I know this. We may have even experienced it. Life does not normally flow in a backward direction. To go back is too often to regress. Growth is an upward and forward movement. A plants roots may be firmly planted in the earth from which it sprouted, but growth is always up or out. When a plant ceases growing, it dies.
Scripture knows this. I think of the book of Revelation. In the next to last chapter of the Bible’s last book (21), there is a new heaven and a new Jerusalem. When this was written the holy city of Jerusalem lay in ashes, destroyed by the Romans. This was tremendously distressing to Jews and Christians alike. No doubt they wanted Jerusalem rebuilt so they could return to the life they once had there. Revelation says this will not happen. Jerusalem will be new. Jerusalem will not be a recreation of what it once had been. Revelation does not anticipate a backward movement that restores some nostalgic time and returns people to a former life. The vision of Revelation was to create and mold life in the present.
We are living in a Revelation time. It is a time we both look forward to and yet are anxious about the future. We want to return to our former life pre-COVID 19. We may even pray for such. God does not return people. God leads people through and God brings God’s people to a new place.
Let’s face it. If asked a few months prior to the pandemic striking how perfect was our life and our world, most of us would not have said it was very special in some outstanding way. God does not want us to hang out in our old haunts and old ways. God wants us to be made new. God does not want us to go home again; God wants us make a new home and God wants us to be at home in our present and our future.
This is the hope of Revelation and the hope of the Christian faith. In the ashes of a fallen city, a new city can be created. In the fears and challenges of living in a pandemic, uprooted from our former life and lifestyle, God can make us new. I suspect you have already added somethings during this time that you will maintain once this crisis passes. I also suspect there is a thing or two you might have abandoned that you will not pick up again in the future. Some part of you has already been made new.
We need not fear that which is and that which will be new. Old standby God will still be there. The God whom we glimpse in Jesus is also made new to do what God has always done: come to us, be with us, and love us. God does not make all new things. God makes all things new.
Becoming new with you,
Gary N McCluskey
Pastor, University Lutheran Church
Lutheran Campus Ministry
Arizona State University