For most of the listeners...
Illustration
For most of the listeners, laity and clergy alike, there was a startling reaction as Dr. Fred Craddock lectured on this text, highlighting a few words often overlooked in the description of the glories of the new age: "... I saw no temple in the city ..." No temple! What kind of a city would that be he mused, for us who check out the available churches in a community before we move. Some who never attend or support the church like to have them around, teaching children and singing songs to the accompaniment of strident organ notes, as they drive to the golf course or to the news stand for the Sunday newspaper.
The hymn goes "We would be building temples still undone ..." This temple-building is so necessary and yet so exhausting that many of us listening to this lecture felt at once distress ("... all this loving labor and struggle for no church in the new city?") and relief ("... no more budgets to raise or struggles over direct or world mission with the short-sighted or endless remodeling projects ...")
The Good News is of course adequate and then some. All our temples of stone or human lives, finished or in progress, will gloriously be transformed and superceded by the eternal and temple-less presence of God.
The hymn goes "We would be building temples still undone ..." This temple-building is so necessary and yet so exhausting that many of us listening to this lecture felt at once distress ("... all this loving labor and struggle for no church in the new city?") and relief ("... no more budgets to raise or struggles over direct or world mission with the short-sighted or endless remodeling projects ...")
The Good News is of course adequate and then some. All our temples of stone or human lives, finished or in progress, will gloriously be transformed and superceded by the eternal and temple-less presence of God.
