How to Find "The Better Place"

The current New Yorker magazine has a cartoon with this caption: "He's in a better place now - no offense to Buffalo." I'm not sure why the cartoonist chose to pick on Buffalo. He could just as easily said Detroit or Washington or Lake Wales, or any other place on earth, because the cartoon above the caption depicts a middle-aged Protestant minister dressed in a coat and tie, standing behind a podium, presiding at a funeral, halfway between an open casket behind him containing the deceased - a bald, bespectacled and mustached man - and in front of him, the veiled widow and son of the deceased sitting together on the front row of a modern, Crystal Cathedral-like structure with a tall dome behind and above the casket whose arches point away from Buffalo, on the ground level, up to that better place which the cartoon preacher is explaining that the deceased husband and father has gone, which is so much better than Buffalo. Isaiah, David, Peter, and John the Baptist have much more to say about that better place in this morning's lessons.

Isaiah comforts us with the assurance that this better place may not be identical with Buffalo, but it will be down here on earth, as well as somewhere up there above that Crystal Cathedral dome. That better place will be in the wilderness and in the desert, along a flat, smooth highway that we prepare every time we lower the hills and fill in the valleys, straighten the crooked and smooth the rough terrain, on God's promise that we will be welcoming him, who, by his very nature, makes every place he comes to better, even Buffalo.

It is misleading for us to think of the wilderness that Isaiah is referring to simply or solely in natural terms. Buffalo, or Lake Wales, or any other community on earth, for that matter, is the sort of a modern day moral or spiritual wilderness that Isaiah had in mind when called upon another city, the city of Jerusalem, which needed as much spiritual and moral renovation as Buffalo, to nonetheless declare to all the other cities of Judah, who were also in need of improvement, that God is here, that the better place we are looking for can be found not just up above the dome or out in some remote desert wilderness, but right here, in our neighborhoods and around the corners of our town and urban landscapes, if we are willing and ready to change, to take another look at the direction of our lives and to turn in a new direction, to believe that the better place is not just "pie in the sky, bye and bye", but that God cannot help but make this world a better place if we believe that he is both willing and able to come, to enter into and transform the wild and deserted places, wherever they are, in Lake Wales as well as in Buffalo.

What will this better place look like? David puts it this way in today's psalm. That better place is the place where salvation is very near to those who fear God, that is, who respect God, who believe that God can and does reveal himself in Buffalo. That better place is where mercy and truth meet, where peace and righteousness kiss each other, where truth springs up from the earth and righteousness looks down from above, where righteousness and peace precede God's coming like a pathway for his feet.

Many of us may be inclined to ask, as the first Christians did, why is it taking God so long to make that better place a reality? Peter explains that what makes that place better is that it has as many people it in as possible who have repented, who recognize that Buffalo or Lake Wales, as they are apart from God, are not the end all or the be all of life. In that sense, the New Yorker cartoon caption is telling the truth, that we shouldn't take offense that the better place is not Buffalo. No place on earth, in the end, will be identical to that better place, even though it is both possible as well as our responsibility to do what we can, by God's grace, to help make Buffalo and every other place where people live more and more like that better place.

Peter reminds us that when the Lord returns in his glory, the heavens and the earth will pass away; they will be dissolved in fire: there will be no more Buffalo, no more Lake Wales. "We wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home," Peter tells us. In the meantime, Peter urges us to strive to be found by the Lord at peace when he comes like a thief, without spot or blemish, and to regard the Lord's delay as his patience, because he is giving us as much time as possible to repent and to prepare for his coming. The Lord's patience, in that sense, is our salvation. Peter tells us that repenting is the way we can hasten the Lord's second coming and shorten our wait.

All the people who left their homes and their hometowns and went to the Jordan River to be baptized by John were confessing with their feet as well as with their lips that they longed to be in a better place, both as individuals and as citizens of a better hometown community. Confessing their sins and washing themselves in the Jordan was the best way, short of doing what only God can do, of removing the spots and blemishes that were making their own lives and the places where they lived less than what God intended. That's why John tells them that his washing is preparing them for the One who will come and baptize them with the Holy Spirit, cleansing them from the inside out, and not just on the surface, making their minds, hearts and bodies the best place of all, a place where even God can dwell.

In contrast to the cartoon caption, Isaiah, David, John and Mark teach us that we do not have to die physically in order to be in a better place. We will find ourselves in a better place whenever we repent, whenever we stop thinking that the world revolves around us, and begin and continue to act as if it does, in fact, revolve around God.

May God give each of us the gift of repentance both here and now and in all our comings and goings in these days before Christmas. May God help us to think and act differently, to live more in accordance with his will for our lives, to live in accordance with his truth, in his righteousness, in his peace and mercy, that we might receive the greatest gift of all, of discovering that we are in that better place, here and now, and because of that, we are making the people in Buffalo and Lake Wales, and even those places themselves a little bit better too. AMEN.