SENT AHEAD

My pastor, Grover Pinson at Windsor Park Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, came out with a really good thougth last Sunday.  Preaching from Revelation 21, he referred to the “New Jerusalem smell” of our ultimate home, like the “new car smell.”  The latter, by the way, turns out to be a Chernobyl mushroom cloud of toxic gasses (http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2005-09-26-new-car-smell_x.htm), but the aroma of the New Jerusalem will waft peace and spiritual health to the redeemed for all eternity.  What I liked about Grover’s concept was that the “New Jerusalem smell” never fades.  I’ve owned one off-the-lot new car in my life, and the aroma quickly gives way to the everyday mustard gas of sweat, vintage sack lunches, aftershave and exhaust.  My last two churches constructed new buildings during my tenure, and I know the “new building” smell; it has a shelf life of about two months.  But Heaven?  Well, when we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sniff God’s grace than when we first begun.

 The sermon made me think of Robert Frost’s poignant lament that, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

When Lancelot first rides toward Camelot in the new rays of an early dawn, he has a condom stashed in the hip pocket of his plate armor.  Though Frodo has destroyed the one ring, Aragorn already knows his line will eventually fade.  But the streets of gold will stay, and the New Jerusalem smell will never diminish.  Which brings up another idea.  During the evening service, my pastor, with a courage which far exceeds anything I ever approached in my quarter-century of pastoral ministry, invites the audiience to do a cook-down on the morning’s message.  I mentioned how taken I was with Grover’s emphasis on the new world which is coming, and lamented that the fascination of most Evangelicals seems to be with what happens to the old world as it is going, as witnessed by the popularity of the “Left Behind Series.”  “Yeah,” interjected a college student sitting behind me.  “We should have a ‘Sent Ahead’ series.”

 Nah.  I don’t think it would sell.

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