God Has Brought His Children Home

Tomorrow Doug is speaking on the afterlife, our eternal hope. He and I share a frustration with the popular perception that human beings are destined for some disembodied state, to be fitted with harps and floating through the ether in perfect, vacuous, albino bliss. How is that something to look forward to? I mean, better than the flaming alternative, I guess, but the biblical picture of the afterlife is much richer. The Evangelical reading goes something like this: trumpets, 2nd coming, taken up to heaven, transformed, bowls of wrath, beasts, judgment throne, all that jazz, EARTH GETS REMADE, and we return to a perfected earth. With bodies. And wine. Certainly with music, art, architecture, work (the good kind), maybe even sex (heaven forbid!). If Phil gets his way, the laws of math and wave physics will get that one last tweak so that a note can function in both “equal tempered” and “just intonation” scales at the same time.

The point is, that last part, the returned to a redeemed and perfected earthly existence, that gets overlooked in the popular view. To the cheapening of hope, I think. I have no desire to be apart of some ethereal disembodied state. But an eternal future of human experiences, without all the brokenness, as it was meant to be? That’s worth looking forward to.

In trying to find a hymn for tomorrow, I realized how strongly fixated the traditional hymnody is on heaven, and how non-existent good songs are that portray the remade earth. I’ll even go so far as to say that this is an area where modern worship music has outshone its traditional counterpart.

So, for tomorrow, I decided to write a good old fashioned honest to God (get it?) hymn that focused on the redemption of earth as the well-suited home for human beings, and it’s place in the end-times narrative. This is still in draft form, and will be until 10:25 tomorrow morning, when I finally have to put my pen down and sing the thing.

God Has Brought His Children Home

Words and Potential Music by Michael A. Lee
In death the pow’r confirmed
Of he who rose again
The grave bereft of fear
For we are coming home
Yes we are coming home

Refrain:
Swing wide, ye gates of glory
Ring out, ye choirs of heav’n
Sing out the ancient story
God has brought his children home

The earth shall be made new
All brokenness undone
The triumph of redemption
In this eternal home
This our eternal home

(refrain)

And we will lift the song
Of peace and hope eternal
The glory of the savior
In justice here displayed

Come join the King of Ages
Come sing the song eternal
Of Christ who rose in triumph
Now raising up all things

(refrain)