No enduring city here
The fall of Rome
In 410 the unthinkable happens. Rome, the eternal city, the order beneath everyone's feet for as long as anyone could remember, is sacked. And among Christians the panic runs deeper than the grief, because by now the empire is Christian, and its fall raises a terrible question: is God's own cause finished, now that the Christian empire has fallen with it. Into that fear Augustine writes, slowly, across years, the great work that answers it: the City of God. There are two cities, he says, woven together through all history — one earthly, built on love of self, and one eternal, built on love of God — and the church's hope was never the earthly city, glorious as it had seemed and easy as it had been to confuse with the Kingdom. Its true home is the city to come, the one whose builder and maker is God. So the fall of Rome, for all its horror, was not the end of the faith. It was the first of the great upheavals that, as Phyllis Tickle would much later observe, seem to shake the church roughly every five hundred years — cracking open whatever cultural shell it has hardened into. The empire fell, and the church was forced to tear its hope loose from a perishing order.
“We don't have here an enduring city, but we seek that which is to come.”
— The letter to the Hebrews — Hebrews 13:14 (WEB)
“He looked for the city which has the foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”
Disconnect here is the collapse that tears hope loose from a perishing order — the first of the great roughly-five-hundred-year upheavals of the Church, and a pattern that reaches every shaken life. The phase asks you to grieve what fell while refusing to call it your foundation, and to let the shaking relocate your hope onto the city that cannot fall.
When an order you assumed was permanent collapses, a career, an institution, a marriage, a whole world you trusted to hold, the disconnect is brutal, and the first thing it threatens is your sense that anything is solid at all. If that could fall, you think, then nothing is safe. But the old word still holds across the centuries: you have no enduring city here. The thing that fell was never your foundation, however much you had let it feel like one. You had simply confused a particular order, a familiar arrangement, with the Kingdom itself — the way the Christians of 410 confused Rome with the cause of God. The shaking is frightening, and it is also clarifying.
It pries your hope loose from what could never finally bear its weight and frees it to rest where it actually belongs: on the city to come, the one whose builder is God, the one no sack can reach. What fell was a city of man. Your true home was never in the rubble. It is still being built, and its maker does not fail.
The Church repeatedly mistakes a particular cultural order for the Kingdom itself, and is repeatedly shaken when that order falls. When Rome was sacked in 410 the panic among Christians ran deeper than the grief, for the empire was Christian by then, and its fall raised the terrible question of whether God's own cause was finished. Augustine answered that the Church's home was never the earthly city, glorious as it had seemed, but the city to come, whose builder and maker is God. This is the first of the great upheavals that, as Phyllis Tickle later observed, seem to shake the Church roughly every five hundred years, cracking open whatever cultural shell it has hardened into and tearing its hope loose from a perishing world before a watching age.
What cannot be shaken is the city whose builder and maker is God. Empires are sacked and permanent-seeming orders perish; the city to come is not built by hands that can fail, and no fall can reach it. When the city of man lies in rubble, the city of God still stands, still rising, still sure.
- What order in my life did I quietly mistake for my foundation, only to feel it shake?
- Where have I confused a familiar arrangement with the Kingdom of God itself?
- Can I let this collapse relocate my hope onto the city that cannot fall?
Lord, an order I trusted as permanent has shaken, and I felt as if nothing were solid. Remind me I have no enduring city here. Tear my hope loose from what could never hold it, and fasten it on the city to come, whose builder and maker is You. That city cannot fall. Amen.