This Land Is Your Land

Most people don't know that I really love sixties music. Peter, Paul, and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles, the Byrds, Pete Seeger... all of them are geniuses. Raw, deeply spiritual, unafraid to boldly demand change. Today I was listening to my sixties Pandora station and along came, "This Land is Your Land," this version by Peter, Paul, and Mary. 
I thought about the lyrics' reverence for God's holy creation: "And all around me, a voice was singing: 'This land was made for you and me.'" Do we hear that unearthly song today? 
I've talked before about the contemporary church's unbiblical eschatology that fails to acknowledge the promise of the coming, physical resurrection, the future "new heavens and a new earth" that are physical, bodily, real. Unconsciously we have sold the Bible's nourishing promises for a mess of pottage: fragments of orthodoxy mixed with gnosticism, Platonic and enlightenment period dualisms, and evangelical rapture theology. 
The effects of this run deeper than I know. One big problem is that it makes "heaven" is boring, flat, one-dimensional. Without physicality, without bodies, what do you do in heaven? This theology sadly marginalizes many people who do not, as I do to my own detriment, live in their heads. I think of my grandfather, who has an almost unnerving connection to animals. Without bodies, I guess that's gone. Or my mother and her mother, who are great at cooking. In "heaven," as "spirits," you can't cook. (Yet the Bible says upon Jesus' return the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and we will all feast at the great banquet!) This "spiritual," bodiless eschatology, that sees matter as a great prison, privileges the mind above the rest of humanness, and sadly excludes those who have connected with God in many other ways, as I have enumerated above. Why do we wonder why so many boys and men-- athletes, mechanics, soldiers and Marines, rough-and-tumble, testosterone-filled guys, do not go to church? Our unbiblical theology excludes them. 
The contemporary church does not know or love the Bible. We are so disconnected from its world. The world "land," the Hebrew eretz Yisroel (the land of Israel, still a holy phrase to modern Jews who have not forgotten Scripture), no longer stirs in us profound joy and aching. It no longer represents God's covenant with Abraham and his children to give them, to give us, the promised land. Land no longer means to us livelihood, prosperity, hard but satisfying work, the beautiful handiwork of our creator God, shared life with our brothers and sisters and the rest of God's creatures, that voice all around us singing, "This land was made for you and me!" 
That is a taste of what the word "land" (or "Canaan" or "Zion" or "Jerusalem") mean in the Bible. We do not understand it, and so we do not understand when God promises to give us the land, finally, and make it new when Jesus returns in final glory. 
Our misunderstanding, to be sure, is not only a result of our biblical illiteracy, and the half-baked theologies held by our pastors and academics. It is also because modern Western life knows almost nothing of the power of the land. We, myself included, live inside. We trash nature. I need to go outside into nature more, to taste the holiness of the land, to hear the world gasp in the pangs of labor, awaiting the birth of the new creation. I feel an inkling of it on my bicycle, at the train bridge with a million galaxies dancing in splendor above my head because we have fled the light pollution, at Thousand Hills, dipping my toes in the cool lake beside people I love, on the drive from Kansas City to Kirksville, the sun setting, huge, away from ugly suburbs... 
"They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall build vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another enjoy. For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be; and my chosen shall long enjoy the works of their hands. The wolf and the lamb shall eat together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent-- its food shall be dust! They shall not destroy on my holy mountain, says the Lord"-- Isaiah 65:21-25. What glorious promises! 
And I believe, on that holy mountain, Peter, Paul, and Mary will sing, and we will cry out for joy: "This land was made for you and me!"