A tale of two cities: the Acts of the Apostles and the Book of Revelation offer two distinct visions of the City of God. Where do you want to live?

EVER PLAY PING-PONG? I haven't picked up a paddle since I was 12, but I had a Ping-Pong flashback recently while sitting at my desk. Flipping through the Sunday readings for the Easter season, I began to recollect the familiar back-and-forth rhythm of the ball from one player to another: Thwock! Thwock!

Only in this game, the players are two biblical fellows named Luke and John of Patmos. The ball, strangely enough, is the idea of church. And as far as I can tell, the players are evenly matched.

So here's how the game is played, liturgically speaking. Many Catholics are aware that our Sunday scripture passages rotate on a three-year cycle (A, B, and C) contained ill the book of readings known as the lectionary. This is nice because it means no one has to decide each week what the lectors should read aloud to the rest of us down in the cheap seats. But it also means that we get what we get--ready or not.

But the Easter season of Year C--which is where we are right now--can be especially daunting for preachers and pew-sitters alike. The selection of readings has all the ease and accessibility of a graduate seminar in theology. During the Sundays of Easter in Year C, we hear first from the Acts of the Apostles and then from the Book of Revelation. The third reading for Easter during all three years of the cycle is mostly from the Gospel of John. For those of us who are awake during this portion of the Mass, then, it is understandable to wonder: "Where's my Jesus?"

It's not that Jesus is gone, Resurrection notwithstanding. It's just that the familiar stories about Jesus we hear in the user-friendly gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke are temporarily displaced by John's abstract, disembodied, and sometimes otherworldly-sounding speeches. And because we are on the far side of Easter, the action has shifted from the life of Jesus to the life of the early church. This means the Acts of the Apostles is a primary text for the season: What are these people going to do with Easter, now that it's happened? And, more to the point, what will we do with it?

The reading from the Book of Revelation is equally important, however, and deserves as much of our consideration. Because here we encounter the heavenly gathering of holy ones a rather alien group until we realize it's just the church with the dirt knocked off it and finally made presentable in bright new robes. This celestial vision of the faithful is served up along with the earthly early church week by week, just as we, the present-day church, sit Sunday after Sunday and hear all about it. The early church, the heavenly church, and the likes of us: What, if anything, do we have in common?

TIME TO PASS OUT THE PADDLES AND LET THE ACTION BEGIN. Biblical Ping-Pong, as it s enacted in this Easter season, is a game where even the spectators are participants. Luke makes the first serve. As the writer of Acts, he holds up his end with a wide variety of stories about folks like Peter, Paul, Stephen, and Barnabas, the "apostles" of the title. Writing at the end of the first century, Luke serves up the events of an earlier generation, when the Spirit of Pentecost imbued heroic figures with a dazzling array of gifts for charismatic speech, miraculous healing, bold teaching, and the courage to face imprisonment, suffering, even death for what they held true.

Mixed in with the stories of wonder are also tales of tedium: answering to the petty charges of the high priest once again, finding a day's teaching undermined by the religious opposition, enduring the hardships of the missionary trail, backtracking to Jerusalem to negotiate at headquarters about whether or not Jewish rules should govern Gentile converts.

Despite the spiritual glamour we assign to those early days of Christianity, paper pushers and administrators still had to be addressed or outmaneuvered. Though Luke capitalizes on the idealistic aspects of the church's first generation, we see realism creep in amid the details. Ah, there's the church we recognize all too well.

On the other side of the Ping-Pong match stands John of Patmos, the famous visionary of the Book of Revelation. Although Luke and John were both first-century Christians, the two faced opposite directions. Luke focused his work on capturing the previous generation of church, which was already slipping out of view. By contrast, John's writings in Revelation make him seem less a man of his times--though his imprisonment on the island of Patmos anchors him in the gritty reality of his persecuted generation. Still, John's gaze is held not by the grim present or the recent past, but by something free of history altogether.

It is not quite accurate to consign his vision to the future, however. We miss something vital about the Book of Revelation if we think of it as a preview of something yet to be. John's privileged look into the heavenly court reveals a reality that is outside of history but also alongside of it, the way a river runs adjacent to the shore. The seen and the unseen, the shore and the river, are equally real; but from the solid shore, the journey of the river is easier to disregard. John sees what is, what was, and what will be--a lot for a human being trapped in time to digest. John glimpses what most of us don't spend five minutes imagining: the eternal reality of things from God's point of view. Most of the time, regrettably, this perspective is hidden from human eyes and forgotten--or worse, disbelieved outright.

From his isolation on Patmos, John sees "one like a Son of Man," an awesome figure who commands him to write down what he is experiencing. How can he do this except in the language of symbols? This vision is hardly conceivable from within the earthly worldview. Angels and other celestial creatures, multitudes and messages too wonderful to understand are presented to him. Evil will be destroyed, all of it, wiped from the face of the earth forever. Justice and joy will become a universal landscape. All things will be made new.

But if everything is new, how can we speak of it in the tired old language we apply to the worn grooves of human history? John's celestial descriptions are an attempt to fill in the gaps between here and there. An unfortunate consequence of his enormous undertaking is that, all too often, these images are reduced to literalism by a modern audience that has lost the capacity for religious imagination.

THWOCK! THWOCK! BACK AND FORTH, OUR ATTENTION BOUNCes from Luke's historical church to John s eternal one. Where do we, the present generation, rightfully belong? Many of us may not feel at home in either landscape. Luke's community has some cracks in it, but the overall portrait is one of heightened dedication and an interactive Holy Spirit that first revs up the community and then supplies supernatural happenings on demand. We would like to live in this church (we think). But we have to admit, so far parish life has been more about religious education, soup suppers, and fund-raisers.

So then is our experience of church closer to John's divine assembly of worshipers with the white robes, every tear wiped away by the hand of God? Actually, we may know a little more about these folks than those other ones. Sometimes during the Mass, in our ritual hour that parallels the celestial liturgy of John's vision, we "see" something that wasn't there before. Maybe ifs just the song we're singing that brings the vision into view. Maybe it's something the preacher said, or a phrase in the Mass we've heard ten thousand times but never like today. In these privileged moments we experience an exaltation of the spirit that makes us feel for a time like we're part of that holy community just offshore from where we're standing. Oh, there's plenty of fog on the banks of that river so we can't see far or clearly. But just for an instant, we sense that community of saints is out there, and the distance between us is not as great as it seems.

And on other Sundays, of course, the mind is a blank, the heart is a wall, and everything I just said makes no sense.

So the ball gets slapped back to Luke again, who tells us about earthly cities like Antioch, Lystra, and Jerusalem, and how the gospel message is proclaimed and received and often rejected in each one. We sigh with Luke: We know about setbacks and stubbornness and how most people, if asked to choose between the good news of Jesus Christ and a sale at K-Mart, would not hesitate to grab their wallet and go.

How does John return that serve? He reveals the existence of a single splendid city of jasper and divine light, a new Jerusalem not built by human hands but with its origin in God. We think of it as the last and final city, the perfect one at the end of time. But we might also call it the first and eternal city, the only one that matters because it's the only one that lasts. To this city we are all invited. The Spirit and the Bride say, "Come." So what are we waiting for, limousine service?

Our problem with approaching this city is that we are caught in the illusion of Our Town, U.S.A. John's splendid city may be the most vital one, but the street I just stubbed my toe on seems more authentic at the moment. A friend of mine often says, "Don't wait until you die to go to heaven." I agree; the heavenly city is too fine a place to retire to when I could take up residence there today. I want to claim my citizenship in the city of light and live next door to John of Patmos. There's nothing to stop me, apart from my lack of faith.

Does this Easter round of biblical Ping-Pong seem like just a game? Are we, the present-day church, caught in a time warp between the never-to-be-repeated early Christian experience and the far off dream of heaven? If so, we are writing our own story as the generation of church that went to parish council meetings and debated whether to stand or kneel during the Eucharistic Prayer. I think there's more to being church than this. I think, if we pay attention to this match-up between Luke and John of Patmos, we just might learn how to get in the game.

By ALICE CAMILLE, author of Exploring the Sunday Readings and God's Word Is Alive!, both available from Twenty-Third Publications.