Sermon preached April 24, 2016
Texts: Psalm 148;
Revelation 21:1-6
Last
Sunday, the Scripture text was from the Book of Revelation. We spent just a few moments in the sermon
talking about the book in general and I noted that New Testament scholar Marcus
Borg, in his chronological version of The New Testament, The Evolution of
the Word, writes about trying to understand Revelation. The heart of the
message of Revelation, according to
Borg is: That accommodation to imperial
ways is wrong. That the struggle between
the lordship of Christ and the lordship of Caesar is the great conflict. That it is important to persevere even when
it looks like the beast is winning.
That, appearances to the contrary, the beast does not have the final
word and is not the final Word. (369)
Borg speaks of the hope represented in Revelation. Its language expresses the human yearning
for a different kind of world, one lived in the presence of God, in which the
sufferings of this world are no more. (370)
The
profound hope and deep yearning in Revelation is expressed beautifully in the
twenty-first chapter. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for
the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…. “See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them as their God; they
will be God’s peoples, and God will be with them; God will wipe away every tear
from their eyes. Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more….
See I am making all things new.”
Can’t you just feel the
yearning, the hope? Don’t the words
strike a deeply resonant chord? Don’t we want a new heaven and a new earth, a
place without all the hurt, pain, sorrow, and inhumanity we know on this earth? We long for the day when the world is
different.
What
this passage represents is also an encouragement to think differently about
now, about our daily lives. If the new
heaven and new earth are places of healing, kindness and care, then these are
the values we want to emphasize in our lives now. The vision of a new heaven and a new earth is
also about new worth, what we should value now.
One of the fascinating dimensions of the vision is that it reminds us
that the earth itself is part of God’s redemptive work. Inspired by such a vision, we might, on this
Earth Day, think about how we should re-value the earth itself. God’s work in the world is not about rescuing
us all for a heavenly realm, it is about creating a new heaven and a new
earth. See I am making all things new.
So
how might we think in some new ways about the Earth as part of God’s redemptive
work in the world, God’s work of making all things new? To be honest, what I have to share this
morning may not be all that new to many of us, but I hope it is a good reminder
of who we are, of how we are connected to the earth, and of how and why we
should include it in our circle of healing and loving and caring.
As
humans, we are a part of the natural world.
We exist in a web of relationships – a relationship with God,
relationships to each other, relationships to the earth, its living things, its
elements. We are here this morning to
tend to our relationship with God in Jesus in a special, focused and
intentional way. We gather together with
others, and our experience here this morning is influenced by others. Was it a hassle getting the family ready
today? Did I see my best friend here
today? If this is your first time here
you may be wondering if someone will be friendly or will someone be
overbearing? The weather affects
us. If we had breakfast, we were
nourished by the earth – by plant life or animal life. We are breathing air. We drink water. We exist in a web of relationships, and we
are a part of that web. Psalm 148
encourages all the voices of creation to sing God’s praises, including the
human voices. We are part of that chorus
of nature. Biologist Charles Birch and
theologian John Cobb write, “the human species is continuous with the rest of
nature” (The Liberation of Life, 139).
We
exist in the web of life and are sustained by the earth, its life, its
elements. As human beings we are unique,
though. We have a capacity for a level
of consciousness and reflection and intellection unknown in other parts of the
web of life. It is a source of wonder
and beauty. We write poetry and
novels. We create beautiful art. We invent.
It is a source of terror and horror. We use our intelligence to build
gas chambers and atomic bombs. We need
minerals to build our inventions and electricity to run them, and we extract
minerals and fuel sources from the earth often with insufficient attention to
how it leaves our water or the animals or the landscapes. Animals can be violent with each other, but
only for food or to protect their young.
Humans destroy each other creatively, inventively over ideas. Animals kill, only humans wage war.
As
unique forms of consciousness, humans have a special responsibility to create
beauty and to care. I love this part of
a poem by Denise Levertov (“Tragic Error”).
Surely we were to have
been
earth’s mind, mirror,
reflective source.
Surely our task
was to have been
to love the earth,
to dress and keep it like
Eden’s garden.
That would have been
our dominion:
to be those cells of
earth’s body that could
perceive and imagine…
A
Christians seeking to love God and neighbor, we need to understand earth as our
neighbor, as part of the goodness of God’s creation, as part of God’s healing
and redemptive work.
Earth
is not only valuable for the way it sustains us and is related to us, it is
valuable, and invaluable, as a way of knowing God more deeply and
intimately. The theologian Sallie
McFague writes, “Christianity also believes nature gives us intimations of the
divine” (Super, Natural Christians, 172). In our relationship to nature, to the Earth,
we can enhance our relationship with God.
Let me share two bits of literature which testify to this.
“The Peace of Wild Things” Wendell Berry
When despair for the
world grows in me
and I wake in the
night at the least sound
in fear of what my
life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down
where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on
the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace
of wild things
who do not tax their
lives with forethought
of grief. I come into
the presence of still water.
And I feel above me
the day-blind stars
waiting with their
light. For a time
I rest in the grace of
the world, and am free.
In
the peace of wild things, we can experience the peace of Christ. In the grace of the world we can know the
grace of God. I have experienced this on
the side of the highway in a snowstorm near Itasca State Park. I have experienced this seeing a full moon
along highway 2. I feel the grace of the
world when I step into our parking lot on a summer night to see the bright
orange moon reflecting on Lake Superior.
I hear something of the voice of God listening to waves gently lap
against a shoreline. Where do you know
the earth and through that know God more deeply and intimately?
Annie
Dillard, The Abundance, 142-143: Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of
pain. But if we describe a world to
encompass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump
against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings
on the skull. For unless all ages and
races of men have been deluded… there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a
grace wholly gratuitous. About five
years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof
gutter of a four-story building. It is
an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a
star. The mockingbird took a single step
into the air and dropped. His wings were
still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not
falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty
air. Just a breath before he would have
been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care,
revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and
so floated onto the grass. I had just
rounded a corner when his insouciant step off the gutter caught my eye; there
was no one else in sight. The fact of
his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that
falls in the forest. The answer must be,
I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense
them. The least we can do is try to be
there.
Praise God, sun and moon and all
you shining stars. Praise the Lord from
the earth sea monster and all deeps, fire and hail and snow and frost and wind,
mountains, hills, trees, wild animals, cattle, creeping things, flying
birds. Beauty and grace are performed
whether or not we will or sense them.
The least we can do is try to be there, and when we are to know that
this is also the beauty and grace of God.
The
earth sustains us. The earth reveals
something of God to us. We are part of
this rich web of life, with a unique task to mirror, to reflect, to care, to
know the peace of wild things, to see beauty and grace, to wrap the earth in
our circle of love and care, and to join the chorus of praise to God.
And
in just a bit we will take one of the most ubiquitous elements of the earth,
and one of its most critical, and we will pour it and bless it and let it bless
us as we bless Charlotte. It is such a
simple element, but used in this way there is beauty and grace and the peace of
wild things, there is a connection to the springs of the water of life, and we
are blessed as we remember our connections to each other in a community of love
and forgiveness.
The
vision of yearning and hope in Revelation is an invitation to us all to live
with grace, to live more consciously of our connections to each other and to
the earth, to celebrate with joy the beauty and grace that we know on this
earth, while also working and waiting for that new heaven and new earth,
working with God to make all things new.
Amen.
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