The end, and what comes before that

 

Revelation 21:1-8

There are dragons that need slaying. Monsters that need defeating. 

There is chaos unleashed on the earth.  Sometimes we can pretend we don’t see it. We can make our lives small and our walls high and pretend calamity won’t touch us. Some of us can get away with this more easily, or for longer stretches of time, than others.  But right now is not one of those times. Not for any of us.  Right now – ironically – it feels like the world is more unified than ever, if only by shared turmoil and upheaval, and the sense of instability. At the moment, we are an entire species anguished and crisis-weary.

Chaos, like the Hebrew people saw symbolized by the wild, thrashing seas, hovers on the edges every day, in nearly every moment. It seeps into the cracks of our daily errands, and washes over the rooftops of crumbling institutions.  It ruptures our confidence in each other and erodes our trust in our leaders, and dumps all over our plans for the future, even the tiny, little, unimportant, nonthreatening plans that shouldn’t be a problem for anyone. Chaos keeps wrecking those too.  
 
And there is evil, real evil, that seems so often to have the upper hand. Sometimes it’s bold and appalling and devastating. But often it slippery and sneaky. 
When you break it down, instead of one big hellish plan of destruction, evil tiptoes in through little, imperceptible lies, small selfish motives, momentary thoughtless decisions, modest breaches of trust and betrayals of confidence, and it spreads and grows. 

And there are villains. Actual villains. Diabolical villains to be sure. But so often the villains look like us. Are us.  We are victims and villains. It merely depends on which story we’re in, and who’s telling it. 
 
All of this is messy, and unsettling, and exhausting. 
We so much prefer our on-screen dragons and monsters. We like our battle lines definitive. Our victories complete.  We want our heroes pure of heart, and we’d like to give evil a face that we can watch whimper in defeat when it’s vanquished and crushed.  We want to gorge ourselves on decadent vindication.  Hope for justice, longing for goodness, these things can feel naive and impossible in the tangled turmoil of this life, especially at the moment.
 
Enter Revelation in all it’s fantastical metaphor and story and imagery.  The book of Revelation is an ancient movie, a radio theater hour, a play in four acts. It gives evil concrete form and then destroys it.  
 
Apocalyptic literature was a popular genre at the time, and Revelation is longest piece of apocalyptic literature in the bible. Apocalypse doesn’t actually mean dramatic end of the world, it means revealing, unveiling, peeling back the curtain for a peek of deeper truth. The language of apocalypse is metaphor, pictures, story. Truth is conveyed not by being told directly to you, but because underneath what is being told to you, the prelingual essence, the elemental substance of you hears a message that can’t be told in words, and your heart or gut screams YES. THIS. 
 
A few weeks ago in a session meeting we discussed nudity. I’ll explain. Each time session gathers, we read scripture together and reflect on it, and we let it inform our work. A couple months ago we began with the first day of creation, and every two weeks when we meet, we read the next day of creation. In lovely, poetic language we had painted for us a picture of this relational God abundantly pouring out creativity into matter, giving goodness concrete form and then celebrating it.  And then each movement of creation ends with God pausing to take it all in, stopping to delight in the wonder and joy and harmony of what now exists.  And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.  And when God creates humankind in God’s image they are “naked and unashamed.” They live freely as beloved by God and connected to all other beings.  So, what’s easier, we wondered, being buck naked in the backyard where your neighbors could see you, or being completely open and vulnerable?
 
Reading slowly through the beginning this way together reminded us that God holds it all, God loves it all, God is present in and through it all, and there’s no rush, in fact, pausing is an essential part of the divine ordering of things, and that God wills goodness and joy for the earth and its creatures.

So when we turned to the chaos of our lives and our world, and this trying to do church one week at a time like we have been for two years, it helped us to remember whose church, whose world, whose lives, these really are.  We are learning that remembering the beginning helps us navigate the middle.
 
But so does premembering the end.  And Revelation tells us where it’s all headed.
In the beginning God created, loved, rested, enjoyed, and made us live freely as beloved by God and connected to all other beings. And it was good. And in the end – God creates, loves, rests, and enjoys, alongside us, along with us, and ensures we will live freely as beloved by God and connected to all other beings. And it will be good.  That’s where it starts and that’s how it ends. 
 
But the middle, oh, the middle, the middle is filled with suffering. Along with the goodness is evil and chaos. Mourning, division and pain, lies and struggle fill the middle.  
 
So comes Jesus Christ, God with us, right into the middle to share middle with us. Instead of rescuing humanity out of life, God joins us here, and infuses this mess of a life with the holy. Right inside the suffering, conflict and loss, God brings hope, joy, connection, and salvation.  
 
And from the very end, redemption leaks backwards into the middle.  Every experience of wonder is a taste of the end that mirrors the beginning.  Every time we pause and delight in the goodness of this life, or marvel at the beauty of this world, we are foreshadowing what is to come, and recalling how it all began. Every moment spent relishing the simple fact of existence, or opening our heart vulnerably to another person, peels back the veil on what will be, and echoes how it all started.  
 
This is a story suspended from love to love. 
 
And so the end also promises that everything from the middle that divided us from love, all the monsters around us and the villains within us, the dragons looming over us, and every possible way evil got a foothold and turmoil took over, will be powerfully obliterated.  All that separates us from God and each other will be permanently destroyed.
 
In light of all this, I would like to suggest that true Christianity is vulnerability - a choice to live without illusion and defenses, (naked and unashamed, one might say), recognizing reality and our place in it. This is faith’s role. Faith is not believing we have extra armor against dragons, protection from monsters, or a secret weapon against chaos. Faith helps us live vulnerably in light of the final reality. Faith is trusting we are held in this life between a beginning in God’s love and an ending in God’s love.  Chaos will not prevail. Evil will not win.  
 
Knowing what is coming, what does it cost us to see and share the pain of another? What do we risk to live boldly and joyfully?  Why not join in where redemption is unfolding?  What do we have to lose? That no matter the turmoil or monsters the moment, Jesus is here with, among us.  And that in the very end, God will deliver us completely and finally.  This is our apocalyptic insight that, if we let it, can resonate in our bones and raise our courage. This awareness can make us sing, and weep, and live, and die, as honest, open people who celebrate goodness, practice justice, love mercy, and live freely beloved by God and connected to all other beings. 
 
Amen.

God's Forever Home - and Ours

"Heaven"

(Psalm 148)

Revelation 21:1-6

“If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”  Paul said (1 Cor. 15:19).  As people of a resurrected Lord, we claim that death does not have the last word, that there is more than we can see, and that death is not the end that it appears to be.  But what does that mean?  What is our hope?

Standing in a long line, our feet hidden by fluffy clouds, outside of a gate made of actual pearls that reaches high beyond the scope of our vision, we approach the oldest looking man we have ever seen.

 Long white beard down to his belly, white robe tied with a golden rope, huge feather pen in his hand.  He is leaning over an enormous volume, on a podium in front of him, and as each one approaches, he fans through the tabbed pages in search of their name.  If he finds it, the gates slowly open, and the person walks into a shining light.  If he doesn’t, he points his arm, and the person is dropped out of the bottom of the clouds like a trap door, to eternal torture.

Once generously inside, we find that the very pavement beneath our feet is solid gold bricks, in a crosshatch pattern.  There are mansions everywhere, in neat rows along the street, everything is bright, in some hue of either yellow or white.  Angels flit around adorned with floating halos and holding harps, and there in front of us, is our name on the mailbox of the house of our dreams.

Is it something like that?  Of course not! we shake our heads and smile.  But, if not quite this cartoonish, I’ve heard lots of similar versions of heaven, or the end, that is too not far from this either.  And so often our messages about what comes after this life are so wildly disconnected from this life as not even to feel hopeful, and also, to be honest, not entirely appealing either.

One afternoon when I was fifteen years old, I was sitting in my living room, looking out at a beautiful rainstorm.  The grass was bright electric green, and wrapped in the sheltering steel gray sky, everything else in the neighborhood seemed put away and quiet, and I was surrounded by the consistent loud drumming of the drops on the roofs of houses.

The phone rang, and it was a friend of mine, (a moody broody friend of mine).  With some measure of desperation in her voice, she asked me if I thought there would be rain in heaven.

We reflected on all the things we had heard about heaven, and it seemed quite unlikely.  But in the middle of that particular spring rain, something didn’t seem right about that at all.

Praise the Lord from the earth,  

you sea monsters and all deeps,


fire and hail, snow and frost,


stormy wind fulfilling God’s command! 


Mountains and all hills,  

fruit trees and all cedars! 


Wild animals and all cattle,


creeping things and flying birds!      
(Psalm 148)

In this season of resurrection, we’ve sought to look for the living One among us, to see where God is at work in the world and in our very lives. To notice that which we fail so often to recognize because it is comes in love and laughter and redeeming joy and true connection and kindness and justice and other ordinary everyday miracles. 

We’ve heard people’s stories of resurrection – like Peter, who is redeemed in the welcome and the sending, the come and have breakfast, and the feed my sheep.  Like Mary, who hears her savior speak her name, and Thomas, whose doubts are put to rest in the invitation to reach out and touch, and trust.  We’ve heard stories of resurrection in Joyce’s family relationships, and in Amy’s neighborhood barbeque, and in Callie’s surprise calling to help children get ready for their forever homes.

But what is the world’s story of resurrection? 

What about the earth and her creatures and the whole harmony of life?

What does God have in store for the big picture, for this whole world that God created and loves?

There is so much wrong in the world. And it’s before our eyes every moment, so much so that to make it through a day takes a certain amount of numbness or denial, or it would crush us.

More than 800 million people on earth are hungry every day.

One in four women on the face of the earth has been raped.

48 million people in the United States are living below the poverty line.

Every year more than a million people die of AIDS in Africa alone.

We live on land that was settled by displacing its inhabitants and herding them into reservations.

We live in a country built on the exploitation of African slaves.

We live in a church that killed and coerced people into believing its truth.

We consume natural resources leaving nothing for future generations.

Parents beat their children who grow up and beat their children.

We reflect the values of the culture we are raised in, innocent children spat on Jews, innocent children repeat the hateful words of their parents, innocent children grow up to shoot others in their schools, workplaces, or homes.

We perpetuate evil, we breed it and nourish it even while we fight it and attempt to escape it.

We wound with our words.

We enter into relationships, knowing that therein lies an encounter with God, but all relationships are polluted with pain, and we hurt the ones we love.

Marriages fall apart, loved ones die of cancer, tragedy comes in seemingly infinite ways.

There is so much pain. There is so much injustice.  There is so much fear.

But there is rain.

And even in tears, there is something comforting, something that tells us we are alive.  And this is what my friend was getting at, I think.

Right now, in the world as we know it, these things are so entwined: beautiful music is composed by madness, breathtaking art is created in anguish, and in the most horrendous of circumstances, real connection is often found. 

My friend on the phone had decided that she would rather not go to “heaven,” if in its sanitized perfection it left out those things.  If there was no rain.  And I was almost inclined to agree with her.

But if we’ve seen anything in the character of God, we’ve seen again and again, in God’s deep adoration and commitment, and God’s relentless self-definition as the One who is with us and for us, that it is utterly incongruent for God to give up on this world, or any of us in it.  Ever. This is God’s Story; this whole big wonderful and broken world belongs to God.  Nobody loves all of this like God does. And God will never abandon it.  God will never abandon any of us.

The end of things is not a trade off.  It is not an escape for humans to a happy place in the sky, a departure from here, never to return.

And it isn’t God giving up on this cosmic failed project, wiping the slate clean and starting fresh.

The end of things is a new beginning for all things.  It is Resurrection writ large.  God says, “See! I am making all things new!” You me, this tired earth and its broken creatures and all creation, made new.

And like the Creator who walked the garden in the cool of the evening and the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us, God will come, and then God’s forever home will be here, where God’s heart is.  With God’s people, in God’s creation.  And when God does, “Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

The passage goes on from here to list all the things that will not be part of this new beginning – the things that will forever be destroyed as in a “lake of fire” – all that injures, damages, erodes, breaks down and harms life and relationship with God and each other will forever be purged from the earth. 

And it will be Life: as it should be.  It will be both the righting of all wrong, and deep, unparalleled intimacy between God and humanity, God and creation, each of us and all of us, belonging to each other as we are meant to, all life in harmony.

And all living creatures “ will join us in cacophonous singing.” (1) And along with Mary and Peter and you and me, “and all witnesses of the resurrection, with the earth and sea all their creatures, we will praise our Creator and join the unending hymn.” (2) 

At the end of the Narnia books (3) is another picture of the end – a little different than the mansions in the sky on golden streets motif.  It is described this way:

“The New Narnia was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.  I can’t describe it any better than that: if you ever get there you will know what I mean.  It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling.  He stamped his right forehoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here.  This is the land I have been looking for all my life, thought I never knew it till now.  The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.  Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!”

He shook his mane and sprang forward into a great gallop – a Unicorn’s gallop, which, in our world, would have carried him out of sight in a few moments. But now a most strange thing happened. Everyone else began to run, and they found, to their astonishment, that they could keep up with him: not only the Dogs, and the humans, but even fat little Puzzle [the donkey] and short-legged Poggin the Dwarf.  The air flew in their faces as if they were driving fast in a car without a windscreen.  The country flew past as if they were seeing it from the windows of an express train. Faster and faster they raced, but no one got hot or tired or out of breath at all.”

That day when I was 15, I wish someone had been there to answer my friend and me in our teenage wonderings about heaven.  I wish someone had been there to say heaven is the new beginning, the resurrection of all, and one day all living things and all those gone before will be redeemed. I wish someone had said to us:

In heaven, there will be rain, but no flooding.

In heaven there will be sunshine, but no parched desert.

In heaven everyone will have what they need, without taking from others, or killing to eat.

In heaven the least will not be trampled on, they will be first.

In heaven the weak will be strong, and the silenced will have a voice. 

In heaven there will be no disease, no injustice, no betrayal.

The earth will be free from abuse, and people will know no pain, sorrow, or death.  In heaven, our Creator will finally come home to earth, and dance with us in the rain.

 And what we experience now as beauty, joy, release, justice, and peace, are momentary and passing views of the real life that awaits us right here, just further up and further in, which will never diminish or disappear. 

This is the hope embodied by you and me, the resurrection people of the living Lord. 

*     *     *     *     *      *

But you know this already.  You already are witnesses.  So listen now, Listen, as this community that lives this hope, tells of this resurrection promise.  (This was followed by an audio recording of people in from our community, answering the question, What is Heaven to you? They answered things like:

Fellowship of all of us after this life, togetherness, peace. 

A feeling of warmth, acceptance and unconditional love.

Family get together.  Nothing to be afraid of.  A reunion.  Welcome.

Love, peace, beauty, serenity, community.

Closeness with God, with everything and everybody, loving, sharing, helping, affirm our connection

Being in God’s loving embrace.

Peace on earth. No violence.

Everything close to God.  Experience being with God.

Paradise.  Being with those I love and have missed.  All my questions answered.

 ___________

(1) quote from Revelation scholar Barbara Rossing

(2) from the Lutheran Easter Eucharistic prayer

(3) The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis