Making All Things New (Revelation 21:1-6a, All Saints' Sunday, November 4, 2012)

Making All Things New

Revelation 21:1-6a
All Saints’ Sunday B
November 4, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

How many of you learned that there are five senses?  That’s what I learned in school.  But it isn’t true.  There are a whole lot more than five.  Sure, sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing are important ways of getting along in the world around us.  But there are other senses that somehow didn’t make the cut. 

There is the sense of balance.   That is a good thing, I think.  So is a sense of rhythm.  A sense of wonder or awe might not be a tool for bare survival, but it is certainly necessary for being fully human.  A sense of humor is a capacity that we need both to survive and to be human. 

Another sense that is not always appreciated, especially by parents, is the sense of justice.  You can tell that it has begun to work when you first hear a child protest, “That’s not fair!”  Since that is likely to happen when we are trying to impose some semblance of order in our household, we are often not terribly open to hearing their grievance.  We just want their compliance.  So we may not appreciate how important a sense of justice really is. 

Think about it.  “That’s not fair” asserts two things.  First, it says that the world is not working correctly, at least it is not working according to my notion of how it should work.  Second, it says that the problem does not lie with me.  Those two bold statements are both implied in “That’s not fair.”

 

Now, of course, we can say that one or both of those statements is not true.  Sometimes we sense unfairness when there is none, when the world is working as it should and, really, I’ve caused  my own problems.  A sense of justice can see injustice where there is none.  Maybe that’s why I have said something like, “Every four year old knows that life isn’t fair.”  An overdeveloped sense of justice can be a real detriment.

But I am just as concerned with an underdeveloped sense of justice.  I am just as concerned when there should be a sense of outrage and there is none, when people humbly submit to evil instead of resisting it as our baptismal promises direct.  When, for instance, there is a recession and the company that I work for has shuttered its doors and there are ten people who are unemployed for every job vacancy so that, if every vacancy were filled there would still be nine out of those ten still unemployed, then I have an underdeveloped sense of justice if I imagine that my being out of work is my fault.  Sometimes the world does not work as it should and the fault does not lie with me.

A woman who is being abused in relationship is very likely to experience damage to her sense of justice.  She may come to believe that abuse is something she has come to deserve and that, if only she would behave differently, the bully in her life will stop abusing her.  A child who grows up being molested is very likely to have an underdeveloped sense of justice.  If the poor in our world had a fully developed sense of justice there would be rioting in the streets.

A sense of justice is socially disruptive whether it’s coming from a four year old, an abused woman, or an oppressed group.

The book of Revelation is what happens when someone gives free reign to the poetic expression of their sense of justice.  The book of Revelation is subversive stuff.  That’s why the church has worked so hard over the centuries to make sure that people don’t notice.  We’ve had two basic strategies.  The first is to keep people from reading it at all.  We say things like, “It’s all very symbolic and almost impossible to understand.  Besides it’s pretty violent.  You don’t want to worry yourself with it.  Read other parts of the Bible.”  Failing that, we give people false clues about how to read it.  We say things like, “This book holds the timetable for the end of history.  The one who works it all out can be ready for the end of the world, because they will know when it’s coming.”  We tell people to treat the Revelation as if it were some sort of coded newspaper from the future.

But in fact Revelation is neither impossible to understand nor a coded prediction.  It is the poetic imagination of a sense of justice.

If we’ve experienced a four year old protesting the unfairness of parental policy, the Revelation shouldn’t surprise us all that much.  There is anger.  There are tears.  There is much muttering of revenge fantasies.  There is the stomping of feet and even a tantrum or two.  All of that is there.  But there is more.

A sense of justice is able to hold the world as it is up against an image of the world as it should be and compare the two.  It’s like trying to solve those puzzles in which there are two nearly matching pictures and you are asked to find ten differences.  Those puzzles are hard.  A sense of justice works by using a very sophisticated mental operation.  The Revelation’s rejection of the unfairnesses of its world is the result of holding the Greco-Roman world up against an image of the world as God intends it.  Not surprisingly, it finds some stark differences. 

Revelation adds up to an indictment of Empire in its Roman form.  Rome is oppressing the people of God.  In particular it is oppressing and persecuting the communities for whom the book was written.  As empires do, Rome looks out at the world and seeks to turn everything into a source of cash.  Pasture land, vineyards, and olive orchards have been turned into commodities that can be bought and sold without any regard for the welfare of the people who depend on them.  In short, Rome has defied God’s intentions in order to do as it pleased. 

Rome is out of control and as its punishment God will release the forces of chaos.  Death, famine, and disease will be let loose to uncreate the world that Rome in its pride and vanity imagined that it had built.

But Revelation is more than a revenge fantasy writ large.  The sense of justice in Revelation is haunted by its image of the world as God intends it.  Yes, it uses that image to condemn Rome.  But it also holds that image for its own sake, as a hope, a dream and even a promise. 

The world will not always be as it is.  Rome is not forever.  No empire is, not even ours.  Someday, the world will be made new.  The work of creation will be completed.  The sky above and the earth below will be renewed.  Life will no longer move toward death.  There will be no more sea, says Revelation, because the sea in Hebrew imagination is the world’s clearest manifestation of chaos.  If that seems a little far-fetched, ask our friends on Staten Island and up and down the Jersey shore whether it seems far-fetched to them.  We will no longer belong to Caesar, but only to God.  We will be God’s people and God will live among us.  And, with chaos banished at last, there will be no pain and no need for grief or tears. 

This is how the story of our long struggle to live fully human lives in a humane world ends.  No matter what we face in the meantime we’ve peeked at the ending and we know what it is.  Defeat is not possible.  The saints whose lives we celebrate this morning have not lived and died in vain.  We do not live and die in vain.  We live and die as victors.

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