Making All Things New (Revelation 21:1-6; Easter 5C; April 28, 2013)

Making All Things New
Revelation 21:1-6
Easter 5C
April 28, 2013

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

There are reasons to be discouraged about the flow of history. Should I just go down the list? Should I limit myself to the last few days? We have a Congress that can move with record speed to make sure that their airline flight home won’t be delayed, but which is unconcerned in any visible way about children who do not have a secure source for food, children whose prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” is not a pious metaphor, but a serious and literal matter. We have people in this world who imagine that they can make the world a better place, that they can serve their God by bombing the finish line of the Boston Marathon. We have other people— who claim to be Christian— who are willing to take out their desire for revenge— which is specifically forbidden to Christians by Jesus himself— on any random Muslim. We have a President in Syria who clings so tightly to power that he is willing to kill his people in order to remain their leader. And on and on I could go.

There are reasons to be pessimistic about the flow of history. And to tell the truth I am not optimistic. I am not optimistic. But I am hopeful. I am hopeful because I know that this world ultimately belongs to God. I have heard God’s story. I have read God’s book. I have read it from Genesis clear through to the end. I know the path that God has walked through human history. I know the character of this God. This is a God who is not in it for the power trip or for the winters on the Gulf Coast. Yes, this God sometimes gets carried away, if the story is anything to go by. But God only gets carried away because God is passionately committed to justice. God takes sides. God takes the side of the widow, the orphan and the stranger. God takes the side of the hungry, the thirsty, the ill-clothed, the sick, the imprisoned, and the stranger. God takes the side of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the weak against the strong. I know the character of this God.

I’ve been telling the kids that Easter is too important to be only a single day of the year. It’s not just a day of the year. It’s a day of the week. And it’s a season of fifty days that stretches from Easter Sunday through the day of Pentecost, that gets its name from pentekosta, the Greek work for fifty. During these fifty days of Easter, and especially on the Sundays in that season, the question that lies behind all the lessons is “So what?” What difference does Easter make? What difference does the resurrection make?

Today the answer to that question is this: To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., it is God’s intention to bend the “arc of human history” toward justice.[1] That is why Jesus is alive. Jesus is alive as God’s down payment on the promise to bring justice to our world. The result of Jesus being alive is that the new life that is in him is also in us and the new life that is in him and in us is also in the whole created order.

“Then I saw and new heaven and a new earth,” writes the author of Revelation. “Then the one seated on the throne said, “Look! I’m making all things new.” I have read this book and I know how this story turns out. And now all of you know how it turns out, too.

It’s that simple. And it’s also not that simple. Or rather, it is simple, but not in the way that we think it is. Confused?

The trouble is that we have a hard time reading Revelation and the rest of the Bible for that matter. For example, we tend to have rather rigid ideas about time. We think that one thing leads to another, that history is one thing after another, and that events come in only one order. The past is behind us and we’re in now and in front of us is the future and they’re all supposed to stay put, especially the future. The future isn’t supposed to seep into the present. But the Bible doesn’t care nearly so much about that as we do. Walter Brueggemann writes somewhere that texts like this one from Revelation are “subversive memories of the future.” I have suggested that we read Revelation (and much of the rest of the Bible) as a work of poetic imagination that expresses the writer’s sense of justice.

Reading Revelation as a work of poetic imagination rules out, I think, the kind of tortured reading done by fundamentalists who pour through their newspapers, converting letters to numbers and trying to figure out whose name comes out to 666, trying to Gog and Magog refer to Russia, and trying to count the 27 members of the European Union and come up with the number 10 because that’s what they need it to be to make sense of parts of Revelation. I advise setting all that aside. With all due respect to those who spend their energy on this, this way of reading Revelation is nonsense.

Poetic imagination does not need to pay much attention to time. The future can bust out in the present, or even in the past. The present can be foreshadowed in the past. The past can erupt in the future. There’s a lot of this sort of thing in Revelation; its time direction is not straight and it doesn’t even move consistently in one direction.

This is important because too many of us read Revelation, if we read it at all, as a way to discover what is going to happen in the future. That is a serious misreading. Revelation is intended to tell its readers about the present and what the present means. The events that Revelation tells about are not future events; they are aspects of what is happening right now.

All of this means that the event described in our reading is a present event. It’s happening now.

There is a new heaven and a new earth. The former earth and the former heaven have passed away and the sea is no more. (What does the writer have against the ocean? For Semitic people the sea is a sign and symbol of chaos. The waters above the firmament of heaven and below the firmament of the earth always threaten to break in and destroy the earth. For the sea to pass away, means that God’s creative ordering of the world has triumphed in such a way that it can no longer be threatened.)

Of course, it still looks like the former heaven and the former earth are very much with us. This is why we need Revelation. It shows another aspect of the way things really are.

Yes, God intends to make all things new. If that is so, then, knowing that it’s happening even now, we ought to be able to see it if we look carefully. Well, the earth around us is going through its yearly renewal right now, but that isn’t what I mean.

Jesus carried that renewal with him wherever he went. He preached good news to the poor. He healed the blind. He cured the sick. He made lepers clean. He set tormented souls free. He announced God’s Jubilee, freedom for slaves and the return of every parcel of land to its rightful owners. The outcome of his mission would be beating swords into plows and spears into pruning hooks. It would mean that everyone would sit under their own fig tree and their own vine and no one would make them afraid. Not everyone would welcome this news. Arms manufacturers and real estate moguls in particular took offense. But God takes sides and so does Jesus.

New broke out wherever Jesus went, as he spoke, as he touched fevered bodies and calmed fevered minds. And here’s the thing— whenever and wherever we follow Jesus and do as he did— new breaks out! When we comfort those who weep— new breaks out! When we sit with those who are sick— new breaks out! When we welcome a Muslim or mentally ill or Latino neighbor, when strangers who are scorned in other places find a welcome with us— new breaks out! When we call for justice— even at our own expense— for our friends far away and for our next door neighbors— new breaks out! When we find a way to repair just a little of damage that we have done to the earth our home— new breaks out!

When we return a kind word for a hard one and we resist evildoers without resorting to violence— new breaks out! When we begin to wage peace as fiercely as we waged war in the past— new breaks out! Whenever we do any of these things, then the expression of the poetic imagination of the prophet John begins to take on solid form: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth… There will be no mourning, crying or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

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[1] “I haven't lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King, Jr., “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” sermon delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967 (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16183.htm, accessed April 26, 2013).