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.”

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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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).

The Last Enemy (1 Corinthians 15:19-26; Easter C; March 31, 2013)

The Last Enemy

1 Corinthians 15:19-26
Easter C
March 31, 2013

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

He did what he said he was going to do.  Luke is a little vague about just where and when.  “Once when Jesus was praying along,” it says.  But it was clear back in chapter nine, some fifteen chapters ago.  Jesus had asked his disciples what the word on the street about him was.  They answered that some people thought he was John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others one of the various other prophets.  Jesus asked who they thought he was and Peter—it’s always Peter, isn’t it?—Peter answered, “God’s messiah, the Christ, the anointed one.”

Then Jesus told them what he was going to do: He was going to Jerusalem.  There he would suffer, be rejected by the leaders of their people, and be put to death.  And on the third day he would rise.  And that’s what he did.

He went to Jerusalem.  He went to confront the powers that be in Jerusalem.  The powers that be were what we would think that they were: the Romans, of course, who governed in Judea without much pretense at home rule, and their Jewish collaborators.  These came mostly from the upper classes.  They were the priestly families, the nobility, the landowning class, the one-percenters.  Rome had arranged things so that the local upper classes would keep their positions and enjoy their privileges as long as they kept the people quiet and made sure the taxes were paid in full and on time.  This was Rome’s scheme of empire that left them free to enjoy the fruits of empire while leaving most of the dirty work to the local elites.  It was a neat arrangement.

Jesus went to Jerusalem to mess up this neat arrangement.  Once there, he headed to the Temple, the center of religious and symbolic power in Roman Palestine.  The Temple wasn’t just a place of worship.  It was also a state-controlled medium.  Its symbols and rituals continually broadcast the message that the way things were was God’s will.  The emperor and his servants were to be obeyed.  Those who obeyed them would be rewarded.  Those who disobeyed them would be punished.  The rich and the poor were rich and poor by God’s will and, since God is just, the rich deserved their wealth and the poor deserved their poverty.

There had been a series of revolutionaries and would-be messiahs who had come to Jerusalem determined as Jesus was to beard the lion in its own den.  What made Jesus different is that he saw that the struggle against the Empire would not take place on a military level.  He knew that it would be a struggle in symbol and story and one that involved the spiritual and invisible powers as well as the visible and political ones.

So on the way to the Temple, he staged a bit of street drama in which he made fun of the symbols of the empire by putting on all the trappings of empire and parading into the city.  Then, when he got to the Temple, he un-tidied the arrangements by making a mess in the court of the Gentiles. He wrecked the booths and stalls of the money-changers and the vendors of sacrificial animals and drove the merchants and money-changers themselves from the Temple.  In doing that he stripped bare the false claims and pretenses of the priestly leaders.  God had in fact nothing to do with what was going on in the courts of the Temple complex.  God had not blessed the status quo.  Obedience to Judean collaborators or their Roman overlords was no virtue and disobedience was no vice.  The only allegiance that anyone owed was to that elusive, never-quite-present and never-quite-absent reality that Jesus called the reign of God.

Walter Brueggemann has written somewhere that what tyrants fear most is not armed revolutionaries—and I would add, not even if they are armed with AK-47s—but poets.  Tyrants are most afraid of poets, because poets can use language to lay bare the lies that tyrants need in order to govern.

In the streets of Jerusalem and in the Temple, Jesus, the poet, unmasked the false promises of the Empire.  The Empire had a way of dealing with annoying poets and it was simple, especially if they were not Roman citizens: they killed them.  So that’s what they did.  But of course along the way they used symbols and speech of their own to try to undo what Jesus had done.  With a thorn of crowns and with the inscription on the cross—“This is the King of the Jews”—they made a mockery of his mockery.  They crucified him in public—a dehumanizing and humiliating death penalty used to demonstrate how Rome dealt with rebels.  With characteristic efficiency and brutality they dealt with this annoying poet and master of street theater.

There were two things they had not counted on.

The first was that even a state-sponsored murder like the one that Jesus suffered can have more than one effect.  The intended effect was to subdue the people, to show what happens when subjects disobey.  But in Jesus’ case it backfired.  Roman claims to rule were based on the claim that Roman justice was just.  But here was Jesus, an innocent man, put to death for a capital crime.  This was a miscarriage of justice.  Romans claimed to be just, but they themselves had made clear that they were more interested in staying in power than in justice.  The Romans had not counted on Jesus’ ability to turn his crucifixion into an indictment. 

More than that, they had not counted on the resurrection.   Now, I’ll be the first to say that I don’t understand what happened in Jesus’ tomb.  Neither Luke nor any of the other gospels is of much help.  They tell us that Jesus died.  Then they tell us that he appeared alive to his disciples in various settings and circumstances.  They do not tell us what happened in between.  I not only say that I do not understand what happened, but also that we should be very cautious about trying to fill in a blank about which the gospels are not only silent, but not even curious.

Still, the resurrection is central to our story and we are here this morning for good reasons.  I have not labored over a sermon, the choir and the musicians have not planned and practiced for weeks, you yourselves have not made the effort to be here only for me to tell you, “Never mind.  There’s nothing to see here, folks.  Now move along!”

It’s just that we’re up against a mystery.  We don’t have much tolerance for mysteries.  But by saying that the resurrection is a mystery I’m not saying that it isn’t important.  The resurrection describes a simple reality: when the disciples gathered after Jesus’ death, they experienced him as present.  Sometimes, especially in the beginning, it was a presence you could see and touch and hear.  Later, and for us, it is a presence that is no less real, but less obvious, experienced mostly in our hearts and minds and that sense when we are together that there is more to us than the sum of our parts.

If you were here last week you remember that I talked about Monseñor Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, who was killed thirty-three years ago last Sunday.  As an archbishop he spent his time and energy with the poor of El Salvador and was such an outspoken advocate for them that the government was frightened and enraged.  He knew that his life was in danger.  A couple of weeks before he was shot while celebrating mass, he told a newspaper report that if the government had him killed he would be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.  I know that what he promised came true, because I have felt Monseñor Romero alive in them as they processed with lit candles to commemorate his martyrdom, when they sang songs to celebrate his love of the poor and his demands for justice, when they spoke of Monseñor’s vision for a Church of the People in a country that worked for everyone, not just for the fourteen fortunate families that control most of the wealth.

As much as it is true for Monseñor Romero, how much more is it true for Jesus.  The Romans thought they had disposed of him, but he is very much alive, more alive now than he ever was when he walked the hills of Galilee and the long, stony road to Jerusalem.  I have witnessed his resurrection.  I have felt him in a hospital room while waiting with someone going to surgery.  I have felt him beside a death bed when a faithful follower has completed their life’s journey.  I have felt him in worship as his people gather to pray and sing and listen carefully to God.  I have felt him as people found the courage to stand up for love and justice and against fear and mistrust.  I have even felt him in committee meetings—yes, I know, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true—I’ve felt him in committee meetings as people wrestled with hard decisions, sought God’s wisdom and committed themselves to supporting each other.  I have witnessed the resurrection.

The Romans never counted on that. 

Their empire, of course, is long since gone.  Other empires have come and gone since.  But the Empire is still around.  Nowadays it’s harder to see.  It doesn’t fly a flag or have a single seat of power.  But its scope now is global and it has no boundaries. 

Its centers of power are in places like Bonn, Tokyo, London, Wall Street and K Street.  It operates differently now.  It no longer crucifies its enemies, at least not literally. 

But for all the differences, there are some things about the Empire that haven’t changed.  It still makes promises it can’t keep.  And in the end the only thing it has to offer is death.  It has turned everyone and everything into a commodity, something to be bought and sold.  It knows, to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde, the price of everything and the value of nothing.  It counts everything, but there is something that it has not counted on.

There is a power at loose in the universe.  There is a justice that oppression cannot overcome.  There is a compassion that fear cannot defeat.  There is a love that hatred cannot bring down.  There is a life that death cannot hold back.  There is a power at loose in the universe that stands with us when everything stands against us.  There is a power at loose in the universe that has drawn us together this morning. 

So we have come to hear the same story that we’ve heard over and over, to take up the task of being God’s people in the world once again, to be sent as Jesus was sent.

We are here because hope has been set free from despair.  We are here because love has outlasted hatred.  We are here because peace has proven stronger than violence.  We are here because life itself is risen from the dead. 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Bad Citizens (Acts 5:27-32; 2nd Sunday of Easter, Year C; Confirmation Sunday, April 7, 2013)

Bad Citizens

Acts 5:27-32
2^nd Sunday of Easter, Year C
Confirmation Sunday
April 7, 2013

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

Well here it is: Confirmation Sunday.  I have been annoying our confirmands since last October and have run out of fresh ways to do it.  There are any number of sermons I wish I could preach this morning, many things that I wish I could tell them about the life of Christian discipleship.  Early versions of this sermon contained at least two or three of those sermons each. 

I’ve learned over the years that a sermon should have one focus.  “Think rifle, rather than shotgun,” my first preaching professor said.  That has been good advice, so I’ll stick with it.  And, when deciding which sermon to preach, I have a bias toward the text.  And what a text!

Just to refresh our memory and put this story into context, we note that the disciples, now called apostles, had been caring for the sick and deranged and people were finding their health and wholeness again.  (This is one of the ways that the reign of God appears.  It’s one of the ways that the risen Jesus makes himself known.) 

Anyway, the religious officials didn’t like it.  It undercut their authority; these ministries were not approved by the proper committees and the people doing them had not even heard of the Board of Ordained Ministry let alone been ordained.  The priests had warned the apostles not to talk and act in such status quo-disturbing ways, but the apostles ignored the warnings.  The priests then had the apostles arrested.  That very night an angel busted them out of the joint and sent them back to the Temple.  There was some Keystone cops kind of confusion as the priests sent to have the prisoners brought to them, only to discover they had escaped, only to discover that they were in the Temple courtyards again, carrying on as if nothing had happened.  So the apostles were arrested once more and brought before the priests.

The priests reminded the prisoners of the earlier warning.  The apostles, however, did not seem particularly respectful of the priests’ authority, nor particularly inclined to obey.  It was clear that they were disciples of Jesus.  “We must obey God rather than any human authority,” they said, “We are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey God.”  

It is in the nature of witnesses to testify; they are not allowed to keep silent.  They are empowered by the Holy Spirit that refuses to stay within approved channels or be subjected to regulation by the Temple bureaucracy.  The apostles are going to keep on doing what they have been doing, what Jesus has been doing.

The Temple puts out a message of stability.  Its message is that the way things are—the Romans in charge, the wealth of the wealthy, the poverty of the poor, the oppression of the weak by the strong, the illnesses of the sick, the competitive striving for mastery in an economy of scarcity, and the violence used to enforce the will of the rulers—all of this is the way that God wants it.  It is the will of God.  Any complaint is rebellion.  Revolution is unthinkable.

Jesus rejected this message.  He offered, and acted out, a different vision of human life in the world, one founded on peaceful non-violence, other-embracing love, and debt-forgiveness.  Jesus called it the Reign of God.  God, the God of Moses and the prophets, sides with the oppressed against oppressors, with the weak against the strong, with the poor against the rich, with the outcast against the privileged.  The God that the Temple offers is no God at all, only the projection of the wishes of the ruling class.  The powers that be didn’t like this message, so they killed the messenger.

But in this struggle between Jesus and the Temple, God had chosen sides.  God had raised Jesus from the dead.  Killing Jesus didn’t stop his message; quite the contrary.  Now there were dozens, even hundreds of copies of Jesus with the same Spirit and the same disturbing message.  Just as putting out an oil fire with water spreads the fire, so killing Jesus had spread his message and vision. 

The apostles were not about to stop what they were doing.  They were followers of Jesus.  They were doing what Jesus had been doing, was still doing through them.  They saw through the lies and the mystifications of the ruling class.  They invite us to do the same.  That’s our text for the morning.

Now, isn’t this a dangerous message to be preaching to young people?  They don’t normally listen to sermons, so maybe they won’t hear this message.  Still it’s risky, don’t you think, even to put this stuff out there?  I have the excuse that it’s just the Biblical text, and what am I going to do?  Still, we mainline Protestant denominations have done a pretty good job of keeping people from reading the Bible to see what it actually says, so what am I thinking in bringing an unsuitable text like this to the light of day?

Unfortunately, like the priests of the Temple, we are thinking more this morning of stability and continuity than we are of resurrection and revolution.  We are looking at these confirmands and thinking, “The Church is carrying on.  I was confirmed.  These are being confirmed.  Their children will be confirmed.  The Church is carrying on.”  The Finance Committee is looking at them and thinking, “One day one or two of these will be strong givers.”  The Nominations Committee is thinking, “I wonder which of these would be willing to serve on a committee?”

Parents are looking at their confirmands with pride.  They’re thinking, “It’s taking so long for them to grow up!  When are they going to move out?”  Well, maybe not.  But it does take a long time to raise a child.  Today parents are offered a hopeful sign that the task of raising them will not last forever. 

We’re looking at confirmation as if it were a milestone, a marker beside a road that shows how far they have come.  We’re looking at confirmation under the sign of stability and continuity.  Our kids are doing what we expect them to do.  We expect them to continue doing what we expect them to do.  They will graduate from high school.  They will chose—at least in a preliminary sort of way—a career for themselves in which they will make enough money to move out of the house.  They will go to work or to college or technical school and then to work.  They will go into debt—probably deeply—and they will work to pay off their debts.  They will fall in love.  They will fall out of love.  They will fall in love again.  They will find someone to marry.  They will have children.  They will have their children baptized, or as I have heard it expressed, “done.”  They will take their turn as the parents of confirmands.  And so on.

It does not further that plan to say to them that they might imitate the apostles who said, “We must obey God rather than people.”  Too much like the Temple priests, we are rooting for the status quo.  Neither parents, nor teachers, nor pastors are particularly eager to hear any of these young people say to us, “We must obey God rather than you.” 

This text reveals a hidden possibility in the rite of passage that we call confirmation.  It is possible that instead of confirmation being a milestone along the way to becoming pretty much like us so that things can go on pretty much as they have, that these confirmands will hear in confirmation a call to enter in a new way into the life of discipleship to Jesus.  It is possible that they will take these vows and mean them, not just as pretty words that mean a special dinner and presents, but as a summons to a life lived for God and for God’s vision of human life in the world. 

They might, for example, hear me ask them if they “accept the freedom and power God gives [them] to resist evil, injustice and oppression, in whatever forms they present themselves?” and assume that because they answer, “I do,” that they may and ought to start resisting evil, injustice and oppression.  And who knows just where they will find it?

Friends, this whole thing could be serious trouble for us and for anyone who is comfortable in the status quo, anyone who would rather avoid trouble, anyone who would rather not be reminded too often that we eat well as others starve, that we are safe while others are at risk from violence that we have paid for, that we drive our cars and trucks while others live with leaked crude oil in their back yard and poisons in the air.  This whole thing could be serious trouble. 

Friends, confirmation is not just a rite of passage for a few young people and their families.  It is not just a series of questions asked of our youth to see whether they believe the right things and are willing to commit to supporting the church.  Confirmation is also a challenge to all of us: are we willing to take these questions seriously?  And beyond that, are we willing to answer as we ask the confirmands to answer?

If we are then we and they can learn together how to strip away the various guises and disguises in which “evil, injustice and oppression” hide.  If we are then we and they can learn together what it means to be witnesses along with the Spirit of Christ of the resurrection of Jesus.  If we are then we and they can learn together how to make a space for God’s new way of being human in the world, and together we will see an answer to our ancient prayer for God’s name to be hallowed and God’s kingdom to come.

We know that God loves us.  We know that God wants truly human life for us.  But God will not be mocked.  If we are not willing to answer as we ask the confirmands to answer, if we wed ourselves too closely to the comforts of the status quo, if we close our eyes to “evil, injustice and oppression,” then the day will come when they will say, “We must obey God rather than people.”  And by “people” they will mean us.

But that day does not have to come.  On this happy day let us commit ourselves to God’s new life as we confirm these young people in the ancient faith.  Let us strive with them to make real these words in the actions of our lives.  Let us work and rejoice and weep and laugh and worship and struggle alongside each other as God’s people who are disciples of Jesus. 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.