A VISION OF A NEW DAY

Sermon preached by Dr. Mark Smutny

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Pasadena Presbyterian Church

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them;  he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.”  Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”

- Revelation 21:1-6a

The Book of Revelation can make church folk jumpy.  One never knows what craziness will pop out.  The images and obsessions of Revelation have fomented more strife, fueled more demonic fantasies, misled more needy people, and lined the wallets of more charlatans than any other book in the Bible.

To those who hope faith can preserve some degree of rational respectability, the Book of Revelation can seem like absolute craziness with talk of a dragon with seven heads, plagues of demonic locusts, women clothed with the sun, and a bejeweled city come down from heaven.

It has been used to justify all manner of things:  anti-Catholic diatribe, militant hate speech, Christian Zionism and sectarian violence.  The book is a happy hunting ground for bigots, numerologists and for mind-boggling distortions of its original meaning and purpose.

Revelation has an amazing power to attract entrepreneurs from Southern California like Hal Lindsey and the authors of the Left Behind series, who though born in Michigan, got tipped to Southern California, the land of fruits and nuts, and who have made four quadrillion zillion dollars, predicting the imminent end of the world as they laughed all the way to the bank.

And yet on this first Sunday of November, All Saints Day, our ears are caressed with these elegant, evocative words, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them;  he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

Lyricism as such needs nothing more to convince us of this book’s enduring power.  It is no accident that this reading from chapter 21 celebrating the holy city where “death shall be no more” has been associated since ancient times with the rites of Christian burial.  This association is consonant with the book’s original intent, for at its first hearing, Revelation, at its heart, was a book of consolation, a vision of comfort for a people persecuted and in distress.

It can be difficult for those of us who live in comfort to imagine what persecution can be like — to live each moment in fear and trembling, always on the run, always faithful but always fearful, never sure.

Such was the life the Emperor Diocletian, a brutal sadist, inflicted on the Christians who wrote and passed on to us this book.  They were brothers and sisters in the faith, who for the sake of a name, Jesus Christ, placed their core identity above that of another lord, namely Diocletian.  For Diocletian, the Christians represented a problem of state control.  He couldn’t tolerate their loyalty going to anyone other than him.  The mid-Twentieth Century confessing church in Germany had the same quandary with Hitler, the Soviet Union with Stalin.  Which Lord will you serve?  To whom will you cleave?

The Christians of Diocletian’s reign, by putting on Christ in their baptism, declared that their citizenship was not of a city made of human hands, but of a heavenly city.  The vision of a new heaven and a new earth replacing an old creation gave hope to a people whose everyday existence hung by a thread of faith, a thread of prayer, a thread of conviction that God in the fullness of time would “wipe every tear from their eyes, death would be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” 

How these people suffered and how they lived and how they died — little do we know about them.  We do not know how they escaped persecution such that we have their book.  We do not even know their names. 

But in passages like chapter 21, we do know they imagined their freedom.  And as they imagined their freedom we begin to see what they saw.  We begin to hear what they preached.  We can see that they envisioned a new universal humanity; we hear of a new heaven and a new earth, a holy city come down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband.

Marrying heaven and earth is a good thing if what you experience every day is shifting values and imperial terror.  A tiny fringe sect, marginal to power, pictures a day when pain and death would be no more.  These words of comfort and consolation were written and held close and dear and declared “trustworthy and true” because the alternative was unthinkable, intolerable, unbearable.

Here we are twenty centuries later.  The cadences and rhythms of chapter 21 roll through the sacred memories of nearly every memorial service we’ve ever attended. 

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the

first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.  And I saw the

holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,

prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice

from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will

dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

Once you’ve heard these words, and heard them again at a grandmother’s funeral or your mother’s or your father’s or your husband’s or your wife’s or your child’s or your best friend’s, you’ll never forget them.  You’ll never forget.

Like in a revival tent pitched on some urban street of an abandoned city block where despair is fought with a vision of a new day where every thing is clean and gleaming, as in sermons that echo the ancient cry of the persecuted and the dispossessed, it is hard to get the cadences and the rhythms out of your mind.  They stick to you like a bride to a groom, like a child to her momma, like a prayer that lingers on the lips.  To hear this reading on All Saint’s Day when we remember all who have gone before, when we remember them and want those we have loved and lost to be with us here and we know they can’t, we hear a summons to hope, a vision of comfort, a promise of a new day.  Whether in the farthest reaches of the First Century Roman Empire, or in solidarity with persecuted people everywhere, or in the misty memory of loved ones who are no longer with us, we hear the longing.  We feel the comfort.  We see the vision of a new day.  We hear the promise, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.”  They are true.  And our tears are wiped away; the pain is lessened and we know the home of our loved ones is with God.  They are with God and so are we.  Amen.