Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

February-22-2009-click-here-to-play

Preached by Winton Boyd on February 22, 2009

The final in our Packing our Biblical Backpack series

So we come to the end of this Biblical Backpack journey. And we save the weirdest for the last – the book of Revelation. It is Revelation, not Revelations. It is a revelation given to John of Patmos toward the end of the first century CE. Traditionally it was thought that it was the same John known as the disciple and the one who wrote the gospel of John. More recent scholarship suggests that John the disciple, John the evangelist and John of Patmos were three different people. It served as an address to seven historical communities in Asia Minor, known today as Turkey. This address was written a warning not to conform to contemporary Greco-Roman society which John “unveils” as beastly, demonic and subject to divine judgment. It was written to encourage people faced with unending challenge and conflict.

But even those of us who have only a cursory understanding of the Bible know that Revelation has spawned anything but rational discourse. Because it talks about the imminent end times and describes some great battles that go on between good and evil, it has been subject to some amazing interpretations.

I did a quick scan on Amazon of books written about or inspired by Revelation, most notably Hal Lindsey. Like many others, I read one of his early doomsday books in the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth, which predicted the end of the world in 1988. Subsequent titles of he and other writers include,

The Rapture: Truth or Consequences

Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth

Vanished into Thin Air-The hope of Every Believer

Left Behind (about 20 volumes)

From Daniel to Doomsday-the Countdown Has Begun

The Rapture- In the Twinkling of An Eye.

As mentioned, Lindsey predicted that the world would end by 1988. According to his logic, while we missed that date, the rise in abortions, environmental destruction, starvation, disease, etc. is A GOOD THING, because it confirms our FAITH that the RAPTURE is about to happen!

But he was not the first with such a predication.

William Miller was an Adventist who predicted the coming of Christ in 1843. Ann Lee was the Shaker founder who declared the start of the new Millennium in the 1840s. A man named Joachim of Italy said the world would end in 1260. And there was even Montanus, the original false prophet of doom, who said Jesus would return in Asia Minor in the 2nd century.

As I was thinking about this sermon, the image that came to mind is of a large family reunion. You gather folks from around the country, people who often have nothing in common with one another except a last name or a distant aunt/grandmother or immigrant forebear. And at every reunion there seems to be at least one wacky, far out and unbelievable relative (If they are not there – they are at least talked about!). They dress different, they speak another language, they see the world in a whole different way – a way often unintelligible to the rest of the extended family. Maybe it is the seldom seen gay uncle who left the Midwest in the 60’s and has lived in the Castro district in San Francisco. Or the cousin who has been in and out of prison for petty crimes, who talks a mile a minute seemingly oblivious to how shallow his nonstop self aggrandizing discourse sounds to others. Or the aunt who is a religious nun who has lived in some small Guatemalan village for 30 years. The reclusive bachelor farmer from the hollows of South Dakota. The used car salesman from Provo, Utah who is married to your mom’s sister’s daughter…

The great thing about these wacky relatives and their different view of the world is that every now and then, in the midst of their strange and out of place quality – they say something amazing. Every now and then, because they see the world so differently, they have an insight that no one else can have. An amazingly potent observation or affirmation is made, an incredible gesture of compassion is shared.

Revelation is to the other books of the Bible what the wacky relative is to our family reunion. We could probably live without them, but we would be lesser people because of it.

So, let’s welcome the seldom heard from relative, the book of Revelation.

First of all, the book was written as “proclamation” not prediction. Sometime it might be good to study the core of Revelation, which are the seven visions written for seven churches. What we are reading today, however, comes toward the very end of the book, and thus the very end of bible. These final chapters are a summation of hope after some colorful, coded language describing the battles between good and evil, those following God and those not.

As he concludes the book, John turns to some ancient imagery. William Loader writes that chapter 21 is a “tapestry of Old Testament images of hope.” The hope is for both a new heaven and a new earth. In many people’s theology hope has been heaven only. Earth is left behind or irrelevant, and therefore there is no need to care about it.

John stands in the tradition of Isaiah 65:17 [17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.] and 66:22[For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, says the LORD; so shall your descendants and your name remain.]. These images from Isaiah have at their root a positive attitude towards God’s creation; rather than a dualism which sees spirituality as abandonment of what we are and where we belong.

As such, it is a reminder that “we enter heaven not by escaping what we don’t like, but by the sanctification of the place in which God has placed us.” (Eugene Peterson)

If this is true – then Revelation, far from being a prediction of an imminent doomsday, is a proclamation of hope in a God who cares about things that are quite tangible, and anything but otherworldly. Community, compassion, incarnation take on even greater importance as we realize the vision that will sustain us is not rooted somewhere else but right here.

Specifically, the language of the passage points to the
power of the city – where God’s people reside, and the importance of creation as embraced and celebrated in the creation stories –
the abundant river of life,
the tree of life which provides sustenance,
and the leaves of the trees which contribute to the healing of the nations.

The home of God, John writes, is among mortals and on the earth. We often think that we are among the first generation to care about the earth, to see in the earth the wisdom and “word” of God. What Revelation reminds us is that these ancient forebears, faced with their own persecution and even destruction, struggling to understand the role of their faith in the face of great struggle – turned to that which was quite integral to their lives, their existence, their income and their livelihoods – the earth. Rather than imagining a heaven in some faraway place, they drew on their very experience with the land and creation.

If the olive and the fig tree still produce fruit – God is still with us and will produce fruit and life within us.

If the river still flows, still provides cleansing of body and spirit, still nourishes our quenched dry throats in the summer and feeds our animals in the winter – then life is possible, hope is still worth pursuing.

If the leaves of the trees still provide shade, can be crushed into medicinal balm for our accident-prone children – then we can still be a force for healing, compassion, reconciliation.

Revelation reminds us that our connection to the earth transcends all the levels of our lives.

I remember the week after 9/11 receiving a newsletter from the CSA farm we have been a part of for 10 years, Vermont Valley. Barb Perkins wrote about the power and importance of weeding and harvesting. It wasn’t a diversion. It wasn’t sticking one’s head in the sand. In the face of incredible suffering, unknown threats and potential war unlike any we had known – she knew in her bones that working her hands in the earth was integral to hope and healing. In their newsletter she wrote, We were in the potato field…The sky was blue, the air a bit cool, the sun warm, a slight breeze was blowing and we all moved as if one with the earth, sometimes talking to each other, often lost in our thoughts…Then the engine noise ceased and David was walking towards us. He had been listening to the radio in the cozy confines of his tractor cab. As he told us the news our mouths opened in astonishment…We learned that another building had collapsed and heard the voice of our president reassuring us..we (returned) and harvested beets.
One of the things I appreciated in our Next Generation Initiative conversations here at ORUCC was the desire for the “greening” of our faith. For some, it involves a desire for more gardening, for others attention to energy conversation. Some want to worship outside and others want to reflect theologically on our relationship to all of creation; both here or in other natural settings – like camps! Some want blessings for the animals in our lives, bike to church, put up solar panels, or practice baptism in real running water. Yet others reflect on the dual power of having their ashes buried in the ground and having that ground be the land on which their spiritual home/church resides.

What I love about this passage in Revelation is the reminder that God is in all of this. Our “sanctification”, our pursuit of holiness is intimately connected to our relationship with the earth.

• When we are biking to work or church or school – it is good to save carbon and it is good to know that the wind that blows across our face is indeed the Spirit of God cleansing our body and soul.
• When a solar panel is converting the sun’s energy into electricity, it is part of the transformation of our spirit and mind and our place in this world.
• When we worship between a garden and a Garth, we not only smell the tomatoes and see the flowers blooming; we are infused with the hope of the God of generations past and future.

Faced with incredibly difficult circumstances – the people of God written about in Isaiah and in Revelation articulated hope for a better day – AND kept on living that hope in the here and now. They asked not to be taken from this place, but moved to live even more deeply in this place, among these people, in this day and with these challenges. Hope was rooted and real.

Truth be told, one of the places I first saw this lived out was among one of my weird relatives. Among my extended family is a farmer who lives on the western plains. He is a strange man, even a troubled man with all kinds of phobias and untested certainties about the world. I remember standing outside with he and several other male relatives while they kicked the curb at a family reunion when I was a young adult – sophisticated, traveled and educated of course. Under the golden summer evening sun I was feeling tortured as the conversation slowly, ever so slowly, revolved around the weather – thre possibility of rain, the chance of hail, the heat of the sun. Can we not talk about anything but the WEATHER I thought? Politics, theology, racism, even baseball or football?

Suddenly, it hit me. The ground on which we were standing and the weather around us were, for these quiet men, life in all its fullness. It was on their land that life made sense, it was in working with the land that they learned of hope, humility, success and failure. The wind and the rain were real live expressions of the power of the Divine as they understood him.

They weren’t talking about the weather because they had nothing else to say. They were simply living out life and faith as they knew it –and frankly were far more connected and rooted in what THEY knew that I was in what I THOUGHT I knew about city life, the urban kids I was working with, or the politics I had studied.

Being green is not about political correctness. It is an ancient and deeply rooted act of hope. Rooted in the earth upon which we stand and rooted in the dna in our bones from ancient forebears. It is an act of hope that for a while in this country some of us thought we could do without. Returning, or revisiting, or renewing our sacred connection to this soilful faith now is both an act of contrition for our wayward ways, and an act of hope in the face of cultures and lifestyles that seek to grind us all up. We need each other in this journey. We need the wisdom of the ancients to help us wade through all of the choices and decision we face with our time, our money, our use of resources. Most of all, we need the Holy One whose love and inspiration and power is seen in the creation all around us – the old heaven and old earth, the present heaven and present earth, and the new heaven and the new earth.  Amen

Revelation 21:1-4

The New Heaven and the New Earth
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.’

22:1-7

The River of Life
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign for ever and ever.
And he said to me, ‘These words are trustworthy and true, for the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place.’
‘See, I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.’