“Then
I Saw…”
Revelation
21:1-6a
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
November
1, 2009
All
Saints Day
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I was so excited this
week to get Wendell Berry’s new collection of poems – his first in five
years –called Leavings.
Even the dust jacket of the book is exquisite. I
already have found, oh, twenty or so of his poems I want to read to you but I am
going to limit myself – for now – to one.
(Wendell Berry, by the way, for those who may not know of him, is a
lifelong
1.
How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free
market and global
trade?
Please name your preferred poisons.
2.
For
the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the blanks with
the names of your favorite evils and
acts of hatred.
3.
What
sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the
monuments, shrines, and works of art
you would most willingly destroy.
4.
In
the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you
willing
to desecrate?
List in the following spaces the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you
could most readily do without?
5.
State
briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security
for which
you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children you would be willing to kill.
Well,
that poem may have you wishing I would stick with Mary Oliver.
But, in light of this morning’s scripture, I hardly can think of a poem
more apt, for
People
sometimes wonder if the same John who wrote the gospel bearing his name also
wrote the book of Revelation. The
answer is no. He calls himself
“John” because, at the time he wrote, it was important to associate all of
the writings judged to communicate the authentic Christian faith with the
original apostles, or they would not be considered legitimate.
So the tradition developed that John, one of the sons of Zebedee, wrote
the gospel of John, the three Letters of John, and the book of Revelation.
But the style of the gospel and the Revelation are so different – the
gospel being written in beautiful, elegant,
flawless Greek while the Revelation is marred with all kinds of
grammatical and syntactical errors – that they could not both have come from
the same author’s hand. Still, the
John of the Revelation, whatever his real identity, was a saint of the early
church, a prophet and a pastor, for it was the zeal of his preaching activities
– judged dangerous by the Roman Empire – that caused him to be arrested and
exiled to the Island of Patmos.
It
was there that this servant “John,” an old man now, was caught up in the
Spirit on the Lord’s day and given a vision, a revelation, and was told to
write what he saw: “Then I saw a new
heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed
away, and the sea (that chaotic sea, that sea roiling with a relentless tsunami
of tumult, turmoil, and trouble) was no more.
And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem (the representative city of
all the world’s cities, the center of life on earth) coming down out of heaven
from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
A beatific vision if ever there was one.
Though the language is poetic and metaphorical, it is inspiring
nonetheless. It is not that God
wipes out the previous creation, the earth that we know, and makes a new one in
its place but that the world is transformed so utterly that it is
new. John does not say that God will
make all new things, but that God will make all things new.
I
do find it telling that John sees the fulfillment of God’s kingdom occurring
not in a return to some Edenic paradise, not going back to a pristine Garden of
Eden existence. The fulfillment is
depicted in the image of a city as winsome and beautiful as a bride on her
wedding day. It is not hard to give
up hope for our cities, to think that they are beyond redemption.
Years ago when Philip Morris was the Executive Director of the Arts
Council – those of you who have lived here for a time undoubtedly remember
Philip the Iconoclast – I asked him one day as we were eating a picnic lunch
down on City Island by the BPU building what one word he would use, if he only
could have one word, to describe Jamestown.
Do you know what he said? He
thought for only a few seconds before choosing the word “abandoned.”
He lamented the number of creative, capable, educated, moneyed people who
had left the city for outlying areas. He
regretted the leadership loss those moves portended, the drain of well-adjusted
children from the city schools, the economic blow.
He understood the flight, for cities, including ours, have problems: high
taxes, increasing crime, deteriorating neighborhoods, older housing,
socio-economic distress.
But
I think Philip saw that if the world was going to work, cities had to work,
cities where the highest concentration, where eighty-five percent of the
world’s people, live. It is one of
the reasons I am happy that this church, that you, we, are committed to our
city. I am glad that I never have
heard any of you say that our church should move out of town and re-locate near
an off-ramp of an interstate in order to build up the church but that we should
stay here in order to serve the city.
In
his vision of a new heaven and new earth, John saw the end of tears, the death
of death, and the absence of crying and mourning and pain.
Such imagery is poetic, of course, because even those things have their
rightful place in our lives and we grow by them, but John fully and faithfully
believed that cities could be transformed and peoples’ lives changed
wondrously for he was told in the vision to “write
this all down, for this vision is trustworthy and true.”
So
it all comes back again, as it so often seems to do for us as we scour over the
scripture week after week, to the grace of “seeing” beyond sight.
To see beyond what is before our eyes to what is in God’s heart.
That does not mean that we look past what is right before us as if it did
not exist, but that what we see with our eyes gets transformed by what we see of
God in a situation or circumstance and by our consequent determination to live
according to that sight.
Theologically
speaking, that describes the process of being sanctified by God’s Spirit by
whose power and presence, like John on
Come
to think of it, Mary Oliver can help us here in her own way as Wendell Berry did
in his. In her poem called “What I Have Learned So Far,” she writes that
Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into
the shining world?
Because, properly attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate
about the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit to
no labor in its cause? I don’t
think so.
All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with a sown seed.
Thought buds
toward radiance.
The gospel of light is the crossroads of – indolence, or action.
Be ignited, or be gone.
Biblically
speaking, saints are people who are being sanctified.
They are not just the rarified personages named as such by the Roman
church. Those indeed may be
exemplars of sainthood, but you are saints, too.
Everyone who dares to see beyond sight so as to see God’s grand vision
for the world and who then lives toward it is a saint.
Today,
we celebrate what Christian tradition calls “the communion of saints.”
We celebrate the life we share with our contemporary companions on our
sainted journeys. But also, because
God is One, we can enjoy with confidence what the hymn writer calls “a
mystic, sweet communion with those whose rest is won.”
So
we give thanks today for the lives of the more public of the saints who have
gone before us who embodied in their flesh and in their actions God’s vision
of a new heaven and new earth. And
we give thanks, too, for those saints closer to us who have done the same thing
and who, by their love and their courage, have taught us that our faith in the
God of this life and this world is not misplaced.
Some
year on All Saints Day, I think I shall invite you to come an hour early and
each of us will make our own placards that will bear the names of saints famous
and saints more anonymous, those known by everyone and those known only by us,
and we’ll carry them in a grand procession into this sanctuary of God where
we’ll burst into a rousing rendition of “For
all the saints, who from their labors rest, Who Thee by faith before the world
confessed…”
Today,
we shall light candles remembering the saints and loved ones of our lives who,
each in their own ways, help us to live in our lives toward that shining city of
which our scripture speaks, the one in which, finally, “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things
shall be well.”
Amen.
Copyright
© First Presbyterian Church 2009