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November 17, 2013
Isaiah 65:17-25
17For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things
shall not be remembered or come to mind. 18But be glad and rejoice
forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and
its people as a delight. 19I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight
in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of
distress. 20No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a
few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies
at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a
hundred will be considered accursed. 21They shall build houses and
inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 22They
shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for
like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall
long enjoy the work of their hands. 23They shall not labor in vain,
or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the
LORD-and their descendants as well. 24Before they call I will
answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. 25The wolf and the
lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the
serpent-its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy
mountain, says the LORD.
Sermon:
“The New from the Old”
Confession time: pastor-types are among
the most sacrilegious people you’ll ever come across. It’s why sometimes we try to explain the
Trinity with a chocolate chip cookie (dough: Father, chocolate chips: Jesus,
nuts: Spirit). It’s why we love a good
religious joke, such as:
How many Presbyterians does it take to
change a lightbulb?
“Change?
What do you mean change? Why would anything need to change??
Our favorite topic of satire is other
Christians, just as each of us has the most fun ridiculing our family, and
honestly, there’s a wealth of material there.
In seminary, we most enjoyed poking fun at the Left Behind Series, a
collection of Christian fiction novels that depict the end times, which has now
been immortalized in film starring Kirk Cameron.
According to those books, at some point,
people who accept Jesus will literally be raptured up into heaven,
beam-me-up-Scotty-style. If they happen
to be flying a plane or driving a car at the time, well that’s just tough. Those who didn’t pray a prayer in the right
way are, you know, “left behind.”
Then a slick suit-wearing Antichrist will
arise and manipulate his way into driving the world into suffering and
darkness. And someday, at the end of all
that horror, God will decide enough’s enough, and set things right with a new
heaven and new earth, destroying the old in the process.
All of this is somewhat based on
scripture, but a very literalist take on what was mean to be poetry in the book
of Revelation. What Dawn read for us
this morning was never meant to be understood as a blueprint for the step-by-step
progression of the end times, as the Left Behind series indicates. It was actually acted out, not read, in the
early church and like any good play, it used over-the-top drama to get people
to ask hard questions about what life and sin and heaven were all about.
We change-loving Presbyterians have a way
of reading scripture, and it’s relatively simple. Scripture interprets scripture. Things can’t be picked out and raised above
others, we take it all as a whole. And
as John Calvin said, we read that word through the rule of faith and life, that
is, through our relationship with God through Jesus Christ and through real
life with all of its joys and struggles.
So this “Left Behind” business just
doesn’t cut it, because it doesn’t engage scripture with itself or with the
real world, but instead seeks to escape it all.
Holding all of scripture together, we read Revelation by first hearing
its parent text: our Isaiah reading from today.
There we hear the bold promises of God who
will restore a broken people, wiping away the past forever. Crying and young death will be no more, and
life will not be a radical escape but a radical relishing of the gifts of
creation, of food and drink, of home and work.
Before people even call out to God, God will hear them.
But this promise, unlike that limited Left
Behind one, is not just for people. It’s
for animals, too! The lamb will eat with
the wolf (and not be eaten by it). It
would seem vegetarianism is in God’s great plan for the world, because the lion
eats straw. The serpent, that crafty
creature, will eat dust. Perhaps we
would we call that...dirtatarian?
Then comes that greatest of promises: “They shall not hurt or destroy on all
my holy mountain,” says the Lord.
Who is ‘they?’ I asked a friend much more versed in Hebrew
than I am, and it’s not what I expected.
These words were first spoken by Isaiah to a people crushed by an
invading army. I assumed, as we often
do, that “they” meant their enemies. But
God’s vision of a new heaven and new earth does not include such a
distinction. “They” in the Hebrew here
includes everyone, the entire re-created order: people, animals, everyone in
this new Jerusalem. It is not just
“they” who hurt and destroy in this life.
It is unfortunately also “we.”
And so God’s ultimate hopeful promise is that we will become our best
selves, and no longer hurt one another and destroy God’s good creation. Sorry Left Behind fellas, but I prefer this
vision of things to come.
God does not bring a new heaven and a new
earth in order to destroy creation. This
is the same God who crafted every speck of this planet and us and called it
very good. This is the same God who did,
once upon a time, flood the earth in its wickedness and start over, but who
also promised to never, ever do that again.
Do we trust God’s promises? Do we reject a lesser (but somehow more
marketable and profitable) god of anger and violence against whoever we
understand “them” to be, in order to embrace the God who entered into this world
willingly to transform “us” and “them” for all time?
I hope we do. Because if we do, there is so much good
news. And this is not the fluffy,
feel-good, stuff of Hallmark cards and Christmas Coca Cola commercials. This is the earth-shattered with the grace of
heaven, world re-creating good news of the One who is creating newness, even
now.
This new heaven and new earth is not a
get-out-of-pain-free card for those faithful enough to cash it in, as some
might have us believe. The God we follow
chose to enter this world in a transformative and troubled way, and so we do
not get to check out of this life. We
live it, just as Christ did, with all of its darkness and light, heaviness and
hope. This new heaven and new earth is
not escape.
It is transformation. This stuff – the stuff of pain and sorrow,
the stuff of a wolf-eat-sheep world and lions threatening the weak, the stuff
of weeping children and old grudges, this is the stuff out of which God’s
newness is made.
We do not know why this life can be so
terribly hard at times, and we do not know why God allows it to be this
way. But we do know God, at least in
part. And the God we know in scripture,
the God we know in our faith in Jesus Christ, the God we see in our real life,
that God can be trusted. And that God
who called everything ‘good’, still sees goodness in this messy world, and
still works to help us see it, too. This
God is, at the very heart of things, a Creator, and not a Destroyer.
So, have hope. We do not get to escape this life’s trouble,
but we get something even better: we get the promise that there is new life on
the other side of it. Isn’t that what
this good news is all about? Isn’t that
why we pray for each other and this world, trusting that promise?
Change is coming, whether we Presbyterians
like it or not. But it is not a change
we need to fear. It is the change of
sorrow for joy and weeping for delight, of hunger for feasting and violence for
everlasting peace. The God who created
us all – animals included – isn’t done yet.
Not even close. And that is good news! Amen.