Summer Sermon Series

SUMMER SERMON SERIES

Famous Last Words: The Bible and the End of Time Revelation 21:1-5, 22:1-8 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham August 27, 2017J. Shannon Webster Ordinary 21

With this sermon we come to the end of our Summer Sermon Series on “Famous Last Words.” I hope you’ve enjoyed it at least a little bit, because I have. If not, as Pancho Villa breathed his last in 1923 and uttered: “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”[i] It seemed right to end this series with last words in the Bible, from Revelation. We could have read all of Chapter 22, but I wanted the meatiest part, not the little curse at verse 18 that is simply a 1st century version of a copyright notice. I want to use the part that lets me talk about what the Bible really says, and not what some very misguided preachers may have told you it says. In my last 2 months with you, I am going to stay off-lectionary and preach about some things I really want to say, to a congregation I’ve been in dialogue with for 10½ years. This is a good to that. We could call it On Scripture.

The Bible was not – as some say, dictated word for word by God into the ears of those who wrote it down. It is many things – poetry, history, lists, prophetic writing, letters, and so on. It’s our Christian family scrapbook of the generations. Many people don’t like the book of Revelation – to them it sounds like crazy talk, repetitive and weird. Martin Luther would’ve taken Revelation out of the Bible, if he could, back when the Protestant scriptures were set. I used to agree with him, but not now. There is nothing literal in it. T Revelation is all metaphor, and metaphor matters! Revelation give us the metaphors of hope for the future, and a guidebook for how the church was to survive under the rule of the Empire, and we still need that. The “Beast” in Revelation turned out not to be the Soviet Union, as so many TV preachers promised. It could as well have been the USA. But it was neither, it was Rome. And yet the message within is still relevant.

Too many assume the Biblical view of the end of history described in Revelation includes the end of the earth. But the Bible says otherwise (outside some unscholarly interpretations of the small apocalypses in a couple of the Gospels). The earth is too deeply valued. Revelation says the end is Redemption, not Destruction. God made it all and called it good once, and according to Revelation will do so again with the new creation. I saw new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. We have this idea that the whole point is that when we die we go somewhere else, to heaven. The Bible says that heaven will come here. I saw the holy city the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven.. the home of God is among mortals! There will be no separation of heaven and earth when all is redeemed.

And yet first, and yet, to be true to the scriptures, we should look at the context within which this was written. In Revelation, written at the end of the 1st century AD, we have a view through the lenses of a Christian living in the Roman Empire, at the onset of the persecution of the church. At one point, where John writes that in the holy city there are no liars or cowards, we know he is calling out those whose courage has failed in the face of Roman brutality. John doesn’t say they can’t get into the new Jerusalem, but that when they do they won’t bring those failings with them. The old Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman military, but in the new one all is redeemed.

The Bible began in a garden and ends in a city. Early on Christianity became an urban religion. Faith had to do (in Paul’s descriptions) of witness in the town square, in the marketplace, in the complex arrangements of economic, social and political forces. And in Revelation, the Bible’s last words urge the faithful to reject the Empire of that day – its values and its ways.

What could that mean, as any lesson for American Christians? We have lived several decades now in a world where order is insured by the Pax Americana. Joseph Nye, Dean of the Harvard School of Government, wrote “Not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above others. Indeed, the word Empire has come out of the closet.”[ii] Sometimes a benevolent rule, but let’s be honest – not for everyone on this planet. How can we possibly avoid complicity? Even if we wish it otherwise, our institutions do the sinning for us, and do it in our name. Historian Michael Ignatieff wrote, “What word but ‘Empire’ describes the awesome thing America is becoming? It is the only nation that polices the world through 5 global military commands, maintains a million men and women under arms on 4 continents, deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean, guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea, drives the wheels of global trade and commerce...”[iii]

We’re sympathetic to our Empire. But our scriptures urge caution. Talk of “American Exceptionalism”

is dangerous; it is even heresy. Rome made the same claims. And before we are Americans, before we are anything else, we are Christians. American hegemony is not the hope that lies in the hearts of the faithful But rather the New Jerusalem, the redemption of all things by God, when Christ comes again. See, I am coming soon!, it says in our last chapter of the Bible. It sure doesn’t seem soon, and yet this is our word of Hope. Cat and I say those words at the Table at the Lord’s Supper. You have said them – “Christ has died. Christ is Risen. Christ will come again. Don’t take that lightly. It is subversive talk! The Empire should probably arrest us.

Some traditions teach salvation as an individual experience, one-to-one confrontation, the solitary soul in isolation with God.[iv] That’s a vision too small for Revelation, for the Bible. It is not the one soul, not even the community of believers, but “all peoples”, and on the Tree of Life, the leaves are for the healing of the nations. All “peoples”, plural, to whom we are sent.

Those are two very different visions: one that we live out our time on this earth, and have gained a remote heaven – either by our good works or our faith confession. (In a more extreme version – at some imaginary, unbiblical rapture believers get lifted up into the air to some remote heaven. Perhaps one of the moons of Saturn? Who knows? The fancy theological words for that are “premilennarian dispensationalism.) OR, that God so loved the world as to send the only-begotten Son that we may not perish but have life eternal. That is, the Biblical version in Revelation, that, loving this world that John Calvin called “the arena of God’s glory”, the heavenly city comes here, descending from God to meld earth and heaven back together, once and for all. Heaven invades earth!

What difference does it make, which version we believe? Consider that in the remote-heaven/rapture version, the earth is disposable. It does not matter, because the true home of God is somewhere else, in a far heaven, and we get to change our address someday so who cares what the tenants do with this world. A good example might be Interior Secretary under Reagan, James Watt, who observed “we don’t know how many future generations we have until the Lord returns,” and yet promised to “mine more, drill more, cut more trees.” Why care for an earth slated for fiery destruction? For that matter, why feed the poor, or even worry about the things of this life if there is not point other than to leave it?

On the other hand everything Jesus said, taught and did was about the concrete, active love of the poor, the stranger and the neighbor, as well as discerning the presence of God deep, deep in the world around us saying such things as: Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin,yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

Yesterday, your Session and church staff met in an all-day retreat to consider the future, to plan and build for it – the immediate plans will be for after my retirement at the end of October, but also beyond that. We reviewed our strategic “Going Forward” plan, which calls us to Speak Up, Reach Out, Build Bridges. We will do that not as if our work would have no permanence, but because we are called to serve Christ by helping to usher in the Kingdom of God, because this earth is the arena of God’s glory.

The New Jerusalem exists among people together in holy community, even though we enter still broken enough that God must wipe away our tears. But tears will be no more, and in the new creation death will be no more! There is no sea, John writes. Yam, in Hebrew, the sea representing chaos and death. God will deliver the faithful just as sure as they walked out of Egypt on dry land in the Exodus. The Jehovah’s Witnesses to the contrary, it is far more than 144,000 than enter heaven, but 12X12 – an infinite number; the number of the redeemed is uncountable. Maybe it is everybody. The world is redeemed, not destroyed. And it seems we don’t go to eternal rest, but to lively activity! The earthly city is invaded by the heavenly one. We enter it not by escape (or “rapture”) but “by the sanctification of the place in which God has placed us.”[v] And, in Thomas Edison’s last words in 1931: “It is very beautiful over there.”[vi]

God does not make all new things, but makes all things new. The Christian belief is that in the end we meet not an event but a person – God in person comes among us and we see the very face of God. And in the end, our text promises, the Lord God will, in the words of the Hallelujah Chorus, reign for ever and ever. So much for Empire. In the meantime, we live and work toward that hope. The redemption of the world, the sanctification of the place in which God has placed us. Is that what we’re saying in our mission and vision statements? This congregation has changed the world before, at least for people who are homeless. Can we do it some more. Can a New Jerusalem be hastened by a New Birmingham?

At the end of the Bible, famous last words. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of Jesus Christ be with all the saints. Amen.

1

[i] Brown, Nathan. To Sing Hallucinated, Mezcalita Press, Norman, OK, 2015, p. 82.

[ii]Wallis, James. “Dangerous Religion,” Sojourners, Washington, DC.,September/October. 2003.

[iii]Ignatieff, Michael. “The Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003.

[iv]Bloom, Harold. The American Religion, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1993, p. 15.

[v]Peterson, Eugene. Reversed Thunder, HarperCollins, New York, 1991, p. 74.

[vi]op cit Brown, p. 91