November 1, 2009 Sermon

The New Jerusalem
Revelation 21:1-6

We just read the climax not only of the Book of Revelation, not only of the entire Bible, but of all time and creation. It depicts the completion, the fulfillment of God's eternal plan. Why, then, can a member of the Tuesday morning Bible study, a life-long Presbyterian, truly say, “Gee, we never hear a sermon on Revelation!”

Presbyterians have traditionally shied away from Revelation. Revelation is weird. It opens with “One who looked like the Son of Man” carrying seven stars in one hand and having a sword projecting out of his mouth. Later, angels stand at the corners of creation, holding back the wind. A red dragon with seven heads and ten horns appears. Seven angels arrive on the scene carrying bowls filled with “the wrath of God”. Scholars passionately argue over what these visions mean. Do they correspond to specific people and nations at particular times in history?  Where in the timeline of the Revelation story do we live?  Revelation causes conflict. It is odd; it is controversial; no wonder established churches and Christians avoid Revelation. Yet our passage for today depicts the happiest news possible. Jesus will return.

Preachers tell each other an old joke. They call it the church custodians' motto: “Jesus is coming. Look busy!”  We can take a completely serious motto from Revelation 21: “Jesus is coming!  Rejoice!”  Today we focus not on the weird or controversial aspects of Revelation 21, but on the Good News. Jesus will come again to this earth, this reality. When he does, death and sorrow will disappear.

Jesus will come again to this earth, this reality. This implies he has left. He has—and he has not. With the gift of the Holy Spirit God remains among us everywhere, at all times. Yet Jesus himself, God as a human being, left this earth a few weeks after his crucifixion and resurrection. It gets a bit confusing. To explain it we appeal to the doctrine of the trinity. The hymn Holy, Holy, Holy proclaims we worship “God in three persons, blessed trinity.”  God has revealed himself to us in three “persons”, three faces, yet God remains One. God created and reigns over all that is. In this person we experience the person of God the Father. God became one of us, being born into a human body, growing into a man, and dying on the cross. In this person we experience God the Son, Jesus Christ. God lives everywhere, all the time. In this person we experience God the Holy Spirit. So while Jesus—as God—has never truly left us, as a human being in a human body he departed some two thousand years ago. Revelation tells us he will return.

John the Gospel writer also wrote Revelation. A few years had passed since he had followed Jesus around Galilee and Judea. Christianity had spread. John had helped lead this expansion from Jerusalem. But the political situation had gotten hot. The Jews were to rebel against the Romans in the very near future. The Christians, though not really involved, got dragged into the conflict because the Romans remembered that Jesus had been accused of leading an insurrection. John had been identified as a potential troublemaker and placed in exile on the island of Patmos in the eastern Mediterranean. There, God sent him the visions we know as Revelation. They predicted the end of time and space as we know it, and the initiation of the Kingdom of God on this earth. Revelation pictures the end, and the beginning.

“See, the home of God is among mortals,” our passage tells us. “He will dwell with them; they will be His peoples, and God himself will be with them.”  John quotes one of the Jewish prophets, Ezekiel. Ezekiel had this prophetic vision some five hundred-plus years earlier. God has been planning it all for a very long time. God will dwell among us again, and forever. We will be his peoples, in the plural. The nations, the peoples, will belong completely to God. Jesus will claim his Lordship over all the earth. But he will be with us. “With”, means among or beside us, but it also means for or in favor of us. President Bush the Younger received criticism in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks when he told the nations of the world they were either with us or against us. The criticism was unfair. One day later Hillary Clinton said, "Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price."  And Jesus himself said, “He who is not with me is against me.”   Revelation prophesies that God will be for us.

Jesus is and will be with us. We need to decide to be with him. Have you, in the old revival language, made your decision for Christ?  Have you confessed your sins and your faith in the risen Savior?  As we wait with all creation for the end and the beginning, for His return to creation, make certain to prepare by being with Jesus.

Our passage also predicts that when he returns Jesus will erase death and sorrow. Revelation 21:4: “He will wipe away every tear from (our) eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”  John quotes another Jewish prophet, Isaiah, who lived about 150 years before Ezekiel, putting him about 650 years before John and about 2,600 years before now. Note that this prophecy does not claim to have come true yet. We know better. We have tears, death, mourning, crying and pain. Jesus has not come again. We live, as John did when he wrote these words, between Jesus' first and second comings into this earth. We still await the ending, the completion, the fulfillment. But we can hope for it. When we confess our faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior we also confess our hope that this culminating vision of Jesus will come true.

In a strange way Christianity has always appealed most to the poor and those who suffer persecution. These visions of Revelation explain it. If your life in this world shows no evidence ever of improving, then the promise of paradise in the world to come becomes the best hope you can have. According to a study published by Gordon-Conwell Seminary in Boston, today Christianity grows more rapidly than any other religion. And the fastest-growing pockets of Christianity, the fastest-growing religion, are in Columbia, India and China. Furthermore, the hottest growth in these three nations is happening amongst the poorest of the poor. Yet the Good News of Revelation, that a perfect reality without pain or sorrow will come in the unknown future, can also speak to us in America. For one thing, we do experience fear and pain. For another, if we are honest about human nature, we must admit we cannot save ourselves. We depend on a holy God for salvation.

David Nadeau is a firefighter from Monroe, Michigan. He told the following story to the website, Ask.com. On September 12, 2001, the same day President Bush told the world's nations they were either with us or against us, Nadeau accompanied seven of his brother first responders from Monroe to Ground Zero at the World Trade Center, where they joined the massive effort to try to find survivors of the destruction of the twin towers. On his first day there, a New York firefighter held him upside down by his boots so he could explore a hole about eight feet deep. Everybody in the area fell silent in hopes that if there were any survivors he might hear them from inside the debris.  There were none, of course, but as the other man pulled him back up, he spied a perfectly white square of paper, which he grabbed as he slid past. It was a business card that belonged to a man who had worked on the 104th floor of the South Tower. Somehow it had ridden down with all the steel and fire and asbestos and everything else and come to rest, intact, at the bottom.

Nadeau, a believing Christian, immediately felt the presence of God in the moment. He felt a calling. He knew he had to locate the family of the man whose card he had found. He had to give it to them. An administrative worker for the NYPD located the family and contacted them, asking whether they would like to have the card. They asked for a few days to think it over. A couple of weeks passed. Nadeau decided the family could not face him or the card and tried to put it out of his mind. But finally, the man on the card's brother called. They arranged to meet in a Manhattan restaurant. (The owner provided a private room, kept the press out, and refused to allow anybody connected with the meeting to pay a penny.)  The dead man's wife received the card from Nadeau, hugged him, and thanked him. She asked whether by any chance he had a picture of the moment he found the card. She knew it was an unexpected request, but she was just hoping. Nadeau had such a picture. He had kept it in his pocket, unsure of how to offer it to her. Everybody cried, he said, because when we feel love in the midst of the hardest pain, that's what we do.

We feel love in the midst of the hardest pain when we take the Good News of Revelation seriously. Instead of dwelling on the mysterious, odd character of the visions in the book, we need to focus instead on its ending. The end, the completion, the fulfillment of the book and of time and of all creation is this: Jesus will come again to this earth, this reality. When he does, death and sorrow will disappear. For now we endure suffering—and the sin which so often causes it. But we believe in the God of Love, who will come to this earth again, and who will bring eternal peace with him. Praise God for the joy and hope we can have when we trust in Him!

Give yourself to Jesus. He is with and for you. Be with and for Him. And trust that his future, the future he will share with all who believe in Him, will be perfect, joyous, and utterly hopeful. Praise God!