Isaiah 55:1-13
Ho,
everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy
and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2Why
do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that
which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and
delight yourselves in rich food. 3Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my
steadfast, sure love for David. 4See, I made him a witness to the
peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. 5See, you shall
call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run
to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel,
for he has glorified you.
6Seek the
Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is
near; 7let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their
thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have
mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. 8For
my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. 9For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
10For as
the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they
have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the
sower and bread to the eater, 11so shall my word be that goes out
from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that
which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. 12For
you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills
before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their
hands. 13Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of
the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord
for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.
Revelation
21:1-11
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. 2And I saw the holy city, the
new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned
for her husband. 3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; 4he
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.” 5And
the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”
Also he
said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 6Then
he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the
end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of
life. 7Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be
their God and they will be my children.
Revelation 22:1-5, 20-21
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 2through
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. 3Nothing
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; 4they will see his
face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5And 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 forever and ever….
20The one who testifies to these things says,
“Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! 21The grace of
the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.
---------------------
Who
can tell me about the picture on the cover of the bulletin? Great. Now what’s
the smaller picture below it? Good guess. I’m not going to make you guess what
the Space Shuttle Endeavor has to do with the Book of Revelation, though I’m
sure that could be an interesting sermon all its own. My point is much simpler:
it’s hard to understand a piece of a picture or story if we don’t know what the
big picture looks like.
I think for many regular church
members and even more people outside the church the Bible is an intimidating
book. It’s intimidating because we feel like we should know it, but there’s a
lot we don’t know about it. A big part of that feeling is that we don’t know
the basic outline of the story; we don’t know the big picture so it’s hard to
understand the individual pieces we read. This summer I’ve tried to address
that feeling by leading us in a tour of the Bible. We started in June with the
creation story and today we’re wrapping up this marathon sermon series with the
end of Revelation, the last book of the Bible.
When we look at the Bible as a we
notice a ton of variety: different subjects, different authors, different kinds
of writing, different perspectives and different times. With all that
diversity, the Bible is also one story, though there are detours and
intermissions from time to time. The whole story of the Bible through all its
diversity is about God’s relationship with people.
Your urban ministry fact of the day
is that the Bible starts in a garden but ends in a city. More important than
that, many of the themes that began in Genesis find completion in Revelation.
God created the heavens and the earth in Genesis and promises a new creation in
Revelation. When Adam and Eve turn away from God by eating the forbidden fruit,
God curses the ground so it will only produce crops with great effort. In
Revelation’s new earth there is no longer any curse and trees of life grow
spontaneously in the street.
When we look at the story from the
end, which is the view John’s vision in Revelation gives us, we see that many
of these themes have been echoed many times over in the Bible story. The pain
and sorrow that came from that first sin, and from the human pride and lust for
power so often on display throughout scripture, is healed in God’s new
creation. We know from Genesis that God is the beginning of creation, the Alpha
or first letter of the alphabet. We hear echoes of Genesis in John’s Gospel
which starts with: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and
the Word was God.” Revelation tells us that God is also the end, the
completion, the Omega, or last letter of the alphabet. There is nothing before
God and there will be nothing after God. As Paul preaches in Acts: “In God we
live and move and have our being.”
There are more echoes too, because
this vision from John isn’t the first vision the Bible gives us of God’s
healing for a troubled world. The passage Karen read us from Isaiah is a
familiar vision, as are other prophetic visions from Jeremiah, Ezekiel and
others. Though there have been moments of doubt, God showed the prophets all
along that the story has a happy ending.
That was an important thing for
John and the churches he served to know 1900 years ago. John had been exiled
for his faith and many other Christians faced ridicule, isolation from
relatives who didn’t understand their new religion and even persecution from religious
and political leaders. It was important for them to hear that they weren’t
crazy, that even though their everyday experience said the opposite, God was in
control and would bring the story to a happy ending.
John’s Revelation is that God is
still on the throne, that Jesus in his scandalous death on the cross is
stronger than Rome or Satan or evil, that one day healing would overcome
suffering and joy would put an end to pain. That was good news to John’s
churches facing trouble and persecution. It’s good news for churches and
Christians facing persecution today in Burma or parts of India and Afghanistan.
It’s good news for girls struggling to get an education in Pakistan or longing
to escape sexual exploitation in Philadelphia. It’s good news for kids trapped
in poverty and violence here in Rochester and Christians cut off from their
family lands in Palestine. It’s good news for the church of every age longing
for an end to evil systems that keep some in power while others starve and
suffer. It’s good news for a church around the world longing for peace, praying
for God’s new heaven and new earth, for the holy city coming down from heaven.
So is John’s Revelation good news
for us? Sometimes this twisted world we’ve made for ourselves is pretty comfortable.
We can’t usually hear the cries of the starving from our windows. The bullets
don’t fly down our streets, and even the poorest children in our neighborhood
can find clothes and food most days. Plus, we’ve got our own problems to worry
about. We’ve worked hard for what we have. The rules and systems we live with
aren’t perfect, but at least we understand them. What’s going to happen to the
place we’ve earned here when this new heaven and new earth appear?
We’re closer to the fallout from
our unjust world than we might imagine. Nationwide, about one in five kids
can’t count on regular access to adequate and nutritional food, so the chances
are pretty high that a family you know personally is in that situation, even if
they’re hiding it well. Scripture reminds us over and over again, that we are
all brothers and sisters and that Jesus calls us to love our neighbor as
ourself. That means when a child shows up at school hungry in Rochester, while
we have plenty to eat we are called to do more.
As a church we help through
ministries like Cameron and today through the Peacemaking offering. That’s a
good start, but our church spends about 5% of our annual budget on helping
others. With our fixed costs as an organization, that’s the best we can do as a
church at our current level of giving, but it’s a long way from the early
church where people sold their possessions to make sure everyone had enough to
live on. Laura and John have done a great job showing us how close we are to a
sustainable budget: 35 people giving $10 per week more than they are giving now
means a balanced budget and the ability to think about a stronger commitment to
mission and programs. What’s the balance in your household between what you
spend on your family and what you give away? That’s a question for each of us
to consider prayerfully as we prepare to turn in our stewardship pledges.
John’s
vision of the future is a call for repentance and an image of hope. We all want
a world where sorrow and pain have disappeared, where no one goes hungry, no
one is homeless and everyone is loved. We cannot create that new world
ourselves; it has to come from God. At the same time we cling too tightly to
the world we live in now, to the things we have and the way things are to truly
long for the new heavens and new earth God promises. To embrace John’s vision
we have to loosen our grip on the world we know and the things we desire.
The
Bible is the story of God’s relationship with us, the story of creation,
redemption and the hope of final victory for love and justice. Our journey
through the Bible and our journey in our Christian faith is a journey towards
embracing God’s vision of radical love and sharing, of freedom from fear and
greed and hunger. We know that Christ’s return and the new heavens and new
earth will mean radical change. Our calling is to grow in faith until we can
join wholeheartedly in the last prayer of the Bible, “Amen, Come, Lord Jesus!”
Thanks be to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment