Beginnings
and Endings
Robert
J. Elder
First Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, Washington
Revelation
21:1-6
Fifth
Sunday of Easter: April 28, 2013
I’ve spent a lot of time the last several days
thinking on the events that took place at, during, and after the Boston
Marathon, as I am sure many of us have: A vicious attack characterized by
senseless, indifferent slaughter and injury to innocent people by people who
were strangers to them. Why must the world be this way?
But we ought not stop with the events in
Boston.
People: Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist – are despoiled, beaten, or killed in places ranging
from Mexico to Syria to North Korea to East Africa. One beating does nothing to
atone for another, and yet the beatings go on. Police beatings, gang beatings,
racially or religiously motivated violence have all become part of the daily
headlines. Why must the world be this way?
Owners of small businesses and shops go
out of business in many cities around the world, their stores burned out,
looted, closed forever. Innocent people living in desolate neighborhoods, folks
who didn’t riot and steal, as well as those who did, find they have even fewer
places to go and get the necessities of daily life. Innocent people running in
the Boston Marathon come away with shrapnel wounds. Why must the world be this
way?
For decades now, economists have
reported that the gap between rich and poor in America has been growing at an
alarming rate, that violence from Los Angeles to Michigan to Miami is a symptom of a despair
that accompanies a sense of lost future, of hopelessness. Why must the world be
this way?
In countries, some of whose names we can
hardly pronounce, in some countries which didn’t even
exist on world
maps a decade or two ago, whole
communities are torn apart by hatred: ethnic, tribal, religious. Sunni Muslims
kill Shiite Muslims, South American rebel forces kill teenage army draftees.
Why must the world be this way?
One German philosopher looked out on his nineteenth
century world and saw the economic dislocation of common people that was
brought on by the industrial revolution. He realized that the power to make
economic decisions rested in the hands of small groups of people, that their
control of financial institutions and even governments made substantial
betterment of the lives of working people a virtual impossibility. He longed
for a world in which economies were in the hands of the common people rather
than a few powerful individuals. He asked “Why must the world be this way?” and
answered by writing books and tracts that predicted a coming new world order in which all
means of production would be held in community for all, rather than by a
powerful few. His name was Karl Marx.
Even though he seems to have asked the same sort of
questions we find ourselves asking well over a hundred years later, his
proposed solutions have so far proved to be a mixed blessing philosophically, socially, and economically to say the least. The twenty-first century communist world, founded on various versions of
Marxist theory, has fallen to pieces, and is dying
from the weight of the failure of its attempted solutions. Human beings are
apparently incapable of bringing in a new, just world order under our own
power.
One twentieth-century singer-song writer
spent much of his life speaking out for peace. He wrote one song in which he
asked us to “imagine” a world without countries, weapons, war. He also implored in one of
his songs, “All we are saying, is give peace a chance.” He saw the self-defeating madness of the endless
stockpiling of weaponry by the nations of the world and asked, “Why must the
world be this way?” His name was John Lennon. He is long-since dead of course,
another victim of senseless violence. And though the world may seem to us to be a bit less tense internationally, within the borders
of the former superpowers as well as the second and third-rate powers, ethnic strife seems always on the verge of creating a
world-wide implosion rather than a
nuclear explosion.
Even my imaginary 7 year-old friend
Clayton found that he was confused last week. His good friend, Jackson, stayed
home from school nearly all week. When Clayton asked his mother why, she said
that Jackson’s mother was afraid for his safety. Jackson is black. Some boys
had been taunting him on the playground a week ago Monday. With all the racial
violence on the television, Jackson’s mother thought it would be just as well
to keep him home for a few days. Clayton wondered the child’s version of, “Why must the world be this way?”
He’s certainly not the first 7 year-old
to wonder this. Nor, sadly, is it likely he will
be the last. We all long for a better world. That dream is as old as humanity,
and from some perspectives, futile. Once, when the people of Judah had been
languishing in brutal exile in Babylon, enslaved and force-marched to a foreign
land where they were made the servants of the Babylonians, Isaiah wondered,
“Why must the world be this way?” Then he recorded a word from God which said,
“Do
not remember the former things,
or
consider the things of old.
I
am about to do a new thing...”
We long for the arrival of that new
thing just as fully as the Jews longed for rescue from their exile. We are
weary of the world as it is. We long for a new world. So when John announced in
Revelation, “I saw a new heaven and a
new earth,” it gets our attention.
And he throws a “new Jerusalem” into
the bargain. In response to our persistent question, “Why must the world be
this way?” like the exiled Jews of Isaiah’s day we hear that something new is
happening.
The people who first read and heard
John’s words were living in a world hostile to their very faith. Many were
called on to make the only witness to their faith available in their violent
world: martyrdom. In fact, the Greek word “martureo” means “to bear witness.” The cry of those going to their death for
their faith, the plea of those facing the same fate must have been something on
the order of, “Why must the world be this way?” Something needs to be done.
John’s vision in Revelation assures us
that something has been done, is being done, and will be done. All that is accomplished is described as “new.” The
thing that is new is also as old as the first covenant God made with people and
as new as the mob of children who come weekdays to our preschool: relationship.
Whenever we ask, “Why must the world be
this way?” chances are good that what has broken down in one way or another is
relationship: the healthy relationship between people of different races, the
desired relationship of friendship between Jackson and his playmates on the
school play yard, the satisfying relationship between
work and vocation or calling. To that persistent question uttered by humanity,
“Why must the world be this way?” the Bible responds with stories,
declarations, visions, prophecies of God’s desire for a new relationship with
people.
What is new is that very thing which God
has sought to establish with people since the beginning: relationship. The Old
Testament describes it as a dwelling or tabernacle,
but anyone who knows anything about life under a single roof knows that to live
in the same house means to be in relationship. So what is new is also very old.
Since the beginning, since the Alpha
of Revelation, God has desired relationship with people, so that we might be in
right relationship with each other. And if we ever want to know the end or goal
or Omega toward which God is moving
the world, we
must keep in mind the same word. The
beginning and ending of God’s purpose for us and for the world is just this
vision: “See, the home of God is
among mortals.”
God wants to be at home among us. The
vision of John brings to mind the very things that happen in healthy homes.
That is where tears are wiped away, where mourning and crying and pain are alleviated
by the love that lives there. As we talked about this passage at a Bible study
I once led, we kept falling into the temptation to speak of this vision as if
it existed entirely in the future. But one person in the group reminded us that
this is God’s declaration for today. God’s desire is to be at home with us today, not just in some distant future.
If we fail to treat each other better than we do, it’s not because the new
Jerusalem exists off in some distant future, but because even though new Jerusalem
has already been subdivided and built, we choose to live in old town, to
continue as slaves to sin rather than as people freed by the resurrection of
Christ to live a life that is entirely new.
When John wrote that “the sea was no more,” he was
writing from his imprisonment on the island of Patmos, separated from his
fellow believers by a seemingly endless tract of ocean. Very likely, he would
have preferred to be with them as they faced their ordeal and their
persecution. But there was a great sea between them. No wonder part of his
vision of heaven included the eradication of that barrier to human
relationships. The beginning and ending of the life of a believer rests in
relationship: relationship with God, and relationship with each other in Christ.
It is the Alpha and the Omega, that which put in motion the very cosmos itself,
and which is the goal or end toward which God is moving the world and its
history.
This vision of beginnings and endings is
priceless because of the assurance it contains, that no matter what, no matter how desperate our
exile, how brutal our encounters on the
streets of the city, how unjust our experiences with each other, that is not
the direction
in which God’s purpose is moving. Though our view of the
hopefulness which God builds into his purpose for creation may be as limited as
the Jews in exile, the Christian martyrs of the first century, and the beaten
and suffering victims of modern violence, God’s work is even now providing a
new world. It is a world in which God lives with us, eradicates death,
suffering, even tears.
God does not bring on the end of the world. God is the end. And glorifying God is our chief end. Receive Christ, know the God who love
you, and offer God your praise. Amen.
