Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Let us pray.
Lord, open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as the scriptures are read and your word is proclaimed, we may hear with joy what you say to us today.
Amen.
This morning's scripture is from Revelations, chapter 21, verses 1 through 6.
You can find this on page 1007 in your Pew Bibles.
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.
And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, see, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them and they will be his peoples and God himself will be with them.
He will wipe away 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.
And 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.
Then 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.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: So in just a couple weeks, we are going to welcome Brooks Williams to the sanctuary for a concert and. And a number of us have followed Brooks Williams for a while. He's this great singer songwriter and one of his songs even made it to my Pandemic playlist.
It even made it to that song list that I would listen to back in 2020 when I'd take long walks with my dog. And it was that period of home quarantine where it was such a blessing to even get outside, but you couldn't really get close to other people other than those in your immediate household. And one of the songs that I would listen to on that this playlist was that song by Brooks Williams, Happy all the Time.
It features some amazing guitar work, which was what originally drew me to the song. But looking back, I suspect the lyrics, particularly at that period of time in history and that place up in Altadena, may have had some appeal as well. The words go like this, you know, there'll be no dying when we get to glory land we shall be happy, happy all the time Being with all our friends and loved ones Knowing that we shall part no more we shall be happy, happy all the time In a time of history you Know when you could only see your friends and loved ones on a screen?
The thought, I suspect, was most encouraging to me, that there would come a day when I would see friends and loved ones in a place of glory.
Albert Brumley is a musician famous for writing or arranging songs like Happy all the Time, songs filled with the promises of a better place and time, up in Glory Land or Up in Heaven. He wrote the song I'll Fly Away that you might have heard, or even heard if you've seen the movie oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?
At the concert Friday night at the Hollywood bowl featuring Willie Nelson. The very last song of the evening, guess what it was.
Fly Away.
That song goes like this. One bright morning when this life is over I'll fly away to that home on God's celestial shore I'll fly away Albert Brumley, the writer and arranger of many of these songs, was one well acquainted with hard times. He was actually born in Oklahoma in 1905, and before he went away to study music in Hartford, he had grown up as a sharecropper and worker, working on his family's farm, picking cotton and chopping it. By 1933, you're well aware a third of farmers in states like Oklahoma had lost their land. And also in those depression years, there were these dust storms that you would never forget once you had seen one.
After farmers had spent years plowing the grassy cover that had previously existed over so much of the land of those plain states to grow wheat, there was nothing to keep dirt from being pulled into the air. And after several years of really dry conditions, dust clouds like this one from Stratford, Texas, in 1935 hit Oklahoma.
And I don't know if you've been watching in the news, but people in Chicago got a brief picture of what it was like back then. Just this last week when the photo of this dust storm was taken.
If that's your experience, if a dust storm is what you associate with life on this world, if depression years, especially of the 1930s, are what you think of as life here on Earth, life in this place and time that it makes sense you would imagine in your songs, in your prayers, in your visioning that God's realm has got to be some place and time other than this one.
Albert Brumley was also famous for a song that went this world is not my home I'm just a passing through My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue the angels beckon me from heaven's open door and I can't feel at home in this world anymore Well, I love so many of those songs. I hope Brooks Williams will play a few of them when we get to hear them the weekend after next. But I'll be the first to admit there is. There's a kind of danger in songs like this and listening to them and singing them if we're not careful. You see, we want to be careful about picturing a kind of bifurcated reality, thinking God's realm is up there in heaven, the realm we occupy here on earth. And there's a dividing wall that separates the two that we will only finally transgress once we have died and fly away up to heaven. There's a problem with imagining it will be up there in glory land and only up there that we will finally be reunited with friends and loved ones. That up there is where we will finally be home.
There's a problem with singing. This world is not my home. I'm just a passing through.
And that problem is that the God of Scripture, time and again breaks through any dividing wall we might imagine between heaven and earth. Time and again, the God of scripture says, your place and your time.
That's my place and my time.
Your home there on earth, that's my home too. Dust storms and all. I have made a home with you.
Think of how the story of it all begins in Scripture. Think of God's creative hand. And God, we read, creates not just the heavens, but the earth.
And then God pronounces both good and God doesn't just create humanity in a vast web of plants and animals that can help humanity thrive and that they can help creation thrive. The God of heaven steps right in to the garden, we read in Genesis, when a people God chose and blessed were held in bondage, ravaged by an empire bent on enslaving and dehumanizing them, God shows up there and then in a burning bush to call a people to freedom.
When the people wandered, tired and hungry and thirsty in the desert, God shows up in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. And then we read again and again in the Torah, in the first five books of the Bible, of how God called the people to create a tabernacle or tent of meeting or house for God as they went through the wilderness, so that right in their community, wherever they were in the center of their life together, they would have this tent of meeting, this tabernacle where they could remember God had made a home for them. God was at home with them wherever they traveled.
When the people would finally settle in a stretch of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. That tabernacle took on a more permanent dwelling that was called the Temple. It was referred to as a house of God there in Jerusalem. And people would come from all over. And even seeing that house of God would be inspiring. It would be this great proclamation. The God of heavens had made a home with the people at home, earth.
And then as Christians, we read in the Gospel of John these words. The word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.
That phrase dwelt among us can be translated from the original Greek as pitched a tent with us or made a tabernacle with us.
God, as God had done in the wilderness, makes a home with God's people only. We read in John, this now happens in a new way. It happens in the flesh. In the flesh.
In Matthew's Gospel, we read how Jesus begins his public ministry with this proclamation, repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Not the kingdom of heaven is something you will one day know, but the kingdom of heaven has come near to your place and time. That was his opening salvo.
And then, as we get to the very last chapters of the last book in the Bible, we get so much more than just a promise of heaven.
It's like the God who first created the heavens and the earth is now recreating or renewing the heavens and the earth.
We hear this glorious proclamation. See, the home or the tabernacle or tent of God is among mortals. We hear the one seated on the throne, the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, proclaim, see, I am making all things new, all things new, not just things in heaven, the passage makes clear, but things on Earth as well.
The world that the Book of Revelation has painted for us up to that point is decidedly grim and bleak.
One can understand why a vision might emerge from these pages of Revelation that pictures heaven as only a place we will go to, that will flee this earth completely to go to some other realm. And that is where we'll know God. For we read in Revelation of hunger, of death, of great earthquakes, of mountains and islands moved out of place, hail and fire falling from the sky, rivers and waters poisoned, a great swarm of locusts and darkness falling over all the earth. And I could go on.
The sea emerges in the Book of Revelation as a threatening monster. Evil comes out of it that threatens all creation. It's a truly apocalyptic vision of human experience on Earth that Revelation paints.
And we hear in the pages of Revelation from chapter one that it's a period of persecution. We hear this from the first chapter of John we hear the author of this book write, I, John, your brother, who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and testimony of Jesus, when I had these visions.
Now, from what we know of the Isle of Patmos, that Greek island, we suspect it was something like an Alcatraz, a kind of prison island, and that this John of Patmos, or the author of this revelation, was imprisoned there, or at very least in exile from what he had previously known as his home.
And we suspect that the time and place of this writing, at least the time of it, was probably around 95 A.D. when the emperor Domitian was in power. And he would not only persecute Christians and mete out violence and economic exploitation on Roman occupied Palestine, as prior emperors had done, but the reason we think he might have been in power during the time Revelation was written is that he was an emperor, famously demanding that people worship him, citizens or subjects in the empire as God.
Well, that was a crucial moment for the Christian church and so many resisted that. And for that, as we read in the history books, there was persecution, consequences, torture, even death. And we also know that just 25 years before that reign of Domitian, when there had been a Jewish revolt, a Jewish rebellion, the empire of Rome had crushed it. And one way they had done that is destroying the house of God, destroying the Jewish temple, it lay in ruins.
95 AD. You can imagine this would be exactly the kind of time and place where people would imagine. My home and place, if it's with God, has got to be somewhere else, somewhere other than this time and place, often glory land.
But when you hear the passage read today, did you catch its earthiness?
It's here and nowness, it's heaven. Come nearness, we hear a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, that mythic sea from which evil and dark threats emerge, that is no more that first heaven and earth. We've known that heaven and earth, full of trials and tribulations, falling upon us from above and from below.
They are now in the past, in the former things, and into that world, that world of trials and tribulations. A new Jerusalem comes down from heaven, glorious and beautiful, not remaining off in heaven, but descending from it, such that glory might fill the earth. See, we read, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them and he 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 are now past.
See, I am making all things, all places new. I'm filling them with glory, with the creative life giving life, renewing power of God.
Well, friends, we're in the Easter season. Today is the fifth Sunday and Easter. And it's a season when the Christian church celebrates resurrection. Not just creation, but resurrection. And resurrection is not the promise of God's work in a realm we hope to go to one day. It's the promise that a body broken by death, the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, a body crucified by the Roman Empire and by the efforts of chief priests and scribes and religious leaders in Jesus Day, that body would know life again.
It would know that power we read about in today's passage to wipe all tears away, to do away with death itself, to end mourning and crying so that they are no more.
And that reality, that resurrection happens at the very place, the very body that had known death and destruction on this earth. We'll get to the ascension a few weeks from now, that time when Jesus ascends into heaven. But let's not forget the Easter story, how before Jesus rises into heaven, he showed up in the very place that the disciples had lived and moved and known life. And in that place, they saw in the very body of their Lord and Savior, the one who they had seen buried in a tomb, resurrected life again, God's glorious work in their world, their place.
And they then became witnesses to it, like Jacob of old. They could say, surely God was in this place.
People in Chicago today are witnessing dust storms. You and I have seen homes turned to ruins by a raging wildfire. You saw some pictures of that in the video that Jessica put together.
And yet to places like Chicago and Los Angeles county and every place on earth, God says that place is mine, that home, this home is God's home too, now and on into a glorious future we see promised in Christ's resurrection.
I know some of you are familiar with the writings of Eugene Peterson, a longtime pastor and author and the translator of the message version of the Bible. I've long enjoyed his writings. And he will write at several points about growing up in a church that was often dismissive of this world in favor of so called spiritual things or heavenly things.
He would write about a church where they would often sing of a glory land and of heaven, but often fail to celebrate God's work in the here and now. And so he writes with deep gratitude of a kind of apprenticeship that he learned.
His father helped him learn this, and his father helped him Learn it by purchasing a plot of land, a lakefront property in Montana. And on that stretch of land, his father built a cabin. And there in the Flathead Valley, the Peterson family would gather. And there they'd have these great times that would be remembered and celebrated later, of loved ones gathering together. And it was there that Eugene Peterson writes of how he learned of God's work in things as simple as a pygmy owl or finally spotting a live grizzly bear on a familiar trail. He saw God's hand in the emergence through spring snow of avalanche lilies.
Peterson learned there about the this ness and thereness of the kingdom of God, how resurrection touches this world and these bodies we possess.
And I thought of Eugene Peterson's description of that lakefront place when I listened back in 2020 to my daughter describe another lakefront property.
Like Eugene Peterson, my father, too, had a dad who purchased a lakefront property on which he built a cottage.
That place was not the Flathead Valley of Montana. It was Roscommon county in northern Michigan. But like Peterson, my dad and then his sons and then their children would find in that place a kind of apprenticeship to a God who is at work in place.
Back In November of 2020, school events took place online. You probably remember that well. And so for this particular day that was meant to celebrate at the school grandparents and special Friend and Family Members Day, a day where ordinarily grandparents and others would come to the school campus. They couldn't have people on camp, so it was all done virtually on this live stream video where they put together videos that all the students had made of them, say, playing an instrument or singing a song or doing a dance or doing a cheer, or in Lucy's case, sharing something that she had written.
Well, Lucy shared on the video a piece she had written about that lakefront cottage. She shared how difficult it was each summer when it was time to leave. And the questions she posed stuck with me ever since. She asked who would want to leave heaven.
Who would want to leave heaven.
I thought about that often since. She went on to describe the leaves, the sticks, the chickadees, about time spent with cousins and uncles and aunts. She spoke of photographs on the wall of family members who were no longer with us. But she talked about how their memories were spurred in the embers of the fire, as if she could almost hear them talking. And I realized that she, like Peterson, like me, had been apprentice to place by a lakefront property, apprentice to a God who's at work in all places, a God who says Behold, the home of God is among mortals.
Some of you are going to have the chance to get away this summer and visit new, different places. Places you associate with the beauty of creation. I hope they remind you of that God who is at work in all places. We can forget that in the rigor of work in our life today, particularly in the wake of the fire. I hope you will have opportunities to visit places like that. And remember what Peterson. What, Lucy. What I so often remember in visiting other parts of the world. God is at work in that place. But God is at work in this place, too.
And maybe someday Jessica will write a song as she talked about doing, as she prepares to perform. And maybe she'll write it about this place.
And maybe she'll write it about today.
Maybe she'll sing a song of how here on her 12th birthday in this house with so many friends and family members today here she was baptized.
Maybe she'll sing not simply of a far off glory land, but how as the waters touched her head, as she died to sin and rose with Christ to new life right before our eyes, how she and we caught just a glimpse of that heavenly realm, will one day know in full.
Maybe she'll sing of how in this place, on this day we beheld the glorious work of that God who says in Christ, behold, I am making all things new, Jessica, even you.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, amen.
