Revelation 21:1-6 God's Dream

Earlier this week, while she was volunteering in the Church Office folding your bulletins and inserts, Frances saw the Scripture reading and commented that she had never heard anyone preach from the Book of Revelation and did not know that any verses were even included in the lectionary.

In fact, there are just a couple of passages from this strange narrative in our three year cycle of readings – perhaps because the creators of the lectionary intuitively understood that the Book of Revelation, this last book in our Bible, is one that most of us who inhabit staunch New England Protestant churches would rarely touch with a ten foot pole.

However, even if we have never ventured to read it from start to finish ourselves, we have certainly heard tell that Revelation is filled with exotic and incomprehensible symbols and psychedelic images of seven headed beasts and seven seals and brides and cities and angels and archangels and warfare and absolute destruction.

The Book of Revelation is that piece of canonized writing that can make us who are theological moderates feel pretty uncomfortable. It is difficult not to associate it with modern day doomsayers who point to chapter and verse as evidence that the end of the world is imminent.

Everything from the creation of the State of Israel in 1949 to the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 point to nothing else, they say. No wonder some of those folks railed against President Obama recently when he brought world leaders together to discuss nuclear disarmament. They claimed that the President was inhibiting the inevitable Armageddon by restricting the way we might go about destroying ourselves.

However, in spite of theologically conservative protestations to the contrary, like all of the books in our Bible, Revelation was written at a particular time to a particular group of people who had a particular history and culture and set of issues. As Christian theologian Marcus Borg wrote, like the Bible as a whole, the Book of Revelation needs to be taken seriously, but not literally.

In order to understand the significance for us of this particular passage that we read, we must understand its historical context. And so we begin by acknowledging that the author wrote this passage not for us as a manifesto outlining the sequence of events leading to the end of the world, but rather for a group of early Jewish Christians during a time of significant crisis in the early church.

The Book of Revelation is really a letter to seven churches, and it is written in the apocalyptic style. The community of faith that first heard it probably felt like they were living in some sort of end times – perhaps like you felt after September 11, 2001 or December 7, 1941.

It was as if your world was suddenly and forever changed. It was different and frightening, and you had all sorts of questions that no one seemed able to answer. Would you be safe? Would your family be safe? What was going to happen now?

For the Jewish Christians to whom this letter was written, two equally traumatic events had occurred. First, Roman armies had destroyed Jerusalem and leveled the Temple. The Holy of Holies was no more. All that was left standing was part of a single wall, where Jews today still congregate and wail.

But it was not only the physical razing of the Temple that was so terrifying. It was also the symbolic destruction of more than 500 years of sacred ritual and prayer. It was the death of a way of life. It was the loss of a place that had been central to Jesus and the culmination of his ministry.

And, second, in the aftermath of the destruction, Rome had singled out followers of Jesus for persecution. Jewish Christian men and women throughout the Empire faced social exclusion, economic embargos, and politically motivated religious harassment.

It was within this context of fear and loss that the people of the seven churches heard these marvelous words of hope that we read this morning. You see, the Book of Revelation – and this passage in particular – challenges us to call up our imaginations in even the worst of times.

Just imagine, the author seems to say, a world whether evil does not win. Just imagine a world that is not scary and lonely and out-of-control. Just imagine a world where our reason for being is grounded not only in the future, but also in the present. Just imagine that in the midst of all the evil, all the malice, all the pettiness God is creating a scenario where heaven and earth co-mingle. Just imagine a world where hope is the last word.

Too often our theology limits itself to hope in heaven only, and the earth is left behind or deemed irrelevant. But that is NOT what the author of Revelation tells us. Rather, he says that “God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women!”

As Church of the Brethren pastor, Peter Haynes, writes, “Here (HERE) then is God’s home, the home which God is even now in the process of making, not in some far off, ethereal never-never land, but here. A new heaven, a new earth, together.”

The passage that we just read is a dream. It is God’s dream, and it is a dream for this earth, not for some future world. And for the author of Revelation (as it should be for us), it is the only dream worth dreaming.

After all, it is what the Gospel is about. Remember how we marveled at Christmas time that the Word – God – had become flesh and was dwelling among us, full of grace and truth. We focused on a baby then. But, oh, the dream is so much bigger than that.

The Word has become flesh and even still dwells among us. And surely, if God is here, dwelling among us, God is in control. So, if nothing else, take comfort that our world – our lives – will not spin off into chaos.

You see, our most profound hope lies with the one who is in control, the one who will make all things new, the one who has been here since the beginning and who will always be here, the one who promises to wipe every tear from our eyes. In the end, we can only stake our lives on that kind of hope and the love it generates – because, in the end, little else will really matter.

The truth of this passage is not that the world will explode in some fiery Armageddon before God’s Kingdom comes. This vision in the final chapter of the final book of our Holy Scriptures is not about an ending. It is about a beginning.

God is at work in our world – creating and re-creating. “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth – as it is in heaven.” It is a cosmic joining, an eternal intermingling.

And you and I are somewhere in the middle of this great unfolding drama, and our task is to live faithfully into the vision of the author of Revelation. Can we permit ourselves to "see" the unseen, to conceive of the good news of a new heaven and earth, to continue to long for a time of healing when the tears are finally wiped away from our eyes? That is the question.

Can we put to rest all of our pain and loss – as individuals and as this church family - for even a little while, long enough to breathe in the Spirit and trust in the One who makes all things new?

Not new things, by the way, but all things new. God does not start over. Rather God takes what it here and transforms it. God takes our lives and heals them. God takes all the broken pieces that are us and makes them whole once more. That is the big picture – even when the details are devastating.

I read a blog this week entitled “Magdalene’s Musings.” Its author writes that this passage in Revelation “beckons us to that place where we can find that we are already part of a new heaven and a new earth. (And that is why we share in communion together.)

When we gather around the table to break the bread and to take the cup, we are gently reminded that even painful memories, even our most devastating losses, can be gathered together and made holy in community.

They are made holy because, as Revelation reminds us, the home of God is among mortals. That is what our communion is about: we do this in remembrance of the One who suffered… who we lost… but who was raised again, and who lit for us the path to new life, life even after loss, life even after death.”

“God has moved into the neighborhood, making a sacred home…with us.” Thanks be to the Holy One!

Rev. Nancy Foran is pastor of the Raymond Village Community Church, Raymond, Maine

http://www.rvccme.org/