22 Then the angel showed me the river of life-giving water,[a] shining like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb 2 through the middle of the city’s main street. On each side of the river is the tree of life, which produces twelve crops of fruit, bearing its fruit each month. The tree’s leaves are for the healing of the nations. 3 There will no longer be any curse. The throne of God and the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 Night will be no more. They won’t need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will shine on them, and they will rule forever and always.
6 Then he said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place.7 “Look! I’m coming soon. Favored is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy contained in this scroll.” (CEB)
“The
Greatest Movie Never Made: The Book of Revelation,” Week Eight
The
last album released by John Lennon before his murder in 1980 contained the song
Beautiful Boy, which in turn contains this simple, famous lyric: Life is what
happens when you are busy making other plans.
And
this weekend, in Aurora, Colorado, Lord, did life happen. Life, and death, and pain, and hurt all
wrapped into yet another mass murder tragedy that has unfortunately become more
and more commonplace. It may be 13 years
since the shootings at Columbine High School, which is located just adjacent to
Aurora in Littleton, Colorado, but it is only a year and a half since the
Tuscon shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that left six people dead,
including a nine-year-old girl.
Judy
Southard had asked me earlier this week, “Eric, will you be talking about hope
at all in your sermon this week?” And
the thing is, I kinda was planning to!
Revelation may be an intense—even scary—story to tell, but at least it
has a happy ending! So I said, sure,
Judy, I’m planning to talk about hope.
This
is it—we’ve made it! This is the final
Sunday of our marathon eight-week-long sermon series on the book of
Revelation. If you’ve enjoyed it thus
far, my apologies for ending it so soon when we really have only but scratched
the surface of this book. But if this
hasn’t really been your cup of tea, then you’re welcome! We’ve covered an awful lot of ground so far,
seen all the major sights, talked about all of the most famous characters: the
four horsemen, the archangel Michael, the dragon, the beast, the Christ
horseman, we even saw the new Jerusalem, but we still have one more fantastic
vision to unpack, one more dreaming wish that John has for his audience. And it’s a doozy, so keep in mind what has
been my regular disclaimer this entire series—I can’t promise you answers, I
can maybe only promise you some better questions!
Father
Albert, a Dominican priest and one of my New Testament professors in seminary,
was always repeating to me—those apocalypses, they mirror the creation—the
authors are writing the end to be like the beginning. And so it is here, in Revelation—in John’s
vision, in this second verse, is the Tree of Life, the same Tree of Life that
is planted at the center of the Garden of Eden in the second chapter of
Genesis. Around it flows the rivers, not
the Tigris and the Euphrates of Eden, but the rivers of life that are solely of
God’s design, and this time the fruit it bears is fruit we can eat, and not be
cast out of Eden.
But
as much as John might long for the mythical Eden of Genesis, he knows that it
will never truly be re-created, and he acknowledges as much by including the
heavenly city in his vision here. He
recognizes that since Eden, humanity has changed, the world has changed, and
the kingdom of God, the redemption that awaits us, is not an undoing of time
back to Eden. In between creation and the
end is everything we have created, and that, too, has become a part of John’s
paradise when he includes the trappings of civilization in this new Eden.
The
implication of having to create a new Eden is that we have somehow lost the old
one, and I would be forced to concede that reality kicking and screaming. It is very easy to see the world as not the
paradise God intended, not the whimsical garden with a petting zoo of
newly-named animals, not the beautiful nature preserve that God sweated over
for six days and nights. It’s easy to
see the world that way because in some ways, it’s true. We have degraded and used up the world, just
as we have degraded and used up one another.
But
we also continue striving towards being this dynamic, thriving community, never
complacent with how the world is, or with how to worship God, but always
asking, with each passing moment, “What is God calling us to do today?” I shared this with my teaching congregation
in California, just months before I came here, but just as John realized that
God had not called Him to envision a future world like the original Eden, so
too does God call us not to escape this world to enter heaven. It is our calling to improve upon it. We may never succeed, but the world will have
become a better place for our having done so.
We
are a church family in the midst of incredible transformation. We are growing and changing in new and
exciting ways that I promise you I didn’t imagine when I arrived. The new, hip term for what we pastors do now
is “vision-casting,” but a lot of what I do is tap dancing instead! And that’s the way it has been for as long as
there has been the church—the church, in spite of itself and its own best
efforts, has never been a truly static entity.
It is living and organic and is meant—designed, even—to take its shape
around the contours of the world which surrounds it.
The
French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote of something he called the
simulacrum—which is the simulation of something for which there is no genuine
article, no authentic original. And that’s
what John is imagining here, at the end of Revelation—the simulation of
something of which there is no actual original version. The Garden of Eden in Genesis does not
contain any city, and the Jerusalem of David and Solomon, the Jerusalem of the
first Jewish temple, did not include Eden.
It
is an apt model for the church as well—no church before this one has had to
address tragedies like what happened in Aurora, Colorado, or what happened in
Tuscon, Arizona, or what happened at Virginia Tech or Columbine High
School. To which you might say, “But
pastor, people killing one another is nothing new.” Yet the way it affects us is new, and does
change. The killing of other people used
to be glorified…even in Scripture, that is so.
In Deuteronomy, God, through Moses, commands the Israelites to kill the
Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, the Jebusites, and other ethnic groups native to
the Holy Land. It is, in effect,
God-sanctioned genocide.
But
now…we read about massacres and our reaction is one of hurt and shame and
shock, but even numbness. Because we
know too many of these stories. We know
the names of too many of these murderers.
The church has not had to rise to this particular challenge before. Like many of the other challenges that are
part of an ever-changing contemporary landscape—social media, 24-hour news, the
phenomenon of “spiritual but not religious…,” we as the church, as the vessel
of God’s message of love and grace and mercy, have yet another challenge put in
our laps.
How
do we, as the current church, explain tragedy?
I cannot ever be so arrogant as to say I have it figured out, but I will
say this—when James Holmes stands in judgment before God for what he did, know
this: he was not born wanting to do what he did. To return to the theme of Genesis, of Eden in
the midst of John’s city of God, original sin does not rest in the individual--after all, Adam and Eve sinned together. It rests in all of us. If James Holmes is indeed guilty of murder,
it is because we have helped make him a murderer—people are taught evil and
hate, and they can be untaught it too, but the world that we shape, that preys
on people with mental illness, that makes it far too easy for deadly weapons to
fall into the wrong hands, these are things that we have created.
Which
means that the mission of the church that exists today—not the one that existed
yesterday, or the year before, or the decade before, is to bring from heaven to
earth the mercy of God for the sins that we commit against one another. Far too often, the church has been complicit
in those sins—in wars, slavery, spiritual abuse, and on and on. We do not have the best track record out
there, and people outside the church might say that should disqualify us from
acting as a voice of grace in the despair and as a source of light in the
darkness, but church, I beg you, I plead with you, do not let that be our way
going forward as we make sense of this broken world we inhabit!
John
was beaten and broken down when he wrote Revelation over 1,900 years ago, but
his hope for God’s arrival survived in his words to this day. You may feel beaten and broken down, not only
after a tragedy such as this, but even just in your day-to-day life as you try
to make ends meet, as you try to love your family and friends, as you try, and
try, and try, to make your little piece of this world better than it was the
day before, but hope, hope itself strives for something we can never attain—immortality. Expressions of hope in God can last far
longer than we can. The Bible is proof
enough of this, but so too are the memories of loved ones that you have lost—they
may have died, but their best selves, their greatest qualities are remembered
and carried by you.
Let
that be the same for the church as well.
For, when the history books are written, what do we want them to say
about the church today? That shrinking
in numbers, and in resources, and in morale, we shrunk from our task of
proclaiming God’s goodness to a world that still desperately needs that message? Or that after yet another tragedy, another
senseless loss of life, we instead answered the call, that we tenderly crafted
out of our own doubts and trepidations a divinely inspired word of grace to our
neighbors that they are loved and cherished as God’s children?
People
are searching for hope right now. And
each of you can offer them a way to that hope.
Of
that I have no doubt.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
July
22, 2012
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