A Box Full of Darkness: Revelation 21:1-6
All Saints Sunday (Ordinary Time)
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the
former heaven and the former earth had passed away, and the sea was no
more. 2 I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride beautifully dressed for her
husband. 3 I heard a loud voice from the throne
say, “Look! God’s dwelling is here with humankind. He
will dwell with them, and they will be his peoples. God himself will be with
them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every
tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. There will be no mourning, crying,
or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” 5 Then
the one seated on the throne said, “Look! I’m making all things new.” He also
said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 6 Then
he said to me, “All is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and
the end. To the thirsty I will freely give water from the life-giving spring.”
(CEB)
There is a
spot in Lake Superior where, every fall, monarch butterflies pass on their way
from Canada to Mexico as they flee the frost of winter. A few years ago, avid butterfly watchers
noticed that the kaleidoscope[1] of butterflies would reach
a point over the lake and head east for a while before resuming their course
south. There wasn’t anything in the way,
nor did the winds change overly much at that point.
Eventually,
geologists stepped in to say that it’s likely that there used to be a mountain
there, possibly one of the highest mountains of North America. The mountain itself is long gone, but the
memory of it being in the way so much that it interrupted the flight path lives
on in these butterflies so very, very many years later. They remember the mountain that is no more,
and avoid trying to fly over the height that doesn’t exist.[2]
“Look! I’m making all things new,” says the one
seated on the throne here at the end of John’s vision, the end of the Christian
Bible entire. The exalted Christ in the
New Jerusalem presides over a city with no mourning, no crying, no pain—a
decidedly new idea to those of us who have plenty of experience with all three.
Yet we are
not, culturally speaking, all that great at “new.” Like the butterflies, we tend to learn a path
and keep to it, leaning hard into the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
mentality that welcomes and celebrates duct tape and perseverance. It’s why it makes ritual such a beautiful and
difficult part of our faith—we repeat the patterns, but sometimes we have
forgotten why.
Today we
remember the souls that have gone before us, the great cloud of witnesses whose
names we ring into the world again to say these people mattered; these
people are loved. We do this every
year, as do churches around the world.
We who are human need moments like this where we remember what was, who
was because they are part of who we have become. For better—and worse, which we acknowledge
far less often but which is also true—these people have shaped our flight
south, turning our paths in ways we do not always realize ourselves. We repeat this ritual not because we love
ritual but because ritual helps us hold the love we have for people, helps us name
the dead and lean into the living.
This text from
Revelation is a favorite at funerals because it looks forward. When we are brokenhearted, we want very much
to hear of a place where there is no pain, where God dwells with humankind and
freely gives water from a life-giving spring.
There is nothing wrong with this; God wants our joy, our healing, our
wholeness, and it is right and good that we should want the same. God offers community in the open invitation
of our restoration, we who have loved and lost and loved again, we who remember
the mountain and how difficult it was to fly over.
But sometimes,
we as the Church need to allow ourselves the grace to admit that the New
Jerusalem isn’t here yet. We repeat the
ritual and sometimes get caught up in saying the trite refutations of sorrow
because we are only looking at the beautifully dressed city and not acknowledging
the everyday loveliness of the city where we are. On this day of memory, we grieve; there is
mourning, and pain, and tears, and there is also the beauty of bright gold
leaves catching the dawn’s light, and this is what it means to be human today. As we look at this passage and the
discrepancy between it and our world; as we look at the grief that we bring and
how we’re decidedly working with old materials, take a moment to realize, as
Eugene Boring points out, that “God does not make ‘all new things,’ but ‘all
things new.’”[3]
It may seem
like semantics, but it is not. Rev. Dr.
Janet Hunt unpacks that, “Indeed, God does not simply replace all that has been
broken, defiled, betrayed, polluted, adulterated, or even in our understanding
or experience, destroyed. Rather, somehow God gathers it all up and makes
the old new again. God redeems what we thought was beyond the human
capacity for hope.”[4]
The chimes of
the bell that rang for our own saints whose names we know and for the 3,841,659[5] whose names we likely do
not are not erased in the new heaven and the new earth as though they never
were. They are part of us; they are the
mountain we remember even if the mountain itself no longer remains. But they are made new; the chimes are not
funereal clangs but peals for dancing that we have the gift of knowing others,
of being connected enough to remember, of loving enough to miss.
One day, the
chimes will be welcome.
“Grief is not
linear,” they say, and they’re right, whoever they are. Some days, it is enough that there are
sparrows in the world and that a beloved grandchild has a new talent to be
applauded. And other days, no amount of
jaw-dropping sunsets can soothe the gnawing ache of absence. While this text promises us that one day it
will not be the twisting loop of healing but a glorious wonder of joy, our
faith in all the thousands of verses preceding this promise teaches us that the
reassurance of “God dwelling with humankind” is one piece of this vision for
which we don’t have to wait.
“Then Moses
set up the courtyard around the tabernacle and altar and put up the curtain at
the entrance to the courtyard. And so Moses finished the work.
“Then the cloud covered the tent of
meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses
could not enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled on it, and
the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.
“In all the travels of the Israelites, whenever the
cloud lifted from above the tabernacle, they would set out; but if the
cloud did not lift, they did not set out—until the day it lifted. So the
cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the
cloud by night, in the sight of all the Israelites during all their travels.”[6] In Exodus 40, God sets up shop with
Israelites and travels with them while they find their footing and their
identity after leaving Egypt. God lives
among them, “pitching tent” in a tangible and visible way. From the second book of our Scripture, God
dwells with humankind.
“And the Word became flesh and lived
among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full
of grace and truth. (John testified to him and
cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of
me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we
have all received, grace upon grace.”[7] John—the same John connected to this vision
of Revelation—opens his gospel with the acknowledgement that God came among us as
the Christ named Jesus, seeing the world we see from our vantage point, living
among us in a tangible and visible way.
From the fourth gospel of our New Testament, God dwells with humankind.
“Look! God’s dwelling is here with humankind.
He will dwell with them, and they will be his peoples. God
himself will be with them as their God.”
It will not be a new thing because it is true now, right now
where there are tears and there is mourning and death is still very much part
of our lives, and what good news it is that we do not face this current heaven
and this current earth on the strength of our own ability to handle pain and
tears and grief. When I was working on
this service and the number of COVID deaths, I had to go stand outside on my
deck for a while and process it. Last year,
Gloria rang the bell 24 times, once for every 50,000 people who had died in
2020. If we had kept that ratio this
year, she would have had to ring it more than 70 times. I do not know how to wrap my mind around five
million COVID deaths, I simply don’t. And
I do not know how to factor it into the fear following the coup in Sudan, or
the collapse of the government in Afghanistan, or the power loss in Lebanon, or
the ongoing recovery of New Orleans, or the water crisis in Benton Harbor, or
the overdose deaths in Bay City. I don’t
know how to handle that kind of twisting grief where Alpha and Omega seems
suspiciously absent while we flounder somewhere around omicron and pi. I don’t know how we will ever be able to
accept a new heaven and a new earth when the mountain is so big and we have
remembered to go around it for so many generations.
There’s a poet named Mary Oliver who
turns up in a lot of sermons, including mine, because she’s really very good at
her craft. On this day of memory and hope,
I am struck by her poem “The Uses of Sorrow”:
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.[8]
“Note that
nothing in our passage indicates that knowing (read: ‘believing in’) the end of
the story somehow magically exempts us from suffering,” writes Professor René
Such Schreiner. “This is consistent with
the entire book of Revelation: it does not tutor us on how to avoid the
suffering the first things bring, in and of themselves. Rather, John narrates
the reality of suffering and empowers his hearers to live into
and through that suffering with integrity—as followers of
Christ, to the end.”[9]
I do not know
how we will receive the things made new, how we will learn that the mountain is
no longer there, but I know that God does not ask us to do either of these
things in unquestioned forgetfulness of everything that came before. We remember the names of our saints because
that, too, is good; we grieve the loved ones lost because that, too, is holy;
we appreciate our box full of darkness because that, too, is part of us.
And one day,
we will learn that the mountain is no longer there, for the former heaven and
the former earth have passed away, and these words are trustworthy and
true. And God will dwell with us, as God
has from the beginning, and as God will until the end.
Thanks be to
God. Amen.
[1]
This is, in fact, the name of a large group of the insect, like a flock or a
herd. English is delightful.
[2]
The
Monarchs Butterflies remember a mountain that has disappeared for millennia at
Lake Superior - Strange Sounds
[4]
Ibid.
[5]
Current deaths (5,029,535) minus amount on 10/31/20 (1,187,876). (number
of covid deaths november 2020 to now globally - Bing, The
COVID-19 pandemic has now killed 5 million people around the world : NPR)
[6]
Exodus 40:33–38, NIV.
[7]
John 1:14–16, NRSV.
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