Sermons for the Month
DATE: May 3, 1998
SERVICE: Sunday: Easter IV
TEXT: Revelation 7:9-17
Sermons for the Month
"The Importance of Being Earnest"
DATE: May 3, 1998
SERVICE: Sunday: Easter IV
TEXT: Revelation 7:9-17
"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
I know some people -- maybe you do, too -- whose first priority in life should be to re-arrange their bedroom furniture. What else could explain the fact that they permanently seem to have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed? It seems as if they misread the installation instructions on their beds and put them up wrong-side out. Anybody here not know these people?
They go through each day cranky and cantankerous, purveyors of doom and gloom. These are the folks that always know what new natural disaster has just struck in the world, what local businesses are about to go bankrupt, whose marriages are on the rocks. They are the people who find always the worst in every piece of good news. How could we survive life without these wrong-side-of-the-bedders? How could we get around without the black clouds and gloomy forecasts. Without wrong-side-of-the-bedders, we would never fully appreciate how miserable life really is.
The book of Revelation is often perceived as sharing that same sort of bleak perspective -- a wrong-side-of-the-bed vision foretelling pestilence, punishment, famine, death, destruction. But the Revelation of Jesus to John is not a narrowed down version of despair, a nerve-racking vision of wrath.
Here in today's text we are given celestial glimpses of glory. What might it be like to enlist in God's reign and exist in God's peace? The divisiveness of nationality, the prejudices of particularity, are forgotten as all peoples forge forward to praise God. There is one congregation, one church, and it joins all its separate voices together in a sonorous harmony of glorifying God. John saw this as the church of the future. John also saw this as our template for bringing the church to life in our own time. Instead of being just another organization lobbying to keep the building in repair, or keeping alive past failures, the church is challenged by this vision in Revelation to itself become an "earnest" of paradise.
Now there's a word for you: "earnest." It's not a word used much in church nowadays, although it is a familiar one in Scripture. But it may be a word that the church needs to proclaim. For our text calls the church to be what in biblical language is an earnest of the eschaton.
In the Hebrew the concept is conveyed by the word Shamayim, which literally means a foretaste of heaven. If you have ever had an encounter with the Spirit, if you are alive and aglow with life, you know the meaning of Shamayim, or "earnest." In Greek the word for earnest is arrabon, a legal term denoting a deposit made that renders the contract binding. An earnest is a promise, a pledge, a foretaste, an embodied symbol of something which is to come in its fullness later. Think of it as a deposit on your vacation to Maui.
When a couple plants that a spindly little oak sapling smack in the middle of their new backyard, it is an earnest of the future they envision in that space. Someday the tree will grow to shade their yard with an enormous umbrella of green. Its sturdy branches will hold the tire swings and treehouse platforms of the children yet to be born. It will carpet the ground with its brilliant fall foliage and feed a legion of squirrels with its annual crop of acorns. It might not look like much when planted, but the few spindly limbs of that sapling oak bear the weight of a tremendous earnest.
Although the ultimate "earnest" is the Holy Spirit, as Spirit-empowered people we are also each called to act as "earnests" of the ultimate triumph we know Christ's salvation has in store for all creation. On the day of salvation, today's Revelation text proclaims, all believers will loudly praise God's "blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might" (7:12). Are you an earnest, a leaven of heaven? Does your life attest to the presence of these divine gifts to the world? When others listen to you speak, watch you work, see your home, do they experience that encounter as an earnest of Christ's victory, of God's redeeming love for the world. Christians are all to be "earnests." Is our church an earnest of the future -- human conduits of the divine light offering others little glimpses of the brilliance, the glory, that awaits redeemed creation? Is our role in this community a leaven of heaven?
Missionary/physician/musician/historical theologian Dr. Albert Schweitzer gave his life to serve the needs of those who lived in the African jungle. He was to the first half of the 20th century what Mother Teresa was to the second half. He gave one of the best definitions of "ethics" I've ever seen, and lived what he defined: "Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain life and further life; it is bad to damage and destroy life ... Ethics is the maintaining of life at the highest point of development -- my own life and other life -- by devoting myself to it in help and love, and both these things are connected." (Reverence for Life [New York: Philosophical Library, 1965], 34-35.)
John in this morning’s text, portrays the coming of an eternal future. He paints a word picture of what that eternal future will look like. This morning's Revelation text focuses on the three most basic human needs of our frail and mortal present.
1) Physical Needs -- The vision from Revelation promises that when believers are gathered around God enthroned they will "hunger no more, and thirst no more" (v.16). In other words, we will be delivered from physical needs.
As a physician, Schweitzer’s caring for the bodies of those who caught sight of the jungle clinic's light came naturally. But each of us is capable of providing some measure of sheer physical comfort to those whose physical needs are consuming all their energy and hope. Welfare reforms have made the church's role as a social service agency even more vital. It's hard to work on an empty stomach; it's hard to learn when you're cold and tired; it's hard to play when you're weak and malnourished. Its hard to have hope when you are dying alone of cancer.
2) Spiritual Needs -- Jesus' vision to John revealed that divine deliverance involves more than just filling up stomachs and banishing body aches. There are other aches that have no neurological cause. There are pains suffered by a parched soul. Without addressing the spiritual needs of the human condition, one finds there is no true earnest of salvation present. Saving the body is not enough, for it will fail to thrive unless the spirit is nourished and nurtured by a community of faith. In our Revelation text the enthroned Lamb offers believers "springs of the water of life" as . . . sustenance for an eternal soul. Earnest upwellings of this same spring are already available from our own faith community.
3) Emotional Needs -- As frail and failing human beings, however, we find our emotional needs are perhaps the most difficult to satisfy, and are even more demanding when denied. Without emotional strength and suppleness, even the strongest body will fail, even the surest spirit will falter. When our body labors, it needs a quiet center, a sense of emotional ease, in order to bear the physical hardship. Our spirit can soar only if it knows there is a safe and secure emotional scaffolding resting under its flight path. One of the most tragic figures in biblical history is Israel's first chosen king, Saul. Although he was a great and strong warrior and commanded the 12 tribes of the new nation, although he experienced the exalted presence of God's Spirit, Saul's body and soul had a fatal weakness. Although he enjoyed physical and spiritual triumphs, Saul's own emotional melancholia destroyed his faith, his vision, his purpose, his will.
In today's Revelation text God meets our emotional needs in two ways. The text promises God will "wipe away every tear" -- suggesting that the emotionally honest and cleansing tears will first be allowed to flow, but that these tears will then be dried by God's own tender hand. As an earnest of this quality of emotional care, we, too, must not be afraid to show the same depth of feeling and to let others do the same. In response to a genuine outpouring of emotion, an earnest of the coming age does not judge, but offers what is needed -- to dry a cheek, to hold a hand, to show empathy.
Do you really believe what we preach, that Christ is risen, or are you a realist, a pessimist, a doom and gloomer? Will this church hold the world in its arms and love it, as an earnest of God's holding the whole world in the arms of the Almighty -- and loving it? Will you be a leaven of heaven in your family, your community, your world?
In a creative writing class, a young teenage girl wrote this short poem:
Don't criticize.
Don't analyze.
Don't even try to sympathize.
Don't say you understand because you don't.
Just hold me in your arms for once.
And love me as I am.
Like my mommy used to do before the world grew up on me. (John Fischer, "In Praise of the Unrenowned," CCM Magazine, October 1997, 84.)
The service had already started when John, wearing a T-shirt with hole, jeans, and sandals, his entire wardrobe for four years of college, entered the worship center. The place was packed for Easter Sunday. Seeing no place to sit in the back, John begins to walk further and further forward, looking for a place to sit. As he walks closer and closer to the pulpit, looking for a seat, more and more of the congregation’s conservative members are getting uptight. Finally realizing there are no seats, he just squats down right on the carpet, a perfectly acceptable behavior in many college lecture halls filled to overflowing.
About this time, the minister realizes that from way at the back of the church, a deacon is slowly making his way toward John. Now the deacon is in his eighties, has silver-gray hair, a three-piece suit, and a pocket watch. A godly man, very elegant, very courtly. He walks with a cane and as he starts walking toward this boy, everyone is saying to themselves, “You can’t blame him for what he’s going to do. How can you expect a man of his age and of his background to understand some college kid on the floor?”
It takes a long time for the man to reach the boy. The church is utterly silent except for the clicking of the man’s cane. All eyes are focused on him. You can’t ever hear anyone breathing. The people are thinking, “The minister can’t even preach the sermon until the deacon does what he has to do.” And now they see this elderly man drop his cane to the floor. With great difficulty, he lowers himself and sits down next to John and worships with him.
When the minister gains control, he says, “What I am about to preach, you will never remember. What you have just seen, you will never forget.” What kind of church are we?
AMEN