The Lesson                                                                          Revelation 21:1-6

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; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God; 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 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.

Sermon Text

 Ideally in life, we would always have stories with proper endings. There’s nothing worse than reading a book, and usually a nice long book, only to find out that it throws everything out at the very end. For many people, I was not one of them, there was a huge cultural moment when George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones series was turned into a television show. The series eventually reached a point where they went beyond where the books had been written. And when the ending finally came, all those eight years of fandom and success terminated in a series ending that everyone, almost universally, hated.

We were all almost always run into some story that does this to us. Mine was the sequel series of Star Wars. It started so promisingly with The Force Awakens, moving on to the apex, I think, of good Star Wars movies, which is The Last Jedi (I’ll fight you on it,) and then terminating with the movie that was made only to make people on Reddit happy… Diatribe aside, I think we are, as a species, worried that, at the end of the day, our own story is going to have an ending that is unsatisfying, an ending that ultimately doesn’t make the story work.

When we look at life, whether it’s our life or human history, a profoundly painful story unfolds. Hegel, a philosopher, once proposed that history is working towards an end. He narrativized history in saying that, as we keep moving and moving, there is an eventual and definite ending. As everything we do follows patterns, those patterns have to lead to a conclusion. Others like Marx would pick this up and propose definite endings to their history – whether that is in Proletariat Revolution or if that’s in the full freedom of humanity through some other means. But the thing about any of these stories that are told about our history is that they’re often stuck in the assumption that the patterns that currently exist will keep on going. That we will keep going down the drain until we finally hit the bottom.

We in the church proclaim something different because we believe that history was interrupted. When Jesus Christ was born, it was a disruption of history. Everything that was leading up to Christ being born is different than everything after Christ being born. In Christ the fullness of God entered into the physical world in a way that had never happened before. God, who we know is largely content to allow the world to spin by the laws of physics and all other things which God has ordained for it, suddenly interrupted it in the most startling way God could – by becoming a physical part of the story. When the author of a story puts themselves into the story, things have to change. You are no longer dealing with narrative, you are dealing with meta-narrative, a story that is commenting on itself and on the idea of the story at all. When Jesus came into this world, God was saying definitively that regardless of whatever rules there were physical or otherwise, God had a different plan for the world than the one the world had for itself.

In terms of physics, the world has only one ending. This universe will eventually run out of usable energy and when that usable energy ends we will experience something called “the heat death of the universe,” where nothing can happen. There can be no new creation, there cannot be anything, because all there is, is useless heat with no kinetic or chemical energy left. If we go over to a historical perspective, then the only thing that we have in front of us is a succession of national powers. One empire rising and another falling, until eventually one wins out or everyone is killed off. If you look at our history, I believe our extinction is a more likely consequence of our own action than the triumph of any one party. If we as human beings are allowed to keep acting the way we do, we will kill ourselves. We will destroy this planet and everyone. That is the culmination of humanity in their sinful existence ever since Cain killed Abel.

So, what does Christ coming in and offering something new to us achieve? We, of course, in this Easter season proclaim the fact that Christ has risen and in that resurrection has defeated death For those who choose to follow Christ, there is no end to life only its brief interruption, followed by the overwhelming joy of an eventual and bodily resurrection. But what does that resurrection mean in a cosmic sense? What can we understand about how this entire universe is changed by Christ redeeming it?

You see, when Christ took on human form, Christ did not just take on the fullness of humanity – although that was his primary work – Christ also definitely combined himself with the very matter of the universe. Christ was made of protons and neutrons and electrons, Christ was made of atoms and molecules, Christ was real and physical in every way that matters and therefore all of creation is redeemed through the work of Christ.

We can infer from this that matter itself is in some way resurrected through Christ. The eventual heat death of this universe is no longer our necessary end. Christ will make a world in which entropy does not exist, in which we as humans and, indeed, the universe itself do not have to see degradation as a necessary thing, Things will be allowed to exist in perpetuity. There won’t ever be a time where something cannot exist and exist in abundance.

As for our human history, we are told in a latter part of Revelation that the work of God is so complete that the Tree of Life, the thing that was forbidden to humanity in the garden of Eden because of our evil, will be freely available. We are told that the leaves that grow on that tree are for the healing of the nations, that the healing of all of the people of the world is complete in the work of God. We are no longer separated by where we were born, how we were born, or the conditions of our birth, but united in the work that God has done to bring us into the Kingdom which has begun by Christ.

Perhaps the most important thing for us in our day-to-day life (although I would say sociopolitical things are much more important in our current socioeconomic climate,) is that we are told that every tear will be wiped away and that there will be no sorrow in this world which Christ has created. Life is so overwhelming, and the course of human history so self-defeating, that it is no wonder that we feel like we have no hope. It is so easy to be hopeless, so easy to give in to the cynicism of the rest of the world. We find ourselves looking for politicians to save us, but they all of them disappoint. They all have to protect either their business interests or their personal interest or the continuation of the system itself, and the system will always hurt people, you can’t have a system that doesn’t.

We look to align ourselves with the most powerful parties, instead of trying to find a way that we can live together for the mutual good of each other. We have to find enemies and we have defined our allies, as we talked about last week, not by what we agree on but by who we disagree with. And most importantly, I think, is the reality in this world that always fails to deliver on good things, we will become despondent, depressed, and we begin to think maybe we should just give up.

The promise that we are given in Christ is that there is a proper ending. After all this hard work and after all the suffering we deal with, we are not going to be disappointed by what Jesus does with the end of time. We’re used to being disappointed, we’re used to being lied to, but Christ is the truth and so when we’re told that at the end of all things everything will be coming together perfectly we have to believe it. Yes, now it’s hard, and yes we need to do things to take care of ourselves – go to therapy, take your meds, talk to the folks around you about what’s going on in your heart, because you need to do that! And pray, pray, pray.

We do all of that and we put the work into making ourselves right on this side of eternity because we have the assurance that there is another side to eternity at all. This other side of eternity is much better than this one, in fact it is the perfect and proper ending to the chaos of this one.

We hold in our hands the most important truth there has ever been. Not just that God loves this universe, loves every person in it, but that God came to be a part of it. To fix it so that it could have an ending different than what it was writing for itself. There is hope for you and for me and for everything in this universe, we only have to participate in what God is doing and be willing to tell people that good news. Because the thing we’re trying to do, even as much as it is saving souls and redeeming sinners (of which we are all good company I’ll remind you,) is to bring hope to the hopeless.

In a world that is purely material, in which entropy will always create the least energetic outcome, there’s always going to be the heat death of the universe, the rise and fall of nations, and ultimately not a single source of hope. We people of God tell a different story, one that has the proper ending, let us share it and let us believe it. Things are not good now, they will get worse.  We can go through our entire life with things going wrong, but if you have faith in Christ and you seek to live in peace with one another, doing all your part to make sure this world is better than it is now… The next world is guaranteed, and it will be better. You, dear people of God, are blessed with the knowledge of God’s true story.  You can tell it. When you tell it make sure the ending is the right one. – Amen