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“Imagine”
Introduction to Scripture Friends, each Monday at noon you offer me a great gift – a chance to get together with 8 or more of you for an hour to read the Bible together, to together attempt to determine is meaning not just for those who might have heard it long ago, but also its meaning for us today. And I know that Bruce White, who holds a Bible Study in his home on Wednesday night for those who cannot get away during the day, feels the same way. This past fall we read, in its entirety, the Revelation to John. Here is a passage towards the end of that book: 1Then 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. 2And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3And 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; 4 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.” 5And 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.” 6Then 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.
One of John Lennon’s most enduring musical hits was “Imagine”, a song which he once commented was as good as anything he ever did with the Beatles. Over the decades since his death in 1980, many people throughout the world have drawn inspiration from the song, where Lennon asks people to imagine a world with no possessions, no national boundaries separating people, no war, and even no religions (perhaps not surprising from someone who caused a furor by saying that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus). It has become something of an anthem for many who strive for world peace, undergirding their desire to work for a more peaceful future for this one planet we all share.Imagination, dreams by another word, is what enlivens people. They are what give us a vision of what just might be possible, and help us set a course for the future. Commenting on her fifth Olympic Games at the age of 41, swimmer Dara Torres said “They may become harder to achieve, but your dreams can’t stop because you’ve hit a certain age.” Armed with those dreams, she went on to win three silver medals. The Revelation to John is a vision given to a man named John of Patmos – Patmos being a little island in the Mediterranean -- late in the first century, a vision which he was called to share with seven churches in what is now present-day Turkey. It is, in some ways, a dream of what will be. But it also is a new vision of what is possible now, of what really is. Revelation is a genre of writing that is strange to us, but which was common in the late first century, and which would have been much more familiar to people than the form of writing we know as the four gospels. It is a form of writing known as “apocalyptic”. Now “apocalyptic” has come to be a sort of short-hand for all sorts of violent cataclysms, such as earthquakes or war or even destruction of the earth by asteroids. But its original meaning – its biblical meaning – means “to lift the veil.” God is trying to “lift the veil” to reveal something hidden from view. Some of you enjoyed the series of films which started with The Matrix, and if you have seen those films you are familiar with the concept. In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that the matrix is “the veil that the world has pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” In the Revelation to John, John’s vision “lifts the veil” to reveal the world as God sees it. In the final two chapters of Revelation, which includes the reading we just heard, we are given a verbal portrait of life as God intends us to live it. It is not a fantasy for the future, but a revealed picture of what life as the church is supposed to look like now, on the other side of the veil. It is a world of great natural beauty, unspoiled by human sinfulness, and a world where God dwells not up in heaven somewhere, far away and removed from us, but in a tent in the midst of the people. Wes Howard Brook, commenting on this passage, writes that “perhaps most amazingly, it is not a human building project, but a pure gift from God. To live in New Jerusalem is not to ‘get busy’ but to remove the blinders from our eyes and see life as it really is, right here and now. For the churches, this means not simply celebrating God’s reign in worship (although it does mean that), but living as God’s people right in the midst of [secular culture]‘Babylon’. To truly be church is to be New Jerusalem in the world: to be a place where God and God’s Lamb [Jesus] reign in justice and abundance for all people; a place whose gates are always open and whose light always shines; a place of great joy where the darkness of violence, exploitation, and death is banished.” Christians are those for whom the veil has been lifted, who can imagine the world as God sees it, a world where God gets what God wants, where there is no more hunger, no more sorrow, where there is housing for all, and war and violence are no more. They are people like the woman who had raised twelve children, eleven of whom were foster children whom she had adopted, all of them children with special needs. The newspaper reporter asked how she, with her limited means, dared to attempt such a thing, what led her to adopt all these children. She simply replied, “I saw a new world coming.” And they are people like Brad and Chris Haven, Kathy and Stan Warren, Kelly and Macalya Washburn, all of whom just took a week off from work and, at their own expense, traveled down to New Orleans, sleeping on bunks at a UCC church, to help rebuild homes ruined by hurricane Katrina. A lot of folk take a look at the devastation in New Orleans, the tens of thousands of homes flooded out by the storm waters that engulfed 90% of the city, the incredible poverty, and the possibility that another hurricane could hit again, and wonder why we just don’t cut our losses and abandon the city. They see the red ants and the mosquitoes and the heat and the humidity and a future without hope and they turn away. But we see something different. We see three churches, 21 people all told, ranging in age from Thom who turned 16 on the trip and Macayla who who is 18 up to several septuagenarians, coming together out of our own little settings and together taking on something none was ready for on our own. We see the United Church of Christ still building homes down there, and we see the St. Bernard Project, on which we worked in groups on three separate locations, having completed to date 276 homes, with 50 more underway even as I speak. We see the joy in the eye of a proud homeowner hosting us all to a Home Completion Party, his little puppy eagerly lapping the frosting off a cake. We see a displaced homeowner and her teenage son and daughter as they walk around a home in the finish carpentry process, and find tears in our eyes as the daughter exclaims,: “look, we’ll even have a door knob on the bathroom door now!” We see 21 people, mostly strangers to one another before this past week, pitch in together to grocery shop, plan and cook delicious meals, set tables with flowers in vases, clean up, and be a new community. We see nightly worship services which include a time to share the days up and downs, scheduled to run only 30 minutes, run well over an hour each evening as tired but enspirited nail-gunners, door-hangers, caulkers, painters, baseboard trimmers, demolition pros, even copper wire strippers, share the way their experiences had changed the way they see the world, changed the way they understood their faith, changed even, for some, their lives. And we see that God has indeed pitched God’s tent in the midst of the people. In the midst of this recovering city on the Mississippi, yes, in the defiant banners proclaiming that New Orleans will rise again, in the steely determination and youthful enthusiasm of the Americorps volunteers supervising our work crews, in the bare-bones halls of the St. Bernard Project where impassioned staffers seek to keep a handle on this burgeoning initiative. But we also see that God has pitched God’s tent in the midst of this people, in this combined mission trip, among Stan and Kathy and Chris and Brad and Macayla and Kelly and Reed – but also in the midst of this congregation, for you were surely with us not only in the laminated photos we carried with us to the job sites, but also in spirit every moment of every day. Friends, we Christians have been gifted with the vision to see a new world coming. And more than that, we have been granted the grace to live as God’s people in that world, a world where sharing by all can mean scarcity for none, where the light shines in the darkness and will not be overcome, where pain and loss and tears are indeed banished, where hope shall bloom, where hope shall bloom. Imagine that, and rejoice, and embrace the life that is real life. Amen.
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