April 11, 2010
What About Now? - Revelation 1:4-8
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI think I mentioned to you last Sunday that I had never missed an Easter Sunday in my life. That’s thirty-four consecutive Easter Sundays that I have celebrated. In fact, that’s 34 times in regular worship services alone (which doesn’t even include sunrise services or what we may have read at home) that I have heard the Easter story. That story is just shy of 2000 years old. As the old song says, it’s an “old, old story about how a Savior came from glory.” We sometimes think that we sing old hymns in our worship, which we do, but they are nowhere near as old as the Easter story. If you don’t like old, then you don’t like Easter, because Easter is an old, old story that we tell over and over and over again, not just on Easter Sundays or Easters seasons, but every Sunday. We Christians worship on the first day of the week, we worship on Sunday and not Saturday solely because of Easter. Every Sunday is a mini-Easter. I may have heard it 34 times on Easter, but we all have heard it, or should have heard it, fifty two times alone just within the last year. And, one more thing, it’s old. Imagine what Steele Creek was like on the first Easter. Everybody says that Steele Creek has changed so much in the last twenty years. Imagine how much it has changed since then. Imagine what America was like then. The nation’s history is one tenth as old as Easter.
Because we believe that old, old story, we have hope for the future. God, through Jesus, has beat death on our behalf. One of the most significant things that I do as a pastor is to lead a person literally to his grave. I show up at the graveside, stand behind the hearse and lead the pall-bearers to an open grave. I don’t know what happens in that grave. It’s a mystery. But I do believe that God is God, even over that freshly dug grave, even over something as ominous as death. I stand over that hole, with that body of someone whom I have known and loved very much. I look at that casket, and that person’s family, and that hole in the ground. Even in the uncertainty of all of that, we declare victory over death. Even in all of that, God still is. This old, old story from the far distant past gives us hope for the future. That’s what we talked about last Sunday on Easter. We retold this old story and how it gives us hope for the future. We talked about the past, and therefore the future.
That’s largely what the Revelation of John does. John has these visions, most all of which are completely foreign to us, of how this old story gives us hope for the future. If you read Revelation, it gets really weird and ugly and bloody, but this old, old story gives us hope for a future beyond the weird and ugly and bloody. It’s Easter all over again, you see. But that’s not all John does in Revelation. John mostly, especially here, talks about something else perhaps even more pertinent than what happened a long time ago and what will happen sometime hopefully in a long time to come.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t thought much about either one of those things lately. I’ve been thinking about babies. I have become quite an expert on babies, in fact. I can’t tell you much about bringing them into the world, but I can tell you a whole lot about what to do with them after they get here, and even after they stay here for a while. As far as my own present and immediate future goes, that’s pretty much it. It’s about raising babies. It’s not that I don’t think about the long term future, or it’s not that I haven’t stood by an open grave lately and thought about Jesus’ victory over that grave. I have, and it is very important when we think about our own futures, and even the present of people who have already died.
My aunt died on August 18th of last year. Her name was Rosanne and she was an immediate part of my family. I have thought about her lately. In fact, I miss her more now than I did right after she died. A month to the day after she died, my dog died. His name was Colby. Leah and I got Colby two months after we got married and shared ten, wonderful years with him. We expected Rosanne’s death. We did not expect Colby’s. I have missed him very much, too. Colby was a ninety-five-pound golden retriever who thought he was a lap dog. Nothing made Colby happier than to jump up in my lap, or anybody’s lap, and slobber all over my face. Colby drove some people crazy. But not Rosanne. Rosanne adored Colby, and she especially loved it when he jumped in her lap and licked her face.
Now I don’t know what the Resurrection is like. I have never been to heaven, and I’ve never known anybody who has and came back and told me about it. It’s a mystery. But I cannot tell you how much I hope, beyond hope, that Colby is crawling all over Rosanne slobbering in her face right now. I know that may sound trite. Forgive me if it does, but that seems like a creation that only God could have made. That seems like a creation that is in right order with itself. That seems very much like Eden to me. I cannot tell you how I hope that’s true, not just for my sake and not just for their sakes, but for the whole world’s sake. Now if this old story that we told last week, and every week, is true…, if this old, old story really is valid, then I have a lot of confidence that Rosanne’s face is covered in dog slobber right now and that Colby and Rosanne are loving every minute of it. And furthermore, I’m going to get to see that one day, when we’re all together again. We will all see our loved ones again one day around God’s table.
I really do believe that John’s vision of God’s future, in all its totality, would include that image. But that’s not all that John does. John’s claim is even bolder than that. John claims two times in two verses that God was, and that God will be (which is what we just talked about), but that God also IS, right now. In fact, it’s not just that God will come in the clouds, but that God comes right now in the clouds. If you keep reading Revelation, you’ll see just how bold that is. Revelation does not sugar coat the world. Revelation has lots of violence and pain and death and weeping, all of which sounds very similar to today’s newspaper. Yet, even in that, God comes. Even in all of that, God IS. The wolf and lamb, as Isaiah says, lie down peacefully together not sometime in the pie-in-the-sky, wistful future, but right now. That’s true right now, John says. Jesus is God right now. That means something, doesn’t it?
That means something about my babies. I’ve got two of them, and one more coming tomorrow. Herman Canipe says so, anyway, and I have more confidence in his judgment on these things than anybody else’s. Raising children today is very difficult. I remember hearing Dean Smith talk one time at Lake Junalusca, the Methodist Retreat Center close to Ashville. He was the basketball coach at the time of UNC. I remember him saying that people often ask him how he handles the pressure of all those close basketball games. He said that the pressure of a basketball game pales in comparison to the pressures that parents face everyday, who want to do nothing more than to provide for and to raise and to love their children.
As a pastor, I stand by a lot of you who under a lot of pressure. How do you care for your aging parents? That’s a brutally hard question, and I’m almost always fresh out of answers for you. How do you save your marriage? What do you do about the job? What do you do if you don’t have a job? What do we do about these low income apartments that might be (will be depending on whom you ask) coming up in our back yard? How do we respond to it? What do we do about worship? A lot of people say that the Church’s worship has become frozen and it was never meant to become frozen. Therefore, we are not reaching a lot of people that we should be reaching. So how do we address that, and how do we maintain our integrity and glorify God while at the same time reach out to a world that needs to connect to God now more than ever?
These are all very difficult questions, and you know what? They don’t teach us these things in seminary. They don’t teach them in medical school either, or law school, or any other school. The most difficult questions in life, which are often the most important, do not come with easy answers. The one thing I can tell you, though, and that John says emphatically here, is that the God who created this world, and who came into this world and defeated death for us a long, long time ago, and who promises to bring it to his own completion one day, maybe soon and very soon, still is. God was victorious then, and will be tomorrow, and is today.
I love to tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love and his Resurrection, and I love how that gives us hope for the future. But if you’re anything like me, it’s the now that commands most of your attention. I’m afraid that I can not tell you all that much about now and all the thorny things we’re slogging our way through now. I’m afraid that we’re going to have to keep slogging for awhile. But I can tell you that the Resurrections affects more than what happened a long time ago and what will happen a long time to come, but also the now. So you can keep slogging knowing who really is God and who really isn’t. So keep reading this old story, and keep looking forward to the future that it promises. And keep slogging through the muck and mire of right now, knowing that the God who was and will be, still is. Hallelujah!
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
