May 16, 2010
Unreal - Genesis 2:8-14, Rev 21:1-8, 22:1-5
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI have a little tid-bit of trivia that will make some of you smile. The Bible begins and ends in a garden. Ya’ll love gardens here and I thought that would make you happy. The Garden of Eden in Genesis 2 and the final garden in Revelation 22 are both absolutely, unimaginably beautiful. I actually grew up working in gardens. I probably like the idea of a garden better than a garden itself. When I was little my grandmother and I would always plant a garden together. She planted and I played. In fact, I would sling some dirt with my hoe for fifteen minutes and call it a day.
It was just too hot out there for me. And there were always a bunch of gnats out there. And you had to bend over all the time. Why can’t God make it so where snap beans grow to waist level? I love tomatoes, but they just don’t give off any shade, now do they? So, in high school, I graduated to peaches and apples. They do provide shade, but they also provide peach fuzz and back aches.
Our idea of a peaceful, serene garden with a gentle brook flowing through it is too good to be true. The Garden of Eden is unreal. The Bible specifically mentions that Eden was somewhere around the Tigris & Euphrates Rivers, or modern day Iraq. Brian Deal got married yesterday and I’ll bet he’s not taking his new bride to Iraq for their honeymoon. This garden, you see, is unreal. Maybe it was real once upon a time, but it’s unreal now. And the same is true with this garden in Revelation 22, which specifically mentions Jerusalem, which is a beautiful place, I hear, but it’s certainly not what Revelation 22 says it is. It may be real in the future, but like the Garden of Eden, it’s unreal now.
Almost all of Revelation is unreal. The beginning of it starts out like a letter, which is fairly harmless. And then there’s Revelation 5, which talks about this scroll being read for the first time, which is neat to imagine. And then there’s Revelation 7 which talks about this terrible ordeal that most of the world won’t survive, but all of us, we presume, will, so it’s fine. And then there’s the end of Revelation, which sounds great with this ideal (even if unreal, at least now) garden. But then you have the middle of it. Revelation would be great without say chapters 2-20. Just read it sometime. It’s the opposite of these gardens. The middle of Revelation is as bad as these gardens are good. You may not like your husband, for example. I’ll bet he hogs the remote, but he’s not the ten-headed monster that we read about in Revelation 13. And you may not be crazy about your wife right now either. I’ll bet she gets on your case about leaving your clothes all over the place, but she’s not the great Whore of Babylon that Revelation 17 mentions. All that stuff is unreal. It’s like a nightmare.
It’s not a nightmare theoretically, especially if you take this stuff metaphorically. It’s not a real monster that John wants us to consider. It’s a symbol of something else, which is fine I guess. In fact, I even preached on that two weeks ago, one how, according to Revelation 7, our little world will somehow come undone one day, and then what? In fact, that’s exactly how I ended my sermon. Now If anything like that happened at all… and I knew it would happen theoretically… it always does happe, but it happens to somebody else. It was you I was talking to that day and not me. I’m the pastor, you see. I help you when your world gets turned upside down.
But then I got that phone call last Saturday morning, and my little world has been turned upside down ever since. I’ve never had my world turned upside down really, until last Saturday. I learned from a Sheriff’s deputy in Greenwood, SC that my 65-year-old father in law was dead. It appeared to be from natural causes, he said, but it really didn’t matter. Leah’s dad was never going to die. I knew he would, of course, I even told him that I would say a few words at his funeral, but he had his mother’s genes, and they lived a long time. And he worked all the time, and he loved his work. And he loved his wife and family, and he had so much going for him. And he was healthy. And he exercised five days a week. And he was dead.
Like much of Revelation, it’s like a nightmare. This past week is a blur. I loved him very much. He and I had a great relationship, so I’m crushed right now and I’m shocked. And I’m not even his son. Imagine what it’s like for his real son, Seth, or his real daughter and my real wife, Leah. The best way to describe it is unreal. People even say it’s unreal. Not one person has even said the words, “he is dead.” “He passed away,” they say. Or even, “he expired.” I understand that people don’t want to seem harsh, and they do want to keep it somehow unreal. But it is real. Leah’s dad, Fred Robertson, is dead. It’s all too real. The assumption that my children would always have a grandfather, and that he would see them grow up, that he would see them get married and even see their children, that we would sit out on the beach all day in three weeks and talk about southern politics until we’re blue in the face, that he would always be there… that was unreal.
As horrible as the middle of Revelation is, it is in so many ways, real. In fact, the middle of Revelation is very much like the middle of the Bible, you know the parts between Genesis 2 and Revelation 22. Just read it sometime, and you’ll read about a lot of pain, and war, and bloodshed, and sex, and rape, and hurt, and murder, and mayhem, and betrayal, and crucifixions. You go read all that, and then watch the news and tell me that the rest of the Bible is not real. We wish it was just a nightmare, but it’s not. It’s real. That pink slip you got that held your financial security, it’s real. That bad doctor’s report, that pornography you downloaded last night, those words you said in anger to your spouse, your credit card bill, our national debt, the casualty count in our two-front war that we don’t talk about anymore… All of that is very real.
The question is, is this beautiful garden real? Or maybe to put it more bluntly, is this good and sovereign God that we come here to worship real? Is Easter real? When we pray, do we pray to a God who actually hears us or do we pray to thin air? You know you’ve asked that question before. Or maybe as Jesus put it quoting a Psalm of all things, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Is the one hope of the world real?
It’s not a matter of knowing, you know, as much as it is choosing to believe. We have all inherited this belief that there is a God who became one with us and who has defeated the world’s pain and promised us a future free of pain. We’ve got this garden to look forward to, and we’re obviously not there yet, and it’s not completely real yet. And so we look forward to this future that God has prepared for us, with the belief that the pain is temporary and the garden us real. The Bible ends in this stunning garden, where everything is right, where there’s no threat of an oil spill, and there’s no war or murder, where people don’t die of heart attacks in the middle of the night.
And, by the way, we do get these glimpses of this garden even now, even in the pain. My grandmother (the same one who worked in the garden) died when I was 15 years old. She died in January of that year, and the weekend she died was bitterly cold. She and I used to pick daffodils together later in the Spring and I still can’t look at one of those things without thinking about her. When we got back from her funeral on that cold January day, I got out of the car, and I looked over in this obscure spot under a bush by the side of her house, and I saw, of all things, a little daffodil sprouting up. Just this past week, people flocked over to the house to help the family. Many of you drove all the way down there just to let us know that you loved us. One of the most beautiful things I think I’ve ever seen was the children. He had six grandchildren, and they all played together like they were long-lost friends, like it was a beautiful day in the park, and I guess maybe in some ways, it was.
It’s very true that every person’s life is defined by pain. Today is youth Sunday, and I know that this sermon has not been all that “hip” or “youthy” today, but you young people out there will live in a world of pain. I hate to tell you that, but you’ll go off and meet Mr. Right, and he’ll break your heart. You’ll get married and the marriage won’t work out. You’ll have a baby, and he’ll get sick and he’ll die. You’ll get call from a sheriff’s deputy somewhere telling you that your father is dead. We live in a world that attempts to deny pain, or attempts to deceive us into believing that we can somehow overcome it if we just read another self-help book. But we can’t. We’re part of the world’s pain. We contribute to the world’s pain. The middle of Revelation paints such a terrible picture, and so does the newspaper, and we’re both a victim of that picture and a cause of it.
All we have is this faith of this God that we sing about every Sunday, “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.” That’s our hope, isn’t it? All we have is the promise of these gardens, that what we see is not all that we get. And if we look hard enough and pay attention, we get these little glimpses of this beautiful thing that God seems determined to do. The events of this past week are very real, and my alarm clock is not going to go off and remove me from this nightmare. But aren’t we thankful that we’ve heard of this other reality, this garden, this Good News, this Gospel? So may God give us strength to face the harsh reality of the world with dazzling grace of a God who makes all things new.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
