"A New Heaven and a New Earth"
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Hilary J. Barrett
Preached at Pleasantville UCC, May 2, 2010
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.”
Revelation 21:1-2

Two hundred miles northwest of the San Francisco Bay Area lies an old lumber town situated high above the Pacific Ocean on bluffs that jut out into the sea.  It’s a place called Mendocino, and it’s sacred ground to my family.  My Dad taught all of us to love that place.  We’ve been going there ever since we were kids.  I remember an old Victorian house that we rented up there one weekend.  It had skeleton keys in the doors and I was sure that it was haunted.  Dad woke all of us up in the middle of the night and traipsed us out into the cold night air in our jammies so we could witness a lunar eclipse.  Standing there in the middle of the night, looking up at the full moon, freezing my hiney off only made me more certain that that house was haunted.

Over the years, everyone in our family has formed an important bond with that funky little town on the Pacific coast.  Some of us have camped there.  Some of us have honeymooned there.  Some of us have lived up there.  Some of us have vacationed up there.  This coming Saturday, all of us are going to meet up there – in Mendocino -- to scatter our father’s ashes in a field of wildflowers.  It was something he wanted us to do.  Even though Dad died back in October, we decided we wanted to wait until there actually were wildflowers in bloom when we did the deed.

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. 

God’s timing is everything.  And as God would have it, this reading from the Book of Revelation would be one of the texts assigned for this Sunday.  It’s a text that we often read during a funeral – and for obvious reasons.  For it conveys a hopeful vision of what will be at the end of days, when the world as we once new it is no more and all things are brought to completion in God.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; 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.”

We don’t know what the other side looks like.  But the Scriptures promise that it will be a place where we will know God’s dwelling among us more powerfully than we have ever known it before.

Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.

I love these apocalyptic texts from the Bible.  They are so wild and imaginative and, in many ways, they are very hopeful.  The word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek word Apokálypsis which means, "lifting of the veil" or "revelation.”  In the Revelation of John, the last book in the New Testament, the Seer of the vision lifts the veil between the worlds and gives us a glimpse of the time which is to come.  This is the promise that is made to us. 

"Behold, the dwelling of God is among mortals.”

The dwelling of God.  One of the things I love about that image is that the literal translation of it means that God’s tabernacle will be among us – or, more specifically God’s tent.  It’s an image derived from the book of Exodus where it is told that God would meet Moses in the ‘tent of meeting.’  The Hebrew word for it is mishkan and it refers to the portable dwelling place for the divine presence.  I love the idea of God setting up his tent among us.

We do what we can to imagine how God can come to be with us in all times and all places.  For a people convinced that God would only dwell in the holy temple, being uprooted from the place where that temple resided must have been absolutely traumatic

We do what we can to take into ourselves the greatest truth that God desires us to know: that the home of God is among mortals: we will be his people and God himself will be with us.  The vision of a new heaven and new earth, with the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God is an answer to our daily prayer.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…

We do not know what it will be like on the other side.  But what we do know is that we have these promises from God.  And so we hope.

We are promised that nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And we are promised that the same God, who raised Jesus from the dead, shall raise us as well.

And we are promised that, more than anything, God longs to be with us.  And God will do almost anything to be near us.

We know that the love of God is stronger than the devastation of death. 

And we know that the same God who so pursued us, and reached out to us, and sought us in all the days of our lives will not cease to pursue us, reach out to us, and seek us even in our death.

We don’t know what it will be like on the other side.  But we know a lot.

Biblical scholars believe that the Revelation of John might have been received around the time when the Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed.  Imagine it.  Imagine, if you truly believed with all your heart, that God himself lived in the Temple and nowhere else.  Imagine how it would feel to see that Temple destroyed and desecrated by the Roman army. 

God would have no place to live.  And without a place to live here on earth, God would pack up his stuff, shake the dust off his feet, and head on back to heaven, never to return again.  Imagine how desolate you would be.

It is in such a time of desolation, that the Revelation of John is given to the people; a reminder of what is true:

That there is no place where God is not. 
Wherever we are, God himself is with us.
And that nothing can ever separate us from that reality.

In a little less than a week, my family will gather to return what remains of my father’s physical being to the earth.   As we do, I will remember what we here already know:

That there is no place where God is not. 
That, wherever we are, God himself is with us.
And that nothing can ever separate us from that reality.

Behold, the dwelling place of God is among mortals.  
He will be their God and they will be His people and God himself will be with them.

Amen.