Revelation 21: 1-6
All Saints Sunday
All things new.
That’s what we believe as Christians.
A new heaven. A new earth. Everyone of our loved ones who has died in the faith, possibly a whole lot of others, maybe even everybody, made completely new. You and me, made completely new.
Revelation uses the marriage metaphor for the days when this will happen. The new Jerusalem will be the bride of God. It’s an apt metaphor. When I perform a wedding, I remind the couple that the two shall become one. Essentially, the two partners aren’t simply two individuals who happen to join one another on the same journey toward the same destination. In marriage, they become one entirely new creation, with a new shared will, a new shared journey, a new shared destination. In that relationship, they change one another.
In fact, in the Biblical model, the love of individuals for one another necessarily changes us. Love of neighbor changes us. Love of stranger and enemy changes us. Godly love is meant to do that. It’s meant to expand us beyond ourselves. It’s meant to make us better than we’d be if we were left to our own devices. One reason we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves is that loving our neighbor is how we love ourselves into being, how we expand ourselves, how we grow ourselves into the fullness of what God intends for us to be. We need to love others to do this. We are not ourselves as God intends for us to be without one another.
And we are not ourselves the way God intends for us to be without God. There’s a God-sized hole in our souls. We are made to be in relationship with God, in a full, loving relationship with God. Remember Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? In those days, God walked in the Garden with them. God spoke directly to them. God kissed into them the breath of life. In the New Heaven and the New Earth, that’s how it will be again. God and humanity, each of us and God, united, made one, in a deep, whole, and complete relationship. God’s shalom, the peace, wholeness, and healing God intends–the perfect union of nature, humanity, and God, the complete healing of the wounds that have damaged all relationships–at that time God’s shalom shall be established forever.
We’ll be whole and we’ll feel whole. We’ll feel complete. We’ll be over our mortal restlessness, because mortality itself will be abolished. Why are we humans so restless, so unsettled, so anxious, so ambitious? It’s because we’re so keenly aware of the march of time. We know all too well that we only have our fourscore and seven to accomplish all the things we’ve hoped and dreamed and longed for in life. That’s why often we don’t want to pursue loving neighbor or even loving God—we’re so aware of our own limitations we can’t possibly imagine having room for other people, never mind for God. And all of us are afflicted by this in some degree.
But in the New heaven and the New earth, we’ll have time. Plenty of time. Eternity. There’s no rush. And it certainly won’t be boring. We’ll have time to get to know everyone who ever lived in a deep and personal way; we’ll have time to get to know God in person. The reason we have eternal life is because it takes an eternity to get to know an eternal God.
And remember, as I told you a few Sundays ago, that our whole purpose, the reason for which we were created, the source of both our restlessness and our hope, is that we were created to be in deep, personal relationship with God. We don’t have that, but we long for it. The fact that we are alienated from God is why we’re alienated from one another, why our world is still so dysfunctional. And we’ll have that in the New Heaven and the New Earth.
We often talk about dying and going to heaven. In fact, that’s the opposite of what Scripture teaches. The Bible teaches that heaven comes to earth—that is to say, God comes to earth. It’s a restoration of the Garden of Eden, where everything is a bright and fresh and new and clean as the first morning, but with one key difference. There won’t just be two people. There will be probably billions, an entire City of God. It’ll be a diverse city with every culture, every race, every age of human time represented. But it won’t be like any city you and I have ever lived in. There won’t be a slum. There won’t be competing interests. There won’t be taxes because there won’t be need. People will live together in harmony. Our differences will not be cause for misunderstanding and resentment, but cause for rejoicing and celebration, because that person’s different way of having a relationship with God is a doorway for me to look at God in a different way.
In the new heaven and the new earth, the human relationship with God will have come full circle. We will live as if Adam and Eve had never eaten the fruit, as if humanity had never fallen away from our deep relationship with God, as if we’d never corrupted nature with pollution and holes in the ozone, never corrupted human relations with the vagaries of self-interest and nationalism and poverty and war, as if Adam and Eve went on to have children and to increae and multiply and fill the earth as God commanded at the beginning, only it was an Earth that never fell away from God in the first place, but was always one with God.
Our loved ones who have died get there before us because in death they enter the timeless realm of God. What we believe is that the saints find the wholeness and healing that we’ve all longed for in life when we die and enter eternity with God. And the point is that we don’t achieve this wonderful, marvelous state of wholeness and completeness by our own actions, but completely because of the grace and goodness of God. Just as we won’t create a new heaven and a new earth by our own actions, but completely because of the grace, love and goodness of God.
But never let that be an excuse for complacency in this world. The difference between a saint and everybody else is that they are afflicted by a different form of restlessness—they know the world isn’t right and whole as it is. They know that, even in its flawed state, this world is still God’s kingdom, and we’re to love neighbor, stranger and enemy, and know that it’s wrong when people hurt and kill and destroy in God’s kingdom. They know their own incompleteness and long to have more complete relationships with others and with God, and to make the world more into the image of the New heaven and New earth God intends.
Their longing for the New heaven and the New earth was lived out in their lives. That’s what makes them saints. And our longing for the New heaven and the new earth is what makes us saints, as well.