The Transforming Vision: The New Creation

I think of our brother Jim, who was in Israel, the Holy Land this morning, and before he left, he said one of his ambitions was to go and just sit down at the Western Wall—sometimes called the Wailing Wall—and there to read his New Testament, but always with fear maybe that some of their rabbis would see him reading the New Testament and chase him away.

Well, I hope he's fulfilled that ambition, and I know that he loves God's land, planet Earth, human life. I'm so grateful to be his friend and to have an invitation to come here this morning and proclaim the vision of John—these two visions that are in the church lectionary from which he preaches week by week. I'm grateful for that.

You know, the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is a profound story. It is one of the great stories of all human history—all of human stories. It is a story of how paradise was created in all of its beauty, in all of its wonder, with everything built into this order in which we live. From the beginning, in the beginning, God spoke His Word and everything that there is bursts forth into being.

I love that vision of creation in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Magician's Nephew, where Aslan, the Christ-lion, is seen walking in the darkness and singing—singing the most beautiful song that has ever been sung. And as he sings, he calls Narnia into being, and the light bursts forth, and plants and flowers begin to pop up, as we see in our own area during this springtime—beautiful flowers everywhere.

I love that. They give us a glimpse of the original beauty and goodness and wonder of the created order—paradise created—and God's commentary: "It is very good." Don’t you long to make that confession of faith in the midst of all the brokenness and fallenness of the creation?

The Bible tells a story—a paradise that has fallen, that has become lost as a result of human sin. It tells us a story of the brokenness and unfaithfulness of God’s people. And in the midst of that story of brokenness—from Genesis to Revelation—where there are tears, and where there is death, and where there is warfare, we hear also the reminder, and we catch just the glimpse, that our God is love.

That our God has revealed Himself to us in Jesus, His Son. That our God has poured out His Holy Spirit to dwell within each one of our hearts—to empower the mission of the church in bearing witness to what God has done in creation and in history. We are not alone. God is with us.

As we move through our lives, we can perhaps through faith capture glimpses of the presence of God, who, when Jesus was born in fulfillment of the promises of the Old Testament, promised to be God with us. The witness of the whole New Testament is that we cannot ever be separated from the love of God, even in the midst of a fallen world.

I think about it—all the things that we have seen in our own history, in our own time—the power of death, the power of violence, the power of warfare, the alienation in the human family, the tribalism, the diseases, and the death. Each time I’ve gone to Washington, D.C., and seen the war memorials there, I want to weep—especially for that wall, the Vietnam War Memorial, with all the names of young men and women who gave their life for this country.

We praise them and we are thankful in this broken world. And somehow, we’re all a part of that in the fallenness of things. And we weep. You weep. I cry.

There were long periods of time—having lived through the Vietnam period—that I could not see that wall without weeping and remembering the unrest, and the lives lost, and the men and women who never came home. I’m reminded of the pain in many parents’ hearts and many wives' lives, with an empty room and a longing for the fullness of life.

That’s what this paradise lost is all about. And yet, in the very center of our tears, in the center of our suffering—if we are real and honest—we have to come to terms with the reality that God created, and that God loves, that God wants to put His arms around us and hold us tight, and promises: the paradise that was created, the paradise that was lost, is the same paradise that will be restored in the fullness of time.

And that beautiful vision in Revelation 21: every tear will be wiped away. Death will be no more. Sin will be eliminated. And the fullness of the kingdom of God will be experienced in the life of every believer.

And we will see—see—the home of God is with humanity. God loves us still and will not let us go. Along the way, we know that somehow we live between the already and the not yet of the kingdom of God. We live in this time with all of our longing, seated beside the beds of our loved ones who suffer.

This past week, as I have done for several months now, myself and the other members of our covenant group—we’ve gone to the home of John and Anne Huffman in Newport Beach, the former pastor at St. Andrew’s. And John is still in his last days. And n sits beside his hospital bed with tears and with laughter responding to every groan that he makes and promising to be there until the very end. She told me yesterday, when he is gone, um, I probably will really break down and cry like I've never cried before.

Well, we were there this week, Ken Kalina and I, she said to us, hand me my Bible, we hell, we handed her the Bible and she said, this is my favorite text. And I read it often to bring comfort to me. And she read the text from Revelation 21 that I read this morning.

Time is coming when every tear will be wiped away and suffering is gone and death will be no more and sin will be eliminated and all things will be made new. And I long for that. That's the source of my hope.

I thought to myself at the time, how did she know this was the text I was gonna preach on this morning?

As we've all been in those places and in those places we have been, we have received glimpses of the presence of the comforting Lord who inspires faith, hope, and love within us in the most desperate of circumstances when we faced up to our own powerlessness, when we cannot control our own destiny. But simply after 62 years of marriage surrendered to the reality, the sooner or later we lose in this world, we lose our loved ones.

How do we get prepared for that? And yet, in the midst of the fellowship and support of brothers and sisters and the word of scripture, we find hope and we find comfort.

The apostle Paul wrote of such a time as this in Romans eight. He said, the whole creation is groaning together until now, waiting for the salvation of humanity, waiting for God's final act in which he makes all things new.

And in the meantime, we wait and we pray oftentimes without words even to pray, but the spirit comes into our lives and lifts our prayers, our size up to God and intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

And the apostle says, I've become absolutely convinced that there's nothing in life or in death that can separate us from the love of God. That was his confidence. And how many of us over and over again have simply cast ourselves on the mercy of that truth, that he is with us and he holds us and he comforts us and promises us it long lasts to bring us into his presence.

We long for a glimpse of that, don't we?

As we remember, I spoke last week of loss of my wife after 57 years of marriage. My son and I last week finally got around to scattering her ashes on our hillside where she wanted to her ashes to be scattered. And we, we mixed in with them, the ashes of her beloved dogs, Frida and Teddy, my son was there, just the two of us on the side of our hill that's really pretty steep. And it has this wonderful view of Saddleback Valley.

And he found the, the seed spreader that she had oftentimes used and filled that spreader up with ashes of dog and human and circle of love. And he began to spread them twisting the knob and the ashes were flying everywhere. I had feared this moment for many years.

And yet it became a beautiful moment of seeing to the depths of reality, the fragility, the mortality, the hope that we all carry within these bodies of ours.

And he spoke words about her and they were such words of comfort. And I thought of all those earlier years in prayers for him and his family and realized that that strategic moments in my life, I had met the presence of Jesus in him.

We started back up the hill and I lost my balance and I fell backwards right into big bushes of flowers. And I would not have gotten up out of those bushes if he had not been there to hold my hand and to pull me up out of them as a representative of Jesus who loves his dad, who loved his mom, and still is in the process of grieving and letting go.

Last Sunday was Mother's Day. And Mother's Day is a difficult day for many of us.

After having a lunch with the lady that before this year's over, I'm gonna marry. We went to Pacific Fuse Cemetery and to the place where her 14-year-old daughter is interred with the full realization that Lisa's not there but is with Jesus in heaven. And we wait for that heavenly reconciliation when all things are made new.

And I looked out across Pacific View where I had been many times conducting services and it was beautiful. The green lawns, the Pacific Ocean, the harbor, the beauty with people all, all around on Mother's Day, leaving flowers at the graves of loved ones called.

So many of those scenes out of the Chronicles of Narnia or in the beauty and the mystery of the grass and the blue sky and the sun.

We catch glimpses of the promises of God that he is not finished with us, nor with the human race, but loves us unconditionally and will at last transform all that has wounded our lives, will transform them and make all things new.

The last volume in The Chronicles is called The Last Battle. The kids have been going further up and further in, into Aslan’s country. Oftentimes, I look at the view from my house and I think, yes, that is Aslan’s country. It is so beautiful. You have these views here as well. It’s something to be celebrated—in the beauty and in the promise of Scripture—to be encouraged by the promise of a newness. Like you, I suspect, I long for all things to be made new—in my life and in the life of the church—for one day, to see the completion of the Kingdom of God.

Right now, we live in the in-between times—between the already and the not yet of the Kingdom of God. In the last paragraph of The Last Battle, the Lion speaks to the children. And as he spoke, he no longer looked to them like a lion. But the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us, this is the end of all the stories. And we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page. Now at last, they were beginning chapter one of the great story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Thanks be to God.

Let us pray. Lord, we stand and we sit this morning in your presence, grateful for all of your promises—in creation, in history, and in the history of Israel, your people. Grateful that all those promises came to fulfillment in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God, who upon the cross bore our sins, reconciled us to the Father and us to one another, and gives us the hope of eternal life.

When all things are made new, and everything we have but glimpsed in this life, we will see with new eyes and receive with new hearts, and be bonded together with the whole creation—singing your praise, as so often sung in the book of Psalms, songs sung in the temple in Jerusalem. And so all the earth will become the temple, and the presence of the Lord will bring comfort and healing to us each—today, if we bring tears to this place, as no doubt many of us do.

We remember the power of death. We remember also that the tomb was empty, and that Jesus was seen and witnessed to by the apostles. They went forth in the power of his Spirit to bring hope of newness, of the redemption of all that we live with.

We sing your praises and thank you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.