All Saints Day (year b)

Sermons:

• New Heaven, New Earth, Revelation 21:1–6a, by Rev. William A. Palmer, Jr.
   

• ALL THINGS NEW Revelation 21:1-6a, John 11:32-44, by Rev. Rick Thompson 
   

• Accepting Death, John 11:32-44, by by Jim from BC
   

• The Best is Yet to Come, John 11: 32-44, by Jim from BC

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New Heaven, New Earth
a sermon based on Revelation 21:1–6a
by Rev. William A. Palmer, Jr.

Within the past couple of weeks an evening committee meeting was taking place at the church. Someone walking down the hall of the education wing stepped on a spider that had made its way into the building. Another person spoke up: “It’s a good thing that Carolyn isn’t here,” she said. “Carolyn would have been upset. She would have picked the spider up and carried it out of the building.”

This person was absolutely correct in her prediction of what Carolyn would have done. My wife has an aversion to killing things if she doesn’t have to. A spider or cricket or moth that finds its way into our house is unlikely to be swatted or squashed. Carolyn will pick it up—often on a piece of paper towel—and escort it to the door. After thirty-five years of marriage, there are still a great many things I haven’t figured out about my wife. But in this particular case I think I understand exactly how she feels. In fact, I not only understand but endorse what may seem like odd behavior to some other people.

Carolyn has a deep sensitivity to the amount and scale of violence in our world. When she picks up a bug and takes it outside, rather than squashing it underfoot, she considers it just her small protest to the violent solutions we often adopt for our problems. I know she’s not a total pacifist in this regard, because a threatening yellow jacket or hornet certainly might not receive the same treatment as an innocuous beetle or cricket. But her objective seems to be the employment of violence—in our home or elsewhere—only when it is absolutely unavoidable.

Violence is so much a part of our existence that we almost take it for granted. Switch your TV on at any time of the day or night and it’s possible that at least half the channels will be depicting some act of violence. Fistfights and beatings, assaults and stabbings, and gun battles—between cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, terrorists and government agents—provide a constant theme for our entertainment. Someone will remind me that such fare has been part of television for the fifty years we’ve been watching. Yet there is no question that the acts of violence have become far more graphic in the past few years. It’s no longer enough to see someone get shot and watch the victim fall down dead. Today we seem to require special effects that treat us to the spurting and spattering of blood, the dismemberment of bodies, and lingering camera shots of guts and gore. What’s worse is the dramatic emphasis that draws us to the ways in which sick people can terrorize their victims. A study released just this past week reveals that, in the United States, thirty percent of children under three years of age have a television set in their room.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about what you can see on the nightly news.

The Book of Revelation reminds us that coping with terror and violence is not just a problem of the twenty-first century. This book was written against the backdrop of the first great imperial persecution of Christians throughout the Roman Empire. Contemporary accounts tell us that Christians were sewn into animal skins and thrown before lions and hyenas in the stadiums where the populace often gathered to watch gladiators fight. We learn how Christians’ bodies were covered with pitch and fastened to poles, where they were set alight as human torches to illuminate the Emperor’s gardens. We may have some image, long-planted in our minds, of these early Christian martyrs going to their deaths with hymns of their lips. But human experience teaches us that everyone—no matter how strong our faith may be—is prey to terror and fear. It’s hard to imagine today, when not a single one of us risked his or her life to come here, what it must have been like to be hunted down like animals. And perhaps because it’s so hard to appreciate what they went through, it may be equally hard to appreciate the vision that sustained them and brought them courage to face death for what they believed.  [continue]