Loading...A Sermon based on Revelation 21:1-6 and John 13:31-35
https://emmanuelsanangelo.sermon.net/main/main/20662229
Sermon for the 5th Sunday of Easter
As we celebrate the 5th Sunday of these Great Fifty Days of Eastertide we hear today that the Lord our God
is about the work of making all things new.[1] The truth of that assertion is all the more easy to believe in the spring of the year, when the rains fall and the quality of the green springing forth in grasses, trees, and other plants
is fresh and new and full of life.
Earlier this week I had occasion to drive to Austin on church business and I was in awe of the beauty of the Hill Country where the Bluebonnets, Indian Paintbrush, Red Clover, and Black-Eyed Susans are out in all their glory;
the rolling hills are covered in a lush, green carpet; and the creeks and rivers are filling their courses
as the waters dance their way downstream. It was such a scene that I was moved to listen to Hank Williams, Jr.,
and even join him in loudly singing, “If heaven ain’t a lot like Texas, I don’t wanna go,” over and over again.
I may sing along with Hank, Jr. from time to time, but I don’t really mean it. I do wanna go to heaven, because the beauty of a Texas Hill Country springtime is just a signpost that points toward a beauty that is coming, a beauty the likes of which we cannot even conceive, something that the greatest artist could never re-create on canvas nor the greatest poet describe with pen and ink.
What is coming is written about in the final book of the New Testament, known as The Revelation to John,
who, as we hear this morning, “saw a new heaven and a new earth.”[2] The reason for a new heaven and earth
is that John sees the passing away of the first heaven and the first earth.[3] I take this to be figurative language
that means the brokenness that brings pain and tears, hatred and war, injustice and suffering, sighing and weeping, infirmity and death, grieving and mourning into this present age will one day pass away in the victory of God, a victory marked as inevitable by the cross and resurrection of Christ our Lord.
A new age is coming, one in which not only will earth be made new, but also heaven, because heaven is not isolated from events on earth, but the two realms of human and divine are bound together so that the pain and sorrow of earth is felt in heaven. Likewise, the perfect beauty and endless joy of heaven are felt on earth.
Thus, the capacity for awe on a spring drive through the Hill Country. We who are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection are people of this New Age. Even as we live in the present age, we do so as those living toward the New.
The chief characteristic that gives shape to our living into God’s victorious New Age is the New Commandment that Jesus gave to his disciples on the night before he suffered and died on the cross. He said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”[4] Jesus tells us to live in love, not only for humanity in general, but more specifically for one another, for our fellow members of the Body of Christ, our fellow Christians, the people we share in worship with Sunday by Sunday, the people we serve on parish committees or in parish ministries with, the people who work on the parish staff, the people who make important decisions for the parish by virtue of their service on the Vestry.
Love one another, a commandment that is altogether impossible to obey on the strength of our own capacity.
Just like the beauty that I took in as I passed through Mason, Llano, and Burnett Counties is just a signpost, a preview of the beauty that is to come, the love that we are naturally able to gather up in ourselves to share with one another is but a miniscule speck on the windshield in comparison to the love with which Jesus has loved us.
The love we are commanded to have for one another can only be expressed by those who know the Lord Jesus
to be the way, the truth, and the life,[5] as we prayed in the Collect of the Day, and we can only know him in that manner as we daily turn to him in faith and rely solely on his grace.
Last evening I stood on the front porch of Bill and Elizabeth Kitch’s newly blessed home. We had a nice little gathering to celebrate and bless their new house, and Bill and I stood on the porch as we watched Philip and Sharon Templeton start on their walk back to their house. Bill wondered out loud if the two big pecan trees on the front parkway will produce a good crop of pecans this year. I said, being the pecan expert that I am, “I think they will,” basing my opinion on how lush and green and full of leaves the two trees are now. I actually don’t know what kind of pecan harvest those trees will produce, but they sure look healthy now, their leaves receiving plenteous water and nutrients from the roots, and then processing those nutrients through photosynthesis into nutrients that will feed the roots, and hopefully produce a bumper pecan crop this fall.
To know Christ as the way, the truth, and the life is something like that. It is to be connected to Christ in such a way that his grace flows into our hearts, filling us with his perfect love, a love most dramatically expressed as he stretched out his arms on the cross and prayed forgiveness for his tormentors. Think about that. Relying on our own capacities, are we capable of such love? I know that I am not, and that is why I know that I need to be in Christ in order to love as he commands.
There is a story about how one of the Fathers of the early Church was converted. His name was Tertullian, a teacher of philosophy at Carthage in Northern Africa. It is said that he observed how Christians behaved while enduring harsh persecution, without retaliation, with calm strength, and with care for one another,
even putting themselves in harm’s way to shield a brother or sister. Tertullian looked at his teaching assistant and said, “See those Christians, how they love one another,” and then he went to sign up for the next class of catechumens, or new members. The reason that our Lord commands us to love one another is because there are more “Tertullians” out there, people who will look at how we treat each other as evidence for the truth of Christianity.
Writing about the New Commandment in the 1930’s, Archbishop William Temple said, “If the Church really were like that, if every communicant had for every other a love like that of Christ for him, the power of its witness would be irresistible.”[6]
Behold, I make all things new. That is the work the Lord our God is about. A New Age is dawning. It’s even better than Texas, as hard as that might be to imagine. As we live in Christ, turning to him in faith, trusting in his grace; knowing him to be the way, the truth, and the life; enabled by his grace to love each other as he has loved us, we are partners with the Lord our God in bringing that New Age, God himself with us, every tear wiped from every eye, no more death, no more crying and pain, into glorious being.
[1] Revelation 21:5
[2] Revelation 21:1
[3] Revelation 21:1
[4] John 13:34
[5] The Collect for the 5th Sunday of Easter in The Book of Common Prayer, p.225
[6] Temple, William, “Readings in St. John’s Gospel.” London, MacMillan Press, 1939. p.216.
