A Beautiful Vision

A Beautiful Vision

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 1, 2015

Scripture: Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Happy All Saints Day! Today is All Saints Day you know. Or maybe it’s All Souls Day, which for our purposes amounts to the same thing. I suppose we all know that last night was Halloween. I don’t know about you, but frankly I’m not crazy about Halloween. Perhaps that’s because my dog seems hardwired to the doorbell and the front door. Whenever anyone rings the bell or knocks on the door, he instantly goes ballistic. Woof woof woof! At full volume. It’s very annoying, so I very much prefer it when no one comes to my front door. But of course the American Halloween tradition is people, mostly but not exclusively children, coming to your front door, knocking or ringing the bell, and hitting you up for candy. So I always arrange for me and my dog not to be home, or at least to try to make it look like we’re not home by turning off the porch light and the light in the front room and hiding out in the back of the house. Not very hospitable I know, but it reduces the number of times the dog gets set off. Yes, some of the kids who come to the door are really cute, especially the little ones, but still. If you like Halloween, fine. I don’t much.

Which doesn’t change the fact that today is a significant day in the church calendar. It is All Saints Day, and we can understand the terms saints here as referring basically to everyone, or at least to every Christian, which is what the word originally means. It’s a day for remembering those who have gone before us in the faith and a day for remembering loved ones who have passed into the next life before us. The lectionary readings for All Saints Day seem geared to remembering those who have passed and to envisioning a future reality that is, frankly, a whole lot more pleasant than the world’s present reality. Our passage from Isaiah dreams of a day when God will prepare a rich feast for all people. It says God will wipe away the tears from all faces, a beautiful image of a world free of pain and grief. Our passage from Revelation picks up and repeats that image in some of the most beautiful language in the New Testament. It dreams of a new earth on which God is present with the people. Picking up that image from Isaiah it says that God “wipe every tear from their eyes,” meaning, I think, the eyes of all people. It always surprises me when I remember that such a beautiful image is in Revelation, a book that is full of images that are anything but beautiful. Our readings this morning give us a beautiful vision of a future time for all people. In that time all will feast and celebrate. God will be immediately present with all people. There will be no more chaos (that’s what the bit about no more sea in our passage from Revelation is about). There will be no more pain or grief, even no more death. It is a vision of a world transformed from a place of sin and hurt to a place of grace and joy. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Well yes, it’s beautiful. We humans create beautiful images of a future time and a better world like these because we know deep in our souls how imperfect, how flawed, our present world is. We know something just isn’t right. We know about all the violence that afflicts God’s world and peoples’ lives. We know about the injustice and the poverty that prevail over so much of the earth. We know about the pain and the grief we have experienced in our own lives, and we know about the pain and grief our loved ones have experienced too. We know that we don’t always do what is right and that we leave undone many things that are good, and we know that pretty much everyone else does too. We know that life could be better. We know that the world could be better than it is. So we dream of a better future, and we create some really beautiful images when we do.

Which, I suppose, is all very well and good, but here’s the thing. Do you think God wants us just to sit around and wait for a better world to come about through divine intervention? Sure, that may happen someday, but it hasn’t happened yet. It seems to me naïve at best to think that God calls us just to dream of a better future or just to hope that God will get moving and do something about it. I think those beautiful visions of the Bible serve a different purpose. I think they are there to show us not what God is going to do but to show us what God wants. They are not there to placate us, they are there to inspire us. They are there not to get God moving but to get us moving.

We all know saints whom we have loved and who have passed into God’s everlasting arms of grace. They lived in a world that was far from perfect. So do we. We can’t fix everything that’s wrong. We can’t make every vision in our texts a reality. I don’t know how to eliminate death, for example. But we can do a whole lot more than we’ve done. We can make the world a better place.

So today we remember our loved ones who are gone. We all have them, or we all will. We all honor them in our own ways. We keep them alive in our memories. We give thanks for the love we shared with them and ask their forgiveness for ways we may have wronged them. All of that is indeed very, very good. But we can do more. We can move the world closer to the kingdom of God, if only by a little bit. We can make the world they have left and we still inhabit a better place. We can make God’s beautiful vision a little bit more real. We can do it in memory of those who have gone before us. We can do it to the glory of God. Shall we? Amen.