A Sermon for V Easter All Saints’ Church, Southern
Shores, NC April 28, 2013 Thomas E. Wilson,
Rector
Pat and I were driving home and as we pulled into
the driveway, I pressed the button on the garage door opener. The door opened
up two feet and stopped. I pressed the button again, and it went down, pressed
again and it went up, grudgingly. It occurred to me that it had been years
since I oiled that sucker. So, I got the ladder and applied some spray
lubricant to each of the moving parts. It really is not relevant to the point I
want to make, but for future reference, you might want to move the cars out of
the garage if you don’t want a nice sheen of oil on them when you do something
like this. What can I say? She picked
me because I’m cute and not all that bright.
Anyway, back to the point I wanted to make. After the maintenance, the garage door was
functioning beautifully because everything was working in alignment. It was
designed well, but it needs maintenance if it’s to continue to work at peak
efficiency. You can see where I am going, can’t you? Entropy, the concept of
the deterioration of all things, applies, and all things need to be taken care
of and renewed - machines, houses, bodies, relationships, families, the
environment, and even faith.
The lessons for today are about God putting things
back in alignment. In the Acts lesson, Peter tells how the vision he received
allowed him to overcome centuries of custom which had separated Jews and
Gentiles and calcified into an inflexible hardened animosity. Peter received a
request from the servants of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, a member of the
occupying forces and oppressors of Peter’s country. The Romans were the ones
who crucified Peter’s mentor, Jesus. The request came at 3:00 in the afternoon,
a time of afternoon prayers for a faithful Jew, and also the hour that Jesus
died on the cross. Peter refuses to come, and who could blame him? However, the
vision comes to him three times, the same number of times that Peter had denied
Christ, and so it finally sinks in that, when Peter was denying a connection to
this enemy stranger, Cornelius, he was denying Christ. Peter had interpreted
Jesus’ last commandment at the Last Supper in the Gospel reading for today -
that they love each other - in the narrowest sense of only loving the people
who were like him. But the message of the vision was to shatter the attempts of
continuing anachronistic division in light of the new life in Christ. Peter,
allowing himself to be lubricated by the spirit of God, was able to remember
that we were all created by the breath, spirit, of God, and he is given the
strength to break down the walls of separation and set Cornelius free to join him
in loving relationship. 
For Peter life is new. It may be the same old place, but everything
has changed. What Peter is experiencing is what the author of the Revelation
shows us in the passage from that dream for today. As in all dreams, this
revelation cannot be taken literally but has to be considered in light of the
choice of symbols presented. He reports
he sees in this vision a “new heaven and a new earth and the sea was no
more”. Earlier in the dream the sea was
the symbol of turmoil and chaos, a place out of which the beasts had come and
joined forces with the dragon on the seashore. John sees God’s power destroying
the beasts and dragons and the wicked city of the whore of Babylon full of
greed, exploitation and violence, and in its place, John sees that now the new
heaven and earth are in total alignment, lubricated with the compassion of God
who will wipe away every tear and give the water of life to all.
This new creation where all things are made new is
what the Psalmist celebrates in the Psalm for today (which the 10:30
congregation sings in a paraphrase) where all creation, every bit of creation,
even “sea-monsters and all deeps; Fire and
hail, snow and fog, * tempestuous wind, doing his will; Mountains and all
hills, * fruit trees and all cedars; Wild beasts and all cattle, * creeping
things and winged birds; Kings of the
earth and all peoples, * princes and all rulers of the world; Young men and maidens,
* old and young together”, all are in alignment, praising God.
This is
how we enter a new creation, by praising God. How can we praise God? We can
start by being in awe of God’s creation. I am an introvert, so I find renewal when I
shut down my rational thinking, where I am the center of my universe and I
allow myself to be swept with awe and wonder at beauty like when I walk across the beach feeling the wind
on my face and the mist in my hair and the sun’s warmth on my body, or in my
predawn walk with the stars as my light and the sounds of the animals ending
their night or beginning their day, or listening to music that opens all sorts
of beauty, Jazz like Dave Brubeck doing Take
Five (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzpnWuk3RjU ), or Cleo Laine doing Send in the Clowns (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjLyuqEL2YY) , or hymns like the ones we sang
for this service e.g. Come my way my
truth, my life http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThH8pwgqEbk , or opera, like Joan Sutherland singing Casta Diva from Bellini’s Norma (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK2LwLyZAlc ) , or the sound of an Azan, the Muslim call to prayer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20fLzaFtVRY ), or the Tibetan Buddhist Om Mantra ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVM8ZYODKng ), or Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76RrdwElnTU ).
I have this fleeting moment of the new heaven and new earth, where
everything is in alignment and all the people of the earth join together in
praising the one God under whom we all are children. Then the other side of my
brain kicks in and I start to think that I have all the answers, and the next
thing I know this vision of a new heaven and a new earth starts to fade, and I
am left with my vision of me being “right” instead of God’s vision.
What would
happen if we just stopped worrying about being the one with all the right
answers and worked at aligning ourselves as God’s lovers, lovers of God and one
another, and worked on living in and maintaining the new heaven and the new
earth? That is a big goal. But, how
about for just one minute, or one hour, or one day; one day at a time? Start
off small by maintaining the small patch of the world in which you live and
then move out, one day at a time. Maybe we can praise God not only with our
lips but in our lives, and live into the Psalmist hope, “Let them praise the
Name of the LORD, * for his Name only is exalted, his splendor is over earth
and heaven.”
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