“A New Heaven and Earth Shall Emerge”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
May 6, 2007

Acts 11:1-18      Revelation 21:1-6

Ever thought of being able to just start over? Ever wished that life as you know it would simply vanish and be replaced by a new and improved version? It’s more common than we think. Men and women in marriage counselling secretly confide that when things get really bad, they have magical fantasies of starting fresh with someone else, someone who’s not  so difficult, who’s ‘nice’ to them, and “ really” understands them, and who would love them – unconditionally.  In its more extreme forms, they will tell you that while they don’t want anything bad to happen to their partner, they do wish that he would just sort of disappear. These feelings come out of a sense of helplessness.

 God knows when you look around at the state of the planet, ethnic rivalries, neo-imperialistic agendas of the powerful, religious fundamentalism, violence everywhere you turn. A new beginning? Bring it on, and the sooner the better.

The author of Revelation had apparently had it with this world. Things had spun so completely out of control, and humans were acting utterly inhumane, that the only solution he could come up with was starting over. There was biblical precedent for this in his tradition – the story of Noah. When violence entered the hearts of the human ones and was spreading out of control like a virus, God sends a flood, according to the legend, saving only a remnant to inhabit the newly cleansed earth.

The legend of the Flood was one way for ancient people to make sense of a natural catastrophe. Why would God do that, they asked themselves?  Humans have always struggled to make sense out of our capacity for ignorance, cruelty, and our tendency to want to rule over others. The author of Revelation is doing the same thing. The Roman Empire seemed intent on running the world on its own terms, and persecuting any who didn’t cooperate with this agenda – including first century Christians. Surely, the writer imagines, it’s just a matter of time before God comes and wipes the slate clean – a new heaven and new earth. Who among us cannot relate to this yearning?

The yearning is natural. It’s what we do with the yearning that counts. This is where theology matters. How we imagine God and God’s involvement with the world will determine what we do with our desire for a better world. If we imagine God as the cosmic puppeteer, controlling all the events of our life and our world, from a throne outside the universe, then we will find ourselves passively waiting for God to do something about it. Alternatively, many religious sects anticipate what they perceive to be God’s impatience with the world, and help God out a bit by hastening the end of the world in order to make room for a utopia, through violence if necessary. That’s the apocalyptic-utopian option. Either God intervenes, or we intervene on behalf of God, through whatever means necessary to impose our preferred world order on others. A new heaven and a new earth – the quick fix.

But change the theology. Imagine that God acts only through love, and never coercively. Imagine God acting through natural life processes – a natural grace – rather than as a foreign agent. Imagine God, present in all creation and in human beings, as the presence of a 14 billion year old intelligence. Imagine that this evolutionary intelligence is available to us – what the Bible calls Wisdom. And what if this Wisdom moves through everything from the inside out in the direction of increased beauty, consciousness, and compassion. Then the new heaven and new earth we long for emerges out of our life conditions, but never overrides them.

In this model, our spiritual life is not about passively waiting for God to do something; it’s about actively cultivating wisdom – imparted through spiritual teachers of all faiths and for us in Jesus of Nazareth. If this describes the nature and being of God, then the new heaven and the new earth is established, not through violence, but through the subversive wisdom of a loving God. It’s spiritual wisdom that brings oppressive regimes crashing down and establishes a new heaven and a new earth, not a unilateral, supernatural divine act. Do you see the difference between these two models of God? In the first model, God imposes from without. In the second, God emerges from within.

In out kitchen, we have a frog calendar displayed.  May features Tree Frog, Hyla sarayacuensis. He’s reddish brown with yellows splotches, big eyes staring up at the camera – very photogenic I might add. His throne is a green plant, its leaves cut in a pattern that replicate the frog’s fingers and toes.  The leaves and the frog’s body are splattered with blotches from the same can of paint. I was standing there looking at this exquisite creature and had the feeling that the frog had emerged out of the leaf. Then it occurred to me that this is, in fact, what happened.  Tree Frog is the emergence of the latent potential within the plant’s ecosystem – the life that wanted to come into being from this ecosystem in the form of an amphibian. Leave an ecosystem alone for a long enough period of time, and an astonishing thing happens, every time. Tree frogs appear, solar systems come into being, each one of you appears as a new creation, distinct yes, but radically interconnected to all that came before.

A recent advertisement by a high-speed communications company got it exactly right. The problem with human beings in the 21^st century we are informed is the medical condition called “connectile dysfunction”.  That ad is referring to a slow Internet connection, but it contains more truth than it knows. We’ve forgotten a critical piece of wisdom that could heal us if we would learn it - that we emerged as a species out of the ecosystems of the earth. Just as the frog is the emergent life of its ecosystem at a more complex level, so we – you and me and the person sitting beside you -  are an emergent form of the planet earth. We are the earth in human form. But in the modern era we forgot our connection. We emerged from the earth and then proceeded to conquer and exploit earth and her creatures as if She weren’t our mother and the creatures were not our kin.  This collective amnesia has left us in a state of disconnection.

Our indigenous people never lost the connection. Various nations emerged out of their native bioregion. Some call themselves the “salmon people”, because their lives were shaped, spiritually and physically by their relationship with salmon. Then there are the “plains” Indians – their very being at every level reflects that truth that they emerged as a people of plains.  They are distinct nations precisely because the emerged from different bioregions. In the 21^st century we’re suffering from the Walmartization and the McDonaldization and the Hollywoodization of the planet – this is a very inelegant way of saying that we’ve lost our connection to our sense of place. It’s weird to be able to travel to any city in North America (and increasingly the world) and not be able to discern the emergent reality distinct to the bioregion.  In the plant and animal world, when a non-native species is introduced into a foreign bio-region – one that didn’t produce it in the first place – we call it in an “invasive” species. In the human realm, we call it progress.

This is the downside of globalization, whereby we import standardized monocultures across the entire planet. Interestingly this is one of the defining characteristics of the era of Empires – the Romans rebuilt Rome in every city they conquered so that their generals could retire anywhere in the Roman Empire in a familiar setting. It’s also why Empires fall inevitably – the wisdom inherent in a particular bioregion and in the people of that culture instinctively abhor the invasive species and finds ways to rid itself of the foreigner. It’s what will happen in Iraq as well.  Humans are now invading the entire planet. We are colonizing the planet, rather than living in relationship with it. Connectile dysfunction has caused us to forget that we belong to earth – like my calendar frog belongs to the leaf and the ecosystem out of which it emerged. 

In an evolutionary theology, the new heaven and the new earth emerges in response to the life conditions. Spirit is intimately involved in the dynamic of emergence. So ask yourself: What new reality is seeking to be born within you? Learn to cooperate with this evolutionary impulse as it moves through you, and you will have learned how to live in relationship with Spirit.  We miss the miracle of this Spirit-drenched world we live in because we imagine Spirit to belong to another realm. But what is it that the author of Revelation tells us? “The home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them as their God” (Rev.21:3).  I’ve come to the conclusion that creation, including you and me, is the shape-shifting emergence of Spirit. It’s all Spirit. The new heaven and the new earth is waiting to emerge through you, my friend. But we’ve lost the connection, and so some religious folks do strange things – like praying for God to come along and destroy this earth at the end of time – and then call this hope. Hope! What a travesty.

Friends, right now, in our day and age, Spirit is in the midst of reinventing the human being in a more radically connected form. We need a new human for a new age. If the new age can be called Pax Gaia, the Peace of the Earth, in Fr. Thomas Berry’s phrase, then a new human must emerge to serve this peace – a peace that extends to our human family, but also to our other-than-human family. If we tweak Jesus’ central metaphor, we can say that what is emerging in the 21^st century is a human being fit for the Kin-dom of God. Out of this felt sense of kinship with all beings, the new human will instinctively want to make room on the planet for all life forms. She will instinctively yearn for justice. And he will instinctively recoil from all forms of pollution, because he will know in his bones that he is the earth.

The evolutionary Spirit invited Peter to being reinvented in the first century. He moved from an attitude that God’s love revealed in Christ was for his ethnic group to a new heaven and a new earth in which God’s love was for all, including the Gentiles. His dream signalled that if diet was his excuse to claim superior status over the Gentiles, then he’d have to change his diet. For Peter this meant breaking the purity code of his religion. It was an apocalyptic dream that said to him: “Let nothing get in the way of the new thing I am doing, Peter”.  The Spirit is still moving in the 21^st century, opening up new horizons, expanding our understanding of what it means to be fully human.

Friends, there is a new heaven and a new earth being born, through you and through me. We are what Spirit is doing in this beautiful and broken world of ours. Everything depends upon us finding the “yes” that will loose the power of the Spirit in our lives.