Hilton Head Island, SC – January 3, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
II Corinthians 5:16-21; Revelation 21:1-7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And he who sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” – Rev. 21:5a (RSV)
Probably more people in more places were more eager for a new year to start three days ago than in any other year in the lifetime of anyone now living. 2020 was a year of unpredictable headlines, interrupted lives, shattered schedules, and economic upheavals. But the primary factor in most of us wanting to escape the clutches of the previous twelve months is summarized in a term we didn’t even know existed at the beginning of 2020. That, of course, is COVID-19.
There have been other epidemics and pandemics in our lifetimes: polio, AIDS, SARS, Ebola, H1N1. None of them was as widespread or as lethal as COVID-19. The only previous pandemic which was as deadly as the current coronavirus was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, and it was far more devastating. The only people now alive who would remember it are people at least 103 years old who have clear memories from their very early childhood.
So what about the rest of us, those who are younger than 103? We have been champing at the bit to bid 2020 a not-at-all fond farewell. It brought us a life we didn’t want, and we long to return to our normal pre-COVID existence. In the comic strip Shoe on Dec. 31, Cosmo, the newspaper reporter for the Treetops Tattler is having lunch at Roz’s open-air diner. He tells her, “I just wrote a scathing review on Yelp.” She asks, “What did you review? He says, “2020.”
Who, or what, caused the coronavirus we now know as COVID-19? For our own spiritual as well as mental equilibrium, we must declare that no one caused it, least of all God. It just happened. There have always been all kinds of viruses and bacteria hanging around out there or in here, inside us. Most of the time we are completely unaffected by them, but every now and then something pops up --- MERS, dysentery, whatever --- and suddenly we are reminded that we are neither invincible nor immortal. If we didn’t know it or think about it before 2020, the virus convinced us of our tenuous lives. We became convinced that we might have died from it. Almost certainly it won’t be tomorrow, and by now, because of the vaccine, we may feel fairly sure that we won’t die from COVID-19. Still, 2020 reminded us, if we needed such a reminder, that we are mortals, and all mortals shall perish at some particular time in some particular year.
“Well,” you’re saying to yourself, “these cheery words are no way to start off a new year! What kind of way is this to ring in 2021, for dying out loud!” We need to hear some positive words. On the bulletin cover today is the first verse of a well-known New Year’s poem by Lord Tennyson. The third verse says, “Ring out the grief that saps the mind/ For these that here we see no more/ Ring out the feud of rich and poor/ Ring in redress to all mankind.”
That’s more like it, isn’t it? Happy, happy, Happy New Year! We had more than enough anxiety and sadness in the old year. What we need now is joy, and a hopeful attitude, and a positive outlook. So let’s get started.
Building blocks for a brighter future don’t just descend on us magically. The strongest ones do not appear from without. They must be given birth from within. 2020 started out alright, sort of, but it ended badly in most respects. 2021 is not starting out alright either, because we have months to go before COVID is conquered, and each of us must be a participating soldier in the conquest. However, 2021 can end very well if we all do what we can to give it more satisfying start than we could give to 2020. As I said last Sunday, for our own sake and that of everyone in the world, we need to be vaccinated as soon as possible. If everyone does that, this year will end up far better than last year did.
Presumably it will be a supremely evident blessing that COVID-19 shall become a thing of the past before this year is finished. When we are convinced that has happened, we will all rejoice. But until then, we must concentrate on other matters to make this new year uniquely new. There are other significant challenges which must be addressed.
In many different guises, the apostle Paul wrote about how we can do that in the letters he sent to various churches and individual Christians in the first century. Paul was an evangelical in the best sense of what that word means. After his Damascus Road experience, he devoted his life to writing about his understanding of who Jesus was, and he did his best to encourage as many people as possible to accept the saving grace of God, which is most fully illustrated in Jesus.
In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote that fully affirming the Gospel of Jesus is certain to transforms us. He said, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (II Cor. 5:17).
New Year’s Eve is a celebration for many people, but the nature of the celebration is frequently misplaced. Is that because too much revelry leads to too much drinking, or is it because too much drinking leads to too much revelry? Either way, New Year’s Day is seldom understood as a true holi-day, a holy day, but rather as the secular observance of the beginning of another year.
When we start a new year, we should give thanks to God, who alone enables us to enter another new year. In doing that, we must also seek to be spiritually re-newed. In a similar fashion, in each new day we must be re-nourished by food. No one can renounce food and continue to live. Neither can we suppose we can be new creations while renouncing spiritual renewal. Each new year, as each new day, must particularly begin with the renewal that is made possible by the evangel, the good news of Jesus Christ.
The problem with people who are part of congregations such as this one is that we do not tend to think in these terms. Such thoughts are too “evangelical” for us, meaning that they are a way intended to form an inner life like those who proudly refer to themselves as “evangelicals,” and we know we are not like that type of Christians.
Two weeks ago, in the Sunday New York Times, there was an interview by the Times editorialist Nicholas Kristof. He recorded parts of a conversation with Jim Wallis, the recently retired editor of the evangelical journal called Sojourners. For decades the Rev. Dr. Wallis has been one of the leading voices of the social-activist left wing of American evangelicalism. It may come as surprise to you to know that there is anyone on the left side of the evangelical spectrum, but there are many such people there, and Jim Wallis is one of the most vocal and influential.
Nicholas Kristof entitled his interview “Pastor, Can White Evangelicalism Be Saved?” In it he asked Jim Wallis briefly to describe his life’s work, namely, to declare that true evangelical Christianity it to proclaim good news to the poor. Mr. Wallis insisted that far too many white evangelicals (as compared to Black evangelicals) have turned the Gospel into the so-called “Prosperity Gospel,” which displays no concern for the poor, many of whom are made poor by the rich. Furthermore, he said, “(T)he operative word in the phrase ‘white evangelical’ is not ‘evangelical’ but ‘white.’”
Wallis has long attacked the movement of white evangelicals away from the essence of Jesus’ teachings into support for a particular form of partisan politics. He said, “When ‘evangelical’ strays from the radical love of Jesus into hateful partisan faith, we see the worst….(W)e believe that any gospel that isn’t good news for the poor is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. Period.”
I suspect that most of the people who attend The Chapel Without Walls would strongly affirm those sentiments. However, we become quite uncomfortable describing ourselves as evangelicals in the way Jim Wallis sees people such as himself, because we associate that word with people such as Jerry Falwell (Sr. or Jr.), Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, et al.
Nonetheless, if we are to become new creations in Christ, we must re-commit ourselves constantly to the radical Gospel of Jesus Christ which has been the motivational force behind Jim Wallis’s life. We want to be what we consider “respectable Christians,” which to us means quiescent Christians, quiet Christians, perhaps even silent Christians. We may enthusiastically support assisting the poor politically and governmentally, but heaven forfend that we should vocally declare that we do that from religious convictions.
Jesus is with us all the time, but we do not recognize him, because he is masked, just as we have been masked for the past ten months. He is the man serving in the church soup kitchen, the social worker finding a job for someone who had been working in a bankrupt restaurant, the girl who befriends a new student in her school who defies easy friendships because her home life is so chaotic and therefore she is quite chaotic.
Loretta Ross is a radical Black feminist who teaches a popular class at Smith College. She is vocally opposed to what is known as “call-out culture.” It is based on the public shaming of those who make racist remarks or whose actions deliberately demean anyone. Instead of calling them out in public, she urges her students to call them into a relationship where they can address the issues which prompt such behavior in the first place. Ms. Ross likes to quote her civil rights mentor C.T. Vivian, who said, “When you ask people to give up hate, you have to be there for them when they do.” If we want to be new creations in Christ, we have to be prepared for the changes that requires of us, and the tension it may evoke in our lives because of those changes. That’s not natural or easy for folks such as us.
The last book of the Bible has always been the biggest biblical enigma to me. That’s probably because its author intended it to be enigmatic. He was trying to lift the spirits of early Christians who were being persecuted by the Romans. The Book of Revelation was probably written in some sort of code that early-second-century Christians understood but about which we are completely ignorant. Our problem, or at least my problem, is that I don’t understand the code. I don’t know what the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are supposed to represent, or what the word antichrist really means, or who the whore of Babylon is, and I confess that I long ago gave up trying to figure it out. I concede the interpretation to the fundamentalists, who revel in it.
Nevertheless, I love the 21st chapter of the Revelation, where it talks about “the new Jerusalem.” It’s the type of vision I personally have never had, I being I. Its mystical imagery is simply beyond my theological reach. Still, I am greatly moved by these lofty words near the end of the last book, where the writer talks about a new heaven and a new earth, and “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (21:2). At the start of a new year which ends a previous year from which we are only too glad to escape, it all sounds very comforting and uplifting.
What I like most about Revelation 21 is the fifth verse, where it says, “And he who sat upon the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’” John of Patmos doesn’t say specifically who it is who is sitting upon the throne. Is it God, or is it Jesus? I guess we are free to decide for ourselves. I choose God. But whoever it is, He is saying to us that He makes us new too.
When we start 2021, having survived 2020, that’s really good news. Everyone needs renewal. We all need a totally fresh start. We have to get beyond where we’ve been, because where we were is not where we want to be.
You may be confused or bewildered as to where this sermon is supposed to be leading you. I have addressed you in a manner I have never used before. I am urging us to avail ourselves of the opportunity to become new creations in Christ Jesus. I am imploring us to open ourselves to the transformative influence of the good news which is uniquely centered in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. I am suggesting that all of us can begin 2021 without the problems that weighed on us in 2020: a lethal new virus loosed upon a temporarily defenseless world, the killing of unarmed Black citizens by over-reactive police, a political culture turned deliberately topsy-turvy, and a sharp economic downturn which has left millions of people destitute throughout the world and also in its wealthiest nation.
Many efforts on many fronts are needed to overcome the calamities. But if you and I are new creations in Christ, if we are made new in God, the world around us can also be made new. The word “enthusiasm” comes from two Greek words – en, which means “in,” and theos, which means “God.” To have genuine enthusiasm is to be in God. It is to be a new creation in Christ. A new year can bring a new world, but it needs our spiritual renewal to make it happen.
Barack Obama has just published the memoir of his first term as president. It is called A Promised Land. When he was trying to decide to seek the presidential nomination, he was told by several people that he should talk to Teddy Kennedy. Senator Kennedy said to him, “I can tell you this, Barack. The power to inspire is rare. Moments like this are rare. You think that you may not be ready, that you’ll do it at a more convenient time. But you don’t choose the time. The time chooses you. Either you seize what may turn out to be the only chance you have, or you decide that you’re willing to live with the knowledge that the time has passed you by” (p.69).
The Rev. George Croly was an evangelical Anglican who was a prolific writer of biography, history, biblical studies, poetry, novels, and songs. In 1835 he became the rector of an Anglican church in the slums of London. My source book which describes the background of hundreds of hymns and hymn writers says this as its final paragraph about him: “He was a fundamentalist in theology, a fierce conservative in politics, opposed to all forms of liberalism. When his flock wanted a hymnbook, he prepared one….His one surviving hymn would indicate that he was Evangelical rather than High Church.” If you have ever been an Episcopalian, you will understand that comment more completely than most other Christians.
Spirit of God, descend upon my heart is that one hymn still found in many Mainline Protestant hymnals. Its second stanza says this: “I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies/ No sudden rending of the veil of clay/ No angel visitant, no opening skies/ But take the dimness of my soul away.”
We have only one chance truly to start a new year afresh. As we do so, let us ask God to take the dimness of our souls away. Then we may be participants in and observers of a new world.