We Can Imagine a World

November 3, 2024

Note - This sermon borrows from and paraphrases parts of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 speech at the March on Washington.

Celtic spirituality discusses what it calls “thin places.” These places are moments in time and specific locations where one feels the presence of God in an intense or special way. In a thin place earth nearly becomes heaven and heaven touches earth. We might otherwise call these places “moments of calm,” “a sense of peace,” or even “revelation.” If we take but a moment, we can all think of a place or a time when we experienced a thin place. You see the ancient and pre-Christian Celts thought there was a veil which divided the land of the living from the land of the dead. A thin place is thin because the veil is thin. The Celtic year recognized the feast of Samhain as the night when that veil was the thinnest providing a yearly opportunity when the living and the dead could briefly commune with each other. Thin places and Samhain were incorporated into regional Christian spirituality when the Celts became Christian. Over time Samhain became All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween, the eve of All Saints Day when, perhaps, the Saints and all righteous Souls could visit the earth once more.

With the exception of Christmas, Halloween is my favorite holiday. No, I don’t do anything particularly special, but as an adult I’ve found a certain peace on October 31 just before academic and religious calendars begin to ramp up in anticipation of Christmas and the end of the semester. By Halloween the leaves have changed colors, and many have already fallen to the ground. The days—usually at least—have started to turn colder, but rarely has it started to snow. Around Halloween my spirituality becomes more internal and focused on themes of nature, mystery, light, and death. Around the beginning of Lent my spirituality tends to become more external, involving themes like community, life, justice, and compassion. Samhain, Halloween, has become a transition point for me. It is a thin place precisely because it helps me transition just as Easter serves as another transition point for me.

The Season of Origins has, in some ways, been a transition point for us. We’ve been asked to wrestle with our beliefs or former beliefs about the Bible and the veracity of what is portrayed in the Bible. We began with two weeks of introductions and then the actual weeks of Origins, each with its own theme. We started with Invite, then Name, then Repair, and this week, Imagine. When I first encountered Undoing Conquest and Origins, I thought the same thing as many of you did: this was going to be about tearing down and getting rid of one or more parts of the Bible. However, as Dr. Kate put so well last week, exploring the Bible and finding both the tradition as it was changed and the echoes of the tradition that was there is not about tearing anything down. Rather, it’s about understanding the Bible, understanding Jesus, and understanding ourselves as Christians in a new, different, and perhaps better way. The Season of Origins calls us to imagine what our church and our faith can be. How a faith that once told us how we were nothing but sinners who could only be saved by the death of Jesus, can now tell us that we are loved by a God who created us whole, not broken. We can imagine a church where addiction and mental health are recognized not as personal failings and sins, but as responses to trauma which call for compassion rather than “tough love.” We can imagine church as liberative spaces where LGBTQIA+ people are celebrated, not shunned. We can imagine a church where people are welcomed just as they are as they come through the door. We can imagine the beloved community where people don’t just have what they need to be successful, but where there are no barriers to their success.

Origins doesn’t just call us to imagine, it prepares us for that imagination.

Our scripture tonight is taken from the Book of Revelation. We simultaneously know quite a bit about this book and hardly anything at all. Traditionally, the author is thought to be John, the apostle who Jesus loved. Tradition holds that John the Apostle was the same John who at Jesus’s death took Mary into his household. John is considered the only apostle not to be executed, rather he fled from persecution, eventually dying an old man on the Greek island of Patmos having written the Gospel which bears his name as well as several letters and the Book of Revelation. It’s at Patmos that he allegedly had this wonderful and terrifying vision that we know as Revelation or the Apocalypse of John. Contemporary scholarship, however, places the Gospel according to John and Revelation as later works, perhaps as late as the mid-200s CE. That would mean that John the Apostle could not have written these texts. Some scholars think that John did escape persecution and martyrdom and that he established a community of believers and possibly even a school to train early pastors and theologians. Authorship of John’s gospel and Revelation are often attributed to students and members of this community.

Like John himself, there are many theories about what one should and should not take from Revelation. Is it a prophecy foretelling the end of the world? Is it an allegorical narrative discussing then current events in a way that some people—Christians—would understand, but others might not be able to decode? Rather than critique the authenticity of the author being John himself or debate eschatology, I want us to think about Revelation as a thin place.

Our scripture tonight began, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” The author is having a vision of something to come. They’re looking on this vision in what appears to be beauty. In fact, this vision, unlike many in the Book of Revelation, is peaceful. We can imagine John or one of his students sitting quietly in a cave or building on Patmos when suddenly they’re struck with the deep presence of the Divine and they begin seeing this extended vision. This is a thin place. This is a time of calm as well as a time of urgency.

What’s particularly interesting in this passage is what the voice from the throne says: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be her peoples, and God themselves will be with them and be their God; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” Even today, few of us think about God dwelling among humans except for the years when Jesus lived among us. Yet this is exactly when God says they will do, they will dwell with us and they will be our God. This is far more than saying that God is all around us or that God dwells in everyone of us. This vision says that God will dwell with us mortals profoundly and truly. We will experience God like the people of Jesus’s time experienced God.

Not only is this vision a thin place, it’s also an echo. Dr. Kate mentioned about hearing echoes of what would be turned into the Exodus narrative and the story of Joshua in other parts of the Bible. We heard some of those echoes in 2 Kings 22 and 23. Dr. Kate also pointed Deborah’s Song in Judges 5. Until approximately the year 1,000 CE, the idea of the Kingdom of God was about the here and now. The Kingdom of God was to be built among people. Many churches constructed before the end of the first millennium CE depicted the Kingdom of God as a wholly terrestrial garden or forest. It was not an earthly kingdom, and the streets were definitively not paved with gold. The home of God was to be among mortals. However, like King Josiah and the Deuteronomists, the idea of the Kingdom of God was changed to be one of struggle and conquest. Why? Because the various branches of the church had worked their way into government and economy—in many places being or having a stake in those governments—and were beginning to solve their theological differences less with debates and more with warfare. They needed a narrative that took the still more peaceful image of Jesus and used it to support and compel war and conquest. Revelation provided the ready imagery.

Over the following 1,000+ years, Christianity developed theologies and narratives where trumpets would blow and Jesus would return on a white horse with an army to claim the earth again as his own. In other narratives people would simply disappear—with or without their clothes—and the people who were left would be subject to a certain number of years of torment under an anti-christ during which many of them would choose the easy path and submit to that anti-christ while others would continue to align themselves to God. In this narrative, God is ultimately victorious of course. Other than scaring and doing real trauma to generations of people brought up with these narratives, they were also very effective—along with terrifying versions of Hell—in maintaining compliance with church and congregational teachings.

Before any of those narratives, theologies, warnings, and beliefs were drawn out of Revelation, there was a belief in humans building the Kingdom of God on earth; a place where “[God] will dwell with [mortals]; they will be her peoples, and God themselves will be with them and be their God; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

As hard as it is with the election on Tuesday and all the vitriol surrounding elections at all levels, we can imagine a world the long arc of the universe has bent towards justice.

We can imagine a world where no one is weighed down by the chains of discrimination.

We can imagine a world where no one lives on an island of poverty in the midst of an ocean of prosperity.

We can imagine a world where no one is an exile in their own country.

We can imagine a world where no one goes hungry and every person has a home and a bed.

We can imagine a world where no one is given a bad check for their rights and liberties.

We can imagine a world where the thirst for freedom is never satisfied by drinking from the cups of hatred and bitterness.

We can imagine a world where violence is never a fact of life and never an answer.

We can imagine a world where nations are judged by how much they care for other nations and not their spending on militaries and their guns per citizen.

We can imagine a world where we are never satisfied until everyone is satisfied; where no one is free until everyone is free.

We can imagine a world where everyone can vote and have something or someone for which to vote.

We can imagine a world where health care and education are human rights.

We can imagine a world where the children of the oppressed break bread with the children of oppressors.

We can imagine a world where LGBTQIA+ people are judged not for who they love, the genders they identify with, or the way they express their sexuality and gender identity.

We can imagine a world where the spring of justice is never dry.

We can imagine a world lifted from the quick sands of injustice to the solid rock of siblinghood.

We can imagine a world which never returns to business as usual.

We can imagine a world where we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children: Black and white; men, women, nonbinary, and Trans; Christians, Muslims, and Jews; disabled people; people of all socioeconomic classes; Socialists, Democrats, Republicans, and people who hate politics; and so many others, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the great spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.

Amen.