ARE YOU A SAINT?
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

November 2, 2008

Revelation 7:9-17

I had a tough time deciding on a direction for this morning's sermon.  On Facebook, the social interaction web site that many here participate on, I sent out a message at mid-week saying simply, “What to preach on?”  The range was from why do children suffer, to please don't preach anything about the election on Tuesday, to please help me know how to vote theologically, to please preach the gospel and if you must, use words.

I have a fallback position every Sunday and that is to preach beginning from the Bible.  Most of my colleagues in professional ministry do the same.  The Bible remains the primary spiritual/historic record of our faith journey as Jews and Christians.  It is slothful of many of us preachers to only ever preach from our favorite Scriptures.  Caela and I have both been encouraged in our professional education to preach and teach from the whole thing, rather than from what is often a rather narrow selection of Bible verses that support a particular brand of theological beliefs.

Because today is All Saints Sunday we have been gifted to have a Scripture lesson from the Book of Revelation, and in particular one that I use at nearly every funeral I officiate at.  I use it so often that I don't ever think about bringing it to Sunday morning.  But, so many folks don't go to funerals.  I lot of us just go to the viewing or the party afterwards. 

The Book of Revelation only made it into our Bibles by one vote.  A lot of wise and spirit-filled saints of old felt that the book should not be in our collection. It has always been a difficult book to make sense of.  It is a second century piece of spiritual literature.  The basic subject of the book is the visions of a man given the name John; it is most surely not the same writer as that of the Gospel of John.  It has been edited through the centuries so many times that one scholar claims to find at least twenty-six significant different revisions with the text from different editors.

Still the book remains and we must deal with it and there are truly some phenomenal moments in the book that move my faith.  It is a book that deals with the author's belief that what we do in this life has an impact on how we will live in the next one.  I believe in a spiritual life after this life.  I believe that the next life is personal and that it contains memory of this life. 

The author of the Book of Revelation was living in a time of horribly violent social unrest and believed fervently in God's imminent return to earth to correct all the bad things of this life.  The author of this book believed that God would come back with a huge divine sense of righteous indignation and would bring God's righteous, well-deserved holy violence to destroy God's enemies and bring a peace to God's saints on earth like the saints in God's heaven were already enjoying.

In the progressive faith traditions, such as this one at First United Church , it is imperative that we be comfortable disagreeing not only with each other, but even with our Scriptures.  A plethora of beliefs expressed in this book are in disagreement with each other.  We are left to faithfully discern where we will choose to stand.

No matter that John in Revelation looks across to the other side in a vision and reports that God's vengeance will be a violent one.  It does not mean that John was right.  I think John's life and faith tradition were mired in violence and that was projected out into John's vision of God.  I do not believe that God's way is a violent one, nor do I believe that violence can ever be rightly defended and used by God's creatures and claimed to be righteous.  Pragmatically, the best I can come up with is that violence is at times a sad and secondary alternative in the face of overwhelming odds.  But, what I am always facedwith, brought to realize, is that Jesus never did fight back—even when pressed against with capital punishment—with anything other than a spiritual wholeness that seemed to recognize that there is so much more to life than fear of dying and death.  He certainly died showing how growth and spiritual development can accelerate for the welfare of others, with life given away in meaningful dying in the face of wrong.

I don't believe for a moment that either Jesus or we are ever willed in advance to die to make some divine mark in this life.  In my belief system I reject any suggestion that God would call for death to make a point.  That is a horrible violence that only breeds belief in divine violence as a reality.  It is an old and evil belief that needs to be replaced by the essence of a God of wholeness and salvation who asks at every available moment in our lives that we be open to the fullness of God and what God desires and those moments are what I call salvation…; not only in the life after life, but in this one, when we are filled with God, salvation has come to us and those we are with.

In the ancient church of Jesus Christ , ALL SAINTS DAY was notably not just about those who had died and gone on before us to live in heaven.  ALL SAINTS DAY has always been observed not only in recognition of those who have died, but those who are living saints, in whom God fully lives now—even those of us for whom the fullness of God working through us is ever so brief.  Today is the day to celebrate those who have and those who are seeking with the fullness of God's presence to make salvation whole right now.

Jesus did many things, but one of the most unique aspects of his message is the change he brought to bear upon our awareness of God's presence.  Jesus said that the Kingdom of God , the Reality of God, the Realm of God, the Kingdom of Heaven , is not tomorrow, but it is happening NOW!  Fully, unequivocally, God is fully present now, heaven is with us, and God is with us, God's spirit speaking to us and luring us forward now and forever more.  Heaven is when or where one is fully with God, when God finally gets what God so badly desires—to have us and to be with us. 

It is not God's doing if we don't feel and know the fullness of God's presence.  One of the greatest misunderstandings of creation is, the belief that God started this evolutionary beauty and then left.  It was the belief of many in the early church that when Jesus was here, God had come back and that when Jesus died, God left and that God returned in the form of the Spirit. 

I disagree with that and hope you might also.  God never left and so God doesn't have to come back because God is already fully here and is participating, fully, completely, unabridged and is aching in the depths of God's essence for us to know God as God know us.

God so loved the world that God gave us God's child.  God has been and will always be sending the fullness of God into God's children, this world, seeking, not to return to some Garden of Eden utopian mythology, but God is seeking since day one, God wants the world, creation to move every moment toward bringing reality closer to what God intended from the moment God birthed us.

God cares about our personal salvation, but God cares for everything equally, so that should humble us and make us very excited all at the same time.  Listen to the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 1:7-10, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished upon us…; he has made known to us to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

You can't miss that “to unite all things in him.”  Paul has poetically sailed beyond the merely personal, “Jesus died for my sins,” or “I know that I will be in heaven.”  God's desire in Jesus Christ is akin to God's cosmic desire in Genesis Chapters 1 and 2.  God is busy bringing worlds into being that were not.  The restless Creator became the relentless redeemer.  The redeemer whom we meet at the cross is the same fabricator of the chaos whom we met as Creator in Genesis 1 and 2.  The work of the cosmic Christ is cosmic salvation of all things.  Contained herein is a theology of environmentalism that seeks and gives reason to sustain the life of all creatures that our world is sorely seeking to have.

Our book of Revelation suggests strongly to us that what God is actively engaged in now, with us as full partners, is bringing heaven or God's dreams fully to light on earth as it is heaven.  God has already come to us, remains with us and walks with you and me and everyone else.  In life, in death, in life beyond death—that God is with us and is our hope and comfort and our salvation.

You are all saints to be celebrated this day.

Amen.