All Saints Day

Isaiah 25:6-9: This hopeful prophecy of Isaiah spoke directly to the Israelite situation, and it continues to speak directly to ours. God comes to us as host at a meal, destroyer of those things that hurt human beings, comforter of the sorrowing and grieving. He is also the forgiver of our sins and the salvation of those who wait upon him. All this, in just four verses of prophecy!

Isaiah pictures God as seated on a mountain. His table is spread for all people to enjoy. Rich food is there, including meat, a rarity in those days; it is meat dripping with its marrow. Fine wine is offered, well-aged, not just wine made from the grapes plucked yesterday from the vine. Hospitality will be warm around the table, for the Lord is its host. The table of the Lord is set for us, as Jesus sets it in the later years.

God who is host is also God who is the destroyer. There is a difference, however, from former prophecies of destruction. This time it is despair that is destroyed, and death itself. God will destroy "the shroud that is cast over all people, the sheet that is spread over all nations. God will swallow up death forever." Paul picked up these words in his chapter on resurrection, First Corinthians 15: "Death is swallowed up in victory! O death, where is thy sting! O grave, where is thy victory."

The seer of Revelation picked up the next words in his description of the new heaven and the new earth, 21:4. "God himself will be with us. God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Death will be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more. For these first things have passed away." God will do more than that. God will take away the disgrace of the people. God will forgive our sins. Jeremiah advanced this thought when he spoke of a new covenant. "The days are surely coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. . . . I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sins no more." Jesus sealed this new covenant for us, first in his supper and then in his death. "This cup is the new covenant in my blood shed for many for the forgiveness of sins, . . . Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!"

Beneath these words were Canaanite concepts and imagery. The people of Israel to whom Isaiah spoke lived in the land of Canaan, and they were surrounded by Canaan temples and rituals. The followers of the Baals looked forward to feast for all (nations) celebrating the destruction of Baal's enemies and the commencement of a new era of peace and salvation. The swallowing up of death is paralleled in the Canaanite myth by Baal's victory over Mot, god of death and the underworld. The destruction of the covering and the veil which is over all peoples, and the wiping away of tears, correspond in The Poem of Baal to the triumphant warrior's command to Anat to "banish warfare from the earth. . . . Weave no longer on the earth tissues of lies, . . . a mesh of guile." (Scott, IB5:304) What is said of the baals is spoken more truly of Yahweh. The Lord of hosts, not Baal, will do all that was ever said of Baal, and more. "The Lord has spoken it." So said Isaiah, so said Yahweh.

The passage closes with a graceful psalm just one verse long. "This is our God: we have waited for him. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation." All this takes place on the mountain of the Lord, as will another scene on a mountain, when the Lord Jesus takes leave of his disciples and ascends to the seat of Power.

PSALM 24: This powerful hymn is the text for a litany that was sung when pilgrims approached the Holy City and its temple to worship. We need to see the text in those terms.

Worshipers: 1 The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein; 2 for he has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers.

Priests: 3 Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place?

Worshipers: 4 He who has clean hands and a pure heart,

Worshipers: who does not lift up his soul to what is false, and does not swear deceitfully.

Worshipers: 5 He will receive blessing from the Lord, and vindication from the God of his salvation.

All: 6 Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob.

Priests: 7 Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. 8 Who is the King of glory?

Worshipers: The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord, mighty in battle!

Priests: 9 Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. 10 Who is this King of glory?

Worshipers: The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory! Selah

The first part of the psalm is a confession of faith: "To the Lord belongs the earth, and everything in it, the world and those who dwell in it; 2 for God has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers." Reference to "the seas" and "the rivers" indicate that God has brought order out of chaos.

3 through 6 begin with a question: "Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and who shall stand in his holy place?" Four qualifications are laid out before us: "Clean hands and pure hearts," that is, outward behavior based upon inward spiritual motivation; putting God first in life ("Who hath not lifted up his soul unto idols") and honorable speech ("Who does not swear deceitfully.") The great enemy of human life is to lack integrity: to see that the one God is behind all human actions, and to see that all human actions, all words and all deeds, correspond to that one God. Israel's faith set out these qualifications to insure such action.

The last part of the litany visualizes the living God coming into the temple. God "entered" the temple with the first rays of the sun at the spring equinox. Peering over the Mount of Olives, the sun shone its beauty and brilliance into the innermost parts of the sanctuary. But the doors of the temple had to be opened to let this visual representation of the Lord come into the temple. "Open the gates," said the psalm, "Lift up the closed doors, and the King of glory may come in." This was the great moment of worship in the temple: watching that early morning sun silently enter the temple. The event needed to be celebrated. "Who is this king whose glory is seen?" "The Lord of hosts - He is the king of glory!"

Revelation 21:1-6: 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.

This is really an astonishing vision that John had and that he reported in the book of Revelation. He talks of a new heaven and a new earth, and he talks of the first heaven and the first earth passing away. I want to talk about John's vision, but before I do, I want to tell you something of what we know about the man who had the vision.

His name was John. This was a very usual name in the church at the time. There was John the son of Zebedee, there was John the author of the Gospel that bears his name. The man who had the vision is neither of these. This man, John the Seer, was a generation younger than the other two. He lived in the city of Ephesus, which is on east coast of the Aegean Sea just opposite Athens on the west coast. He was a traveling preacher. He traveled a circuit of churches. The beautiful city of Ephesus was his home, but he also went to the churches in Smyrna and Pergamum, Philadelphia and Laodicea to bring them the message of Jesus Christ.

While John the Seer was preaching his message, the Roman empire began to make demands of the Christians. Chief among the demands was that the Christians make a sacrifice to the god Roma. Roma stood for the Roman empire. To sacrifice to this god meant that the person was willing to say that Rome was the most important thing in their lives. Rome had created them, Rome had given them life, Rome had protected them against their enemies, Rome demanded their highest allegiance, they were to live and die for Rome.

John the Seer could not sacrifice incense on the altar of Rome. John knew it was God who had created them, not Rome. It was God who had given them life, not Rome. It was God who protected them from their enemies, not Rome. It was only God who could command their highest allegiance, not Rome. It was God alone, God in Christ, for whom the Christian had to live and die.

So when the officials of the Roman Empire asked John to step up to the altar of the god Roma and burn incense on that altar, John refused to do it. It was against his religion to do it. The authorities gave him a second chance. "Burn the incense," they said. A second time John refused to do it. So the Roman authorities arrested John and shipped him from Ephesus down the Aegean Sea to the distant island of Patmos.

If you go to Patmos today, you find a sparkling little island in the middle of the Grecian islands. If you go there looking for John the Seer, you will be taken up a high mountain on the island. You will be led into a worshipful monastery, high in the hills, where you can look over the island and the sea and be moved by the beauty of it all. But don't be misled. John was not on that island to enter a monastery. He was there as a prisoner, a slave of Rome. Every day when he awoke, he would be led off to the granite quarries on the island. He would spend all day cutting rock to go into the temples and shopping malls that Rome was building on other islands. At night he was taken back into the prison, in leg-irons, with his hands bleeding and his back breaking. With the other prisoners, John would get what sleep he could, and then too soon he would be routed out of bed to go back to the mines under the blazing sun to spend the next day working the granite quarries of Rome. And it would go on and on like this, month after month, year after year, a decade and more, until John broke under the weight of it and died.

But this prisoner, this slave, this John had a vision. Each morning as he was dragged to the quarries, he would look up into the heavens. On its dark blue canvas, he would see the morning star. It stood out from the other stars. It was bright, very bright. It was close to him. It moved around the sky and seemed to beckon him home. He began to say to himself, "That morning star is like Jesus Christ. He stands out from all the other stars. He shines very brightly. The morning star tells me that a new day is about to break. Jesus Christ tells me that too. Behold I make all things new. Jesus Christ represents the resurrection and the life to me. Jesus Christ," said John aloud, "Jesus Christ is the bright morning star."

Soon John's vision had other parts to it. When a Greek astronomer looked up at the heavens, in his imagination he saw all kinds of figures etched there on the vault of the sky. At the middle was the figure of a Great Bear, Ursa Major. Some even said that this figure made up of seven stars was a Big Dipper that poured out its water and gave life to earth. Off to one side was another configuration of seven stars, smaller than the first. They imagined this one to be the Little Bear, Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper. Nearby was a set of stars that they called Orion, the hunter, hunting down the beasts of the heavens. Over there were the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, who had been cast up into the sky and could never return home. Winding around the heavens was something they called Draco the Dragon, whose tail would flick the earth from time to time and cause all kinds of havoc there. That's what the Greek astronomers and philosophers saw when they looked up to the sky.

But when John looked up, he saw something different. He saw a great book, and its pages were bound together with seven seals. When the seven seals were opened, plagues began to fall upon the earth, and a fourth of the earth's inhabitants were destroyed. Then he heard seven trumpets sound, and there were more plagues, and this time a third of the earth's inhabitants were destroyed. Then he saw seven bowls. Each of the bowls tipped over in turn, and the poison they spewed out destroyed half of the earth's inhabitants. One-fourth, one-third, one-half - each time the plagues came, they were worse than the last time, and each time they destroyed more of the earth's people.

But John saw something else, too. He saw great battles taking place in heaven. On the one side were all the forces of evil, Satan, the cosmic serpent, the horrible dragon, the beast with ten horns and seven heads, feet like a leopard so it could run swiftly throughout the earth, mouth like a lion so that it would

crunch and devour everything in its path. On the other side, the mighty angel Michael, and a woman who had just delivered a child, and the little child himself, and most important The Lamb Who Had Been Slain. The two powers were arrayed against each other. Their battle was the battle between Good and Evil, between God and the Enemy Kingdom. Do you know what this is most like in our own experience? It's like the Star Wars battles. These battles take place up in the heavens away from earth. They are peopled with all kinds of strange living creatures, half-animal, half-human. On the one side, Luke Skywalker and the Jedi, representing all that is good in human life. On the other side, Darth Vader and the dark kingdom. It is the battle between good and evil. It is the ultimate battle for the soul of the world. The battle is so closely fought that, as we watch, we have to ask, "Who will win?" It is the nearest thing we have to the vision that John the Seer was writing down.

Well, John knows who will win. He knows it because the decisive battle has already been fought. It was fought on a hillside outside the city of Jerusalem. It was fought on a cross. On that cross there was a Lamb that had been slain. All the forces of evil in the world had arrayed themselves against that Lamb. There was betrayal - Judas had betrayed him. There was denial - Peter had denied him. There was indifference to human pain - as Jesus hung on the cross, the crowds either gaped at him mindlessly or walked away. There was desertion - all the disciples deserted him and fled. There was hatred - the priests hated him. There was violence - all the violent power of the Roman empire had pounded those cruel nails into his bleeding hands and arms. The Lamb had been slain, all right, and you would have thought that the dark forces had won. Yet - the love of Jesus for people could not be snuffed out. Though he died, he loved his people to the end. The forgiveness of Jesus could not be extinguished - "Father, forgive them," he said, and that was his last word on the subject. The faithfulness of Jesus could not be shattered, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." Betrayal, denial, indifference, desertion, hatred, violence - all these evil powers were lined up against him, but they could not kill the love, the forgiveness, the faithfulness of the Lamb that was Slain.

This was the decisive battle in the whole history of humankind. All imaginable evils fought against Jesus Christ, and he destroyed the power of every one of them.

Against this backdrop of Christ's victory, John the Seer offered his final vision. 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.

A new heaven. The paganism of the time had thousands of gods. But all the gods had one thing in common: they didn't care at all about people. They were so busy carrying on among themselves that they didn't want people to bother them. Some of them were so downright mean that they went out of their way to hurt people. This was the old heaven with its thousands of gods.

The result of it was that people didn't care about other people, either. We have a letter written about this time from a soldier at the front to his wife back home. She was about to have his first child, and he was sending instructions about what to do with it. "If it is a boy," he wrote, "raise it. If it is a girl, take it out on the hillside and leave it there to die." Can you believe it! That's how uncaring the people of the age were, even toward their own children. That was the old heaven - full of uncaring gods. That was the old earth - full of uncaring people.

But the new heaven is presided over by a God who cares. This God sent Jesus Christ into the world, and Christ loved the poor and Christ cared for the sick and Christ fed the hungry and Christ stood beside the prisoner and he demanded that the oppressed be freed. Did any other person at this time do this for his people? Of course not. Did any Stoic philosopher and Epicurean preacher do this for his people? Of course not. Only Jesus Christ did this. Only the God of Jesus Christ did this for the likes of you and me.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; God will dwell with us. This is a restatement of the covenant God made through Moses with the people of God in the wilderness: God will be with us. We shall be God's people. And what does this caring God do, this new heaven? He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away. If ever there have been tears in your eyes, know that God in Christ will wipe them away. If you have ever been pained by the death of those you love, know that God in Christ stands beside us to hear our mourning and bear our crying. This is the new heaven that surrounds us, that has descended upon us. God himself will be with us, to share our sorrows and to bear our sins.

But the new heaven must be accompanied by a new earth. The God of the caring heavens wants his earth peopled with caring people. We have to care enough to wipe away tears. We have to care enough to bear with mourning and crying, with pain and death. Like Christ we are to love the poor and care for the sick and feed the hungry and stand beside the prisoner and demand that the oppressed be freed. A new heaven -- a new earth -- John's vision. Is it also ours?

John 11:32-44: "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?" These are the solemn thoughtful words of Jesus Christ.

The situation in which Jesus spoke these words concerned his friend Lazarus. Lazarus lived in Bethany with his sisters Mary and Martha. Bethany was located on the east side of the Mount of Olives. It could not be seen from Jerusalem because it was over the lip of the Mount. When Jesus was in the region of Jerusalem and Judea, he appears to have stayed with this family in Bethany.

As Jesus was making his way from Jericho on his way to Jerusalem to celebrate a last passover there with his disciples, the sisters sent a message to him that their brother was very ill. When Jesus arrived in the village, he found that Lazarus had died four days before. He went with the sisters, and the crowd that had followed them, to the tomb.

What happened there is worth examining with great care. Upon coming to the grave, said the gospel, "Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved." This same word was used for Jesus as he came into the Garden of Gethsemane and prayed that "the cup be removed" from him. There is no scene in John's Gospel of Jesus praying in the Garden as his great decision concerning the cross was before him. The use of the word "greatly disturbed, deeply disquieted in spirit, vastly upset" tells us, however, that the raising of Lazarus was the equivalent for John's Gospel of Jesus facing the issue of life and death in Gethsemane. What happened at that moment supports this interpretation. When Lazarus came forth from the grave, the Pharisees and the chief priests held a formal meeting to see what they should do in the light of this. Their great fear was that the Romans, upon hearing of what Jesus did, would come and destroy both their holy place, the temple, and the nation itself. The high priest of that year, Caiaphas, summed up the issue. "Is it not better for one man to die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed?" The result of the meeting was that the Pharisees and the chief priests planned to put Jesus to death. (John 11:45-53) Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. The consequence of this act was that Jesus had placed himself directly on the path to the cross.

The moment of Lazarus' deliverance from this death is presented with dramatic force. Jesus stood before the grave. He ordered that the stone be removed from the tomb. Martha demurred. "He has been dead four days. The stench will be overwhelming." Jesus said, "If you believe, you will see the glory of God." Jesus prayed. Then, like the trumpet on the last day, Jesus cried out with a loud voice: "Lazarus, come out!" Bound up with the grave clothes of death, Lazarus came out. "Unbind him," said Jesus, "and let him go."

"I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?"

Do we? Jesus seems to be differentiating between "the resurrection" and "the life." Resurrection was part of the popular belief of the day. Martha had said to Jesus, "I know that my brother will rise again on the last day." Jesus accepted this, but by adding "the life," Jesus brings a new dimension to this belief. Jesus says that everyone now living who has faith in him will never die; the believer is already living in a manner which excludes the possibility of his ceasing to live. The miracle of Lazarus' bodily resurrection is a living symbol of the real resurrection by which we pass from a purely physical existence, which is bound up with death, into the life which is life indeed. It is life that we can imagine best when we explore the life that, in this gospel, Jesus already shares with God.