Sermon: Healing Leaves
First Presbyterian Church, Green Cove Springs, Florida
May 22, 2022
Scripture: Revelation 21:10, 22-27, 22:1-5
“It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.” I’m not sure I feel as assured as the band R.E.M. did when they sang those words in 1987. We were staring down the Cold War then. And here we are now, on the other side but still in the grips of a global pandemic. Then there’s war in Ukraine, divisions in our nation, global warming threatening the earth. It certainly is justified to not feel fine. On the other hand, I wonder if R.E.M. was on to something. What does it take to feel fine in tumultuous times? What gives us hope that tomorrow or at least in the end, all will be well?
Our scripture reading from Revelation today suggests a way all may be well, a way so sunny it’s a bit hard to believe. A new heavens and earth where no sun is needed because the light of God shines on all. A river with waters shining like crystal, like the St. John’s that flows just outside these doors, lined with trees of life and on those trees, healing leaves. Kings and nations coming together, not in service to their own agendas and greeds and violence, but to the good and gracious glory of God. Would we dare believe things could end so well? Could we have even a taste of those waters and a touch of those healing leaves here and now?
This has been the question of the ages with this letter from a man named John, a follower of Jesus, a visionary who shared this revelation sometime after the year 100. He wrote to a people under the Pax Romana, the militant peace of Rome. Though followers of Jesus perhaps did not see widespread persecution by the Roman government for being Christian until later, followers of Jesus knew he had been crucified, a punishment of Rome, and perhaps they knew of the Apostles Peter and Paul’s crucifixions. Apparently they found pockets of resistance wherever they lived, in part because they did not pledge allegiance to the sacred rule of the emperor because Jesus was Lord. In this tense world, John unveiled a future to them, one marked first, perhaps it would feel realistically, by those continued cycles of violence, but then finally, hopefully, healed and made whole by God.
This is what the book of Revelation was always about. Through tribulation to hope. It’s about the struggles we are passing through and the healing and paradise on the other side. So it’s not so much about predicting the future of end times. Of course, Jesus taught about a Day of Judgment that we will know neither the time nor place. But this has not stopped interpreters through the ages from building intricate interpretations out of the wild images of this apocalypse, laying it over their own times. The most famous recent version of this, from 19th Century America, goes by the academic tongue twister Premillennial Dispensationalism. But you’ll recognize its most famous idea more readily: the Rapture. This is how it goes: The end times near, the earth is gripped by war and disaster and the faithful are whisked away, raptured up to heaven. This is the end as seen in media through the 20th century, in movies like A Thief in the Night and culminating in the media empire of the Left Behind series. Like theories before, Dispensationalism picks and chooses from the mad mix of end times of imagery in ways that seem out of joint with a gracious God. In her book “The Rapture Exposed” Lutheran Minister and Theologian Barbara Rossing puts it like this: “In place of healing, the Rapture proclaims escape. In place of Jesus’ blessing of peacemaking, the Rapture voyeuristically glorifies violence and war. In place of Revelation’s vision of the Lamb’s vulnerable, self-giving love…”
So this is good news at least. Revelation says, in all our struggles, the big and the small, God is with us and for us.
And yet, part of what is so challenging about Revelation is what is so challenging about this world. The sheer scale and unending cycle of it all. A world at war, empires, nations and kings, and here we are in Northeast Florida. In Green Cove Springs or for me in Jacksonville. Of course, the smaller scale battles are just as great, in our health and finances and family. Our lives as in Revelation are this seesaw of tribulation and God fighting for us and tribulation and…how long will this go on? Are we stuck in what has been? Are we fixated on a future that promises only more disappointment?
I went to the dentist this week. I dread going to the dentist. I never expect it to go well. I imagine pain – and scoldings. Even when I’ve flossed every day, there’s still stuff to scrape painfully off my teeth. My last couple visits were painful and I just got to these moments where I thought things like, “You can give up on that tooth, I don’t need it”. And the way the hygienist constantly asks, “Are you ok?” and I’m thinking “No, you’re stabbing me, now you’re going to another tooth I thought you already did. I’ll be ok when I get out of here.”
But, you know, what? Really, this visit was better than previous ones. And I have to admit, darn it, I think the Dentist was right. I’ve been going to the dentist consistently for a couple years and flossing everyday for the first time in my life, and I think the word healing is appropriate. My oral health is getting better. So this end of the world Dentist visit that I imagine, that is stuck in my head, is changing. I’m not as stuck in the past and I’m not fixated on a painful future.
So I think John with his Revelation, is the Dentist. He’s telling us, things have not gone well, but there is hope. There is healing.
It’s hard when all we feel we can expect is for things to go wrong or go badly or get worse. We have seen the cycle too many times. A relationship with our child or sibling or spouse that never seems to go right. Cancer that keeps on coming back. Falling deeper and deeper into debt. All the things out there in the world too, but just as much our every day lives. Can we believe in better days?
It’s not just a matter of believing in better days. Believing something is possible is not transformative. It is simply an intellectual exercise. But to have faith in God, to trust ourselves to the future promised here at the end of Revelation, means to go deeply into this vision, to dream.
We need to dream about paradise. To allow ourselves to go to that blessed place in our imaginations, in our prayers. I saw a new movie recently, Everything Everywhere All at Once, which centers on a woman caught in a multiverse, multiple universes crashing together with multiple versions of herself. It’s end of the world stuff or in this case end of multiple worlds. It’s sci-fi but it’s really about how we hold the chaos of our lives together. And it comes down to something very personal, her relationship with her daughter. In the final confrontation, I was watching in disbelief as unbelievably love triumphs and overcomes chaos. I walked out not really sure if I believed that ending. And then it hit me – this is a vision of hope, of paradise. This is like when the great Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich, said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
So what paradise would you ask God for? What would you dream?
Now my son, when he was about 6, created a list of his idea of paradise which I think is pretty solid. His priorities: Pets, Friends, Cake.
As I was driving here, I was listening to Celtic jigs, reminding me of where and when I first heard them, on travel abroad in the Czech Republic, driving through rolling fields of sunflowers, where I felt like I was in paradise.
We can also dream about who will be there. My best friend from high school, Bob, died last year from ALS. I imagine him there. I can see his gangly walk and hear his laugh.
For John’s Revelation, it was a place where we people came together from all over, and a place with every sign of life: light, water, trees, fruit and healing leaves. It’s a place. It’s a renewed Earth. Falsehood and all the pain humans subject each other to are kept outside the walls. And yet, the gates are open for all to enter.
As we struggle with our divided politics, questions of prejudice, immigration, budget priorities and more, I also wonder what might happen if we asked each other, what does paradise look like to you? What does a healed nation, a healed land, a healed Earth look like to you? We might still disagree, ok we’ll definitely still disagree, but maybe we will start to find healing leaves when we dream together.
And what healing leaves do you need today? What relationships need healing? What help do you need? What prayer do you need? Can we offer healing leaves to each other? As the church? As a part of Green Cove? Where can you take those healing leaves? Where are you already doing it?
It’s the end of the world as we know it. Do we feel fine? Maybe not now or always, but even so may we dream of God’s healed world. Healing leaves for here and now, for us, for our healing, and for us to offer in love and care to others. And to dream of an end time with all things new, by the tree of life, by the bright crystal waters of the river. Amen.
Matt Hartley 