Latest / North Raleigh United Methodist Church Podcast / Sermon: All Saints Sunday

Transcript

Sermon: All Saints Sunday · North Raleigh United Methodist Church Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if we have not yet met, my name is Laura Johnson.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I serve as senior pastor alongside Kevin.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to tell you about a book that was written in the mid-1990s.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you kids out there, that was the 1900s.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was written by David and Elizabeth Heller, and it's a book that records children's ideas about heaven, much like what Kevin just had the kids do for us.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: What is heaven like?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: The Hellers asked the kids, to which one responded, it's where girls get turned into angels.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then God tries to do the best he can with the boys.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: When asked what God does in heaven, 12-year-old James said, God just plans for the future.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, he's probably figuring out what job to send me to, and I hope he realizes that I would like a hockey job the best.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Six-year-old Kara answered the same question about what God does in heaven, saying, God is sitting in heaven, but he isn't on a throne or everything.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, sir.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: He's sitting in a garden, playing with the children and the animals and letting them climb on him.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Concerning entrance into heaven, 10-year-old Richard said, When you see the big bold gate with the sign that says, Welcome to all, then you'll know that you're entering the kingdom of heaven.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Today is All Saints Sunday when we remember and honor the loved ones who have died, and we rest in assurance that they are in heaven, in God's presence.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: In our scripture appointed for today from Revelation 7, we're given a glimpse of heaven, of who's there and what's happening and what God is up to.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And as you listen to this passage, I think you might hear some echoes of what the kids imagined heaven is like.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: So here now, this reading from Revelation chapter 7, verses 9 to 17.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is from the Common English Bible translation.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: John writes, After this I looked, and there was a great crowd that no one could number.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: They were from every nation, tribe, people, and language.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: They were standing before the throne and before the Lamb.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: They wore white robes and held palm branches in their hands.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: They cried out with a loud voice, Victory belongs to our God, who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: All the angels stood in a circle around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: They fell face down before the throne and worshiped God, saying, Amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and always.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then one of the elders said to me, Who are these people wearing white robes and where did they come from?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: I said to him, Sir, you know.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Then he said to me, These people have come out of the great hardship.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: They have washed their robes and made them white in the lamb's blood.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is the reason they are before God's throne.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: They worship him day and night in his temple, and the one seated on the throne will shelter them.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: They won't hunger or thirst anymore.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: No sun or scorching heat will beat down on them, because the Lamb, who is in the midst of the throne, will shepherd them.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: He will lead them to the springs of life-giving water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is the word of God for us, the people of God.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Let us pray.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh God, open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit that as we ponder these scriptures, we may hear you speaking to us.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: We may be encouraged and strengthened.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: In Christ's name we pray.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: So this book of Revelation is a letter written by the Apostle John, who was exiled by the Roman Empire to a remote Greek island called Patmos, and he lived there in a cave.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And in this cave, he received extraordinary visions from God.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Near the end of the first century, around the year 90, John wrote a letter describing these visions to seven churches throughout Asia Minor.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Real Christians and real church communities received this letter, and it was written to speak directly to their experience as Christians in the Roman Empire.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike Paul's letters, which are full of practical instructions, John's letter is written in an entirely different type of genre.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Revelation is written as an apocalypse.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now I know you hear the word apocalypse and you think of all of the end of the world movies that have ever been made.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not what I mean when I say revelation is an apocalypse.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Apocalyptic literature is not only about the end of the world.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's an intentionally cryptic and symbolic type of writing that helps the reader make sense of current events in light of a heavenly perspective.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's writing that is meant to give us a peak beyond our earthly reality so that we can see the cosmic forces of good and evil behind the scenes.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Apocalyptic literature helps us make sense of how God is working even when God appears to be absent.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And this was the situation many Christians found themselves in at the end of the first century.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: This was a terrible, terrible time for Christians because the Roman Emperor wanted to be worshipped as a god, and the Christians refused to do so, and so the emperor had them slaughtered in gruesome, horrific ways.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Revelation was a letter sent to the churches who were experiencing this type of danger to encourage them to stay the course, to trust that God was with them in their suffering, that God is mighty and powerful, that God is working behind the scenes of their earthly reality to overcome evil with good.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: So in this apocalyptic vision, John looks and sees a great multitude that nobody can count.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And they are standing before God's throne and waving palm branches, which was a common symbol of victory in those days.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this great multitude is as diverse as the world from every nation, speaking every language.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Six-year-old Marie, when she was asked about God's passing thoughts, she imagined God thinking this.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Then I could put drawings from all the children of the world on it.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: When you consider this diverse, vast multitude in Revelation 7, you realize that God really does need a very, very big refrigerator to hold all the pictures of God's beloved children.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And what is this very large crowd doing?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: They are celebrating, they are crying out with a victory cry.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Victory belongs to our God, who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Lamb in Revelation is the symbolic name for Jesus.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it goes all the way back to Exodus, when the Hebrew people were enslaved in Egypt and Moses was sent to get them free, and God sent plagues to win their freedom.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: One of the plagues was the angel of death.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the Hebrew people slaughtered a lamb and they put the blood of the lamb across their door frames so that the angel of death would pass over their houses.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: The blood protected them from death.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And here we see Jesus, the ultimate lamb, whose blood covers us and rescues us from eternal death.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's why this multitude are wearing white robes, washed in the blood of the Lamb.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: They are clothed in Jesus' forgiveness, so they may share in his victory over sin and death forever.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: So John is showing us a big old party in heaven.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: It reminds me of the videos I saw from the Lenovo Center when the Cains won the cup.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe some of you were there.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: I was watching on TV, but what I saw was pure joy, pure celebration over the victory that was won.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: This picture of heaven is a heavenly victory party.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus has won the victory over sin and death forever, and the multitudes in heaven cannot stop celebrating.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: But as John gazes on this moment, one of the elders explains that this great happy multitude was not always so joyful.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: The elder explains that these are the ones who have come out of the great hardship.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: They are the ones who suffered under persecution, who were murdered horrifically.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: They are the ones who knew suffering and trials and tribulations, and here they are now celebrating God's eternal victory.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: We look at this vast multitude and we recognize them as the saints of God.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And sure, this multitude includes the traditional saints like Peter and Paul and Mary, and sure it includes more recent saints whose faith shone amid the trials and tribulations of their day, like John Wesley, who founded the Methodist movement, and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr., and of course Dolly Parton.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it also includes the multitude of ordinary saints who live for Jesus in their own quiet ways.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: If we look carefully at this heavenly crowd in Revelation 7, we can pick out those ordinary saints that we know.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: The ones whose candles are represented before us.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: The friend, loved one who fought valiantly against cancer, the loved one who struggled mightily with their mental health.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: We see that person who knew the depths of grief and loss.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: The ones who experienced great fear or trauma.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: We see our family and friends who stumbled from time to time and messed up, but whose hearts remains steadfastly devoted to Jesus.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: And as we see their lights shining in that heavenly multitude, we can see that they are now alive.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: They are whole and happy, and they are in that party celebrating Jesus' victory over sin and death because it is their victory too.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: The tension of the book of Revelation lies between this promised future and our present reality.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: God has already ensured our victory over sin and evil and death, but we are living in the in-between times.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Between the broken and heartbreaking world as we know it and the world that God is creating, the world where a diverse multitude shine with God's love and live in harmony and joy and celebration.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: In this world that God is creating, this heaven that we glimpse in Revelation 7, the saints are in God's presence.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: God shelters them with God's love.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: They won't know the pangs of hunger or desperation of thirst ever again.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Never again will they know the sharpness of loneliness or the emptiness of despair, for God wipes every tear from their eyes.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus is their shepherd, leading them through the valley of death into the meadow of everlasting life and joy.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: This is our future.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: But in the meantime, we are here.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: We are on this earth and we are here for a purpose.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: When Jesus taught his followers to pray, he taught them the words we call the Lord's Prayer.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And part of it says, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've always been intrigued by these words because when we pray them, we are asking for God's kingdom, the picture of heaven that we're seeing in Revelation 7, to be established here on earth.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is a revolutionary prayer.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: To truly pray this prayer, we can't just ask God to make it so.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: We also ask God to work through us to make heaven a reality here and now.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Praying the Lord's Prayer means we dedicate ourselves to the work of manifesting God's heavenly kingdom in our life.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Revelation teaches us that behind our earthly experience exists another reality, a spiritual, heavenly reality, the kingdom of God, and this kingdom of God is made manifest on this earth through the power of the Holy Spirit at work and the ordinary saints of God like you.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever you allow God to work through you, a little bit of heaven is made accessible to everyone you know.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: You, ordinary saints of God here at North Raleigh UMC, you are called to be part of God's mysterious work to transform the reality of this earthly existence into the vision we see in Revelation 7.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: You are called to work what you for work for what you pray for, to be people who help others glimpse heaven through your life.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this doesn't have to be done in big, flashy ways.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: When you think of these saints whom you've lit candles for, who helped you experience heaven on earth, they didn't put on a show, and they'd likely scoff at the notion that we're calling them saints today.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: For them, following Jesus was just what they did.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was who they were.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: There was nothing monumental or flashy about it.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: They simply lived and loved as best they could, and that is the hidden beauty of ordinary sainthood.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: From our earthly perspective, they were quietly living out their faith.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: But in the apocalyptic heavenly perspective, they were victorious conquerors, for they refused to let the suffering of this world grind them down into powerless victims who turned their back on God.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, they invited the Spirit of God to live within them, to give them purpose and hope and love, and in so doing, their victory was won.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now we don't have any records that I know of describing the reaction of the early church to John's letter, but I think we can assume that the early Christians found great hope and encouragement in this vision in Revelation 7, because it reminded them that God is in control, that all will be well, that suffering may last through the night, but joy comes in the morning.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: That is the primary message of the entire book of Revelation.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Even though it may look like evil is winning, even though it may look like cancer is too powerful, or our debt is too big, or our heart is too broken, or our grief is too deep, even when all seems lost, we can picture the celebration in heaven and remember that nothing is impossible for God.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: We can remember that God is making the world into his kingdom, even now that God is not giving up on us and on this world, that no matter what we face in this life, it is not the end of the story.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you find despair at the end of your story, then your story isn't over yet.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because God's love and peace and hope and life will always prevail.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Always.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: As you consider what heaven is like today, I pray that you are encouraged.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: For no matter what evils you face, what trials await you, what struggles cause you to despair, no matter what it is, God is bigger and more powerful than your suffering.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: And God cares enough about you to draw close to you, to never leave you to face it alone, and to wipe away your tears.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: I pray that you will rest in our Christian assurance today, trusting that God's victory is one for these loved ones who have passed, but also for us, that when we will join the church triumphant, the multitude of saints one day in the heavenly party, we will be you reunited with these loved ones, and we will be safe in God's arms.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now the truth is nobody knows in its completeness what heaven is like.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: But Revelation 7 gives us a peek into this victory celebration where all of the saints find rest from the trials and tribulations of this world.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps nine-year-old Rebecca explains it best when asked what God does in heaven.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: She said, even when he is relaxing, God is always dreaming of a better world.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Amen, Rebecca.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: God is dreaming of a better world.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And God is working tirelessly to bring it into existence.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And may we, the ordinary saints of God, do the same.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.