At the End, Everybody--November 6, 2023

At the End, Everybody--November 6, 2023

"After this I look, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne of God and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, 'Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!' And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, 'Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen." [Revelation 7:9-12]

Sometimes I just really need to be reminded that Love wins at the end of the story.

And sometimes the need is even more fundamental--sometimes I need a word to remind me what to hope for when Love wins.

On days like that, visions from the old dreamers like John of Patmos here in what we call the Book of Revelation come to me, and they remind me not just to hope, but how to hope again, for God's great gathering of all peoples into one.

And here today, in words we heard in worship for All Saints' Sunday, I am reminded of the shape of our peculiar hope as Christians once again--how vast, how deep, how full, and how beautifully compelling God's promised future is for us. These words remind me that, as Revelation tells it, at the end, everybody is enfolded into God's Reign of Love. On the days when we are fumbling with even how to hope, amid all the fearful voices, all the simmering tension, all the worst-case scenarios chattering in the back of our awareness, and all the anxiety we feel about our immediate present and future, God speaks again the ancient-but-ever-new vision: we will be gathered with people from every language, culture, nation, and category into the very presence of God, breaking into song over the joy of it all.

I need to remind myself of that expansive hope, because I am tempted--and I suspect we all are--to settle for too small a hope, on too short a time frame. But the dreamer of Revelation keeps telling us here, "Don't settle for too small a vision--don't accept too meager a hope or too small a love. At the end of this story, God throws a party, and everybody's there. The old boundaries and borderlines can't and won't keep anybody out. Remember that."

That's especially important on a day like today, while war rages and captures our headlines from Israel and Gaza, and here in our country, on the day before Election Day in a polarized time like ours. We are tempted, first off, to settle for too small a hope--just of your side or my side "winning." But the vision John offers us is bigger: he speaks of all creation made whole, and of all peoples gathered in the love and worship of God.  While we feel the tension of the present moment, whether in the partisan divides of another election cycle or in the outright destruction and death of a war zone, the book of Revelation pushes us to see further down the road to a day when those divisions are overcome and done with.  

It's hard to remember that, but it's true. At some point, those things will have come and gone, and we'll still have to decide how we live with one another--how we comfort those who will feel upset and scared, how we will mend relationships with people we need to apologize to or forgive, and how we will be decent and good to people we still will disagree strongly with on a whole host of issues, topics, and problems. We will have to ask again how to love not just "people who are like me" or "people who agree with me" but also "people who oppose what I believe" and "people who have been rotten toward me," and we'll have to do it knowing that these aren't merely hypothetical people or faceless crowds from far away, but right down the street, right in the next pew, and right there on your social media feed. Pinning all our hopes on "getting my side to win" is too small a hope--and quite frankly, it is the wrong shape of hope, too.

The book of Revelation teaches us how to hope again--and what is worth hoping for. The vision we are given here is of a new creation in which all the old allegiances that had kept us separated are cut away, so that we can be part of the great multitude so numerous that they cannot be counted. The hope, in other words, is not that just Me and My Side will be there, but in fact, folks from all groups, all sides, all languages, all nations, and all cultures and tribes and peoples will be there. That has to include folks who have been enemies before. That has to include folks who don't agree on the proper rate for the capital gains tax. That has to include people who said terrible things to and about each other on Facebook. That has to include people who vote like you... and people who voted the other way. And the hope we are given in the Scriptures is not that those decisions or differences were unimportant in the end, but that at the last, everything in me that resists God's way of goodness, justice, and mercy will be transformed. At the last, we will no longer be threatened by one another, or by our differences and diversity. At the last, we will let go of our pet agendas and platforms and the idols and demagogues we have projected them onto, and we will see that at the center of everything is a Lamb who was slain that we might live. The national flags will all fall. The shouts and chants and angry yelling will be silenced. And there will instead be a song that rises up, centered on the God who is love.  That love song is what will remain.

If all we can focus on today is, "I hope my side wins," in whatever the conflict of the day is, we are setting our sights on too small a hope and too short-term a future.

But if we live today in light of that expansive hope--the one that is Lamb-shaped, cross-and-empty-tomb-shaped, and in fact, shaped like a crowd from every corner of the world--it will enable us to make it through difficult days, lingering tensions, and bruised relationships. There will be much still to be done after the dust settles and the smoke clears, when the wars are done and the guns fall silent.  But we can be a part of that work, knowing that God's promise is to lead us all toward a new creation where our old pet hatreds are hammered straight, our old bitterness is transformed, and our old wounds are healed and scarred over enough for us to reconcile with the crowd of everybody else who is there at God's party.

Don't settle for too small a hope. Not today. Not ever.  And remember: at the end, everybody there is pulled into God's Reign of love.

Lord Jesus, give us your expansive vision of new creation today, so that we can love through difficult days.