But Not As We Know It--May 21, 2025

But Not As We Know It--May 21, 2025

"[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." (Revelation 21:4)

The first thing is for us to admit that we can scarcely imagine a world no longer in the grip of death. Once we dare to consider the Scriptures' vision of a new creation in which "death will be no more," we are in wholly uncharted territory, unlike anything we have ever known.  As Mr. Spock or Dr. McCoy on the original Star Trek might put it, it will be life... but not as we know it.

We need to start here, with that admission, because I truly don't think we realize just how much our experience of the world is tinged with the shadow of death.  We are used to death as an unavoidable danger--what do we say, after all, but that the only two sure things in life are death and taxes? And not only that, but we are so accustomed to the looming specter of death that we don't recognize how it makes us perpetually on edge, afraid and anxious at anything we perceive as a threat.  We are used to a world where war is just seen as inevitable--as though there is simply nothing to be done about the fact that humans will kill each other, bomb each other's villages, or starve each other's children as we squabble over resources or real estate.  Because we are so used to being afraid of death, we are used to collateral fears, without ever stopping to think that it doesn't have to be this way: we are inclined to see strangers as potential threats, to see other people outside of "our group" as competition for scarce resources... and therefore as dangers, and therefore to see every relationship as a zero-sum game where my success can only come as a result of your defeat.  The world as we have experienced it all our lives is powered by an engine that runs on death, all the way down to the food that we eat needing to come from the death of something else in order to keep our bellies full.  We do not have the categories or language to conceive of any other way of existing in the universe that does not take death as a given.  And therefore, our species conducts itself with knives out, ready to kill rather than be killed in an endless and exhausting game of King of the Hill. We simply cannot imagine otherwise.

And that, of course, is where the Scriptures offer a minority report.  Today's verse from Revelation 21, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, makes the impossible sounding claim that God intends to make all things new in such a way that "death will be no more." And therefore, all the other realities brought about by death's engine will come to an end as well: "mourning and crying and pain" will be no more. Their services will no longer be required.  And with them, there will no longer be the need to view others with immediate suspicion or fear, because we will no longer need to view them as competition for daily bread or enemies who can hurt us.  They will be rendered harmless, and we will be harmless to them as well.  God's new creation will both embrace and disarm us at the same time.  And it will call forth from us an entirely new way of understanding our existence, in which life is no longer fueled by the combustion of someone else's death.  

Now, again, I realize that the Scriptures don't give us a blueprint for how that would work.  I'll admit I can't imagine how a world without death would function, or even a world without war, grief, hatred, and violence.  But at least part of what it means to be people of faith is to have humility enough to admit that just because I cannot fathom how something might work, it does not mean it is impossible. For most of human history, no one could imagine how human beings could fly using heavier-than-air vehicles (airplanes), until along came the Wright brothers who stretched our collective imaginations by doing it.  For millennia, nobody could conceive of a means of communicating around the world in an instant, and yet now we live in the age of high-speed internet and satellite communications, and we complain when a work meeting is required to be held in person rather than with people joining in real time on screens from anywhere. And for as long as anyone could remember, no one could conceive of how space and time or matter and energy could all be entangled... until Albert Einstein offered a completely new way of understanding them as connected in relativity.  We could go on and on with examples, but I suspect the point is clear. There have been plenty of times when no one could see how a thing could be true or possible, only for a new voice to reframe the conversation or invent a new possibility, and it changed everything. Could we allow that God is capable of creating new possibilities, too--if we have already seen airplanes, the internet, and relativity?

Once we grant that God might well have ways of remaking creation without death that our minds just cannot comprehend yet, then it compels to see, even now, that death doesn't have to get the last word.  We don't have to let death and the fear it generates in us get a stranglehold on us.  We don't have to see everyone else in our lives as a threat to be fended off or attacked.  We don't have to be resigned to a world full of war-caused starvation or generations of endless killing between opposing groups.  And we do not have to accept that there always has to be war or killing somewhere.  We do not have to be that kind of people--we know it, because God has promised us that at the last, we will be made new and there will be no death to make us afraid of each other. We can begin to live that kind of new creation life now, because we know where all of the universe is headed.  

We are headed into life... even if it is not life as we know it.

Lord God, widen our imaginations now for the new creation you are preparing, so that we can trust your promise of a world beyond the grip of death and fear.