Making All Things New
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
May 2, 2010—Senior Farewell Sunday
Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-36
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. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he 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.”
And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.John 13:31-35 • When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
I. BEGINNING
This is a bittersweet moment in the life of this community. It’s not an easy time for us, because it’s a time full of change. And we’re not big fans of change.
Abraham Lincoln said, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” Now, Lincoln was one of the greatest wordsmiths we have had as far as presidents go, but it may be that he said it that way because if he’d come right out and said, “Hey folks, we’re going to have to change the way we do things” he’d have had a riot on his hands. Indeed, one of his successors, Woodrow Wilson was quoted as saying, “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”
We are not big fans of change. Some members of this community don’t even like it when we move the furniture around in the office area downstairs. (If that describes you, you might want to keep your distance this summer). There is something unnerving about change.
II. THE FIRST THINGS HAVE PASSED AWAY
And so I imagine that for many people, the words from Revelation that “the first things have passed away” might be more frightening than all the language about beasts and dragons and lakes of fire. We like continuity. We like sameness. Just think about how upset people get every time they change something on Facebook. It was so much better the old way—why did they have to go and change it?
I have had alumni look at incidental pictures of campus posted online and send me messages: what is that building? Where did thatcome from? It’s unnerving to see what was familiar change so drastically. Every time I go home and drive up the road to my home town, I am confronted by some new building: a Wal-Mart that wasn’t there before. A new supermarket. Change can be disorienting.
Perhaps it’s because with predictability comes survival that this stuff is hardwired into us. If we know that water can always be found in a certain place, or that plants will always bloom at a certain time, and trees will yield fruit in a certain season, it makes the world an easier place to navigate. The regular, the routine, becomes the familiar, the comfortable, the safe.
It’s why we’re such big fans of the past. Because the past is unchanging. It is what it is. The present feels too fluid, to hard to grasp. Too much in play. The future too uncertain.
When I was younger, I went through a phase where I took a lot of photographs of the things I was doing and the people I was with. I would almost experience anxiety if I was going out with my friends and had failed to remember my camera for the evening. As I reflected on this, I was trying to hold on to the present moment. There was something about it that was too fleeting, too subject to change. With a photograph, that moment could be preserved. It would last. No matter what was going on, that photograph would be proof of that moment’s occurrence: it was static. Unchanging.
A. The Safety of Tradition
The uncertainty of the future often causes us to place a lot of value in tradition. There is constancy with tradition. Certainty. Tradition connects us to the past in ways that we find comforting. That’s not a bad thing. But we can place a lot of emotional importance on those traditions. Anyone who has ever tried to plan a worship service where you change the customary hymns, or the order of service, knows the resistance that can engender. President Wilson was right about change in politics, but he hasn’t seen anything like the change resistance in the churches.
We like our own traditions. We like our customs. We like the routine of our lives. We like the arrangement of our furniture. And when we face change, we feel the anxiety of uncertainty.
III. CHANGE AND ANXIETY
But I don’t have to explain that kind of anxiety to you. For we live in a world wracked by the anxiety of change.
A. National life
I suppose something like that has always been happening, giving truth to the old line that the only constant is change itself. I am sure someone once led a campaign against the dangerous innovation of fire.
But we live in an age of seemingly constant change. For 150 years this nation was safely protected by two great oceans to either side of us. A distance that became irrelevant to the 30 minute flight of an intercontinental missile. For the longest time, the U.S. had been spared the kind of religious violence that had ravaged Europe for centuries, until at the beginning of the 21st Century, that violence came calling.
Many people in our country view the world as changing in ways they do not like or understand.
The racial and ethnic makeup of the nation is changing. By the year 2042, Americans of European ancestry will be in the minority for the first time. [1] The continuing cultural and religious diversity in the country is only on the rise. Who we were is not who we are. Who we are is not who we will be.
Technology is continuing to change our world. We are able to connect rapidly across the globe in ways undreamed of mere decades ago. We have access to information and ideas it would have taken years to compile in the past. This new technology is creating new opportunities and rendering other long held institutions obsolete. Video and music stores. Pay phones. Newspapers everywhere—the stalwarts of American culture and life for centuries—are in decline, perhaps soon to fade away altogether, but for a viable few.
New technologies require new sensibilities about privacy, finances, and a whole range of other issues that compel us to make decisions we’re not accustomed to thinking.
And you thought moving the office furniture was scary.
The realization that the world is changing is causing a lot of anxiety in people. All one need do is turn on the news to see that. People everywhere, it seems, are about to crack under the strain. There is a constant clamoring for the ‘good old days’, a return to the way things used to be, a reclamation of the world of yesterday. But the past is gone. It is not coming back. And somewhere deep within us, that realization scares the hell out of us.
B. Student Life
This is something that you all know already. The seniors, of course, most of all. But before you freshmen get too cocky and think this change stuff doesn’t apply to you, talk to me after you get back from your first summer at home.
But it is our seniors tonight who face the biggest change and thus the biggest anxiety. For as different as college was from high school, it was still school. There were still classes, tests, papers. Summers off and years that began in the fall. Sure, you take different courses, have different internships, but the rhythms of the year remain more or less the same.
And now begins a new time. A time of uncertainty. An unscripted time. A time of change. Now begins a time where you step outside of the familiarity of college life and set out on a new adventure. Wherever that takes you.
I don’t pretend that this is easy. In fact, I know that it’s hard. For there is much good in what you’re leaving behind. This amazing community that you have built here. This place of refuge and welcome. This place of openness, of inclusiveness, of intellectual and spiritual challenge. Of commitment to a lived faith. Of free food.
You have built here a community that lives out the commandment of Jesus’ that “you love one another” just as Christ as loved you. The love that is known in this community is a reflection of that deep and abiding love that God so freely shares with us.
It’s a hard thing to leave. It’s hard to look at the change that is coming and not feel the anxiety of the unknown.
It’s not any easier for me. Every year, I am reminded of Joe’s warning to me when I began this work: the hardest part is that theyleave.
IV. ALL THINGS NEW
You know, the Book of Revelation gets a bad rap. It is so often associated with gloom and doom and the end of the world that people miss the wondrous hope that it represents. For the Book of Revelation was written to an oppressed people, feeling that the world itself was against them, that they were marginalized, isolated, cut off, and surrounded by a hostile idolatrous culture. And in the midst of that alienation, they should be told these beautiful words:
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. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he 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.”
And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”
“See, I am making all things new.” God promises change for a broken and hurting world. Promise for reconciliation, healing, peace, and life. And in that promise we understand that change does not happen apart from God. God is in the change. The change is ofGod.
A year and a half ago, when we did the “Seven Words You Can’t Say in Church” sermon series, word #1 was “Evolution”. And as we looked at the purported conflict between science and religion we noted that by claiming to be made both in the image of God and products of evolution we understand that we are part of an ongoing creative process. God’s creation does not end back at the beginning of time. God is not a watchmaker who built the world, wound it up, and then put it down to run while he went away to find something else to do. The world is in a constant state of creation. A dynamic reality in which we play a part. The Book of Revelation does not describe a heavenly paradise on some other plane of existence. It describes this world at the culmination of God’s new and ongoing creation.
When we find ourselves in the midst of change—we find ourselves in the midst of God’s creative activity. We are witnesses to creation all around us. When we set out into the unknown future, we do so not leaving God behind, but going where God has gone before us.
V. END
I’m not going to pretend that that makes change any easier. Few things about Christian life are easier just because God is involved. In fact, they often become much harder.
We still won’t like change. Especially when it means saying goodbye to people who have meant so much to us. And it is at times like this that we who remain behind need to remind ourselves that you will never really leave us. The community you have helped to build, like all the alumni who came before you, will be a living monument to your time here. Years and years of students after you will find this community a special place, because of what you have done. For we have made for ourselves a tradition, a real tradition in the midst of change: a tradition of love and grace so deep and profound that it will become a home to generations of students whom you may never know.
Your names get added to that honor roll of those who have gone before and built this community into what it has become: [Taylor Walters. Chrissy Lindstrom, Chris Slatt, Bradford Cheney, Lou Belsito, Stuart Denyer, Erin Trouth, Erin Taylor, Amber Pezan, Kate Moore, Kate Boustead, Katie Schroepfer, Dennis Rowe, Nathan Brownback, Holly Masters, Roza Guillaume, Danielle Dickey, Sidney Traynham, Ariel Schwarz, Gussie Abrahmse, Laura Peck, Kim McClain, Bryan Colombo, Jason Reimer, Velda Jones, Sarah Anderson, Allen Hays, Patrick Elliott, Eileen Barber, Eileen Hassett, Emily Randle, Erica Benjamin, Jessica Dillon, Jennifer Arver, Kate von Richthofen, Colin Mattoon, Laura Goodman, Shawna Perko, Thaddina Wiley, Adrienne Arey, Steven Bielinski, Marlon Brown, Jessica Davis, Brandy Dillingham, Kathryn Fekete, Marjorie Jeansonne, Lindsey Kerr, Jeff McAleer, Jason Shippy, Corrine Thompson, Lindsey Triplett] Lennea Bower, Bonnie Crouch, Meredith Herbert, Patty Herold, Lara Hogan, Ruth Kemmish, Jesse Marsden, Vajaah Parker, Lisa Rothman, Molly Thomas, Ali Clark, Luke Pepper, Laura Goodwin, Michael Wagner, Alex Bruce, Lia Comerford, Rachel Birkhahn-Rommelfanger, Danielle Mahaffy, Sarah and Kyle Ashworth, Sarah Simpson, Chris Smith, Justin Peck, Anna Finn, Marc Tomik, Mark Meyer, Casey McNeill, Alissa Tombaugh, Amy Robandt, Charlie Kilby, Ali Shott, Nicholas Grainger, Hannah Hanson, Carrie Johnson, Niles Anderegg, Elizabeth Royall, Stephanie McDaniel, Robin Jones, Miriam Wood and so many others.
And one day, you will come back to visit us, as a number of our alums are doing tonight, and you will get to see the fruit of your labors. Oh, sure, you’ll probably complain about how they’ve changed the Tavern again. Or there’s a new building where the Nebraska lot used to be. But you will get to see how the community will have thrived and grown. You will see how God will have continued to make all things new, with a new class of freshmen, with new energy, new ministry.
But your legacy is not the only thing that is enduring, because in many ways, we will never leave you. This time here will have shaped you in ways that you will only begin to discover over the next few years. Friendships made here will endure. Lessons learned. Understandings of yourself and God formed. This place will continue to be a part of you for years to come. You don’t get rid of us that easily. Plus, you still will receive the E-pistle. (Unless you opt out of it, you get that thing until you die.)
Change is a difficult thing. And at times like this, it can make our hearts heavy with feelings of separation from one another. But we can be reminded that there are things that endure. St. Paul said that “faith, hope, and love abide” and that the greatest of these is love. The love that you have known here—the love that you have nurtured and shared and helped to take root here—that love will abide in this community and with you forever.
And as we face the change that comes upon us, we do so with faith and hope: hope for the future formed by resurrection, and faith in the God who is not removed from the change, but who is in the change. A God who calls to us in the midst of our anxiety and uncertainty. A God who calls to us from a future being created all around us, and says, “See, I am making all things new.”
