Atom“Goodbye Sea”
“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.” Revelation 21:1
Play video clip – “The Lost Stethescope” (Youtube.com)
I like that little clip…if you had a stethoscope that would reveal to you the inner music of any object you placed it over, what would you hear? A cookie sings, “Sugar, sugar…,” a fire hydrant sings, “Who let the dogs out?” A crossing light sings, “Stop! In the name of love…” I like that…and when placed over the Christian’s heart? His heart sings, “Hallelujah! (the Hallelujah Chorus) “Our God omnipotent reigneth, forever and ever, Hallelujah, hallelujah!” “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! And we are risen with him. This is the mystery we gather to celebrate every time we gather for worship – “Christ in You…Christ in us…the hope of Glory!” When we are united with the Risen Jesus Christ through belief and baptism our future is secure…the word of Revelation is our hope and destination. We may not understand all the strange imagery of John’s vision in Revelation, but the message is always one of hope for followers of Christ…that when all is said and done, Jesus reigns. God’s final word for all of God’s creation is newness and life. In the end, death – the great enemy that takes our love and our life – will be no more. And so with this little verse from the beginning of our reading from Revelation this morning: “And I saw a new heavens and a new earth for the old one had passed away and the sea was no more…” We have a sense of new heavens and new earth…of a new creation – all that we love best of this creation only better…but what about, “the sea will be no more?”
Some of us may wonder at that. We like water…fishing and boating, the breeze in our hair, the sun in our face. Peter and John, Andrew and James, fishermen followers of Jesus surely had a similar love for the sea. But ancient Israel also thought of the sea – of water – as a place of danger and chaos.
Water can be that for us, too…an become an image of danger and chaos. “I felt as if I was going down for the third time,” she said. She wasn’t talking about drowning, but she was. She was talking about what it felt like to have lost her husband in the accident, and to be left alone with a couple of kids to raise. Those of us who may have experienced a near drowning, gasping for air, feeling the crush of the waters may understand that feeling. Those of us who have lost a loved one that we depended on and have felt ourselves gasping for air, feeling the crush of new responsibility and aloneness may also understand that feeling.
The Psalmist describes it this way: “Your Waves and your billows have gone over me.” Psalm 42:7
The sea. It’s an image of chaos, of life-threatening oblivion in a watery grave. Maybe that’s why Israel never had a navy. Let other nations go down to the sea in ships. Israel preferred the good, solid ground of promised land.
It makes sense. Remember what God did when God began creating the world, as Genesis tells it? “In the beginning,” the earth was “without form and void.” In the Hebrew language it was “tohu wabohu”
Even if you don’t know any Hebrew, it’s like you still know what those strange words mean. Tohu wabohu. It was to this dark, bubbling, watery chaos that God spoke the words, “Let there be dry land.” And it was. And God called the dry land – that which was left after the dark, tohu wabohu was pushed back – God called that land “good.”
And so, creation began when the sea was pushed back. Yet just a few chapters later in Genesis, the dark waters gush forth again. There is the great flood obliterating every living thing from the face of the earth, save those on the ark. Once again there was the dry land at last after the flood, and the rainbow with God’s promise never again to let the tohu wabohu get the best of us. But…it does.
Your life is smooth sailing. You are doing fine. But then there is the phone call in the middle of the night, and the voice on the other end saying, “I’m sorry to wake you, but you need to know…” And the news is bad. What does that feel like? Like you are going down for the third time? Like the flood waters are rising? You gasp for air as you try to tread water and you taste again something of the ancient tohu wabohu.
A friend told me of their experience on a big ocean liner – a floating “city on the sea” as the brochure described it. And so it seemed, big and heavy and oh so safe and secure, until they hit a storm and the waves began to billow and the view from the porthole was one of dark watery chaos and the big boat suddenly seemed like a bobber and no match for a creation suddenly become “without form and void.”
On this bright May day, life may seem relatively smooth. I hope it is for you. But if you have lived this life for long, you know how quickly the sky can turn dark, the wind can pick up out of nowhere, and the waves rise; we sometimes feel like we live our lives on a thin crust of order and stability. The sea bubbles forth and we begin to sink.
Today’s lesson then has power for such life lived precariously. This word from the last book of the Bible speaks of the culmination of God’s work in the world, the final act of the play, the last chapter of the story. The writer paints a picture of creation brought to completion, of God’s work finished. We shall receive a “new heavens and a new earth.” The former earth, the place of crying, tears, and heartache, will be passed away. The will of God will be accomplished “on earth as it is in heaven,” as we pray each Sunday.
One way of describing that new earth is in this little line in this most familiar passage. John says, “the sea shall be no more.”
The sea, that dark, primal, watery grave will be drained dry. The land, always threatened by a flood of surging water, will conquer this sea. We who have lived by launching our frail little boats out into the deep shall know what it means to be secure.
See? You may have noticed in your own reading of the first chapter of Genesis that the first words of the Bible are not, “when God created the heavens and the earth,” as if it were done in the past, finished, complete. Rather, it says, “In the beginning.” The story of creation begins, but does not end, in Genesis. God continues to create, continues to push back the dark chaos.
And today’s lesson from Revelation is the promise that one day God will finish that creative work. And the sea shall be no more. Which is a mighty good word to hear during this time after Easter. If you for whatever reason happened to think that Easter was a one-time thing that happened to Jesus, and not to us, think again. Easter began the decisive last scene in the drama starring God the creator and God’s beloved, yet still unfinished creation. When Jesus was raised from the dead, God began a final mopping-up action on the world. The early church leaders once spoke of Easter as “the eighth day.” It took God six days to begin creating the world. Well, the eighth day is when God finally brought God’s intentions for creation to completion.
I hope you see the relevance of this for where you live. It is no fun when the dark, bubbling chaos of death, evil, and pain surge forth in your life threatening to engulf you and all that you love. Yet by the grace of God in Christ, God keeps wrestling the chaos, keeps defeating that tohu wabohu. And one day, according to the promise of God’s word in Revelation, the sea shall be no more; all those things that threaten to undo our lives, to overwhelm and engulf, inundate, and submerge us shall be no more. So Paul speaks of Christ as the “firstfruits.” The risen Christ is the first act of what God plans to do for us, for the whole world. One day, by the grace of God, the sea shall be no more.
Believe that; live by that; remember that when you are threatened with the possibility of drowning. Remember that nothing - no evil that we or the cosmos can commit – is able to stand against God’s power to redeem, to defeat the powers of darkness, and to bring Good out of bad. And the song of a Christians heart echoes the song and the vision of John in Revelation:
And 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 new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God…and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
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 Christian’s heart sings, “Hallelujah, hallelujah…forever and ever, hallelujah, hallelujah!” Christ in you…Christ in you…the hope of glory!
Thanks be to God. Let’s pray…
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