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Sermon title: “God’s Promise of Renewal” © Ellen Clark Clémot - 2018

Scripture text: Revelation 21:1-6a

Rev. Ellen Clark Clémot, Interim Pastor, Larchmont Avenue Church

November 4, 2018

Theme: As we remember the Saints, we put our trust in Jesus, our God, to make all things new.

O Holy One: Reveal the meaning of your Word in scripture this day. Open our eyes with renewed hope as we proclaim you our Living God, Creator and Redeemer, our beginning and our end. Open our hearts and minds to you so that we and our world might be restored, transformed, and made new.

Now, may the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen.

Personal Remarks

Before we turn to consider this morning’s scripture, I want to take a brief personal moment to say thank you. Thank you for the privilege of allowing me to serve as your interim pastor, to be standing here today, and for sharing in ministry over the months ahead, as I accompany you, all the saints of the Larchmont Avenue Church, into a bright future.

My name is Ellen Clark Clémot, and I have been called to walk with you and guide you along the way ahead. As your interim pastor, I will lead you as a congregation as we journey together through a time of change. I will advise our church officers along the way. I will encourage our staff through this transitional year and a half, or so, until a new pastor is installed to be your permanent senior minister. I am delighted to be here. And I am grateful to the members of the interim pastor search committee for their confidence in choosing me, and to Session for electing me, and for their trust in my leadership.

My husband André and I had a wonderful welcome from the church officers last night at the home of Marge Lindblum. Thank you. You have all been so generous and kind. I am thankful for you.

I am also very fortunate to have the help and support of a very special and abundantly competent associate pastor, Rev. Elizabeth Smith-Bartlett, who has ably led the church over these past few months of transition. I want to extend a special thanks to her. And a thank you to all the office staff, and the worship leadership team, especially Douglas Kostner, for your most gracious welcome.

Together we will be participants in Christ’s church with a very specific mission ahead: renewal – our collective renewal of mission, of ministry, and of membership. Together we will witness God at work in our lives, making all things new.

So, with that promise, let us now turn our attention back to today’s text with a sermon to illustrate our hopes for a bountiful new beginning, starting today.

* * *

Sermon

Today we observe All Saint’s Day, the Christian celebration that falls on November 1st each year in remembrance of all the saints – people who have gone before us in life and in death marked as Christ’s own. Later in worship this morning we will remember the saints of this church who passed away over the last twelve months. It is a way of experiencing our church as one family in Christ. I am hoping you will find it a sacred moment of honoring our past even as we look forward to a new future.

Thursday, November 1st, the official date for All Saints Day, was also my first day here at L.A.C. It was a poignant beginning. Thursday evening, I gathered with many of you and our Larchmont neighbors at Constitution Park for a vigil in remembrance of a different group of fallen: saintly people of different faiths. Rev. Smith-Bartlett shared a reflection. I offered a prayer. And several members of the local clergy: rabbis, priests and pastors in the Larchmont/Mamaroneck area also attended. Mayor Lorraine Walsh organized the gathering to be a town-wide moment of unity. But it was more pointed than that.

The All Saints Day prayer vigil was held for the shooting victims killed in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue and for their families, and for the shooting victims near Louisville, in Kentucky, and for healing of our nation as a whole - that we might be restored to sanity. That we might rediscover neighborliness and live out God’s command to love one another.

In prayer, we asked God for mercy. We asked God for healing, for reconciliation, and for unity. We asked God for things that are too great for any of us to achieve on our own but that are possible in community. In some ways, our prayers were a rallying cry for action – against lethargy, against racism, against turning our back-ism, against xenophobia and anti-Semitism. We stood up for one another against the evil force of hatred in the world. And then, in humility, we asked God for help. We asked God to come make all things new.

* * *

That is God’s promise to us from scripture this morning - that God will come and make all things new. We are given a hope-filled vision from the Book of Revelation that gives us courage for the future. For God’s love for us is so constant, and God’s faithfulness to us is so assured, that even at the end of times, God comes to us, once again, with the gift of a world transformed, a Holy City for all of us to share in community, and in relationship with God.

And because this transformed place, this Holy City, is an eternal city, it is already available for us to see in glimpses, to share in moments, when in the bright light of day – and with day-after clarity - we can see our shared humanity, our shared dependency on God’s provision of healing, mercy, and love. We see glimpses of the Holy City in moments like a town-wide prayer vigil on a village green in response to unconscionable acts of hate.

It is in those moments that we come to understand that God has not abandoned us. On the contrary, God is busy working on our hearts, transforming our minds, making us new.

* * *

You may have heard about the Book of Revelation before. You might even have read it. I don’t recommend you try that alone. Revelation contains sections that are Halloween scary. But, it also includes the tremendous promise of renewal that we read this morning – the final resolution of all wrongs – when all things are made new by God and Lamb. There is no more crying or pain, no dying or fear. This renewal happens in a heavenly place brought down to earth, for all of us. Scripture tells us this holy place, just beyond the next hill, is encircled by the trees of life, bearing fruit to feed us, and verdant leaves to heal the nations. It is a vision of wholeness and peace – not just for us as individual people, but for our communities, our cities, and the many nations overall.

Most scholars consider John of Patmos to be the author of Revelation. He was not the Disciple John, nor the Baptist John, but rather, he was a later follower of Christ who had an urgent prophetic message for his first century world. He wrote his revelation about the lordship of Christ for his nearest neighboring churches in Asia Minor, people who needed shoring up. As one commentator puts it: “[John’s hearers] were Jews become Christians in a Roman world, members of a heretical wing of a minority faith barely tolerated by a brutal empire.” [1]

Like our All Saints prayer vigil, John’s apocalyptic narrative was a rallying cry as well. “Stand up, Christians!” his pages shout. “Stop accommodating those sin-filled, polytheistic, emperor-worshipping powers of Rome. Stop blending into the crowd. Stand up and stand out! Be Christ’s disciples. Tell the world – show the world - how God’s message of love, compassion, and welcome governs your lives. Tell them who the Lord is. Not Rome. Not Washington D.C. But Jesus the Christ.

Today we might answer John’s prophetic call by getting up and going out to join a protest march against injustice. Or a rally for welcome. Or a vigil. But in John’s day, Christians would have been slaughtered for doing so. It took courage to be a Christian then – and, in different ways, it still does today.

One of my hopes for all of us at L.A.C. is that we might learn together what being a Christian means in our secular world. In sermons and songs, in prayer, and in small group conversations, I hope to share with you more about Christ’s teachings, while you teach me about LAC and the community here, so that we can make reasoned, ethical choices with relevance to our complex world today. It takes discernment, decision-making, and stewardship. There is not always one single “right” way to act, but there is always a more “righteous” way of living our lives together in diversity.

Together we will learn and share ways of doing, being and thinking as Christians. How we recognize conflicts and discern answers to the choices we face. How we find prayerful ways to do the best we can do and be the best people we can be.

Like John of Patmos, I want to enable us to stand up and be Christians in ways we did not think possible before. I want to invite the Holy Spirit into your lives, so that you, too, will feel God in your heart, making a saint out of you. And we’ll start today.

* * *

But be warned: some people have said, after reading Revelation that John of Patmos was completely nuts. His book of Revelation is packed with symbols and visions that sound like sheer craziness on the surface. Even the compilers of the official scriptural canon hesitated about whether to include John’s Revelation in the Bible at all. But they did, because when we step back and look large, we find that John’s Revelation provides us with a hopeful and powerful message of faith and trust in Christ’s redemptive work in the world.

* * *

Here’s another glimpse of that vision. In Leif Enger’s novel, Peace Like a River, we meet an eleven-year-old boy, who is our narrator, and his Dad whose Christian faith takes us into the world of the supernatural at times. Enger uses the literary device of magical realism to great effect. There comes a place in the story when by mistaken identity, or mishap, someone draws a gun on the father and son, and by tragic error, they both have been shot. They are dying but not yet dead. The two of them pass into a liminal zone between life and death. The boy describes his unconscious experience of a dream-like journey. He encounters God’s heavenly city and describes it to us:

Is it fair to say the country is more real than ours? That its stone is harder, its water more drenching – that the weather itself is alert and not just background? Can you endure a witness to its tactile presence?

We attained a pass where the stream sang louder than ever, for it swelled with depth and energy the farther it rose. Dad reached it first; I saw him mount a shelf of spray-soaked stone and stand waiting for me, backlit, silver-lined, as though the sky had a sun after all and it was just beyond this mountain.

But it wasn’t a sun. It was a city.

Joining Dad on the rock, I saw it, as a further distance than any yet conceived; still it threw light and warmth our sun could only covet. And unlike the sun, you could look straight into it – in fact you wished to, you had to – and the longer you looked, the more you saw.

Turrets! I exclaimed. I couldn’t wait to get there, you see.

Then Dad pointed to the plains below, at the movement I took at first to be rivers – winding, flowing, light coming off them. They came from all directions, streaming towards the city, and dust rose in places along their banks.

They’re people, Dad said. And looking again, looking harder, I could see them on the march, pouring forth from vast distances: people like I’d seen everywhere and others like I’d not seen, whole tributaries of people with untamed faces you would fear as neighbors and most were afoot, and a few were on horseback, and many bore standards with emblems that were strange to me. And even those were wild with singing a hymn that rose up to us on the mountain, and it was as though they marched in preparation for some[thing] imminent and joyous and sanctified….[2]

* * *

Something new was happening. Something healing, and hopeful, and filled with energy. And not a moment too soon. For us too. Our cities, our institutions, and our churches, especially our churches, have fallen short of their noble purposes. But, here, God promises that they will be restored, transformed, and made new.

And because this vision of the new heaven and new earth exists for life eternal, we can find glimpses of it in the here and now. The building of the Kingdom. The transformation of God’s world. The renewing of our church. We can be part of God’s renewal of all things through our commitment to Jesus Christ and Christ’s ministry of compassion, grace, and neighborly love.

* * *

So when can we start? Soon! John’s revelation is a vision of Jesus the Christ working in the world here and now. We can start with church today. We can broaden our welcome, expand our giving, augment our teaching. Soon, we can get creative with Christ. We can start renewing our mission, restoring our ministries, rebuilding our place in the community. Very soon, we can renew our children’s programs, expand our family outreach, grow our membership, encourage new leaders.

If you have not yet felt God at work in your lives, in your church or, in your community, if you have not yet experienced the grace of Jesus Christ, or joy in worship, from the Spirit dwelling in your very heart, then soon, very soon you will. Very soon, we will share the Lord’s Supper, the bread and the cup. Here and now, the love of God, the transforming Spirit, the gracious forgiveness of our Lord Jesus Christ, these are real experiences coming to you – soon, and very soon – to each one of us, as Christ the King is revealed to us. Soon and very soon, we will find our lives transformed.

…Soon and very soon we are going to see the King

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King

Soon and very soon we are going to see the King.

Alleluia, Alleluia, we are going to see the King!

No more crying there…

No more dying there…

Soon and very soon we are going to see the King!

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[1] Roger A. Ferlo, “Pastoral Perspective” Revelation 21:1-6a, ed.s David L. Bartlett ad Barbara Brown Taylor, Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009),pp. 230-235.

[2] Lief Enger, Peace Like a River (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 303-304.

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