Revelation 19:5-10; 1 Cor. 13:1-13; Joel 2:28-32; Revelation 22:1-5

         And now, at last, we come to the big problem that has been humanity’s biggest problem, I would say, down through the ages.  You and I, and all the human beings that have ever existed, have lived in a world in which there is far more going on behind the scenes, if you will, than we could ever think, know, or acknowledge, based on our own sense perception and ability to think. Although it seems to us that our brains are limitless in their creativity, in their ability to come up with new items, new words, and new interpretations. In reality, just like a computer, just like a hard drive or a bank of RAM memory, we eventually come to the end of our resources. There is a point that we can hold no more knowledge, we can think and process no more data.  And our problem is that you and I have to deal with the God of the universe here. How does God communicate with us? How to know the creator and programmer of this world, who is, as some philosophers describe, infinite mind, infinite personality, infinite being in itself (don’t let your head hurt on that one). How do we communicate with the infinite if you and I are just finite beings?

And reverse that. Here we are, who are here, limited in time and space, historically bounded on every side by events, circumstances, just the normal accidents of being born a human, with all that entails. How are we ever to cross the barrier from the physical to the spiritual, From the finite to the infinite, from the limited to the limitless, and commune with God? These are the kinds of questions that torment people through the ages. And this is the basic question you and I need to deal with today.  It is essentially the question that all major religious faiths wrestle with at one point or another.

In our understanding of how scripture came to be, we believe, as Christians, and this is generally believed across the spectrum of Christianity, that God worked in and through and with the authors of the Bible to ensure that what God wanted us to have in scripture got there. But here’s the difference that I want you to point out to ponder when it comes to differing religious faiths. We do not believe that God dictated in the ears of Moses and Paul and Peter the exact words that God wanted communicated in the Bible. God, unlike myself, does not use a dictation program when he is teaching or preaching. Instead, God uses the Holy Spirit. One scripture puts it this way, “All scripture is God breathed.” Another one, “No prophecy of scripture ever came from the mind of an individual by themselves, but men and women spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” These are beautiful scriptures that tell us a little bit about our Bibles. The Bible is inspired. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean that it’s inspirational in the same way that a book from J.O.Y. might be, or inspiring as in a piece of art that encourages us to think about the world differently. No, that word is God breathed, theonoustos in the Greek. Just imagine God breathing through the Holy Spirit out into the world a message. That message is faithfully transmitted by the author. But the author is never lost in the process. The author’s grammar, spelling even, and their perspective too, is mixed with that of God to produce what we call the Bible. The Bible is a 100% divine production. But it is also a 100% human production. Now that sounds like a contradiction. Until you remember that our understanding of God is all about the collaboration, connection, relationship. Jesus is 100% human and 100% divine. Two natures, one person. What do we call Jesus? He’s called the Word of God in several places. What do we call the Bible? The Word of God, don’t we? I don’t want you to equate Jesus and the Bible, but this idea of the Word of God is going to become central to what I’m going to talk about next.

Christianity is unique in the way it views its scriptures. In Islam, there is no room for the human in the scriptures. Instead, it is believed by Muslims, and this is Orthodox Islam of whatever stripe, that Allah dictated verbatim the entire Quran to the Prophet Muhammad, and that he commanded Muhammad to recite, to recite, to recite. The Quran was meant to be heard, to be memorized, and to be recited exactly. That is why today, the only Orthodox interpretation of Islam must be done from the Arabic. And then there are other world religions, like Buddhism, where the revelation of the God is more internal, more a feeling, a sense that one gets, or is chasing after, as in the case of some of the religions where you are chasing Nirvana. Now I can’t go into world religions now, but just know that Christianity’s place in the world is very unique in its collaborative approach to how we view scripture.

I have spent nine months trying to show you what the Bible says. I have tried to show you the different arcs, stories, narratives, characters that the Bible gives to us. And there are movements, almost like a play, which gives the Bible structure. In the beginning there was creation, where God spoke into being that which was not, and the world came into existence. God created everything as a beautiful temple for his habitation. And the last thing God created was not just a person, but a relationship. God created someone to be in relationship with him. And that someone was plural, just like God is plural. God created humanity, male and female. That is essential to the creation that there be diversity in unity. God created these humans in the image of God, which means that we have been given a task that mimics that of God in creation itself. We are to be like small g-gods, if you will, ruling over this creation much the same way that Joseph would rule over Egypt and could do so in Pharaoh’s name and by his authority. We only have authority in this world so much as it is designated to us by God. But we yearn for our own authority. We desire that which belongs solely to God. We want to make our own judgments about what is right and wrong, what is fitting and proper, what is good and evil. And so in the story of Adam and Eve, after being tempted and twisted around by the careful, crafty words of the serpent, first Eve and then Adam, with eyes wide open, chose to sever the relationship that existed with God. That is what the phrase “On the day that you eat of the fruit, you will die” means. Death is not so much a physical accident of history when biological processes stop as much as it is a spiritual condition in which we are severed from the source of all life.

God, however, is so intent on relationship that God pursues, God tries to amend, God tries to bring restoration and healing to the relationship that exists between humanity and God, and starts over in a number of ways, first with Noah and his family after the flood, then with Abraham after the Tower of Babel incident, and again and again throughout the history of Israel, as Israel stumbles its way through the wilderness, into the Promised Land, out of the Promised Land, and back in again, as the Old Testament ends on the note of “exile not yet completed.”

In the New Testament, in the person, work, and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, God enters into human flesh, enters into the world, into everyday reality, and joins us in solidarity, truly human, and yet truly divine, Mystery All, that is. And Jesus, as we have seen, rehashes the life of Israel. In fact, in many ways, Jesus becomes Israel 2.0. And at the cross, all the curses of the law that God could throw at Israel, God takes upon himself in Jesus Christ. Three days later, God, to demonstrate the innocence of the Son, raises him from the dead to new life. And as the only faithful person to the covenant that has ever existed, Jesus inherits the blessings, and through the Spirit, at Pentecost and beyond, those blessings are now poured out upon women and men of all nations, tribes, and tongues in this messy thing that we call church. One day future, who knows how long. We talked about that last week. Every time we try to predict it, we get it wrong. And Jesus knew not even to try in his own human perception. But there will come a day when the story that we have been living reaches something of an ending, but what could be regarded as a new beginning.

Did anyone notice what I’ve left unsaid this whole sermon series? Why do I use the word “story” to describe something that’s real? In our common English usage, most of the time we use the word “story” to describe something fictional, something that’s made up, something that is creatively told to entertain, to frighten, to teach, or for some other purpose. We say, “It’s just a story.” And so I hesitated this whole time, these nine months, to use the word “story” to describe how God communicates. But story is exactly how God communicates to us. God is not Allah who dictates to us the Quran and expects that we live it to the letter. Nor is He even the God who gives Torah as the permanent expression of God’s will, as many of our Jewish friends would believe even to this day.

God, unabashedly, unashamedly, has given us the Bible for what it is. Warts and all, grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors, passages that seem to rub up against one another more than chafe, clearly touched and influenced by human hands. And we’ve discussed why that is not a bad thing. But what do we do with it? How do we approach it? If this is the way that God communicates, then for what purpose have we been given the Bible in the way that we have received it? Well, the Bible is given to us the way it is because it describes life’s story that is in reality. The Bible does not escape from this world. And here is what I promised you I would do last week, which is explain why I do not believe in the rapture, why I do not believe in a teaching that tells us that we will escape from this world. The reason I cannot go down that road is because the Bible does not go down that road. The Bible is a this-worldly book. The glimpses we get of what is beyond our reality are slim and almost irrelevant to what we are called to do as God’s people. We are called to be God’s people for this life. We are called to be God’s people for our neighbors, our friends, our family. We are called to love now, not in some distant future. We are called to act now, not in some faraway heaven after we shed the mortal coil and fly away. Oh, glory!

So, what does the Bible say about the future? Well, I can’t say that the Bible says nothing about our future, but I can tell you that the way the Bible speaks about the future is highly symbolic, highly metaphorical, highly artistic. But those symbols have all come before in the story. At the end, there is a tree, and that tree has a name. It is the tree of life. The tree of life first appears in Genesis chapter 2, and it disappears when God and God’s universe disappears from Eden. For it’s not so much that Adam and Eve were exiled from the land, though that is true, but what Adam and Eve were exiled from was the immediate experience of God’s presence. That was death. To be severed from the source of life face to face, that was death. And throughout scripture, there were those that had brief encounters with that life force. And God did not exile them out of anger, but like a loving parent to protect them, so that they could not be stuck in their fallenness and brokenness and fractured relationships. The end of time, my friends, is not the end. The end of time is the dawn of something new. There is a sense in which the Bible is a bit circular, if you look at the story, that the Bible ends happily ever after where the problem in the beginning has been fixed. What was the problem in the beginning? Human beings chose their own reality over against the reality that God has clearly given them and instructed them and lovingly persuaded them to live into that reality, to be masters of it even. The problem came when people became discontent and wanted to tell their own story, when the I overcame the we. My friends, we live in a culture in which that is enshrined in our founding documents. And I don’t just mean in this country, I mean in our world. The right of the individual selfishly trumps the right of society at almost every turn. God calls us to something higher, deeper, a different story. That story is the story of a family. My friends, when Jesus says, “I have gone to prepare a place for you and in my Father’s house there are many rooms,” that’s an Old Testament connection. That’s an Old Testament connection to the patriarchal household in which one family of extended generations lives under one roof in peace and harmony, caring for one another, all living in relationships of mutuality, love, and respect. In a society like that, in a family like that, there is no room for my preferences over against yours. It is what is good for us together that decides who will do what and when and how. It is not because I feel like it, it is not because someone even dictates it. It is what is good for all. And what I choose to be a part of. My friends, the story of the Bible has a golden thread that runs through it from beginning to end. That thread is not sin and selfishness and God’s remedy to fix it, although that is present. It is not even the people of Israel and defining who the people of God is as the people of Israel expand to the Gentiles, although that is part of the story. The story that is present in the Bible is the story of the singular, relentless, matchless, never-ending love of God that will stop at nothing to be in relationship with the object of its love, which is this world. God doesn’t hate this world and is going to throw it away. God is not going to trash it like we have. God is not going to put it in the recycle bin even and start over. God is going to renew and restore. If you want to escape to some disembodied heaven and play a harp for the rest of history, I can introduce you to Plato and you will have a wonderful time exploring his ideal world. But if you want to be in touch with the God of the Bible and live as God intends, then you’re coming back again. You’re coming back to this world, back to work, back to enjoyment. You’re coming back to love, eating, drinking. All of those things which we think maybe we can do away with in the world to come, it’s because we’ve been telling the wrong story. We’ve been reading the Bible through the lens of Plato and our culture rather than through the lens that the Bible commends to us, the lens of love, the lens of community, the lens of peace, patience, kindness, joy, gentleness, self-control, and humility.

I’m going to end this sermon on a note of personal privilege. I don’t often ask you to do me favors. I don’t often wield the authority of this pulpit and say you must believe thus and thus. And I’m not going to start now. But what I’m going to kindly do is request in love that you pray, think, contemplate your relationship to the Bible. To God and to others. Is your approach to the Bible primarily a book of inspiration? Probably a book of great literature? Perhaps a book of rules? I suggest and commend to you to read the Bible through the lens of story. The story of not only God’s people, but the story of reality itself. And I invite you as you go forth from this place today, find your place in the story. In the web of love that is woven from person to person, from time to time, from place to place, and will find its ending happily ever after. In a future in which God is as present to us as our own breath. And we will be unashamed unafraid. Amen.