Church on Morgan
Beginning and End
[MUSIC PLAYING] From Church on Morgan, a United Methodist congregation whose desire is to be a reminder of the beauty of God and each other. This podcast is a collection of Sunday teachings, inspired by the revised Common Lectionary, and recorded weekly in Raleigh, North Carolina. And now a moment of silence before this episode begins. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] This morning, we're looking at an excerpt from the Book of Revelation. Relax. Sincerely, here's a reading from Revelation 21, verses 1 through 6, and John writes this. He says, "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, "You see, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them, and 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. Morning 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." And then he said to me, "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega. The beginning and the end." Friends, this is the Word of God for us, the people of God. Thanks be to God. I wonder where you go when you lose your sense of self. Where does your mind go? Where do you physically go? When the sort of story of your life starts to pull apart. When the story you've been telling yourself about yourself doesn't seem to be true anymore when you're unsure who you are in this moment or in the season of your life. Like, where do you go when your sense of self? It seems to be lost. If that sounds like a question that somebody who's walking through a midlife crisis is asking, that's because that sounds like a question someone who's walking through a midlife crisis is asking. And if you've never kind of lost the plot or the thread on your life, at some point you will, so maybe just take notes for that future day. What I've found over the last four or five years of this prolonged experience, somebody please tell me when it will stop, is that some of the most helpful moments have been sitting outside by a bonfire and beginning to do that thing on Spotify where I just, I follow one song from high school after another song from middle school, after another song from college, and there's this kind of like experience that floods back in. I remember a little bit about who I am and how I got here and who I was. Sometimes it's helpful to look back at old photos. I feel like I'm starting to understand more and more of that holiday tradition. When I was a kid that used to annoy me when we were having a good time and then like the parents and the grandparents would be like, "Now we're going to go watch some old movies, family movies." And I was like, "This is a terrible idea." And they would all sit there and talk about our great second ant, whoever, and it just, but now I find myself being that person, spending more time looking at old photos than I am even taking new ones. There's this kind of search, there's this sense in which somehow the key to unlock the tension that I feel kind of in my own midlife existential, whatever, might be in that feed somewhere. If I could just find that old hard drive where I had saved those photos from six iPhones ago when there wasn't a cloud, right? As I've even been thinking about kind of my life and my work, it's amazing how putting a couple of those small pieces together will just release something. I had this kind of a a-ha, I was sharing with someone the other just a week ago, that as a kid I loved Legos. It was like my obsession. I could just build and build and build and I'd tear it down. I'd build something else, I'd tear it down, I'd build something else. My first job that I ever really loved was doing landscaping in the summer where you would come into some horrific scene and by the end of the day you would walk away with this garden of Eden. There was this kind of like taking something that was nothing and creating something out of it that was like core to who I was that it's taken me 40 some years to realize it's how I ended up standing here. This is just Legos for a kid who also happened to really love the church. All the memories of crawling under pews and all of those extra aunts and uncles and growing up at a church. It's like my, as I go backwards so much of my story seems to make sense. Where do I go when I kind of lose my sense of self? I go back. And here's the deal. I think when it comes to your identity you do the same. We just expected of each other. In fact, when you introduce yourself to somebody, when someone asks you probably in a slightly more polite version, like who are you, right? Your answers are this is where I grew up. This is where I've lived. These are my people. This is what I've studied. This is what I've done with my life thus far. And when you lose the plot and when something in your life gets disrupted and you find yourself in a therapist's office, is this not the work that they're doing with you? Going through the scraps of your life, sifting through all of the things, hoping to find kind of like that thread, that story, that identity that might just sort of answer this ease and give us direction for the moment ahead. There really is nothing like that clarity that comes when you have that aha, like this is who I am. It brings this like comfort to us. It also brings a great deal of conviction. All of a sudden we can stand again. We can move again. I've probably shared this at some point in the life of our church, but one of the roles I had before I was pastoring was I served as a hospice chaplain. And as I sat at the bedside of folks who were walking through their final days, I mean one of the most powerful experiences, and they're a handful, and if you ever get the opportunity to volunteer or serve in that capacity, I strongly encourage you to do so. But one of the things that I found to be so beautiful and helpful about that is often people at that moment would understandably be overwhelmed with fear and anxiety facing kind of the unknown and the trauma of this. And one of the things that I watched my mentor do again and again that I will never forget is having spent two or three weeks with these individuals listening to all the scraps of their life. He began to tell them their own story back. And he would say, "I know that you're scared right now." But James, your life has been one of courage. When you set out as the first one from your family to go to college and you didn't know how you were going to pay for it, when you built that company, when you did, and he would begin to recount for them that you are a person of courage. In other moments of unknown and overwhelm, you have found a way to step into it with grace and you are going to do it again, even in this moment. And to watch somebody kind of like settle into themselves as their own story is told to them. You know, fearful that maybe some relationship needed more work and to remind them of how gracious they had been and how gracious others had been to them. There's something powerful about finding our sense of self in our past. That's not just true of individuals, it's true of communities, it's true of countries, it's true of species. I mean, this past week I've been spent way too much time going through literally probably 5,000 photos trying to make two Instagram posts of our history, right? And it was this kind of reminder, this is who we have been, over the years, who's emerged and all the people who've shaped us in all the different ways and all the different iterations of who we've been that's led us to this day. But as a church right now, we are also kind of our board who's been working to refine our vision because here's the thing, like we've had a little bit of our own disruption, the city that church on Morgan was planted in the center of isn't the city that exists outside these walls anymore. The city's changed, our world has changed. The kind of sermons, the headlines, the issues that we were leaning into that defined us in 2015, 16, and 17 define us in different sorts of ways today. The people who are literally in the room are different people than were in the room those 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago. And so as we felt this kind of disruption of like who are we, where are we going in our own little early mid-life church crisis, right? It's been helpful to look through all those photos and remember this is who we've been. These were the moments that made us. It gives us this sense of clarity about what this church is for and about what our days ahead might look like. I think it's also why so many of us are obsessed with folks like Malcolm Gladwell or even if you want to go out a little bit bigger, Yuval Noah Harari, right, who wrote the book Sapiens. These are people who step back from the big picture, look at the big human photo album and go, let me explain for you how we got here. Why it is that we live in this sort of way in these sorts of neighborhoods and have the laws we do and experience life in the way that we are, right? The folks who can tell us the story of ourselves have our attention. I spend a lot of time looking back trying to figure out who I am, who we are, who our country is, right? But this week I've been reminded that there's another place that people have often gone to make sense out of their life, out of our shared life. That not only have people been shaped and formed and inspired and given clarity by looking back, but also by looking ahead. That the future also has a way of shaping some of us. These are the great stories, right? This is Frodo and this is Harry Potter and this is Luke Skywalker. This is Martin Luther King. This is Nelson Mandela. These are people who don't just look back but have this sense of ease and comfort and commitment and presence and conviction about the present because of what they believe to be true about the future. And as I thought about it this week, my sense was for us, Church on Morgan, that there's a sense for many of us that we would rather leave that kind of imagination to the movies. As one commentator said, we prefer ediologies to eschatologies, and so two of you got that and went to seminary, but let me, ediologies are like explanations. It's why the leopard has spots, right? We prefer a good explanation over an eschatology, a good vision and it makes sense because to us the past seems so concrete and defined and the future seems so fuzzy. One thing to note though is that that's only about 100-200 years of us who felt that way. The vast majority of human history has felt like the past is just as mysterious as the future. We just happen to have this technology and devices and phones and whatever that we feel like we can put all of our energy, emphasis, commitment. We can understand ourselves in our moment fully if we just look back. But up until this moment, the church and the saints and those who are faithful have been committed to looking ahead. I see it in our own expression of our faith. My sense is, Church, I'm Morgan from having conversations and coffees with you, is that we don't lack faith in this room that there's a God of the universe who set this whole thing in motion. But where we avert our eyes and start to mumble and drift off is when the question about whether God can actually pull this whole thing back together again is possible. Our sense of the future has become thin. We're Genesis people, not Revelation people. We'll have endless Bible studies about Genesis and read it to our kids at night, but to crack open the book of Revelation feels silly, feels untethered, feels unrealistic. I'm concerned about us for that because the saints have been shaped not only by the past but by the future. What gave them the life they had was this tethering they had to a future image of what that might look like. Here's the good news that's hidden in that too. Barbara Brown Taylor says it this way and I haven't been able to get over this all week. She says that your life, our lives, my lives are more than the result of our histories. There's your gospel good news for you this morning. Your life is not just whatever is in the rear view as much as God is back there as well. Not saying it doesn't matter but it's not all that matters. Your life is not just the result of your histories. She goes on to give us this image as a tree that's rooted in the earth. That is our history still rises toward the sun so our lives unfurl toward their purposes. There is a sun that our life is bending towards. It's not that we're planted nowhere. Your place matters but it's not all that matters when it comes to understanding this moment in your life and who we are. Revelation 21 that we read a few moments earlier isn't a text that's just for funerals. It is the sun that our lives in all of creation is bending towards. Let me remind you of what John lays before us and what has shaped the imagination of God's people for centuries. John says that in the end the vision that we are walking towards as we walk away from our past is this one in which heaven descends to earth. It's a vision in which a new Jerusalem, a new city, descends to the troubled location of our existing Jerusalem. And that in this future life there will no longer be any temples, rituals, holy books. Any of this will be needed because there will no longer be any mediation. The God who has seemed hard to find will be perpetually eternally ever-present to us. This vision shapes us in these sorts of ways. When you realize in the same kind of epiphany looking back and going oh okay I see the kid playing with Legos getting into landscaping who's obsessed with the church leading to start we also begin to look forward and go mmm this is why deep in our soul there's a sense in which taking care of creation is a holy work. Because unlike Elon Musk our vision, our son, is not that this place gets discarded thrown away and trashed and we're finding a new home on Mars. Our story is that the God of creation that heaven will descend to this earth and so it reminds us that this earth, this place, it matters and it matters to us and it makes sense out of our experience of it. Why we're so moved when we get inside of it. It's our forever home. We're also reminded that in the end oh this was hard for me to hear this week. Barbara Brown Taylor says those of you who are dreaming of us going back to Eden of just two people hanging out in a giant garden alone with God I got news to break to you that ain't how it ends. It's a city crawling with people. Revelation he says he sees it as 1500 miles wide filled with people of every nation, ethnicity, background and tribe. It's a reminder for us that this is why deep in our soul we know that part of our story and when we live it most fully is when we recognize that not only do we not get to throw this place away but we don't get to throw any people away. A city whose gates John says are never closed, always open, more people, more life so this idea that I just need to carve out some quiet place for me to get away from all of this humanity is working against the very vision of our life. And last that in this final vision of our life together that we come to see that all of these beautiful religious artifacts that we have from candles and books and temples as helpful as they have been as a mediator for us to find the God that often seems hard to find. On that day we won't need them anymore and so that shapes the way we handle them today they are not our God, God is. The ultimate end for us is being in the presence of God. An experience of the presence of God in our lives. This is why it feels a little silly when we get a little too caught up in the religious artifacts and it feels especially true and resonates when we have that thin space together. This is what we were made for. It's on homecoming Sunday as we look back and celebrate also all saints, those who have gone ahead that we re-center ourselves, that we remember who we are that we make meaning of this life we're finding together and hear and knew that this God is not just the alpha but also the Omega. This is God is not just the God of your beginning but the God of our end. May that imagination shape us for the next 10 years, Church on Morning. The name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit Amen. Thank you for joining today. If this episode has been meaningful to you would you take a moment to share it with a friend? To support this ministry or learn more about our community visit us at churchonmorgan.org [Music] You [BLANK_AUDIO]
The good news of our future. A sermon for All Saints Sunday on Revelation 21:1-6 by Rev. Justin Morgan.