Easter 5 - Creation’s Visions of Resurrection

Easter 5 - Acts 11:1-18, Psalm 148, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35
Advent Lutheran Church, Calgary

What visions we are given today from Scripture! In this fifth Sunday of Easter, when we are over a month past that glorious Easter Sunday, it’s a blessing to be reminded, once again, of the new life that Christ’s resurrection has inaugurated. To be reminded, as the visionary of the book of Revelation says, that “God will dwell with [us] and be with [us] and wipe every tear from [our] eyes,” that “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” And to be reassured, through the story in Acts, that God gave Peter a vision of radical inclusion through Jesus Christ and the blessing of the Holy Spirit on all peoples, a continuation of the miracle at Pentecost. And even in our Scripture from the Gospel of John, to hear Jesus, who knows that Judas is about to betray him, continuing to proclaim that love is the way, and that this love is the glory of God. All together, our Scripture readings remind us that resurrection life is real, and that God calls us to live and love in that resurrection world.

It’s inspiring. But I confess that it has been hard to live into this resurrection world. I read the stories from Acts and think, Where is my vision? Where is my voice from heaven? I receive the words from our second reading, the wonderful words about death being no more, and I think, “How long, O Lord?” The vision in Revelation was given when the Christian church was being persecuted by Roman Emperors, but that was almost 2,000 years ago - we are still waiting for God’s city to come down among us. In just this year alone, it seems we have moved even farther away from “mourning and crying and pain will be no more” than ever: more Canadians are dying from fentanyl poisoning than ever before; the medical journal The Lancet estimates that we are approaching 20 million COVID deaths (Volume 399: Issue 10334); American legislators are rolling back women’s rights to decide what to do with their own reproductive systems, nevermind attempting to criminalize people like myself, who actively support our transgendered children; more than fifty percent of Ukrainians have been displaced in just two months by Russian invaders; murderous white supremacy is on the rise as the people of Buffalo, NY experienced just yesterday, and, of course, there is the ever-increasing concern of climate change and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s April assessment that we have already blown past restricting global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius and are well on our way to blowing past restricting it to only 3 degrees. 

One of these things is hard enough to live with, but when we take all of them together, along with those things that weigh on our hearts that I haven’t even mentioned, and it becomes difficult, if not almost impossible, to wait with genuine hope for the resurrection kingdom to come. And we don’t even need to be following the latest news on any of these issues to feel exhausted by this period of waiting for the Lord. Across the world, there is a general feeling of hopelessness about the future. Maybe you’ve noticed an increase in societal anxiety, polarization, divisiveness? Or maybe the opposite - an increase in cynicism, apathy, exhaustion? These are two sides of the same coin—these are two different manifestations of hopelessness. If you have noticed in yourself a tendency towards grumpiness, or exhaustion, know that you are not alone. This is what hopelessness can feel like, this is what it can feel like when we lost hope that the resurrection world will be a reality for us.

And today we have these Scriptures calling us to live in hope, and more than that, to live as if our hope is real, no matter how long the time between that moment in Acts two thousand years ago and that moment when the new heaven and new earth will finally arrive in fullness. And I confess that while I do find them inspiring, there are many times in these past few years when I have found that gap between two thousand years ago and the fulfillment of the vision in Revelation really hard to live in. The Word of God remains the most important revelation of God that we have, but the written words are not always as alive for us as they were for those twenty centuries ago.

I have been reading and learning a lot about Christian Indigenous theologies over the last two years, particularly about how our Indigenous siblings receive the Word of God and understand God to reveal God’s self to them. One of the most helpful things I have learned is that Indigenous people believe that God is revealed not only through the stories in Scripture but also through the world around us, through Creation. The animals, the plants, the rivers, even the rocks reveal God to us, because they, too, are made in the image of God. They, too, are recipients of God’s Holy Spirit, proclaiming as much to us about the resurrection world as our Bible does.

And so this spring, I have been looking to nature, to the plants and animals that share this Treaty 7 territory with us, to experience the resurrection of Christ in the here and now. And here is the vision that I have been given, the blessings of the Holy Spirit that I see flowing upon us all as we wait:
I see that the grass is pushing its tiny blades of green through last year’s straw. I see that the trees are sending out their tiny leaves to receive the sun’s rays. When I drove back from Saskatchewan last week, I saw that baby cows are wobbling though the stubbly fields next to their moms. (Yes, I know they’re called calves, but ‘baby cows’ sounds cuter.) I see that the prairie sage in my garden has tripled in number from what I planted last year. And these plants and animals are saying to me, “We will continue to live and to grow, despite what the climate change reports predict about life ten years from now. We will continue to live and to grow in this moment, with this spring that God has given us.” I see them moving into spring trusting that these next few months will unfold as God has intended them to.

I see the little kindergarten children running out of their classroom to clamber on the school playground behind my house, and I hear them laughing and shouting with joy. I don’t know any of them personally, but I have seen their bodies grow from those awkward and timid September days to smooth and confident almost-Grade-1 bodies six months later. And their lengthening, strengthening muscles and bones say to me, “We will continue to grow and strengthen, despite the continuing and even worsening COVID pandemic. We will continue to laugh and rejoice in this sunny day that God has given us.”

I feel the sunshine getting warmer and the days getting longer as the earth continues its yearly circling through the solar system and continues its daily turning on our wobbling axis. I saw pictures from the new JW Space Telescope of galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies, saturated with stars and presumably planets. I saw just this week an actual picture of the centre of our galaxy, of the supermassive black hole, and was reminded that the Milky Way, created by the Word of God that was in the beginning and is now and ever will be, is over 13 billion years old. And these metereological and cosmological wonders say to me, “God’s ongoing acts of creation and new life have continued for billions upon billions of years, and will continue, despite the death and war you humans wreak on one another. We will continue to give birth to new stars and new planets and new life in this cosmic moment that God has given us.”

God continues to give us visions and experiences of the living Word in the here and now, in addition to the visions we receive from Scripture. Indigenous theologians are teaching us that God gives us the living Word, the experience of the resurrection life of Christ, in this very moment, in the world around us. God has not ceased bringing new life to us, it just looks different than what we expect, as all resurrection life does. 

God continues giving us, as God gave to Peter in Acts and as God gave to the writer of the book of Revelation, ever new visions and experiences of resurrection, not to deny the pain and death in our world, but to proclaim that this pain and death is not the end. We will not be stuck with it forever. And as we wait, inspired and refreshed again by these new visions, we can indeed act for life and newness and resurrection for all of Creation, we can indeed live with hope, because we—and all of creation—have been and still are the recipients of God’s new life. Thanks be to God, Amen.