“Mending the World”
By Rev. Dayle Barrett
Sunday, November 24, 2024
Reading: Revelation 21:1-7
I'm excited, not just because it's Christian New Year's Eve, but because I kind of have an easy assignment. Today’ sermon is on the last of the five pillars. The first one we did was “awakening community” then “raising disciples” then “celebrating beauty”, and last Sunday was “inviting worship”. Now, I have the easy job of explaining to you how we're all going to mend the entire world.
All right, maybe that's not so easy. There are enough of us, right? Good bunch of people, we should be able to do it. Mending the world seems like a bit of a strange concept to have in a church vision. How on earth are we supposed to do that? Especially now? I mean, we have more than a few problems in our world, don't we? A housing crisis, a mental health and addictions epidemic, possibly being on the brink of World War III. But don't worry guys, we are going to mend the world.
When I was younger, my father and I used to think we mended the world all the time. Politics nerds, both of us. We watched the news every single day, several times a day, and we always watched prime minister's questions on Wednesdays. So, around the dinner table, there was always a discussion about whatever the government was obviously doing wrong that we would have done better if they let us do it instead. The end of the meal would be something like this: “Well, that's it - If only the leaders of the world were around this table, everything would be fine, right? Because we just mended the world!”
Maybe a bit of a tall task for a dinner table. Definitely a tall task for a church. But it is one of our pillars, isn't it? Somehow, we at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church are thinking about how to mend the world. So, I thought I'd better figure out where this is coming from. Who's seen this pamphlet before? A future bigger than our past. If you haven't, make sure you do because it explains what the five pillars mean. And this is what it says about mending the world: “Our Jewish forebears speak beautifully of God's work of repairing creation. Tikkun Olam. Christ's new creation is begun, and we still have so much work to do.”
Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? A few things I learned from this is that mending the world wasn't our idea. Apparently, this is something we inherited from our Jewish forebears. And the other thing that I learned from this is that it says repairing creation is God's work.
So why are we doing it then? If this is God's work, surely God's going to do it better than we can. Surely, we can just sit back, mind our own business and applaud when the new creation comes, right? Well, if you're gonna do any good research, you have to go back to your sources. So, I thought, let's have a look at the Old Testament and see what our Jewish forebears meant when they started talking about this new creation. In Isaiah chapter 65, verse 17 to 19, the prophet says this:
For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem as a rejoicing and her people a joy. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and joy in My people. The voice of weeping shall no longer be heard in her, nor the voice of crying.
What a beautiful image that is, right? And if you were listening when we heard the passage from Revelation, it might even seem a bit familiar to you. John, who wrote the book of Revelation, was seeing a vision of this same promise that God had already given to the people of Israel through Isaiah. A new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem, God with God's people, no crying, no tears, no death. What a lovely image that is. But in both instances, we see the same thing. God said, “I will create a new heaven and a new earth.” In Revelation, God says, “Behold, I make all things new.”
So, what does that have to do with us? If God is going to mend the world, how do we have a part in it? What is our place? How is God mending the world? How will this new creation come? And where do we need to be positioned to help tikkun olam?
There are a few different ways of thinking about the new creation and about the second coming of Christ. The first one, the one I grew up with is called pre-millennialism. A bit of a mouthful, isn't it? If you have a life and you don't read theology books on weekends, you might know this as the rapture. We were taught when I was a kid that Jesus is coming back, which he is by the way, but you never know when. You don't know the day or the hour. Jesus is coming like a thief in the night. And at any moment now, because this is gonna happen soon by the way, the skies are going to peel back like curtains. There are gonna be angels singing, trumpets blasting, and the Lord will appear in the sky with a long white robe. And blonde hair and blue eyes and a perfect Hollywood smile.
All right, I might've added in a few extra details, but that's how I imagined it, okay? And instantly when that happened, everyone would see Jesus and then people would just disappear. Lots of people, the proper Christians, I mean. They were going to just disappear left, right, and center. You'd be walking down the street with your friend, friend's gone. And then you sit in it, man, I should have given my life to Jesus. The band would be playing: drummer disappears, drumsticks all over the place – smash! Bang! wallop! Airplanes are crashing, it's pandemonium in the world at the second coming of Christ. And so, you had to make sure you were ready because if you weren't, you were going to be left behind. I think they made a movie about that. You were gonna be left behind. And when you were left behind, it was gonna be terrible for the people that were left on the earth.
I know I'm being a bit jovial about this, but this is actually a legitimate reading of the scriptures too. Thessalonians talks about Christ coming and people being snatched up to meet him in the air. Luke 17 talks about there being spouses together and one taken and the other left. Even in the passage we just read, Revelation 21, “I see a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.”
There's this idea that this new creation doesn't come about by making the world better. Perhaps the world continuously gets worse and worse and worse until Jesus comes to rescue his people. If that's how you think that the new creation will come, it will affect the way you see your own faith and the way you interact with the rest of the world.
Here's what I knew growing up: I knew I had to make sure that I was serious about my faith. I knew that I had to be ready because Jesus could come at any moment, and I did not want to be left behind.
If you go to the church I grew up in, those people know the Bible like the backs of their hands. Always at Bible study, always at prayer meetings, fasting regularly, and never scared to tell people about Jesus because they don't want any of their friends getting left behind. You spread the gospel; you live the great commission. It's ingrained in you because you never know when Jesus is coming back, is coming for a holy and a righteous church, so you'd better be ready. That means, get rid of the dirty magazines and the funny cigarettes. That means be careful what music you're listening to and what shows you're watching on TV. That means be careful who you spend time with, because when Jesus comes, you want to be ready or you're going to be left behind.
There were good things about it too. Sometimes on Saturdays, you'd go down the high street in Southeast London in Woolwich and you'll see us all as a band together. We'd have a drum kit set up, amplifiers, the praise and worship team singing and clapping, and volunteers from the congregation handing out pamphlets, inviting people to church. If somebody said they had a need, we'd lay hands on them and pray with them, believing that Jesus was going to move in those situations.
Now we often hear that that kind of stuff doesn't work, but I know several people I grew up with in church who started coming to church because of those Saturday outside meetings. I know people whose lives were transformed by that kind of outreach, that kind of passion, because people thought Christ could come at any moment. But there are also downsides to that way of thinking. You see, if your framework for the new creation is that Jesus is going to come and rescue you from this fallen world, then you might not be so concerned about fixing it.
I mean, how is climate change really a problem if you're not going to be around for the destruction of the world? I once worked for a great guy, Christian guy, a gentleman, and every so often in a construction site, I'd get something wrong and, you know, everything that goes wrong in a construction site costs money. After he'd finished having his little tantrum, he'd calm down and say, don't worry about it, Dayle. It's all going to burn one day anyway. To him, it was just money, just material goods. We'd try our best, but if it failed, it didn't matter because one day Jesus was coming, and we were going, and the world would just be the world.
But there's another way of thinking about the end and it's probably the one most of you in this room are familiar with. It's that God is going to mend the world using God's people. And so, God's people, as we read in the pamphlet, still have a lot of work to do. Now all theology is contextual so there are reasons why people think these different things.
You see, I grew up amongst Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the UK. Their faith story was a story of a God who was with them through dark and difficult times in a world that wasn't for them. You couldn't convince somebody with that kind of history that they were going to mend the world: No institutional power. How are we going to mend the world? The best hope for these people is that Jesus will come, take them away out of bondage, and then judge the people who oppressed them.
But our historic churches have a different story. We were always with the institutional powers, weren't we? In the 19th century, we were spreading across the world, getting bigger and greater. Building the hospitals and the schools and the shelters and the orphanages and the alms houses. It was very believable that maybe we could mend the world. And so, we had a different way of thinking about the end. It was that if we followed Christ and preached the Word everywhere we went, if we built good institutions and fixed the systems, the world would become a better place. And then finally Jesus would return.
The church was going to build the kingdom of God. Now that has its upside. If you believe like that, you think you can do things like abolish slavery, which we did. If you believe like that, you think you go and campaign against war and end child labour, tackle alcoholism with things like temperance movements, and have real influence on the world around you.
There's also a downside. Because if you believe that you're the one mending the world, maybe you're not so serious about your own personal salvation. You might begin to think that Christianity is about fixing social issues and not about your own relationship with God. You might begin to think that sin exists only in systems and things outside of yourself and never in your own personal behaviors or the darkness of your own heart. And so instead of tackling ourselves and looking in the mirror, we might be tempted to say, “Lord, please fix, I don't know, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and any other list of isms.” Because it's never about what we personally do. It's always about something invisible out there that we want the systems of this world to fix.
Upsides and downsides to both of these ways of thinking. Both of them could be found in the scriptures. But what can we learn from them? Is God going to mend the world without us? Is everything's gonna be fine if we just make sure we have our personal relationship intact? Or is God going to mend the world with us and we have to do everything we do to fix this broken planet?
My answer is both.
In Psalm 127 verse 1 the psalmist said this, “Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain who build it. Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”
It sounds like there's more than one builder. We mend, we build, but unless God builds, our building is nothing. We preach, we sing, we pray, but unless God is in our midst when we do this, our striving is nothing.
We need to do both at the same time. We need to live with the urgency of those who think Christ will come at any moment and with the purpose of those who think we'll spend eternity right here on Earth. Because if we're honest, we don't really know which is the case.
Jesus says this in Luke 17. “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, see here or see there, for indeed the kingdom of God is within you.”
Here's another idea.
What if the kingdom that God is creating isn't just something God's making with you, but it's something God's making out of you? What if we are the living stones that Peter talks about that are ready to get built into this great city called Jerusalem? What if the key to mending the world is neither what you do in your private life, nor what you do in public, but it's about taking this Christ that we worship here to the world around us, everywhere we go.
We used to be great at that. We built the greatest institutions in the Western world. And then we kind of got sad after the second world war and the cold war. It was a bit more difficult for us to think that we were gonna mend this planet when we'd seen so much evil for decades. And so instead of trying to build great institutions that spread Christ, we started lobbying the government to do it for us instead. The schools became secular. The hospitals became secular. All the great institutions of the West became secular institutions. And by the end of the 20th century the Church was dangling around trying to figure out what it was there for. Didn't we build the kingdom of God? Well, let me ask you, when you look around at our world, does it look like the kingdom of God?
Maybe this is something we need to do. Maybe we need to remember that without God building this house, it's absolutely nothing. If we're not happy with education, maybe we go back to building schools. But this time we leave the Bibles in them. If we're not happy with healthcare, maybe we go back to building hospitals, but this time we keep prayer in them. If we're not happy with the institutions we see in the world, maybe we become the body of Christ that changes the world around us again. But we do it by bringing Jesus with us into our schools, into our workplaces, into our family meals, into our friendship circles, everywhere we go. Because if God's gonna mend the world, He's gonna do it with every single one of you.
The kingdom of God is within you.
So how do we live? One we live with urgency because we don't know when Christ will return. We don't know how the coming will happen and we don't know how much time we have. So read your Bibles and pray and fast and live as holy a life as you can and spread Jesus to every single person you meet, but also live with purpose. Mend this world, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, love the lonely, be Christ to everyone you meet as if we're going to be here for hundreds and thousands of years. But most of all, my friends, live with hope because no matter how dark the world seems right now, how many tears you cry, how much death you experience. We don't know exactly how it's going to happen, but we do know this one thing: that Christ will return, and God is building a new heaven and a new earth. All things will be made new. So, let's proclaim that Christ is King as our God mends the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.