Passing Away and Becoming New
And the One sitting on the throne spoke. “Look, I am making everything new.”
To be a saint is to be made new or in the process of being made new. To be a saint is to be hallowed, holy, set apart from those on the earth that don’t want to be made new, but want only survival and self-maintenance at all costs. To be a saint is to recognize that to become the person God made us to be, we must pass away, not to nothingness, but to the new person who is the same as the first but infinitely better. Today we celebrate those heroic saints who made enough progress in being made new that we now remember them in our calendar of saints. And we, also, this day recommit ourselves to that process of being made new, to that process of being a saint.
Revelation is a strange book, nearly as strange as some of its more avid readers. But what Revelation is not is a blueprint for how God is going to obliterate this earth and replace it with something completely different. In that time, Christ's holy Church lived in the shadow of Caesar. So powerful was he that he could claim to be a God, and most of the subjects of his empire accepted it. John, the author of Revelation, had been exiled for witnessing about Jesus. He knew that anything he wrote would have to get off the island of Patmos where he been exiled. He knew that anything he wrote would be read by Roman authorities on the island. So, to communicate his message to the seven churches in modern-day western Turkiye, he had to encode it. He used a lot of Old Testament images about Babylon, the empire that had once conquered Jerusalem and exiled the Jews, and he applied those violent images to Rome. Most of Revelation is about Rome, and the encoded struggle between a Roman Emperor who styled himself a God, and Christians who would have to die to deny it.
But here today at the end, in the 21st of 22 chapters, is John’s inspired imagination of the end of time, the true end of history. We do not hear our God speak of obliteration. We do not hear our God speak of endings. This All Saints morning our God does not say — Look! I am wiping out all things. This morning our God says — Look, I am making everything new. That is what John recorded God saying to this earth 2,000 years ago. And that is what God says to this earth today — Look, I am making everything new. The book of Revelation is not about the end of the world. It is about the new beginning of the world as God first made it to be.
What is passing away are not the things themselves but those weaknesses and failings that make them less than what God created them to be. God has no intention of destroying us, but of making us like his only Son, crucified but raised from the dead. Yes, the first, or former earth and heaven must pass away. For how else will the holy city, New Jerusalem, come down to us? How else will God’s dwelling be with humankind, unless the first earth and first heaven pass away so that earth and heaven can become one? When the One seated on the throne says — Look, I am making everything new — it means that whatever on this earth is ending is only the next stage in our being made new. What makes the saints different is our readiness to cooperate with God in this process of making all things new, and being made new ourselves. The saints we that we will celebrate throughout the Church year in our weekday masses are our guide to passing away, and our guide to being made new. In their readiness to accept the “swift and varied changes of this world” that sometimes must have felt like passing away, they have been made new. We who are still here on this first earth are in the process of passing away, and of being made new.
This process of being a saint began in the water of Holy Baptism, in which we have been buried with Christ in his death, and through which we all are being raised and made new. For us in the process of being saints, today is our opportunity to recommit ourselves to that process of being made new. The Book of Common Prayer allows the substitution of the Renewal of Baptismal Vows for The Nicene Creed on four occasions: The Baptism of Our Lord on the First Sunday after Epiphany, the Easter Vigil, Pentecost, and All Saints.
So, you will be asked to renew your willingness to be buried with Christ in his death, or less dramatically to accept the small deaths that may only leave us in mourning for what once was. You will be asked to renounce Satan, the fallen angel whose name means “accuser,” and in renouncing Satan, renounce accusation. You will be asked to put your whole trust in the grace and love of Jesus Christ the crucified. You will be asked to love your neighbor as yourself, your neighbor being the person next to you, not the person you choose. You will be asked to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.
On this day of All Saints, believe that you are a saint, a holy person elected by God, in the words of our collect, elected for “ineffable joys” beyond your wildest imagination. And if all you seem to see around you are the first things passing away, remember the word of God that I have repeated over and over — Look, I and I alone am making everything new.