The Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Austin, Tex.

As a child, I read voraciously. The story goes that I taught myself to read Green Eggs and Ham when I was three and I never really looked back. Around the age of 12 I picked up a series of novels that going around called the Left Behind series. Let’s call it a creative retelling of the Revelation to Saint John from a particular theological standpoint. The series takes all the strange and miraculous and bizarre things that are going on in John’s vision very literally and casts them into an imagined near future in a very “ripped from the headlines” kind of way. The series is very interested in how God essentially conquers the world, overcomes his enemies and puts them to flight. If you’ve ever read the books, you may remember that they’re very vivid, stark, and violent, and, frankly, the characters are all pretty shallow, which meant at that age I ate them up. 

To the extent that the average American is thinking about the Book of Revelation—I admit that maybe I’m overestimating how many people that is—it seems that this is the prevailing interpretation of what Christians think about end of the world. God is going to come back and just smite everyone who has not said the magic words to be on God’s side, and somehow this is meant to be good news. Looking back on it, it occurs to me that this interpretation is generally speaking a very colonial, imperial understanding of what God is doing in the world: that God is here to take over, and you need to get with the program or get out of the way.
 These days, older and hopefully wiser, I have come to an understanding that when we are interpreting any book of the Bible, not just Revelation, we have to consider what the authors of the biblical text thought they were doing. What book were they writing? 

For the past few weeks, we’ve been working through bits and pieces of John’s revelation. There are a few key things we need to keep in our view. First: John is writing a few decades after Jesus to encourage these first generations of Christians to keep the faith. 
He wants them to think carefully about what their allegiance to Jesus means for the world that they are living in, to consider what is downwind of the good things they have already experienced as a result of following his way. He wants them to understand that authority based on violence is at odds with the whole “kingdom of God” project Jesus was all about. He seems to be very critical of systems that seek to centralize power and wealth in the hands of a few; not critical only of the systems themselves, but of complicity and acquiescence to them. John sees them as dangerous to what Jesus was about and what his followers should be about. 

Second, all 22 chapters of John vision are rooted from his perspective in God’s throne room. The vision is centered around and in reference to a scene of a king who appears as a lamb who has been slaughtered. We’ve gotten some snippets of this the past couple of weeks. John sees God giving authority not to one who has conquered, but to one who has been sacrificed. 
Today we hear a passage from chapter 21, close to the very end, and for the next couple of weeks we will be lingering in this culmination of what John sees God up to as God completes the work begun at the dawn of time.

Third, perhaps most importantly, John is not concerned with distant future events. 
John is concerned with the present. Again, he’s speaking to groups of people who are feeling the tension between their loyalty to Jesus and the loyalties that the rest of their world demands of them. They need a word of encouragement right here and right now. 
John’s revelation is an uncovering, a peeling back of the curtain to try to show what God is already doing underneath the surface of things as they seem. 

Here we are on the fifth Sunday of Easter. We are still dwelling with what it means for the resurrection to be real. What does the resurrection change? 
What has God accomplished in raising Jesus from the dead? How does it matter to us? Revelation may seem like an unusual lens on this question, but I think in context it is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Every Easter season we hear writings from the first Christians alongside passages from Acts and the Gospel according to Saint John. It’s important for you to know that when I’m on the schedule to preach here, I go back to the livestream and I listen to what Genevieve and Kendrah have been saying so that I don’t repeat anything that you’ve already heard. But this time, I found that a theme that has been rising to the surface to me these past weeks is the same theme that Genevieve last week called “faithful tenderness.” Jesus feeds and comforts his bedraggled and traumatized disciples. 
He cares for Thomas tenderly, with warm words and gentle touch. Last week, we heard that wonderful evocative story from Acts, of Tabitha and the ways that she literally dressed her community as a seamstress, and the ways that the people around her cared for her when she died, bathing her body and passing her story along and showed her garments to Peter. 
We hear about how the Lord our shepherd guides us by still waters and prepares a feast for us. Tenderness, care, fidelity: these are not incidental details. 
We dwell in the house of the Lord forever, and today, John reveals to us that that house is here with us. “See! the dwelling of God is with mortals.” Revelation has often been interpreted as God starting over, God wiping the slate clean and trying something new, but rather, we find that the resurrection is not about starting over, it’s about affirming and strengthening the goodness of what is. 
God does not come to conquer and obliterate, but to sit with us and offer us a Kleenex. To wipe away our tears. To prepare a fabulous, sumptuous wedding reception and everyone’s invited. To love us and our fractured world back into being with acts of gentleness and care.

On the night of the Last Supper, Jesus initiates this commandment of faithful tenderness to one another. 
Not an option, not a suggestion, not a good idea if you can get around to it. A commandment to love one another, but not only to love one another. Love one other as Jesus has loved us. The commandment to love is not new. 
Many, many, many generations before Jesus was on the scene Moses brings down the Law from Sinai. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. This is not the new commandment. 
The new commandment is to abide in the love that has been given to us through Jesus, to dwell in that, to marinate in that, to let it soak into our bones, to let Christ’s love replace our own, to let Christ’s love fill in the places where we fail to fulfill that commandment to love God and each other. This love overcomes death, makes it work backwards, resurrects that which has been killed by hatred.

John’s first listeners lived in a world not that different from our own, where the pursuit of power and wealth dictated the lives that mattered and those that didn’t. 
And the first Christians—we know this from historical records outside scripture—they were known for the ways that they went against the grain, the ways that they cared for the poor, for the cast-off, for the stranger, for those who had been marginalized because of their gender. Not only caring for them, but bringing them into the center of the story, because those were the people for whom the good news of Jesus’ beloved community was Good News. It could be no other way. 

Christians have no need of a king who conquers. We follow a king who suffers, who weeps with us, who dries our tears and overcomes that which destroys God’s creatures. Today, John drives home the point that the Resurrection changes the world not through mighty acts of power, because this is the old way of doing things, and God only does new things. God accomplishes God’s will in the world through tenderness, care, gentleness, warmth, and community. The old patterns of violence and domination that we see in the news today are no different than the ones John’s first listeners knew, and God gives us a better way: See, I make all things new.

This new way comes through what Dorothy Day called “a revolution of the heart.” Day and her collaborators in the mid-twentieth century committed themselves to a Christian community not unlike some of those that we hear about in the Book of Acts, committed to sharing what they had in common and always saving a seat for the stranger because they knew that the stranger was Christ among them. In her memoir, appropriately entitled Loaves and Fishes,* she writes, “We can be responsible only for the action of the present moment, but we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform our actions. 
And we know that God will take them and multiply them as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes. The greatest challenge of the day is this, how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution that has to start with each one of us.” 

I’ll echo Kendrah here too: that revolution shows up in our actions. Volunteer at Loaves and Fishes on Tuesdays. Serve our neighbors at the Central Austin Food Bank or Micah 6 or any of the many groups of faithful people who are serving Christ in the stranger. Our government is abandoning us for the old ways that God has rejected. Join God in doing a new thing that will change the world. Take time to craft something with care and attention for someone you love. Sit with the broken-hearted. Offer them a Kleenex. Share a meal. Rejoice. 

What does the resurrection change? 
What is God up to? The resurrection opens the door for us to be like Jesus, to tenderly and faithfully care for one another. It is not about starting over, it honors, elevates, and recreates what already is, draws out what is good and true, pulls us all further up and further in to God’s wildest dreams. It is the engine that drives a new community made of people with new hearts inscribed with the new commandment to love as we have been loved. It helps us all go against the grain, to keep our trust in the king who has no need for conquest. The Resurrection makes all things new, even our relationships, even our power structures, even our capacity to love. 

All things new. Even us. Even you. 

*The parish’s primary outreach ministry to under-resourced and homeless people is called Loaves and Fishes, shared with a similar feeding ministry that works throughout the city.