“The sea was no more.” Most of the time when I read this text, it is the promises of tears being wiped away and death being no more that I cling to.
That makes sense. As a pastor, you deal with a lot of death and lots of people and those you love end up gone. Believe me, there are a lot of tears behind the confident proclamations of Christ’s triumph over sin and death. The tears flow on the way home in the car, or quietly fall behind the closed door of the Pastor’s Study.
But, I am not alone in this. A lot of you have shed the same tears over and over again. Some of you have lost a great deal of family and friends, the count getting larger every year older you become.
So, yes, most of the time I cling to the promise that the Lord will wipe the tears away, and death will once and for all be vanquished through Jesus death and resurrection.
But, this time around, it is the mention of the sea that has captured me. As the writer of Revelation travels into the heavenly realm to see all that the Lord desires to show, he notices a curious thing among all of the newness of the heavens and the earth…he notices that “the sea was no more.” The sea. It is gone. Non-existent. The sea is dead. And that is seen as a good thing. That is so curious.
After-all, it is the beautiful, blue ocean that you see on the posters hanging in the AAA office. It is the crystal blue waters of the sea that call to you from the screen saver of your computer as you plunk away at work. Why would anybody rejoice that those beautiful scenes would be gone?
You know what country has a lot of shoreline? India. You know what country seems to have very few swimmers? India.
When we visited India, we and some friends on the seminary’s "Religions of India" trip took a day to go visit the shoreline. We donned our bathing suits, walked past the staring locals who were fully clothed, and we jumped into the Indian ocean for a swim.
As the locals continued to stare at us, we quickly realized why no one else in the country was enjoying the ocean. Wading in only about 15 feet, the shore under our feet began to disappear quickly, and the pull of the ocean became amazingly strong. We dug our toes into the sand to keep from being pulled out into the high, crushing waves of the Indian ocean. Swimming in the Indian Ocean is not about relaxation, it is about survival.
We survived the encounter with the sea, but as you have probably heard over the past few days, the crew of a large cargo ship did not. Steering only 65 miles from a recent hurricane, they were caught in the high, chaotic waves of the sea, and were drowned. Far from being a destination of paradise, the sea is a deadly, chaotic sea creature that seeks to devour.
And, that is exactly how people in the ancient world viewed the sea. It was viewed as a creature that creates chaos and death.
In the beginning, God tames the creature of chaos and separates the chaos from the dry land. During the Exodus, the sea creature of chaos is literally cut into two as Moses leads the people through the sea…through the chaos…on dry land. And, Jesus stands up in the boat as it is being “swamped,” raising high his arms, and brings calm to the creature of chaos.
“Swamped.”
It is no surprise then that when our lives have become completely chaotic, we use the word “swamped.” Have you felt “swamped” lately? Have you felt the chaos pulling you in so many directions, that you do not know which way to tread water? Have the waters begun to raise, the chaos of the world overtaking what little order you had made out of life?
Have tests and papers overwhelmed you as a student; your future hanging in the balance? Have the pressures of job and relationships at home begun to raise the waters over your face? Have the deaths, one upon another, upon another, upon another drawn you to focus on the chaos of the deadly waters? Or, maybe someone you know is walking toward the metaphorical beach of the Indian ocean. You can see that they are about to be in trouble, pulled in by the sea as soon as they get 15 feet into the water, pulled in by the chaos, and you feel as if there is nothing you can do.
And, when the waters of chaos threaten to cover the dry lands once again, we call out to the Lord to separate the waters from the dry land once again. "O Lord, hear my prayer! When I call, answer me!"
When my one of my best friends, "R," slipped into a dark tone of lipstick and fingernails, no longer walking down the hall of the school between classes with me, and when I saw her from a distance holding a cigarette for the first time in her life, I cried out to God that the distant future of Revelation in which chaos is destroyed once and for all might break into the world today...for her.
And, so we cry out also. Please Lord, do not wait. Allow the vision of Revelation to break into the world today! That vision where the tears are dried up, the audible cries of pain cease, and the sea is gone for good! Lord, please create some order out of the chaos and mess that we have made of this world! Please Lord, set things at peace! Allow the vision of Revelation to break into the world!
And, the vision does break in. God chooses to break into the world and take on flesh. Jesus chose to come to us, bringing healing along with him everywhere he stepped. He healed the sick, set the captive free, calmed the storm, and drew us together once more in his arms on the cross.
The new heavens and the new earth are not a distant picture…a distant projection on the screen that we can only view far away. It is a reality that bleeds into the present and makes all things new this very day.
God’s intention for the world is not to allow it to destroy itself. God’s intention is not to allow it to get so bad that we need to be rescued from it; raptured away from the evil.
No, quite the opposite. God intends to heal it, to transform it, to make all things new. God will not abandoned the world, rather God “so loved the world,” and has promised come to it, to break into it and create a kingdom that where grace pervades every corner.
So we cry out for the reality of Revelation to bleed into today. We cry out for Jesus to come to us. And, every once and a while we catch a glimpse of exactly that.
Students make it through the stress of the tests and papers, struggling people eventually find peace, and friends who have fallen away eventually send an email to let you know that everything has somehow…in some way…turned out fine in the end.
It is not perfect, of course. Ships still sink, taking their crew with them, but the world is not abandoned. Sometimes, when we look close, we see that God has allowed the vision of then to bleed into the now, and it gives us hope. We hope in a future where the sea is no more. We wear that future as a pin on our shirts, or a mark of grace on our foreheads for all to see.
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