Love is making all things new
A sermon preached at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Nogales, AZ on May 18, 2025
I’m always nervous when people say they love the book of Revelation. And … I love the book of Revelation – especially the part we hear this morning.
I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.
So, first off, I don’t know if we need a new heaven … but I could sure handle a new earth right now, because we seem to be hastening the passing away of the one we have pretty well.
But really, I love this:
And the one who was seated on the throne said, "See, I am making all things new."
Because that is what God is always doing.
God is always in the process of becoming.
We are always in the process of becoming.
The whole of creation is in the process of becoming.
It’s why the church is in such need of the wonderful transgender images of God among us … because becoming takes courage and they show us how it’s done.
In recent years, Octavia Butler wrote her own Book of Revelation called Parable of the Sower, and in it she sings:
It really is Revelation. The journey into God is a journey of change. A journey of becoming.
We are going to take a journey this morning.
We are going to take a journey through time starting 2,000 years ago.
In fact, we’ve already started in the other readings we just heard.
We just heard two pieces of profound wisdom – one from the Gospel and one from Acts.
In the Gospel we hear Jesus say
I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another.
And then in Acts, we hear Peter relate God saying to him
What God has made clean, you must not call profane.
These are core truths that the first followers of Jesus used to define themselves and their communities. And though we have not always lived by them, throughout time we continue to come back to them.
Let’s move ahead 100 years to the second century and a Greek bishop serving in the south of France – nice work if you can get it – His name was Irenaeus, and he is primarily known for advocating for the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and for apostolic succession and the role of the pope.
But I love Irenaeus for one line that he wrote … another piece of deep wisdom.
The glory of God is a human being fully alive
That just makes me want to dance when I hear that.
The glory of God is a human being fully alive
Let’s put those three pieces of wisdom together:
I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another.
What God has made clean, you must not call profane.
The glory of God is a human being fully alive
I don’t know about you, but I can feel my heart get lighter just saying those words.
Because the theology of those words – from the first days of our faith – the theology of those words begins to unbind my heart.
And it goes back even further than that.
From the beginning of the beginning when we tell stories that say we are – all of us – made in God’s image and good – through Jesus and Peter and Irenaeus – there is a theme. That every single one of us bears the image of God
(and, as my mentor Bishop Hays Rockwell says,
“the image of God is on every one of us … only on some it is in deep, deep disguise”
– and I know there are times when I resemble that remark.)
That every single one of us bears the image of God and that what God dreams for us is to love that image in each other … and to become that as fully as we can.
No matter what.
No exceptions.
No “toning it down.”
And yet the history of the church is quite different.
Because this kind of love, this kind of human flourishing is powerful.
This kind of love, this kind of human flourishing sets loose power that cannot be contained, power that can change the world, unseat fearful leaders of hate and topple empires of oppression.
And so of course, those throughout the centuries who were invested in keeping those empires in place … who perhaps feared that they themselves weren’t made in the image of God and lovable themselves and projected that fear onto others … I’m reminded of what Anne Lamott said of Donald Trump, not that he was evil but that he was someone who showed no evidence of ever having been loved.
And when you have not been touched by love, when you live a theology of scarcity rather than abundance, when you are governed by fear instead of by love and joy, we take the power of Jesus teachings and corrupt and twist them and used them to bind and not to liberate.
Use it to draw lines of who is worthy of love and who is not.
Lines, despite what God said to Peter of who was sacred and who was profane.
Of who can be in and who should be cast out.
And to use the fear of being unloved and cast out to control.
And, tragically, that is the history of the church and that is many people’s primary experience of the church. Far from being a place where we become fully alive, many people’s experience of the church is of a community and a place that tells us that we are profane and unlovable unless we fit into a very narrow and fearful definition of humanity.
And that’s where I want to stop and say if that has been your experience of the church, I apologize, and I want to say thank you for the courage it takes to come back to a place that has perhaps hurt you and denied your very humanity.
And … our journey through time continues.
Let’s fast forward to the 20th century to a prophet named Fannie Lou Hamer.
Now Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights activist and a devout Christian. She was an amazing woman. She grew up as a sharecropper and dependent on her employer for her home and when she dared to register to vote she lost both her job and her home.
And in 1962, when young SNCC students came to her church in Ruleville, Mississippi and took scripture passages that had been used to imprison her in segregation and turned them into texts of liberation, Fannie Lou Hamer’s heart, spirit and voice was set free and she became a speaker and singer for civil rights, for equal rights, for human rights.
That kind of singing always has consequences. Because the fear of the power of love to transform and liberate is great. In June, 1963, she brutally beaten … nearly to death … and cast into a jail cell in Winona, Mississippi. Her cellmate there was a teenage civil rights worker named Euvester Simpson.
And as Fannie Lou Hamer lay in that cell, bruised and bleeding and slipping in and out of consciousness, she turned to Euvester and said:
“Euvester, sing with me.”
And this is what they sang:
That was the extraordinary Mahalia Jackson singing the song that was on Fannie Lou and Euvester’s lips that night — Walk With Me.
And she survived that night. And the next day she was able to walk out of that jail cell.
Fannie Lou Hamer knew what it was like to be imprisoned. She knew what it meant to live that 23rd psalm we said last week
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because you are with me, God
Fannie Lou Hamer knew what it was to be imprisoned and she knew what it was to be set free. And she knew that if we are all images of God, freedom is our birthright, and so in the face of a church and society that was imprisoning so many in narrow cells of what was permissible to be as a human being, Fannie Lou Hamer imparted the nugget of wisdom for which she was most famous, singing out:
Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free.
Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free.
So, let’s add that to the list from our journey.
I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another.
What God has made clean, you must not call profane.
The glory of God is a human being fully alive
And Nobody is Free Until Everybody is Free.
And … there is one more stop on our journey.
A few years after Fannie Lou Hamer sang in that prison cell, a Brazilian educator and philosopher named Paulo Friere wrote a book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Like Peter, Like Irenaeus, Like Fannie Lou Hamer, Paulo Friere was a devout Christian, he called himself a revolutionary Christian … and in that book that became a central text of what became known as liberation theology … a strand of theology that resonated with a phrase coined by Pedro Arrupe and popularized by Desmond Tutu, “God’s preferential option for the poor” … and the need of the church to engage in that primary work of liberation that Fannie Lou Hamer sang, that “nobody is free until everybody is free” …
In that book, Paulo Friere talked about what being that jailer, what being the one who looks at what God has called clean and calls it profane, does to us.
Paulo Friere wrote:
No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.
Let’s put all the stops on our wisdom journey together now:
I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another.
What God has made clean, you must not call profane.
The glory of God is a human being fully alive
And Nobody is Free Until Everybody is Free.
No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.
The work of the church from Jesus’ last supper with his disciples until today is this work of liberation.
The church, the community of the revolutionary Jesus, exists so that each and every one of us can ask that core question of life
Who Am I?
The church, the community of the revolutionary Jesus exists so all of God’s people can have a safe space to explore that. To have a safe space to become that. And to be a part of helping each other become that because all of the wisdom of the millennia is true.
The core of following the revolutionary Jesus is loving one another.
God has made everyone as they are and as they are becoming clean, and none must call them profane.
The glory of God is a human being fully alive.
Nobody is free until everybody is free
And no one can be authentically human while they prevent others from being so.
That wisdom … the core of our faith … is our polestar, our guiding principles. And so when we are faced with any situation in life,
…from our child coming to us and saying they are gay or genderfluid or trans
…to the barbed wire on the wall just miles from here keeping images of God from following the resources we have stolen from their country into this land.
…to our tax dollars being used to bomb and starve images of God in Gaza,
the question we get to ask is what action, what response, what intervention best embodies the Christ wisdom of the ages.
For as much as people throw around the moniker of Christian, that is the sole test for whether we actually are.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.
Let’s put all the stops on our wisdom journey together now:
I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another.
What God has made clean, you must not call profane.
The glory of God is a human being fully alive.
Nobody is Free Until Everybody is Free.
No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.
We are all on a journey of becoming.
Do not fear. God is with us.
All that you touch, you change.
All that you change, changes you.
The only lasting truth is change.
God is change.
We need a new heaven and a new earth. And we are becoming it.
And the one who is seated on the throne says "See, I am making all things new."
Through me. Through us. Through you.
Alleluia. Amen.
I spent two years learning about apocalyptic literature and translating the book of Revelation. Reading differently, from the eyes of a marginalized prophet, changed everything for me.
Excellent sermon, Mike. Thank you!