I’ll never forget a couple of summers ago when Ian and Doug and I were taking our little boat across Lake Winnepesaukee at the end of our vacation. It had to be taken that day because the next day we were going home. The boat was to be put away for the winter.
As we came out of Alton Bay and turned east across what is called “The Broads,” toward Wolfeboro Bay, the sky grew dark, the water kicked up and our little boat seemed very little. We tossed and bobbed and turned like a cork on the sea. Trying to keep everybody’s spirits up, I said, “let’s sing” so we whistled and sang and talked very loudly. All the while, keeping a sideways glance at the shoreline should the boat go down. I didn’t think of it then, but I have since read Psalm 42, “your waves and your billows have gone over me” and I have thought of that afternoon crossing Lake Winnepesaukee.

In the Bible, the sea is the place of chaos, life-threatening oblivion, the watery grave. It explains why the Hebrew people are known as land-loving nomads not sea-faring folk. You may remember from the creation story in the book of Genesis, the story-teller says the earth was without form and void. In Hebrew, “tohu wobohu.” I love the dark fluidity of those words. Tohu wobohu. It was to this dark, primordial, bubbling mass that God said, “let there be land” and there was. And God called the land good. You see, the sign of creation, the beginning of creation is God pushing the sea, the chaos, the powers of destruction back. God making dry land.
Just a few chapters later we hear the story of the flood. How the dark waters cascaded from the heavens and engulfed every living thing – except for Noah, his family and the animals on the ark. God’s rainbow was the sign of God’s promise to Noah and to every generation since not to let the tohu wobohu overtake us again. But that is not to say God removed the storms of life once and for all.

Life has a way of going along just fine, smooth-sailing as they say, until some dark cloud forms on the horizon and you worry if your little boat can withstand the coming deluge.  The phone rings in the middle of the night. A voice says, “sorry to wake you, but I  have some bad news.” Suddenly, you feel caught in the undertow. Being dragged into the vortex of some powerful, menacing whirlpool of life and emotion against which you feel powerless. You gasp for air, tread water as best you can. It’s your turn to experience a little of the old tohu wobohu. Sometimes there are no dark clouds. But everything that was beautiful turns deadly. We lived near the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. That winding, bending ribbon of water is beautiful. Banks lined with lush dogwoods and maples. But every spring, someone dies in the river’s powerful currents. Furious and swift they make quick work of fishing boats and canoes. Surviving something like that it is the beginning of wisdom.

Nor are we always necessarily unwitting participants in our own calamity. Sometimes we seem to ask for what we get. Maybe you read the book The Perfect Storm or saw the movie – the account of a group of people who, despite weather reports, head their boats into a terrible storm in the Atlantic.  At least one message of that true tale is that human pride, overconfidence, and willful denial can also play a role opening the floodgates.
 
But today’s story from Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is a word of good news. It concerns itself with the end of time not the beginning of time, with the completion of God’s work, the culmination of history. It gives us a perspective beyond the storms of life.
In this season of Easter, when we celebrate the gift of renewal and new life, I’d like to explore with you the significance of John’s revelation this morning. Some of us today may see some dark, roiling clouds on the horizon, some may even be caught in the whirlpool, others of us may realize we are paying the price for pride and overconfidence. Today’s story offers hope.

The first words of the 21st chapter of Revelation are to the New Testament what those words “in the beginning” are to the Old. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” Did you ever wonder about that last phrase of the first verse “and the sea was no more”? If you are a lover of the water, as I am, if you like boats, as I do, this is not God’s way of spoiling all the fun for sailors and water sport enthusiasts. Rather it is a way of saying that those forces of darkness and chaos and destruction – symbolized in Scripture by the sea – will be drained dry. Gone. No more. Nada. Finite. The former earth, the place of crying, of tears, of heartache will be passed away. The will of God will be accomplished on earth as it is in heaven. We who launch our little boats out into the deep will know what it means to be completely, finally safe and secure.

Will Willimon, chaplain at Duke, makes a good point. He says that the first words of the Bible are not, “when God created the heavens and the earth,” as if it were already done,  past and finished. The first words of the Bible are “in the beginning.” The story of creation only begins in Genesis. But it does not end there. What we celebrate in Easter is God’s continuing work of creation, pushing back the chaos, the sea of despair and hopelessness creating dry land. Until one day when the whole creation will be finished and the sea shall be no more. The good news here is Easter is not a one time thing that happened only to Jesus, long ago and not to us. If that’s what you think, John is saying to you this morning, “think again.” What Easter and God’s raising Jesus from the grave announce is the beginning of the last assault against the forces of darkness. The church is God’s Corps of Engineers so to speak, pushing back the waters of destruction, constructing dry land, a place of safety and refuge and justice.

When God raised Jesus from death, it was the beginning of the final mopping-up operation. The early church described this by saying we are living in the “eighth day.” It took God six days to begin creating the world, God rested on the seventh day, we now live in the “eighth day.” Perhaps you feel your little boat is about to capsize in the sea of darkness, the ocean called tohu wobohu. There is good news today. Take heart. Your struggle is not in vain. We are living in the “eighth day.” And at the end of this day, when the storms cease and the waters subside all that is lost shall be found, all will be well. Your efforts matter. The outcome of the struggle has already been determined. God will be victorious. The sea of chaos and death no more.

This past week a few beachheads were established. The Pope visited Archbishop Christodoulos, Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in Athens. It was a remarkable thing. After nearly thirteen centuries of deeply entrenched feuding, the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox leaders decided to talk to each other. So deep and wide is the hostility in the Greek church for Roman Catholics that the security was tighter for John Paul II than is was for President Clinton a year ago. The Archbishop didn’t even come to the airport to welcome the Pope. But John Paul knew he was on a mission of reconciliation. He knows the final outcome of the battle will be in God’s favor. He could lay aside his precise worries about the outcome of this particular visit. He disagreed with his advisors, went to Athens. I say a beachhead was established. It was a noble effort. The Pope apologized for past wrongs. The raging waves of anger and hatred among Greek Christians subsided, even momentarily, to hear the Pope’s offer of healing. Some dry land was visible between the two churches for the first time in 1300 years.

Another beachhead was established this past Tuesday here in Buffalo at the Convention Center. Several of us from Westminster attended the first annual Salvation Army luncheon. The featured speaker was Carl Upchurch – a middle aged man who was raised in the projects of South Philadelphia, spent the first twenty of his 31 years incarcerated in youth detention centers, then federal penitentiaries. Upchurch talks about his turning point. He was in solitary confinement at the federal facility in Lewisburg, PA when he got tired of reading the graffiti on the walls and noticed a little volume steadying the leg of the table at which he was sitting. It was a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He started reading. Sonnet 29 talks about coming out of darkness of despair. That’s when the dry land appeared for Carl Upchurch. He discovered his soul strangely, deeply touched by words written three centuries ago. He wanted more. Started reading every piece of great literature he could get his hands on. Though he was in prison he sensed deep within him that the victory had already been won, the waters were already receding. Raised in a den of drug-dealing and prostitution, it wasn’t until he got to prison that Carl Upchurch discovered he was free. “In the end,” he says, “I may not be responsible for what I was, but I am responsible for what I am, what I hope to become, and what I hope my children will become.”

A little beachhead established right there in the Lewisburg federal penitentiary of all places. Who would have guessed? Today Upchurch’s life is a veritable continent of good works and peace-making in America’s inner cities. Saving teenagers and families from the ocean of despair. Nor would it surprise me if some distant or not so distant day scholars and historians will look back on John Paul’s visit to Greece as the beginning of a new day, an eighth day of creation for the church. When not just prelates but Roman and Greek believers found to their surprise they stand on common ground, the good dry land created by the same God they worship. The patriarch absent at the start of the visit even smiled when the two leaders met the press at the close of the talks.

I hope you see the relevance of this for your life. It is no fun when the dark, bubbling chaos of death, evil, pain surge forth, swirl around you, and threatening to engulf you and drag you and all that you love into oblivion. Yet by the grace of God in Christ, God keeps wrestling the chaos. Keeps defeating the tohu wobohu. And one day, according to John’s vision of the end time, the sea shall be no more. All those things that threaten to undo our lives, to overwhelm and engulf us shall be defeated.

When you are threatened with the possibility of drowning, of going down again and again into the waters, John wants you to remember today that nothing, no evil that humans or the cosmos can commit, is strong enough to counter God’s power to redeem,
God’s power to defeat the powers of darkness, God’s power to bring life out of death.

Amen.