All Saints Sunday
Texts: Isaiah 25:6-9
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
November 7, 2021
Vision: A Little Bit o’ Heaven Here on Earth
I remember many years ago I was teaching Confirmation class to junior high students, and we were looking at the Book of Revelation, chapter 7, with St. John’s vision of heaven. All God’s people there are gathered around the throne of the Lamb, all robed in white, singing “This is the feast of victory for our God!” One of my students said, “So, being in heaven is worshiping all the time, kind of like being in church 24/7? I really don’t think I want to go there.”
Contrast that Revelation vision with what we get in our Old Testament lesson this morning, because, thanks be to God, Revelation 7 is not the only vision of heaven that we get in Scripture! This morning we get Isaiah chapter 25, in which: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” Now THAT is a vision of heaven that Bob Klonowski can get behind. I’m all over that; where do I sign up?! I want to go … there!
Or how about this for a vision: heaven is a place where Daylight Savings Time ends every night, and *every* night we get that extra hour of sleep! Wouldn’t that be a great way to live? Doesn’t that sound heavenly? I want to go there!
There are things in this old world that grind down your vision, make you think there is no future. And when you think there is no future, when you have no vision that draws you, well then there’s nothing for you in the present either, nothing to get you out of bed in the morning, extra hour of sleep or no.
It’s been that way sometimes with the pandemic, has it not? Trying to make future plans so often, when even now, 20 months in, we still don’t know what the future holds. We still don’t know what that post-pandemic vision looks like.
It’s that way with race relations in our country. As we all come to more forthright terms with America’s history on race, the question rises, as it did in a book I finished just this week: Can a “unifying but realistic optimism … coexist alongside accurate historical understanding?” Or to put it in my own words, can we be honest about all of our history and all of our current context concerning race, and still commit ourselves together to the bright ideal of the American prospect, that we can indeed live up to the aspiration of the Declaration, that we can be a community in which all are recognized as equal? With all the hard realities that we have come to know about ourselves, can that cherished vision still be compelling?
It’s that way with the church, too. Harsh realities face the church in America these days; since the year 2000, in 20 years, church membership in America has fallen by a third. A third! And a church can get caught up in the harsh realities of challenges like that, caught up in anxiety about those things, instead of in the vision of what God calls us to be in this world. And when we lose that vision, well, as it says in Proverbs 29, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” To put it in terms even more stark, I will say: Where there is no vision, there will be no parish.
But before I get you all depressed into the hard, narrow realities of life with no vision, let me remind you of the other side of this equation: When we do live with that vision before us, with what God calls us to do shining every moment in front of us, why, then, that piece of heavenly imagination will break into this world of ours from time to time, and with great power indeed. You will remember that the very first words of Jesus’ public ministry were, “The Kingdom of God has come near.” And so it has: that vision has now broken into our old world and you can see it if you look, and if you believe.
I got a remarkable phone call yesterday morning from an old friend. This friend of mine is a guy who has struggled with his alcoholism his whole life, and that hard, narrow slavery he’s known has led him to do things he’d be embarrassed for me to tell you about. Among other things, let’s just say he mistreated his children so badly that for long periods they cut off all relations with him, and they did that for their own health and safety.
He’s doing better now. He would want you to know that, too. His witness to you would be this: The Kingdom of God can indeed break into this old world, even into an old world that is dominated by screaming demons; God’s power is mightier than the demons that beset you! My friend has been in recovery for years now. And part of the vision that kept him going – that vision was big, and this was only one part of it! – but this part was that he would be permitted once again to be part of the lives of his grandchildren, some of whom he’d never met. That vision was part of what kept him going, kept him getting up in the morning, kept him sober.
He called yesterday because he wanted to tell me about the family wedding last Saturday. For one thing he was invited; that was different, and it’s a measure that they’ve come to trust him some, and they’re beginning, just beginning, to trust his recovery.
But the best part, he said, was not the wedding on Saturday. The best part was because he was staying over into Sunday, they invited him to go trick-or-treating with the grandkids. “The kids hardly knew me, of course,” he said, “but then, they hardly knew any of the history either, and that’s a good thing. All excited about the candy and stuff, they came running from one place to another and hugged me in between. And all I could think of was, I have prayed for this day, for so, so many years.”
It was, he said, a little bit of heaven here on this old earth. Never underestimate the power of holding a heavenly vision before you. Never doubt that God can make what seems only a future vision, into a present reality. Never doubt, that the Kingdom of God has come near.
I want to end this sermon, still talking about heavenly vision, but on something of a lighter note. All my life I’ve been a fan of a Chicago singer I first heard when I was in high school, a singer named John Prine. Now most of you have never heard of John Prine, but that’s okay. If you’ve heard Johnny Cash’s song Paradise, or Bonnie Raitt’s Angel from Montgomery, or George Strait’s I Just Want to Dance with You, well, those are Prine songs that made him a whole lot of royalty money because, as he put it, “other people sing my songs a whole lot better than I ever did.”
Like many people it seems in performing industries John Prine led a hard life. He was a terrible alcoholic, but in midlife he entered recovery and gave up drinking. He was a chain-smoker – one of the reasons other people sang better than he did – but late in life he got cancer and had to give up his beloved cigarettes.
Also late in life, in 2018 at the age of 71, Prine had not recorded an album of original material in more than 13 years. So his wife got him a motel room in Nashville, and told him he couldn’t come home until he’d written a whole new album’s worth of songs.
Prine said that approach was “marvelously motivating,” and the result was the last record of his life, Tree of Forgiveness. There’s a song on there titled When I Get to Heaven that lays out a vision that, believe it or not, is an echo of Isaiah 25. When I get to heaven, he sings, “Well I’m gonna get a cocktail/Vodka and ginger ale/Yeah, I’m gonna smoke a cigarette that’s nine miles long!” Now what is that if not the Chicago way of saying a feast of rich food filled with marrow, and of well-aged wines strained clear? Heaven is a place that is so good for ya, that that even the things that are bad for ya, are redeemed!
But Prine sings on:
Then as God is my witness
I’m getting back into show business.
I’m gonna open up a nightclub called “The Tree of Forgiveness”
And forgive everybody ever done me any harm.
Man, I can’t wait to get there. I’ve got to find that bar. I want to sit down and share a drink, at the Tree of Forgiveness.
What are the heavenly visions with which God has blessed you? What is it that God has put before you, that God is calling you to, that can pull you out of bed in the morning with the prayer, “I want to go … there!” This world will tell you that visions like that are pie-in-the-sky. What is the vision for our country going forward? This world will tell you that’s wishful thinking. What’s the vision for the Church of Christ in days like these? Speak of your vision, and this world will reply you’re living in la-la land, and that what’s real is what’s hard and narrow.
Don’t let this world sell you that bill of goods. The Kingdom of God has come near; it’s heaven that is real, and the only reality that is worth living for, the only reason to get up in the morning, is to live into the life-giving vision that is God.