Four In One

“Four in One” May 2, 2013 by Shirley Edgerton

In January of 2010, Joe and I were meeting students on the patio of the Haitian Methodist Guest House, when the earth began to shake; buildings tumbled down; 200,000 plus people died; and millions of lives were rearranged forever.  Three of our friends and colleagues were trapped for more than two days under tons of concrete and ruble; two died; one survived; and, all over the world people where pondering the “will of God” related to a Christian culture uncommonly poor in the midst of developing nations.

This week I prepare a sermon with lessons from the Book of Acts and the Gospel of John. The Revelation of John lurks in the background, confusing a simple message of mission and peace spread to “the ends of the Earth”.  I question if there is a “simple” message in God’s creation.

Three “men of God” whose lives were spent working to make life better for broken people all over our world, were crushed in a natural phenomenon of horrid magnitude.  One survived to relate the story of “peace in the ruble” as they sang hymns and praise; prayed and even laughed at times before one heart became still; one mind was numbed by pain; and, yellow helmets accompanied light in a dark place. 

The Gospel of John tells us of Jesus trying to prepare his disciples for his death.  Some of it sounds like “double talk” but he promises they will be helped by a spirit that will continue to teach them and be a constant reminder of his time with them.  They take little comfort in that and feel the fear and anxiety that all of us feel when someone we love dearly is dying.  Jesus promises a “non-anxious presence” that will give them a type of peace which provides “thin places” where God’s presence with mercy and grace are experienced more easily.  Our colleague who survived in Haiti, is witness to that “thin place” opening to God’s presence, holding them as they lived and died, sharing love in a complex culture.

The Apostle’s Peter and Paul plus John of Patmos, all shared “visions” or encounters with God. These experiences resulted in reconciliation of diverse cultures and peoples; and the message of God’s love, mercy and grace beginning it’s journey to the ends of the earth.  

I seldom preach Revelation but as John envisions the New Jerusalem, I think of the “evolution” of the church.  I’ve known it from childhood dreams of African adventures and missionary friends, to my own adventures in the bush of Africa and the slums of the largest city in the world.

I’ve represented the church at bedsides of dying children; the gravesides of the saintly and the “not so” and searched with my Haitian brothers and sisters through the ruble for their families and for my friends.

On a motorcycle I have climbed to the highest peaks, where the air was thin, and at the top of my lungs sang “How Great Thou Art.” I have held in my arms a child dying with cerebral malaria, and prayed over a skeletal young woman on a beach in Haiti, as she smiled goodbye to her 12 year old daughter, soon to be orphan.

For many, I have been the “non-anxious presence” in the chaos and crisis of their lives. I have been blessed by those times.  Preaching my sisters’ funeral tested the “non-anxious” part but grief makes one vulnerable to the thin places  when God can reach in and touch ones soul, so that also was a blessed event.

Jesus told the disciples they would know a “helper, an advocate, a comforter, a teacher” who would lead them to the thin places where they would know God was actually present.  Peter and Paul and John of Patmos, in dreams and visions; on journey’s, imprisoned and before the religious tribunal of the temple, were guided and empowered to speak words to “the church” that changed the churches understanding of who was acceptable, who just might be “members of the elect”, and what the will of God for all of the world just might be.

“If” the New Jerusalem of John’s vision is a metaphor for “the church”...and what “the church” is to be, it seem far from “the church” in our violent, greedy, power hungry, contemporary world.  It’s a city of light with a tree of life; “on both sides of the river” that is flowing to the ends of the Earth. God is there. The Holy Spirit is there, drying tears, making thin places, and reminding all of Jesus’ ways with empires.  Can it be?