Nov. 5 sunday of All Saints-Rev. 7:9 taylor The saints, the martyred saints, stand before God's throne and worship God. God, in turn, will shelter them. The word translated as shelter is the word that also is translated as dwell (21:3, e.g.). God's presence, God's shekinah in Old Testament terms,from the word for a desert tent, will remain with them. In a world in which subsistence was the normal pattern of life, the vision of no more hunger or thirst communicated at a visceral level. Relief from the sun and from heat reflects life in the Middle East.
In the final verse, John once more plays with language and images. It is the Lamb who will be the shepherd (also in 12:5, 19:15) who leads God's people to the "springs of the water of life." "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes" (see also 21:1-4). I assume those are tears of sadness, but not of joy, perhaps.
Heaven-place, a dimension where we are alive in god, with god and in contact with the myriad of others there in the divine presence. I don;t imagine it to be as in Eastern religions. an absorption into the divine where are lives are erased but treasured, cherished as a keepsake here.It is to live in the reality described in I John.
I John 3:1-3 The church need not gaze wistfully for a “someday” to come in order to be itself. There is no need to wait until there are more members, or more resources, or more of whatever we might believe is necessary.The church is comprised of the are children of God. Already. Today. Now.West To abide in Christ is to be fully anointed by his truthful teaching (2:27). To be a child of God is a divine vocation, articulating the depth of God's love for us (3:1a).The church's integrity wells up from, and is channeled by, God's calling (3:1b; 3:3). To be a saint is to live in the same love by which God has loved us (3:16-18; 4:7-12). On the Sunday of All Saints we give thanks to God for those who have abided in divine love, who have educated us in love "because he first loved us" (4:19). We belong to that company of saints, called to "walk in the light as he himself is in the light [and to] have fellowship with one another" (1:7).Black
-Until that day, the Beatitudes stand as a daring act of protest against the current order. Jesus cannot very well insist that we be poor in spirit, but he can show us how to look upon such people with new eyes, and so gain entrance to a new world. On All Saints Day, the Beatitudes tell us that we are blessed not because we are blessed with good fortune, but because nothing separates us from god.. These beatitudes would seem to be better avoided at times, but they touch all of us at some point.The current regime seeks to sweep aside those Jesus declares blessed of God, but we discover a new reality. When we learn to recognize such people as blessed -- to call them saints -- we pledge our allegiance to that new world even as we participate in its realization.Blessed are the well-connected, for their aspirations will not go unnoticed.Blessed are you when you know what you want, and go after it with everything you’ve got, for God helps those who help themselves.If we are honest, we must admit that the world Jesus asserts as fact, is not the world to which we aspire and proclaim.
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