Regenerate or Degenerate

Texts: Ecclesiastes 3, Revelation 1

Congratulations, survivors of 2011! Welcome, citizens of 2012!

Some of you look even better than you did a year ago. I know I am more mobile on two legs and two feet than I was this time last year. Some of you, like my partner Mary Jane, took on new things, got outside your comfort zone, learned, grew, and thrived. Thank God!

Gabrielle Gifford, the US congresswoman shot in the head a year ago this week, can sing and speak again –and our own Joanne Miller is making more modest progress. It’s a tribute to brain plasticity, that neural pathways can be built and developed - or atrophy. Thank God!

Others of us feel older but no wiser, more aware of our losses than of our gains. Dementia overtakes the best of us, including my own father who isn’t sure who I am any more. If God is what counters entropy, it may only resist but not reverse those deteriorations. Thank God.

Our Puritan, Calvinist tradition had words for all this, that are no longer current or popular: regeneration and degeneration. Regeneration was the saving sanctifying work of god still creating, redeeming, and renewing. Degeneration was about the processes of sin and death. Each of us aspired to be regenerate, and risked being degenerate.

Those words have only survived as parodies of the original terms. ‘Moral degenerate’ is a pejorative term for a few particular transgressive behaviours, substance abuse or sexuality. ‘Regeneration’ is used by neuroscientists and about gene therapy. These semantic fields are narrower and shallower than our earlier constructions. I invite you today to a wider, deeper use.

I asked you on this New Year Sunday to subvocalize the two words, and consider how they might help you name the past year, and the coming one: regenerate or degenerate. Which have you been in 2011 and which name will you claim in 2012? With what dynamics might you cooperate, and what processes might you resist?

Regeneration and degeneration are not limited to individual physiology or morality – but extend to all our growing, learning, thriving, maturing – and to all our dis-ease and deterioration. Organisms need environment, and the terms apply to our social and political world – and to our ecological and environmental context. What is regenerative and what is degenerative?

As survivors of 2011, and as citizens of 2012, what’s thriving, developing, growing, and what’s deteriorating and suffering? How are we contributing to or resisting either? What do we imagine as our future, this year – and ultimately? That’s all that I was inviting you to consider!

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones,
and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

People choose this text for funerals – perhaps too often. It’s partly because of the musical cover by Pete Seeger and the Byrds in 1965, which lodged it in pop culture. It’s also a diplomatic compromise for families ambivalent about the God and Jesus words. It has an air of fatalism, or at best a strong doctrine of providence, as we review a person’s life at the moment of death.

Fewer people are familiar with the verses that follow:

What gain have the workers from their toil?
I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with.
He has made everything suitable for its time;
moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds,
yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
I know that there is nothing better for them
than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live;
moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.
(‘Eat, drink, and be merry’, as the older translations render it)

We have a sense of past and future, yet can never figure it all out. Thank God! We can name our times, in the terms of the linked pairs of Ecclesiastes. We can also distinguish our labour and busyness from what is truly regenerative – or degenerative. It’s a more powerful language than our culture’s fixation with progress, evolution, productivity and profits.

Some folks appear to work for 30 years in my trade – but in fact they really just learn in the first year, then repeat ‘year 2’ for another 28 times. We toil and appear busy, but our bookshelves reveal that we have not learned or grown much, and the lines in our faces reveal that we haven’t had much fun along the way. Is it the same in your profession or business?

I encouraged you today to try the exercise of drafting your obituary as of today. How is it different from what you would have written a year ago? How will it change this year? I told of my friend who invited 300 of her closest friends to her 95th birthday. Many play bridge with her – a game she only learned in retirement. Others, of all ages, have met her even more recently.

How are you regenerate – and how do you cooperate with regenerative forces, of divinity and Spirit defying entropy? How are you degenerate – and how do you resist the degenerative processes of sin and death, dis-ease and deterioration? How’s your guest list for your 95th birthday building? How does your bookshelf reflect your mind’s ongoing adventures?

Our culture adulates and fixates on progress, understood as numerical quantifiable growth. Similarly, our culture demonizes and avoids aging, understood only as deterioration. What if true progress was about qualitative development, and aging about regeneration as well? Imagine a vision greater than the next quarterly report or dividend:

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.
And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,
prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’
And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’
Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’
Then he said to me, ‘It is done!
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

Of course, we recite this text a lot as well. I usually just impose it on folks at committals, graveside, unlike the popular choice of Ecclesiastes. But if they have never imagined it in routine Sunday worship like this, it hardly resonates as it should at that moment. Once every few years, we get to celebrate the text on a New Year Sunday – with a new year ahead of us and opportunities to change our responses, and ourselves.

Where’s it all going, ultimately, and where do we fit in it all? Revelation is not an account of a three-story universe, where each one leaves this earth for that heaven (or hell) as reward (or punishment) for our response to the immutable world, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever more shall be’. Revelation assures us of a new heaven and a new earth, fulfillment of regeneration and degeneration, as some stuff passes away, and other stuff comes clear.

If you were to measure our heaven and earth now, against the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, what would be regenerated and revealed more clearly? What would simply waste away and fall away, demonstrated as degenerate? What about your city, measured against the vision of a new city? What justice and equity would be fulfilled – what mayors and councilors – or prime ministers and ministers - would be revealed as degenerate, and fall away?

If you were to measure yourself as a citizen of this commonwealth, are you ready to claim your citizenship in the new Jerusalem, in the new heaven and earth? Neither am I! But that will give us some orientation for the coming year – how to let the degenerate fall away, and claim the regenerate. Thank God for another year to grow and learn! Thank God that we are survivors of 2011, and citizens of 2012! Now, what will we make of this regenerative opportunity?

God who creates a new day, who promises a new year, there are some people here who would like a word with you, who have a word for you, who need a word from you, so we pause now to find words, to hear words…

For we are survivors of 2011, and we have words of thanks for where we went and who we shared our year with and what we accomplished. Remind us now of our regeneration last year, your creating, redeeming, sustaining - strengthen our cooperation with it…

Yet as survivors of 2011, we have words of asking, for our regrets, our ‘not yet’s, for who and what we lost, and what went wrong. Remind us of that degeneration last year, the working of sin and death - strengthen our resistance to it…

And we are citizens of 2012, and we have thanks to say for life and breath and company to share it, for the opportunities you set before us, choices to grow and learn, to become more of what we might yet be, to do more of what we might yet accomplish, to celebrate your presence, to live with respect in creation… your regeneration – with our cooperation…

And as citizens of 2012, we have prayers of asking about all that’s not yet right, about what is getting worse, and how we might resist that degeneration. Some of that is deeply personal…. God you know it. Some of that is pretty political. God you see it. So we pray to seek justice, and to resist evil…

Each one brings particular prayers, of thanks – and of asking, after a holiday season, before a new year, for those known to us, and those known only to you…

What word do you have for our hearts, O God – give us ears to hear. Amen.