Sermon for Sunday, May 18, 2025 || Easter 5C || Revelation 21:1-6

Today’s sermon is about newness, and it springs from the reading from Revelation in which God says, “Look! I’m making all things new.” We’re going to dig into the concept of newness and celebrate our opportunity to be renewed again and again, while also recognizing that everything new is made up of everything old.

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We’ll start with something pretty darn old: a thought experiment called the “Ship of Theseus” catalogued around the time of Jesus by the ancient Greek philosopher Plutarch. The thought experiment goes something like this: if, over time, each old and decaying board of the Ship of Theseus is replaced with a new board until one day every single piece of the ship has been replaced, is it still the Ship of Theseus?

If you say, “No, it’s no longer the Ship of Theseus,” then you have to decide at what point in the replacement process the ship no longer qualified as Theseus’s Ship: after the replacement of a single board? Well, that’s just silly – repairs are made all the time. After 51% of the boards? That makes a little more sense because now we’re talking a majority, but the ship still has a huge part of its original material.

If you say, “Yes, it’s still the Ship of Theseus” after all the replacement you have to wonder what would happen if someone had collected all the old boards and rebuilt the decaying ship. Isn’t that the Ship of Theseus? What is this new shiny ship that looks a lot like the old one?

This is a paradox and is not meant to have an easy answer. Rather, a thought experiment like this helps us clarify our thought processes. What do we really mean when we’re talking about newness?

We can extend the Ship of Theseus experiment to our own bodies. Each day we replace 330 billion cells, the equivalent of 1% of our total cells. While certain types of big cells like muscle and fat cells can live decades, most of our cells die and are replaced every few months. Our physical makeup is not exactly the same as the Ship of Theseus because our bodies are making the replacement parts, but it is accurate to say that the baby you were on the day you were born is – cellularly – entirely different than the human you are now. And yet, you are still you. I am still me. The beings we are today are combinations of all of the past versions of ourselves, who are, at this moment, turning into the newest versions of ourselves.

I find this idea comforting – that I am, even now at 42 years of age, turning into a new version of myself. And this newness happens on many levels: cellular, mental, emotional, psychological, spiritual. 

I have, at times, fallen into ruts where I don’t take in any new information for a long time, where I don’t read books that challenge me or seek out encounters that could alter my perspective. At some point during those ruts, I realize I have not renewed my mind in a long time. My mind feels like sludge, like brackish standing water. And the river of my mind doesn’t start flowing again until I kick myself into gear with intentional reading in a new area of discovery. In this mental newness, I am guided by a verse from Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Don’t be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God’s will is—what is good and pleasing and mature” (12:2 CEB).

Be transformed by the renewing of your minds. This renewal of the mind also includes the renewal of our emotions and psyches. I was resistant to therapy for a long time, thinking that going to therapy was like admitting defeat, like admitting I wasn’t tough enough to cudgel my mental health into submission. But then my body forced my down some new paths, and I had to lean into newness, into new ways of being, in order to find my way back to health. This included therapy and medication, along with embracing some new patterns of exercise and understanding my limits. Each time I see my doctor, we talk about whether anything needs changing. Rather than being guarded against, newness is expected. Adaptation is the norm.

Along with our physical and mental newness, God invites us to embrace spiritual renewal. In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation. The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived!” (5:17). Actually, in the original Greek, Paul is more excited than that. He says, “If anyone is in Christ – new creation!” Paul himself, is Patient Zero for this new creation after his life-changing experience on the Road to Damascus. Paul, formerly Saul, even changes his name to signal the new life he has embraced in Christ.

Following Christ is all about walking a path of continual renewal, even as our Companion on the way remains stalwart. Because the presence of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit endures, we are able to embrace risks that lead to change. We are able to go beyond our comfort zones, to learn new things that challenge our biases, to enter into new relationships with those of different perspectives and life experiences. We are not afraid of this newness because we worship a constant and eternal God who said, “Look! I’m making all things new.”

I am not the same person I was a year ago or ten years ago or thirty years ago. Neither are you. We are all in the process of becoming. God invites us into the spiritual work of transformation so that we grow deeper in our relationships with God through the renewing of our minds, our hearts, our spirits.

At the same time, every atom that makes up our bodies and archives our thoughts, has been around since God spoke creation into being. What is new today is really just the recycling from yesterday. The cells in our bodies were once stardust and they will be again one distant day. This universe that God loves so much is one big Ship of Theseus, which God is constantly renewing and renewing and renewing. And each of us has the opportunity to step into the river of God’s renewal, as we walk ever more closely behind Jesus, who leads us toward new creation.

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Photo by Fareed Akhyear Chowdhury on Unsplash.