Please read this passage before reading this homily.
God is creating new heavens and a new earth. Do you know how to create something new? You start by destroying the old. One strips the old paint off the wall before applying new paint. One turns the field over from last year’s crop before planting new seeds. We repent of our wickedness in order to be born anew. Lent comes before Easter, Easter is new life, life born anew.
Yesterday we advanced our clocks an hour to start eight months of Daylight Savings Time, not that it saves time, but it merely rearranges certain blocks of our time to give us more light in the evening. God, however, is creating time anew, not rearranging blocks of time. In God’s new creation, a person who lives less than a hundred years will have died young. Infant and childhood deaths will be abolished. Premature death and wars will not happen; people will live in houses that they have built. It will not be Daylight Savings Time but the total redemption of time, called Redeemed Time.
How will it be that young people will be those who live less than a hundred years and nobody will be old until after they have turned hundred? There are two main causes of early deaths, old age and war. If we abolish all wars, we shall enable people to live longer. We can abolish war if each of us abolishes all hate from within ourselves. We can abolish hate if each of us fosters love for all people.
Negative stress destroys, but positive stress builds. Sometimes our diseases are psychosomatic because internal negative stresses impact the body’s state of health. Our conversion from negative to positive, from evil to good, from sin to virtue will help our whole person to live longer and better in this life. This will be a foretaste of heaven and make pour life on earth more heavenly. Our conversions are part of the way God is creating new heavens and a new earth.