It
begins in a garden and ends in a city. It begins in Eden and ends in the New
Jerusalem. It begins with Genesis and
ends with Revelation. Our Bible, I mean.
Most
of us are pretty familiar with the beginning, with the garden part. We remember Adam and Eve, the serpent, and
the apple. We also remember the leafy canopy
of trees, all measure of blooming plants, and seemingly infinite numbers of creatures
great and small. We remember the cool
rushing streams and the quiet pools, and, most of all, we remember the innate sense
of goodness and newness. Yes, most of us
know by heart those certainly mythological, yet profoundly true, stories of
creation.
However,
most of us know far less about the end, about the city part. What I mean is that Revelation (whose climactic
image is that of the New Jerusalem) is a Biblical book that either we take too
seriously because we insist upon putting our own stamp of literalism on it, or
we do not take it seriously enough.
Either
way, we tend to focus on the middle chapters of the book, that is, on the
Armageddon images and the horrors – the dragons and wild beasts, the smoke, the
fires, the lightening, the earthquakes, and all those puzzling numbers. We seek
to understand this troubling book much as James Denney, a Scottish preacher and
theologian, did when he described it as “a tunnel with a light at the beginning
and a light at the end, but in the middle, a long stretch of darkness through
which lurid objects thunder past, bewildering and stunning the reader.”
If
we take this Biblical book too seriously, in tandem we read such pseudo-scholarly
works as “Left Behind” and “The Late Great Planet Earth”, convincing ourselves
that the author of Revelation surely had us – you and me - in mind when he
wrote his apocalypse nearly 2000 years ago.
Yet, as theologian Bart Ehrman wrote, “In every generation since the
book [of Revelation] was written, Christians have argued that its vivid
description of catastrophic events would happen in their own day. So far, none
of them have been right.”
And
if we do not take this Biblical book seriously enough, we still look to its
middle chapters, like our fundamentalist counterparts. However, instead of matching its images with
current events, we “pooh pooh” it all,
bothering neither to discover its
historical context nor to search for more promising reasons for its inclusion
in the Biblical canon. If truth be
known, we disregard it as the work of man named John who was probably on some
hallucinogenic substance at the time of writing.
Today,
I am suggesting that we put aside all those prejudices and pre-judgments,
however, and take a few moments to look with new eyes at this Book of
Revelation. First, we will figure out why
it was written, and, second, we will reflect on what today’s verses, which come
near the very end of the book, might say to us in the present time.
Like
all of the books in our Bible, Revelation was penned at a specific time in
history, and it was penned to a particular group of people. The book is attributed to John, but we really
do not know the author’s name. We do know
that he wrote to a community of Christians who were suffering and feared for
their lives.
What
we have here then is a letter of support and encouragement written to people in
hardship in the literary style of an apocalypse. It was designed to bring comfort by relating
the dreams and visions of its author, an author who himself was apparently also
victimized and suffering because he was a prisoner and in exile. Going forward then, let us entertain the
possibility that John wrote this book, as one blogger maintains, as a “document
that describes the attempts of a community to deal with unspeakable loss.”
(Magdalene’s Musings”)
The
community that first heard this letter, this Revelation, was in the midst of a
world rife with persecution. Life had
changed on a dime and was spinning out of control. Nothing was the same anymore. John’s
listeners were desperately afraid – for themselves, their families, and their
communities.
It
was the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was the hours after 9/11. It was the kind of world that made you ask
all those questions you never in your wildest dreams ever thought you would
have to ask. What do we do now? How can we be safe? How can I protect my family, my children?
As the author of the blog “Magdalene’s
Musings” writes: “For the early
Christian community, which we must remember was also, largely, a Jewish
community, there was at least a twofold trauma: first, Roman armies had
destroyed both the Temple and Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. And second, in the
aftermath of that destruction, Romans especially singled out followers of Jesus
for persecution.
This was a time of tremendous loss. The
loss of the Temple was a kind of death. It was the symbolic destruction of more
than 500 years of sacred ritual and prayer. It was the death of a way of life…It
was the loss of a place that had been central to Jesus and the culmination and
goal of his ministry.
And
the losses continued, extended into each home, each life. Parents, children,
spouses, friends… everyone was touched by death. Everyone was touched by loss.
Entire communities were struggling daily with the question of how to face yet
another day of persecution, yet another day of uncertainty, yet another day of
loss. The early followers of Jesus were suddenly living in a different,
frightening world, a world that caused them to ask all sorts of questions
they’d never faced before. What do we do now? My family, my community, those I
love… are we safe?”
Who
can blame this little Christian community for its apparent crisis of
faith? And in response to this historical
context, the author of Revelation wrote his apocalypse. That is the setting to
which he directed these words that we read this morning. What he wrote was not a particularly new
idea. Clearly, he had looked to the
ancient writers for inspiration, in this particular passage drawing heavily
from Isaiah, the great prophet of hope.
Listen to those words again, this time
in “The Message” translation:
“I saw
Heaven and earth new-created. Gone the first Heaven, gone the first earth, gone
the sea. I saw Holy Jerusalem,
new-created, descending resplendent out of Heaven….I heard a voice thunder from
the Throne: “Look! Look! God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home
with men and women! They’re his people, he’s their God. He’ll wipe every tear
from their eyes. Death is gone for good—tears gone, crying gone, pain gone—all
the first order of things gone.” The Enthroned continued, “Look! I’m making
everything new. …Then he said, “It’s happened. I’m A to Z. I’m the Beginning,
I’m the Conclusion.
What
powerful words of hope on which to conclude our Holy Scriptures! What powerful words of hope for all of us
even today, because surely, like John and the community to which he wrote, we
are all in exile in some form or another; we are all prisoners, and we all
live in fear and insecurity.
We
may not have had our legs blown off in Boston or lost a child in Newtown, but
we are all victims. Yet, as we read this
passage, it is as if we have been invited to an immense sacred gathering where John
gives us a glimpse of what God has in mind.
And the author does it in order to– what? Simply in order to restore our hope.
And
how does the author understand this hope being restored? Well, guess what! It is not that we will be beamed up to heaven
in a glorious rapture. We do not need to
sit on some desert mesa and wait for the end times – and that is surely a good
thing!
No
- instead God is descending to earth, moving into the neighborhood (as The
Message translation puts it), making a holy home with us, ready to wipe away
our tears and embrace us in our pain.
“When we are oppressed by a sense that our losses are too much for us,
Revelation beckons us to that place where we can find that we are already part
of a new heaven and a new earth.” (Magdalene’s Musings)
God
has a long history of using the world and all that is in it to make new things
happen. Remember that! There were the
Hebrew slaves that ended up a chosen people.
There was the Jesus’ crucifixion that ended up in resurrection.
And
so, if we insist upon looking for signs, then maybe the signs we ought to dwell
upon are these: that God has chosen to
come among us as a fellow traveler, a sojourner, that we are not alone, that in
Jesus, all the sacred promises of the past as well as our hopes for the future
have already begun to take shape.
It
is what we remember every time we share communion together in our imperfect
world. It is what we remember when we
take all those parables of Jesus as seriously as he hoped we would take
them. It is the Gospel message oozing
into our crazy lives, whispering to our fearful hearts, and seeping into our jaded
souls.
Oh, we know all to well that we do not live yet in the New
Jerusalem. We do not reside where heaven
and earth are one. We live in a nation where over 32,000 men, women, and
children were victims of gun deaths in 2011, where there are nearly 89 firearms
to every 100 people. We live where life is
cheap, and the innocent often suffer. We live in Newtown, in Oklahoma City, in
Aurora, Colorado, in downtown Boston.
To me, those statistics are as horrifying as some of the
Armageddon images in this Book of Revelation. However, I feel, as Methodist
pastor David Haley remarked, “Having seen John’s vision of the world God will
bring, of the new world God is struggling to bring, is it too much to ask that
we work for it as best we can, by seeking justice and peace? Where, in
emulation and anticipation of our God, we dry the tears from human eyes, in the
name of Jesus Christ?” Is it too much to ask that we seek to love, to serve, to
forgive?
A Benedictine nun remembers when her own mother lay dying in
a hospital. The sister bent down to her mother and ventured to reassure her
saying, “Mother, in heaven everyone we love is there.”
And the older woman replied, “No, in heaven I love everyone
who’s there.” (Kathleen Norris)
Maybe
hope – the hope of which the author wrote in his Revelation – is not so much a
hope that is merely intellectually seized upon, but rather a hope that is shared,
given away in fearful times, and above all, a hope that is lived, day to day,
hour to hour, in our committed attempts to love, to serve, and above all, to
forgive.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church (U.C.C.)
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