Resurrection, Art, Hope (Reading Revelation, Week 1)

Revelation 1:4-8

I want to take just a few minutes today to introduce our next sermon series.  Our Sunday worship usually follows the lectionary, which is a plan for reading Scripture used by many churches.  For this year’s Easter season, the lectionary suggests a series of readings from Revelation, the final book in the Bible.  So first of all, I’d like to invite you to begin reading a very strange, but very rewarding and even transformative text for the next five weeks. 

 

And here’s my suggestion for how to read it: don’t worry that much about what it all means.  Just read it and let the imagery wash over you and see what insights or questions emerge.  Walk around in the imagery and sounds and smells of it.  Touch things, wander around with your curiosity, and pay attention to cues you might get about what reading it is supposed to do to us or for us.  The adult class that meets in the library at 9:30am will be discussing these readings, so that’s another opportunity for growing deeper.

Actually, the choir cantata today is the perfect entryway to understanding Revelation.  The whole thing is a sustained act of worshiping God.  Revelation is filled with songs - extravagant, beautiful, moving worship.  The angels, we’re told, are before the throne of God with bowls of incense, and the sweet smell of that smoke is the prayer of God’s people.  Reading Revelation gives us a new sense of the largeness of our worship.  When we gather to sing and pray, we join our voices to the heavenly choirs of thousands upon thousands of angels, of martyrs and the faithful already in God’s heavenly presence.  So I expect that our reading will renew and refresh our practices of worship and prayer. 

The series is titled, “Resurrection, Art, Hope.”  And so let me say a few things about each of those words.

First, Resurrection.  The text of Revelation is built around several dream-like visions of the risen Christ.  These visions will surprise and shock you if you are familiar only with the lowly, humble, peasant Jesus who was crushed by the Romans.

The first chapter introduces us to the risen Christ as the primary figure in the poem.  The writer says that he saw “someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest.  The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire.  His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.  In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword.  His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance” (1:12-16). 

If you find yourself more interested in the fabulous beasts or gory battles or bizarre numbers, you’re missing the point.  The whole thing is about the resurrection of the crucified Jesus and what that means for the world.

Second, let me say a word about Revelation as art.  This isn’t the scribbling of a teenager in a diary.  This isn’t a list of information.  It’s not a series of predictions.  This is more like a poem or a film script.  It is elegantly put together.  And it may seem bizarre to us.  But it is a standard Jewish way of writing.  It’s called “apocalyptic.” 

That is, in fact, the title of the text, “Revelation” just translates the Greek word “apocalypse” – to unveil or reveal.  This is “the apocalypse” of Jesus Christ – that’s the first sentence.  Ezekiel and Daniel were apocalyptic texts.  They function to unveil or reveal something that is hidden or hard to see.  And the poem is rich with images and symbols that enable us to see something we wouldn’t see otherwise.  So you can’t read it like you would a news item or a recipe.  It’s an imaginative poem, and you’ll have to read it imaginatively.

Third, let me say a word about hope.  The whole thing is written in order to encourage some little congregations to hang in there and not lose heart.  (See the map of Western Turkey: these are real people in real places).  They are small, and tired of being hassled and persecuted, and they are thinking of giving up.  They have lost sight of God’s victory over evil and it’s beginning to seem to them that evil is stronger than God.  They’re beginning to wonder if their hope that the whole world will be transformed by the love of God is a silly, baseless illusion. 

The writer is a pastor who has been exiled and imprisoned on a small island called Patmos just off the Mediterranean coast.  And he offers to his brothers and sisters in these seven congregations the gift of a poem that can sustain them in trying times.  It’s a poem that asks us to keep believing that good is stronger than evil, that we should keep fighting, keep loving, and never give up our dream of a world completely transformed by God’s victorious love.

Now everything I’ve said is true.  But perhaps a little misleading.  I have probably made Revelation a bit too tame.  It’s an entertaining read.  So for you adrenaline junkies who like car crashes and suspense-filled horror flicks, here are a few scenes that will interest you.

Chapter 9 introduces some gruesome monsters.  The army of locusts that swarm the earth are half horse and half scorpion with human faces and long hair and teeth like lions.  They sting people with their tails and leave them writhing in terrible pain.  There are horses with the heads of lions and venomous snakes for tails.  They breathe sulfur, smoke and fire and ride around the earth, killing millions.

In Chapters 12 and 13 we meet a woman clothed with the sun, resting her feet on the moon.  She is crying out in great pain as she is in labor and ready to give birth.  An enormous red dragon with seven heads appears before the woman, waiting for the birth so that it can eat her child as soon as it’s born.  But the woman is given two wings like a giant eagle and so she flies away to safety with her child.

In Chapter 14 angels fly out of God’s heavenly temple with sickles, slashing across the earth, cutting God’s enemies down like wheat.  The dead bodies are gathered and put into a wine press, where they are crushed like grapes, the blood flowing as high as horse’s bridles for 200 miles in every direction.  How’s that for a little gore?

And yet, the whole thing is about hope, not fear.  Marilyn Robinson wrote a wonderful essay on fear.  Her two-part thesis is simple:  “First, contemporary America is full of fear.  And second, fear is not a Christian habit of mind.”

I think she’s right on both counts.  We Americans, for all our bluster and optimism, often live like we’re afraid.  This is unfortunate, because fear isn’t a Christian habit of mind.  To live in the posture of being afraid is to fail to embody and express the victory that has begun in Jesus’ resurrection. 

Robinson also says, “Fear operates as an appetite or an addiction. You can never be safe enough.”

Many, many people are afraid.  And some of them are skilled at provoking and manipulating and amplifying our fears.  It is a very easy lever to pull in people.  Much of the attention given to the last book in the bible has come from people who are afraid, from people attempting to make others even more afraid than they already are.  The “Left Behind” series of bestselling books, for example, is a foolish and fear-mongering misreading of Revelation.  There is a better way to read it.

The irony of all this is that there really are things to be afraid of in life.  There are real harms and dangers.  Anyone not able to say this just isn’t being honest.  And so what we need is the kind of good news that will help us stay afloat in these scary waves.  We need some kind of courage that steels us for hard times.  We need tools that help us stay together and keep each other warm.  That’s exactly what The Revelation is about.  It’s good news, comfort, and courage for people who have organized their lives around Jesus Christ.