 |
| "The Communion of Saints" by Elise Ritter. |
November 6, 2016 - All Saints Sunday
“After This”
Revelation 7:9-17
9 After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no
one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,
standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm
branches in their hands. 10 They cried out in a loud voice, saying,
“Salvation
belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
11 And all the angels stood around the throne and around the
elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the
throne and worshiped God, 12 singing,
“Amen!
Blessing and glory and wisdom
and
thanksgiving and honor
and
power and might
be
to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
13 Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these,
robed in white, and where have they come from?” 14 I said to him,
“Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have
come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white
in the blood of the Lamb.
15 For this reason they are before the throne of God,
and worship him
day and night within his temple,
and the one who
is seated on the throne will shelter them.
16 They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not
strike them,
nor any scorching
heat;
17 for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their
shepherd,
and he will
guide them to springs of the water of life,
and
God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
Sermon: “After This”
Well,
you got my name right, I’ll give you that.
I am John, but not the one you think.
I’m not John the Apostle, and I’m not the epistle author John (I could
never talk as good as he does, y’all).
But that is my name: John. I did
write one book in your Bible, but I’m sorry to say, you got the name of that
wrong.
It’s
not called Revelation, actually. (Well,
it’s not only called
Revelation.) Go to the first verse of
it, and see for yourself…the first five words are the name of my book. (If you need a little help, it’s on New
Testament page 230 of your pew Bibles.)
What’s the name of my book?
The
Revelation (or Apocalypse in the Greek) of Jesus Christ. Right.
It’s not the revelation of the end times. It’s not the revelation of the antichrist
(that word, by the way, doesn’t even appear in my book). It’s the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Now,
I, John, will be the first to admit that my book is downright weird,
y’all. It was a bizarre vision to
receive too, believe you me! I suppose
that’s why so many have tried to make sense of it ever since. Trying to identify rulers of the present day
with the Beast; trying to calculate the day Jesus will come back, or the number
of people who will be saved. That was never the point of my book. I mean, the number of the Beast 666 was
actually a pun on Emperor Nero’s name in Hebrew[1] (and he
was a beast of a ruler for sure).
Sometimes trying to be clever means no one understands what you’re
actually saying!
As
to that other number, 144,000, the number saved when Jesus returns, don’t be
too literal about that. Let me make it
clear: I am not a mathematician. I am a prophet: a dreamer who dreamed of the
world remade by the Savior who was slain, the Messiah who is both Shepherd and
Lamb. For me, 144,000 sounded like one
heck of a lot, which was the point, really.
I
never asked for my visions. I never
sought out God’s revelation. But they
came to me anyway. I wrote these visions
around the year 90 CE, a time when tensions between Jews and Romans were even
more intense than tensions between certain politicians, if you can imagine
that.
I
was living in a time of conflict, fear, violence, institutional greed and
oppression. Everything I wrote grew out
of that contested context. It’s no
wonder people always connect my words with the particular time they’re living
in! It seems we’re always experiencing
these same cycles as human beings. But
my revelation, my apocalypse, was all
about the God who interrupts those cycles. The God who takes suffering
willingly. The God who allows the
troubling events of earth to shake the very heavens themselves. The God who believes that violence does not
have to beget violence, and hatred does not have to beget hatred. The God who longs to bring peace on the other
side. You just heard a piece of that
peace read.
“After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne
and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to
our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
Not
too shabby, huh? Did you catch that “no
one could count” business? See, don’t
get hung up on that 144,000 saved. God’s
grace is beyond numbering.
The
vision became even more grand from there:
Angels
worshipping the
Lamb. I bet you know some of their faces.
Saints
who made it through the great ordeal. I
bet you know some of what that’s like.
And
finally, the death of hunger and thirst, scorching heat, and tears. Even the
death of death itself. Can you imagine?
It’s
no wonder people long to take my words and turn them into a GPS for the end
times. What a promise! But, here’s the thing about my words: they
weren’t for the end.
They
were for the struggles of today, which is why I wrote, “After this…”
We
were in “this” when I wrote these words some 1,926 years ago, and we still are. You don’t need me to tell
you that. I see your grief, your
exhaustion, your political fears and your spiritual worries. I see the wars of this planet, the refugee
boats sunk, the emptiness that comes from having too much stuff and too little
contentment.
Sometimes
it seems like to live is to suffer, and to suffer is to live. There I go talking in riddles again, so let me
be clear; the whole point of my book is this: Jesus lives to suffer with us.
Jesus breaks the cycles of suffering in this world with songs and beauty
and saints and healing waters and hope, even now. The question is not when the end will come. The question
is, how is heaven breaking into earth here, now, today?
The
funny thing is, like that elder I read about earlier, you already know the
answer. You just may not know you know
it. Heaven breaks in to earth in so many
ways; the veil between this world and the next is not as thick as we may
think. We find heaven breaking into
earth in all those things beyond measuring.
In
the love and incredible hope of a child’s first breath.
In
the holiness and incredible loss of a loved one’s last.
In
the time it takes to fall in love.
In
the choice it takes to stay in love.
In
the advent of that fall smell in the fresh air, or the time it takes a star to
shine.
In
the waiting for dawn to break, and the night to finally be over.
In
the moment just after a laugh, when the world seems just a little bit lighter.
In
the shadowed moments of grief, that make the world feel small and empty.
In
the time it takes a weary leaf to fall to the ground, and a new leaf to grow on
a very old branch.
Heaven
is breaking in – can’t you see it? God
gives us special people to help us see this revelation, this apocalypse, this
breaking in of eternity into the ordinary, and we call those people saints. And
even if you can’t see heaven right now, you can see their faces, can’t
you? In your mind, in your memory, in
your heart? They are the bearers of the
grace of the Lamb to us. And there’s
something magical about these saints: they have a way of turning us into
saints, too. Because we want to be like
them. We want to have the courage to
face “this” time, and to hope for the time “after” it.
So,
all this is to say, if you read my wacky book and are filled with fear or
despair, you’ve missed the point of it all.
Sure, there’s some downright scary stuff in there, but the time I lived
in was a terrifying time to be a Jewish follower of Jesus. I couldn’t ignore that. Earth is a messy, messy place. We fear. We hate.
We regret. We hurt. We sin.
But heaven breaks in, the saints help us see it, and the Lamb is in the
midst of it all, bringing hope, especially in suffering. And that is good news.
My
story begins and ends just as the world began and will end and begin again:
with the grace of God in Jesus
Christ. So, let’s bless one another with
those words, now when we, your country, and this world, most need that
blessing, turning to the last sentence I wrote, in the last page of your Bible
(246). Let’s say these words together:
“The
grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.”
No comments:
Post a Comment