Reclaiming Revelation

Revelation 2:5, 10 & 25, 3:2

Revelation 2:5: Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lamp stand from its place.

Revelation 2:10: Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.

Revelation 2:25: Only hold on to what you have until I come.

Revelation 3:2: Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God.

Jesus Speaks to the Church

Each of the verses just read includes a command from Jesus to one of the seven churches of Asia that received the letter from John that we call Revelation. Like the taped voice on the old "Mission Impossible" show--"Jim, your next mission, should you choose to accept it..."--the voice of Jesus in chapters 2 and 3 of Revelation instructs churches as to their mission. In the light of their historical circumstances, in the light of their strengths and weaknesses, in the light of what Jesus needs done in the world, each church is told what it must do. Thus, "Be faithful, even to the point of death", is the mission, the central organizing principle for all activity in the church at Smyrna. "Hold on", "stand fast", "go to prison", "do the things you used to do", are all commands to a particular church.

(At various intervals today I am going to interject relevant insights from a movie entitled, Romero. Oscar Romero was the Archbishop of El Salvador who was murdered by the government of that country in 1980. He was killed because of the fateful decision he made concerning his personal vocation and the mission of the church. The church he served had inherited a mission, but it was corrupt. Romero struggled to hear what the Spirit was saying to the church. He paid attention to events. He prayed. When it was time, Romero declared what he heard from the Spirit of God. The mission of the church was to suffer persecution with the poor.)

A Point in Review

The El Salvadoran church of 1980 and the seven churches of Asia in the first century and the First Baptist Church of Springfield in 2006 and every church of every time must allow Jesus to re-form the mission of the church. The book of Revelation gives us tools for this critical spiritual process. So, by way of review, may I remind you that:

Up until writing this sermon series, I was part of a long tradition of Christian theologians and scholars and preachers and teachers who wanted nothing to do with Revelation. From the beginning, Revelation has been subjected to so much abuse by its supposed friends--so much wildly speculative interpretation--that other Christians have felt that their only choice was to turn their backs on the "strange madness" extruding from this book. Progressive Christians must reclaim Revelation from its fanatical and self-serving interpreters. For example, many Christians believe that the end of the world is upon us and that that end will be violent. Novels like the Left Behind series by LeHaye and Jenkins, many other popular books and much popular preaching on Revelation, fuel false expectations of doom. Current events like the continuing struggle of the Israelis with the Palestinians and earthquakes and hurricanes seem like compelling evidence of the last days. Believing that a war-like Christ will soon bring about a violent end to history, Christians have become more supportive of violence solutions to international problems and less supportive of calls to be peacemakers and good stewards of the Earth. Wrong belief leads to tragically wrong action. We must take Revelation back from the pre-millenialists and the dispensationalists and the fundamentalists.

An Introduction to Apocalyptic

I am going to give myself and you a break and not try to explain those words. However, we do need to understand some other words if our study of Revelation is to be fruitful. Most of you have heard the word "Apocalypse" or "Apocalpytic" or "Apocalypticism". The second word of John's letter, usually translated as "revelation" is actually "apocalypse", thus, "The apocalypse of John". Apocalypse means "an unveiling of hidden things." The people who hear or read the apocalypse are going to understand something they could not understand before. To get a handle on Revelation you have to have at least an elementary understanding of apocalyptic literature and thinking. Maybe the best way to establish this point is to talk about another kind of literature. As children you probably read the book or saw the movie Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift.

What kind of book is it? Here are some of the answers I have heard. Gulliver's Travels is:

Fiction
Fantasy
A children's story
An historical drama
A travelogue
A fairy tale
A Classic

Sort of. Certainly Gulliver's Travels is fiction and fantasy and it is a classic. But far more important, if you want to understand the story, is that Gulliver's Travels is satire. Jonathan Swift's intent was to shock people out of their complacency, to awaken them to their capacity for error, corruption and bestiality. Gulliver is a well educated surgeon, a person of great good will, but he lacks critical consciousness, reason. Gulliver is gullible. His journey to four lands is filled with symbolic encounters with all the weaknesses of humanity. Swift paints a very pessimistic picture of mankind.

The point is that if you read Gulliver's Travels as a children's story or as a fairy tale, if you read it without knowing that it is satire and without knowing how to interpret satire, you will completely miss the message.

If you read Revelation without knowing that it is apocalyptic literature and without knowing how to interpret apocalyptic, you will miss the message completely. The original hearers of the letter called Revelation, like 18th century Englishmen who had no problem understanding the satire of Gulliver's Travels, the first century Christians had no problem grasping apocalyptic. They easily got the point with an initial reading. If you and I want to get the point we will have to work much harder. That is why I am on the fourth sermon on Revelation, have worn out some of my listeners, and feel I have hardly begun.

Three Facets of Apocalyptic

I cannot cover the entire territory of apocalyptic literature today but here are a few of the most important things we need to know:

1) Apocalyptic literature was common in the period between the Old and New Testaments and became one of the accepted ways in the Early Christian church for belief in God's providence to be expressed.

To those of you who continue to have a hard time with Revelation, I would counsel that you can't simply ignore this one book and think you will be done with the problem. Apocalyptic thinking is woven into the tapestry of the New Testament, including the gospels and Paul's letters. If you pull out all the apocalyptic threads the tapestry will fall apart. It may be difficult for you, but I believe Christians have to make their peace with Revelation.

On the other hand, apocalyptic references in scripture do not tell the whole story of what the Bible says about the end times. Once again, there are a variety of Biblical teachings related to how God finally works things out that have to be held in creative tension. Most important, Jesus came to proclaim the arrival of the Kingdom of God. And Kingdom of God theology believes that God intends the redemption of both history and creation. In Apocalyptic thinking, history and creation are so bad they can only be terminated by God. Which is true? According to John, both are true. Remember, John is a dialectical theologian. To know the truth different aspects of truth have to be held in dynamic tension.

(By the way, you can watch the Oscar Romero film from this point of view. Will God save the persecuted church by redeeming history-by bringing justice and peace to El Salvador? Or will God save the El Salvadorans by ending history and obliterating evil and welcoming the martyrs into heaven? Romero and some of the priests and the poor of El Salvador had not yet quite given up believing that their actions could make a difference within history. Despite the horrible suffering, they did not yet see history as totally evil. On the other hand, they were still getting clobbered in El Salvador. Romero was horrified by the growing roll call of Christian Martyrs killed for teaching the children to read or for running health clinics. In such times, where does one find hope? In history redeemed or in history terminated?

2) Apocalyptic literature is an answer to the question, "how long?" How long before justice comes? Apocalpytic explains the delay in God's salvation by way of a "dualistic" theology. Although God is "the Almighty", God is not directly in charge of what is going on in the world. And, human sin did not create all the evil in the world. There is also spiritual evil that operates, for now, independent of God. We come to know angels and demons and satan far more intimately in Apocalyptic literature than anywhere else in the Bible.

The seven churches of Asia already knew that the Roman Empire was a beast. They knew Rome was abusing its political power. What Revelation revealed to them--and remember this is the purpose of an apocalypse, to reveal the unseen--was that Rome was an evil historical manifestation of cosmic evil. The evil that Rome was doing on earth was connected to evil principalities and powers in heavenly realms. The war down here is also being fought up there. That is why you have all the wildly symbolic language in Revelation. That language is describing the war up there.

Thus, every evil that a person does or a government does on Earth today is connected to evil principalities and powers in heavenly realms. In fighting for economic rights for the poor what the church is really doing-Revelation reveals-things are not what they appear to be-what the church is doing is standing against demons of darkness that reign in high places. Only the undefeated and undefeatable Christ wins such battles. We can never win the war for justice with the weapons of this world because the enemy we battle is both worldly and other worldly. That is the hidden thing that the apocalypse of Revelation reveals. Only Jesus can win, has already won, and His weapons are the Word and sacrificial love-the blood of the Lamb of God.

(This issue too is dramatically played out for us in the Romero film as the Archbishop confronts a priest carrying a sub-machine gun. The priest has joined the guerillas, believing that is the only way to stand up against the evil that is killing, it is now estimated, 50,000 of his people. Romero chooses another way, the way of Jesus. What would you do if the choice was yours?)

3) A final feature of apocalyptic literature; the apocalypse of John that we call Revelation was delivered to and only to a persecuted church. They had no power to change their world. It takes a lot of insensitive nerve for affluent and powerful Christians to think that they can interpret the book of Revelation without consulting the persecuted and martyred church in the world today about what it means to them. If you and I want to know what Revelation is saying, why don't we ask the churches where Christians are dying in the battle against evil? This is why I keep referring to the movie, Romero. I am checking in with the spiritual truth learned by martyrs.

Naming Evil

(Once again, referring back to Oscar Romero, the Archbishop's most excruciatingly painful task was to name evil. In El Salvador in 1980 what was the locus of evil? There were two choices. Evil was:

1) Either, the peasants and priests who only appeared to be fighting for justice and freedom but were really, according to the government of El Salvador and the government of the United States that provided all the military hardware, lackeys of an international communist conspiracy.

2) Or evil was the wealthy landowners and politicians and military leaders willing to do absolutely anything, including slaughtering their own people, to hold on to power and gain material wealth.

After almost unimaginable struggle, after personally witnessing the ruthless violence and the horrific injustice, Archbishop Oscar Romero finally took his stand. He said that the poverty and the torture and the killing all had their root in the attempt by the wealthy and powerful to defend an indefensible economic order. The enemy had been named. Now the battle could begin in earnest.)

The church has not always been so astute in naming evil. In our recent history, the German church prior to WW II is a tragic example of Christians turning a blind eye towards radical evil; as is the struggle of white Christians during the American Civil Rights movement to finally decide that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Prophet of God, not, as J. Edgar Hoover tried futilely to prove, a communist. It is always part of the church's mission to name evil.

I must name evil. Watching Romero with your young people last Sunday evening was a revealing and painful experience. One of the worst moments for our teenagers was when one of the priests was subjected to torture. Groans rose across my living room. Torture is always terrifying, repulsive and evil. All I would have to do to demonstrate graphically how vile and immoral torture is would be to take just a few seconds to describe what happened to that priest. Your reaction would be proof that you know vile evil when you see it. As a nation, we have always known that torture is always evil. There was no question.

There was no question. Now there is a question. We, the United States of America, our government, our elected leaders, are debating torture. Torture is already being used clandestinely as a weapon in the fight against terrorism. Now this sickening evil darkness is being defended in our halls and houses of power. This is radical evil. We will not win the war on terrorism or any war with such a weapon. The more we use evil to battle evil the more we become the terror we say we oppose. Imagine. Think about it for a second. What happens to the men, the American boys we send into combat to be soldiers of freedom, who are instead ordered to be purveyors of torture? What happens to their souls as they pulverize the faces and cut out the tongues pull out the fingernails of their captives? What happens to our national soul?

Torture is wrong.

   Has it occurred to you how unimaginable it would have been just a few years ago that I would be standing here in front of you saying……torture is evil.

   Never before have preachers in America had to name this evil.

   Lord Jesus, make haste to save us.

Evil there and evil here

Christians in the seven churches of Asia were dying because the Roman Empire believed that murder and torture were legitimate weapons of national policy. The empire was evil. It was a reflection of the evil of principalities and powers in high places. The mission of the churches in Asia included standing fast against the evil of the world, being light to the darkness, holding on in the midst of persecution. The mission of each church was to oppose evil, and if necessary to die in the battle. But before the churches in Asia could hold fast against external evil they had to overcome internal evil. The locus of evil was not just the Roman Empire and the principalities and powers it served. The locus of evil was not just the pagan culture and its false gods. The locus of evil was also in the church. That evil in the church included a fragmentation of its purpose, forgetting why it was called into being, the worship of other gods, a failure to listen for God's voice and trust in God's power, immorality of every sort, and a spiritual sleepiness that seemed unable to attend to the things of God.

The church participated in the evil of the world. "Physician, heal thyself!" The church that stands with God against evil is the church that has healed its purpose; in other words, it has renewed and deepened its commitment to its mission. Like the seven churches of Asia, such a church knows the particular piece of God's work to which it has been assigned. For some churches and Christians that mission could be summarized as, "Die for Jesus." It was as simple as that; painful, but simple. For the rest of us who are commanded to "Live for Jesus", it is not simple at all. For we have to learn "how?" The promise of Revelation is that if we listen we will be told. The Spirit will speak to the church.

We will pick up on these questions next Sunday.

The revelation unfolds.

Amen.