Attack of the Demon Locusts.

Revelation 9:1-12

May 26, 2019

I.

We don’t have any experience of a plague of locusts.  We don’t know what it is like when billions of insects about the size of your thumb apparently come out of nowhere and devour every green thing in their path for miles, and when they are finished they expire and then rot in huge, stinking mounds.  That doesn’t generally happen in New Jersey.  It is hard even for us to imagine.  The closest we come is every few years when a cohort of cicadas wakes up.  They are very noisy and I remember some years where they practically denuded the foliage off the trees, so it almost looked like winter… which is all mildly annoying, but it’s nothing compared to a real plague of locusts.

Locusts are the ultimate consumers.  When they show up they treat the landscape like their own smorgasbord, a feast of resources for them to exploit, devour, and exhaust with absolute mindless abandon.  They eat everything green in sight until it is gone, then they die.  

It shouldn’t be that hard for us to imagine a species that is so focused on consuming, devouring, using up, and wasting that it destroys the very environment that nourishes it.  For our species approaches the planet the same way.  This is the point of this passage.  People will get back from the Creator what they put into the creation. 

The strange and terrifying mass of locust-like things that pour in a dense, black cloud up from the bowels of hell when the fifth trumpet is sounded, is different.  These are not ordinary bugs which, destructive as they are, are still part of the natural order.  Rather, what we see here are mythical, demonic, and weird entities with human faces, lions’ teeth, long hair, iron vests, and little gold crowns.  

They inflict their horrible stings on the people who have dedicated their lives to devouring the earth, those who, like human locusts, have given themselves to consumption. 

This reminds me of and illustrates one of the most famous quotes of the Franciscan teacher, Richard Rohr:  “We are not punished for our sins;” he says, “we are punished by our sins.”  In these hellish locusts, the sins of the people are made manifest and animated, and then turned against them.  Those who treated the earth and each other with wanton, selfish, devouring, wasting violence, get similar treatment applied to themselves.  We bring down upon ourselves what we ourselves do.  We get back the consequences of our own actions.

II.

The sad thing about all this is that people generally don’t know what’s going on.  We are all convinced very early in life to think of ourselves as separate entities in a dangerous world.  We are all raised and trained and taught to think of success in terms of what we are able to grab for ourselves out of this world, usually in terms of money, popularity, and power.  It doesn’t even occur to the vast majority of people that getting as much as we can for ourselves isn’t the only way to live.  It’s survival of the fittest, isn’t it?  

Humans develop very early on a kind of locust-brain that sees the world in terms of what we can get out of it, and defines winning and success as how much we manage to acquire, control, consume, extract, gain, and keep.  

Even if we were brought up in Christian homes and in the church this remains a deeply ingrained way of thinking and acting.  It is very difficult to get free of.  At least in the church we hopefully hear enough of the Bible and Jesus’ teachings to have the idea that there is another way to live.  But even here we tend to judge success the same way the world does.  We deem a  church as successful if it has many members, a lot of money, well-paid staff, and big buildings. 

It’s hard to get out of this egotistical, self-centered way of thinking.  Most people don’t even realize there even is any other way to think, let alone that there is a better and attainable approach to life.  It’s like we are in the grip of some horde of buzzing voices, constantly jabbering at us from within, perpetually spinning an elaborate tale about what we need, what we want, what we might lose, what we have to get, what we have to protect. 

III. 

So I wonder if these little armored, stinging locusts don’t also represent a more profound struggle going on in our own souls.  I wonder if one way of interpreting what John sees here isn’t as a presentation of the way our sins punish us within.  In Buddhism they talk about the “monkey mind,” the many voices in our heads that are hard to silence in meditation.  Maybe what we have here is like a “locust mind,” voices within us telling us how hungry, how entitled, and how bereft we are, and stinging us with fear, anger, and shame that prods us into theft, hoarding, and a mania for “security.”

The locust-mind is our addict-mind.  I have been attending meetings of 12-step groups for several years, and I have learned that it is not just the person who is physically addicted to alcohol, narcotics, or some other obviously self-destructive behavior is who is the addict; it is also others around them who enable, support, excuse, or otherwise participate, however indirectly, in their addiction.  

Furthermore, it turns out that every one of us is addicted to something, even if it isn’t a physical, chemical substance or behavior.  We all have outlooks, habits, backgrounds, ways of thinking, stories, traditions, memories, allegiances, and so forth, that we hold onto and depend on.  We all have thoughts and actions that are killing us and others that we can’t or won’t change.  Indeed, we don’t even see the necessity of changing them.  We need them!  What would we do, who would we be without them?  How would we even function?  

We do these things because on some level they make us feel good.  They make us feel safe, or fed, or justified, or loved, or happy.  They take away our pain or the prospect of pain.  Sometimes they make us feel alive, powerful, or popular.  People don’t do drugs because they are trying to commit suicide; they do them because they feed the ego and make them feel really, really good.  It must be an amazing high to be a locust on a binge through a cornfield with millions of your comrades.  It must feel like the pinnacle of success!  Life is good!  

But the consequences down the road are bleak and nasty.  Eventually we collide with reality and discover that our strategies for success, because they are based on lies we tell ourselves, are deeply destructive to us, to others, and to our world.  And the euphoria of our locust-brain sours.  It starts feeling like John’s vision of toxic demon-insects, eating away at us from the inside.  And we might even long to die, but our fear, which is the root of everything, does not let us even have that relief.

IV.

In John’s vision, the monster-locusts leave the earth’s vegetation alone and attack instead people.  And not everyone, but these grotesque, nasty flying gremlins only attack those who are not marked on their foreheads as followers of the Lamb by God’s identifying mark from chapter 7.  That seal, you may recall, is only given to the members of the 12 tribes representing the vanguard of God’s Kingdom and commonwealth, the divine insurgency, the church.   

These are the slaves of God, as distinct from the slaves of egocentric human greed, hubris, wealth, power, and consumption.  They obey the Creator by living in simplicity, humility, generosity, and gratitude.  To have God’s mark or name means you have taken on the life of repentance and discipleship.  They are exempt from these locusts like the Israelites in the Exodus story are protected from the final plague by the blood of the sacrificed lamb.  

I suspect that this is the only antidote to the catastrophe we are bringing on ourselves.  This is the only way to deter the stings of these torturous, toxic spiritual locusts.  To turn and follow Jesus and live his non-violent, non-consuming, non-acquisitive, unselfish, God-centered life.

That starts with a realization that our existence has become unmanageable and that we are indeed slaves to our own ego-centric desires and fears, by which we are killing ourselves, each other, and the beautiful planet that God has placed in our care.  And it continues in disciplines whereby we turn our lives over to the Creator and the Lamb who gives his life for the life of the world.  And finally it bears fruit in practices by which we let go of our addiction to consumption, and instead live each day seeking to take and use less, and give and offer more for others.

Frankly, one major expression of this is what we give to support the mission of the church.  We, the disciples of Jesus, are the antidote to the forces of annihilation and extinction that are loose in the world.  When we focus and train our resources on God’s mission, we are offering a counterweight to the locust-mind that is all about taking and hoarding and consuming.

For the gospel community is that safe space where people may gather to support themselves and each other in letting go of the locust-mind and our addiction to consumption, and letting God — God’s life of generosity, joy, forgiveness, hope, and love as revealed in Jesus Christ — reign.  It takes courage.  It takes commitment.  It takes patience.  And most of all it takes a deep trust in the goodness of creation and the One who created all things.

+++++++  

The Uninhabitable Earth.

Revelation 8

May 19, 2019

I.

The genius of the book of Revelation is that the very things that supposedly “prove” to some that, in the words of one atheist writer, “God Is Not Great,” actually demonstrate God’s transforming, redeeming, saving — indeed, loving — Presence.  We see this in what Paul writes about Jesus’ crucifixion.  The very event that looks like the complete failure and ignominious end of Jesus’ whole mission, the gruesome execution and burial of the so-called Messiah, actually, to the eyes of faith, and in people’s actual experience, turns out to reveal God’s power, wisdom, strength, and, paradoxically, love.

It is a matter of perspective.  If we radically alter our point of view, the meaning of God’s actions becomes clear.  We see this in the central and seminal event of the Hebrew Scriptures: God’s deliverance and liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  In the process of freeing the people, Egypt gets smitten by 10 horrendous, mostly ecological, plagues, which basically demolish with considerable violence the elaborate system of oppression in which Pharaoh had bound the people.  

From the perspective of the Egyptians, these successive disasters must surely have felt like a conclusive demonstration that there is no good God taking care of them, preserving them from evil.  How could God be so mean and wrathful?  Where is God’s forgiveness?  But, of course, from the perspective of the people being liberated, whose descendants go on to write the Bible, these events are celebrated as aspects of God’s miraculous deliverance.  God’s incendiary love for the world means the destruction of hateful institutions.

It often seems to be privileged, comfortable, powerful, well-off people who interpret their own inconvenience and discomfort as evidence that God doesn’t exist, or at least is, in Woody Allen’s memorable phrase, “an underachiever.”  As if God were an employee who was not performing up to expectations, not doing what we want and making things easier for us.  They understandably greatly prefer a deity who lets them off the hook, who overlooks their own selfish violence, and gives them a free pass into heaven after they have invested a lifetime in inflicting hell on others.

But the reality is that God’s liberation always means the deconstruction of whatever enslaves us.  For us to be free, God has to undermine the egocentric self we have constructed within ourselves.  And God has to destroy  the different kinds of prisons we have built for others.  Freedom requires the breaking of the chains that had been binding and crippling us. 

The emancipation that God brings into our life undermines everything we have learned to depend on and give our allegiance to.  It shatters the-world-as-we-know-it.  To what is false, the Truth comes as an annihilating cataclysm.  To evil, goodness feels toxic.  Darkness is allergic to light.  Life kills death.  That is the meaning of resurrection.  The point then is to align ourselves with the truth, goodness, light, and life of God that always prevails in the end.

II.

This next scene in Revelation begins, after a long, pregnant silence, with the people of God, the saints, gathered at worship in the heavenly Temple.  Their prayers ascend to God along with billows of fragrant incense, burning on the golden altar.  

The prayers of God’s people are always for liberation and deliverance, for life, redemption, and justice.  They are the prayers of those who have nothing to lose, no stake in the status quo.  Indeed, they are looking for the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, so that God’s true and good world may emerge.

And the response of the angels is to take the hot coals from the altar and throw them onto the earth, applying fire, the agent of refining and purification, to the world.  In this case, the fire is accompanied by thunder, lightning, and earthquakes, indicating God’s will expressed in nature.

That is the cue for four angels to blow their trumpets in succession, and for a series of disasters to occur.  There is a lot of fire, a lot of blood, and a lot of damage to the earth, vegetation, the waters, and even the sun, moon, and stars.  That which the Empire had reduced to commodities and resources, to be extracted, taken, used, wasted, polluted, and used up in the pursuit of gain and power, now get decimated.  They are reduced in value and quantity often by a third, which would undercut the Empire’s material foundation.   

Frankly, these verses sound almost like a condensed version of a book I just read called The Uninhabitable Earth, which gives a sober, unflinching view of the dire consequences, according to science, of the rise in atmospheric temperature which is now undeniably occurring on this planet, due to our burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal.

The fact is that it has been 800,000 years since there was as much carbon in the atmosphere as there is today.  Back then, the planet was 11 degrees warmer.  That doesn’t seem like a lot, but we’re already at 1 degree warmer and seeing the effects in storms, fires, heatwaves, and floods.  For every degree rise the consequences get more severe.

Some of the things that John sees in his vision are actually literally happening among us!  We are in the middle of a period of significant extinction.  We are facing crises of fresh water, and deforestation. 

As I have said before, the visions in Revelation should be interpreted less like historical fact and more like what we see in dreams.  We get images, symbols, metaphors, stories, and associations, which may be interpreted on several levels.  Revelation is more art than science, more poetry than prose, more about imagination than measurable, quantifiable data.

That being said, it is somewhat disconcerting to see such parallels in our actual contemporary events, or even weirder to discover, for instance, that the word in Russian for “wormwood” is actually “chernobyl.”

III.

One question is: What do we do in such a situation in which the order of nature itself seems to be unraveling?

Remember that a lot of this mayhem is happening in at least apparent coordination with the prayers of the saints.  They pray, and disasters occur.  It is not that they are directly praying for such destructive events.  We would never pray for anyone to suffer.  Ezekiel tells us that God never delights in anyone’s death.  The people of God are longing for the coming of God’s Kingdom.  It is something we still pray for every day when we say in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy Kingdom come.”  What do we think that means, I wonder? 

In order for the new, the true, and the good to emerge, the old, the false, and the evil has to fall.  We have to lose our allegiance to the principalities and powers in this world in order to see God’s new world being born among and within us.   

The coming of God’s Kingdom means the collapse and disintegration of the world’s Empires.  This is something that is always happening.  And we who live in the time before the final fulfillment of God’s Kingdom, nevertheless are always looking forward to it, anticipating it, and living now according to its values.

This is why, whatever is going on out there, what is happening in here — both in our own hearts and in our gospel communities — is repentance and discipleship.  We are living together according to Christ’s example of compassion, generosity, service, humility, non-violence, and love.  We are living in gratitude and grace.  We are welcoming and accepting others in forgiveness and peace.  We are experiencing together the deep joy that comes with the knowledge that God does triumph, and God’s Kingdom does come, in the end.  

The early church does not sit on the sidelines and root for death and destruction, even when it was the fall of an evil regime like Rome.  They never succumbed to hate or glee at others’ pain, even that of their enemies and torturers.  No.  The church is known for their ministry to victims of whatever was happening, no matter who they are.  Christians were the only people who would stay in cities to care for plague victims, for instance.  

Because the crises, including such things that John sees in his visions, are treated as opportunities to witness and serve.  We minister to the victims of disasters, regardless of any other circumstance.  This is the example of the Lord, who never asks about how a person got sick; he just heals them.  Neither do we attach any conditions to whom we will help.  We just give what we are given to give.

IV.

For in Jesus Christ we do identify with the suffering of the world.  Even as we await the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God, living in that Kingdom now, and having that Kingdom within us now, means consciously placing ourselves with Jesus, which is to say, with those in need, whoever they are.

That is our part in the working out of God’s will.  That is the content of the prayers of the saints before the altar.  It is intercessory prayer and active service for a world in turmoil as we continue to witness to God’s Kingdom in simplicity, humility, faithfulness, hope, and joy.

+++++++

"Washed in the Blood."

Revelation 7:1-17

May 12, 2019

I.

The Lamb has opened six of the seven seals of the scroll of destiny.  Before he opens the final seal, an angel arises in the east and hits the pause button.  The continued and intensifying consequences of human injustice, symbolized by destructive winds from each of the four directions, are held back so that God’s servants may receive an identifying mark to protect them from the worst of what is to come.  The followers of Jesus basically receive this seal identifying them as belonging to God.

This seal reminds us both of the blood of the lamb which protects the people at the first Passover, when the Israelite slaves are preserved from the angel of death killing the first born of the Egyptians, and a scene in the book of the prophet Ezekiel where some are marked with what would have been an X on their foreheads to set them apart and exempt them from the consequences of injustice.

The angel proceeds to apply this special mark to 144,000 disciples, listed by Israelite tribe, 12,000 in each tribe.  144,000 is one of those symbolic numbers that show up in the Bible which are not meant to be taken literally, but indicate a large, inclusive, complete set.   

This is the fulfillment of the 12 original tribes of Israel that come out of Egypt into Canaan under Moses and then Joshua, about 1500 years before this.  At that time, God establishes in the Promised Land a tribal confederation.  Each tribe is given territory to be governed by the Torah, the Laws of God.  This political arrangement is decentralized, with power spread out among clans and villages, exercised by the local elders.  If they follow God’s Torah, it is impossible for them to fall into the toxic and oppressive political regime they escape from in Egypt.

Egypt was a hierarchical autocracy with Pharaoh at the top, with a command and control structure in which power flowed down through the nobility and the owner class, with the Hebrew slaves languishing at the bottom owning nothing and doing most of the work.  It is a system of gross inequality and injustice, and God wants this new nation to have nothing to do with such evil.

The fact that this is what John sees in his vision is important because this tribal system is explicitly anti-Pharaoh, and is just as obviously anti-Rome.  God’s kingdom is a place where God, not Caesar, rules, and everyone else is equal under God.  There is no ruling class.  There is no owner class.  There is no aristocracy or oligarchy.  There isn’t even a central government, really. 

God sets this up as a kind of ideal political system; the best way for people to live and thrive together in peace: a commonwealth gathering around God’s Word, submitting to the will of the Creator.  

In some ways it is what the church is supposed to be, which is why Jesus makes the point of choosing an inner circle of 12 disciples: to remind us of the original tribal theocracy.  Only, instead of being clustered in one geographical territory, the church gets spread throughout the whole world.   

II.

This is what God’s anti-Empire looks like.  This is literally the kingdom of God.  It is a kingdom without a human king… God is the king.  Everyone else is equal as God’s servants, or literally, slaves.  And to be God’s slave is to be truly free because it is to be bound to our deepest, truest, blessed, essential created nature.

God’s mark on the 144,000 means they belong to God and it serves as protection.  It means that, in the beautiful and powerful words of the prophet Isaiah, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”  

The mark is a sign that God is with us and will carry us through to the other side of whatever is coming.  The sign does not exempt us from passing through the water and the fire; but it promises that we will emerge beyond the power of death that the water and fire represent.

These 144,000, ordered according to the 12 tribes, serve as the vanguard of God’s movement.  Because of their witness and their leadership as exemplary slaves of God, the movement will expand and grow both in faithfulness and numbers.

But the point of Israel, beginning even with Abraham, is to be the exemplary people of God through whom God will bless everyone.  God chooses one nation — not so that nation would have God’s blessing and keep it to themselves — but through that nation God intends to bless all.  The Israelite tribal confederation was not supposed to be a hermetically sealed special place where God’s will is done; but the values and practices of Israel are from the beginning supposed to spread.  It is supposed eventually to influence and embrace the whole world!

This is what the coming of the promised Messiah is intended to jumpstart. It is to reset this fundamental idea of Israel as the prototype of the global kingdom of God.  Through Israel God’s shalom is meant to be shared with all.  Just as God chooses one nation to bless all nations, in Jesus Christ, God sends one person to bless all people.

So the 144,000 represent the new Israel, the church, us! sent into the world with a mission to make disciples of all nations, drawing everyone into the commonwealth of peace, equality, non-violence, and sharing, which is the Kingdom of God which Jesus makes it the centerpiece of his mission to proclaim.

III.

Then John’s vision expands to include all those nations to which the church is sent, a vast inclusive multicultural, multi-racial, international multitude of people who have come through “the great ordeal” and “washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb.”  If the 144,000 represent the church as the new Israel, the holy nation sent into the world, the “great multitude that no one could count” represents the fulfillment of this mission, when all the nations are reached by the good news.

I wonder if the “great ordeal” doesn’t describe the Christian life in every age, especially in times of persecution.  I mean, we already know that John’s assumption is that being a Christian will necessarily provoke the rage and fear of the world’s empires.  We saw this in his letters to the churches earlier that a persecution-free authentic church is inconceivable to him.  So maybe what he is seeing is the completed, fulfilled church, all the witnesses in every age to the good news of God’s love in Jesus.  He is seeing the future consummation of the Christian mission.

To be a Christian is by definition to be someone who has “washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb.”  Paul says that those who have been baptized into Christ have “clothed themselves with Christ.”  This kind of imagery means that we are covered, we are protected and preserved by Jesus’ life, as represented by his blood.  We are clothed with Christ when his compassion, his simplicity, his generosity, his justice and love, his non-violence, his forgiveness characterizes our approach to the world as well.  Such a robe is our spiritual armor.

And the fact that these are our own robes means that we have participated in a death like his, in his suffering, and in his witness.  It means we have "died before dying,” in the sense of having denied ourselves, taken up our cross, and followed the Lord Jesus.  

There are different ways of “washing our robes in the blood of the Lamb,” different kinds of “martyrdom” or witnessing.  Sometimes Christians are actually called to shed their own blood and suffer bodily violence and even physical death for their trust in Jesus.  This endurance of brutal persecution witnesses to the Truth in a world awash in lies and delusion.  It has always been a part of Christian witness, and is happening today in several places in the world.  

It also counts as a kind of martyrdom when we exhibit selfless compassion and serve others in need in obedience to the Lord.  This can even be personally costly.  People are being arrested in this country for giving food and water to migrants and homeless people.  It is quite possible to go to jail in America for doing things Jesus commands us to do.  

A final kind of martyrdom or witness is the intentional undertaking of spiritual disciplines which help us to let go of our own ego.  We can’t be Christ in the world until and unless Christ sits on the throne in our own hearts.  And that doesn’t happen until our old ego-centric false self is dislodged, and our true Self in God, the living Christ, emerges within us, shaping our thoughts, words, and actions.  

IV.

The vast multitude sings a magnificent hymn to God.  Indeed their purpose is worship, “to glorify God and enjoy God forever.”  They live under the shelter of God’s blessing, comforted, fed, with the Lamb as their shepherd.  This is our purpose!  This is our destiny!

John’s vision never forgets that the ultimate meaning of life is joy!  God intends joy for us!  We are made for joy!  We are preserved and carried through every great ordeal, for joy, peace, love, hope, and blessing!

And what happens in this book is the collapse and disintegration, the implosion and the crumbling, of anything that gets in the way of, or prevents, or denies our joy.  I am sure that John has Psalm 23 in mind when he talks here about being guided through the valley of the shadow to springs of the water of life by the Lamb, who is our Good Shepherd.

This is a life to which we witness and which we may begin to know even now.  For he is, the Lamb, who gives his life for the life of the world, who realizes our true humanity and reveals God’s nature, is the true life of all.

+++++++

"Under the Altar."

Revelation 6:9-17

May 5, 2019

I.

In the cataclysmic collision between Truth and lies, goodness and evil, life and death, and the Kingdom of God and the empires of this world, people die.  It’s a problem because sometimes it looks like God can’t protect the faithful who trust in God.  It looks like their trusting in God was in vain, if they end up dying anyway.  Their faith, we might imagine, didn’t save them at all.

John wants to comfort and encourage a church that is faced with a choice about which way to follow.  It is not always clear to us which is the Way of life, and which is the way of death.  To us, with our minds and hearts clouded and our thinking distorted by egocentric self-interest, the Kingdom of God and the empires of the world can look strangely similar.  

In our self-serving delusion, we often follow the world’s empires and tell ourselves that we are following the Kingdom of God and doing the Lord’s work.  Too often in history we have descended to killing, stealing from, and oppressing others supposedly in Christ’s Name, when in reality it was in the name of our own fearful agenda and we just slapped Christ’s Name onto it.  

We cannot with integrity do in Christ’s Name something that the Jesus we know from the gospels would never do.  If supposedly Christian leaders are suggesting that Jesus approves of bigotry, war, injustice, and environmental degradation, I suspect they may be following someone other than Jesus.  

John says pretty unequivocally that the Way of the slaughtered Lamb is necessarily a Way of suffering and death.  It absolutely never involves killing.  But it is necessarily a Way of loss and, well, pain.  I am frequently reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s statement that when Jesus calls someone he bids them “come and die.”  It’s not the kind of thing churches are likely to put out on their message boards, but it is absolutely true. 

There is no away around this crucial fact for us.  Spiritual growth has to do with death.  No one gets out of here alive.  Jesus’ Way is through the cross, and that is true for all who follow him.  

One of the mottos of Christian monasticism is, “If you die before you die then you won’t die when you die.”  This means that if we let go of our egocentricity and let our old selves die while we are in this mortal existence — which is what our baptism and participation in the Lord’s Supper are about — then when our physical, mortal existence finally does come to an end, as it must, we who have already in a sense died continue to live.  But if we try to hold on to the people we think we are, we will perish when our biological bodies with which we have identified die.   

Christianity’s approach to death is a matter of letting our false self go, or die, so we may realize our True Self in Jesus Christ in whom we do not and cannot die in the sense of cease to be.

The good news in all this — and the Way of the Lamb is essentially and finally about good news and great joy — is that we emerge on the other side of death in a new and unimaginably good life of resurrection. 

II. 

The difficulty is that in the meantime, in this existence we know, all we see is the cost.  We don’t necessarily see the destination.  That we understand only by faith.  And it is compounded by historical situations of intense and horrific persecution in which following Jesus often means dying, not just figuratively in baptism and spiritual practices, but by having Roman soldiers take, torture, and slaughter your physical body by ruthless violence.

When the Lamb opens the fifth seal of the scroll — and always remember it is the Lamb, whose life is given for the life of the world, who is doing this — what we see are the souls of those who had, like the Lamb himself, been slaughtered because of their faithfulness to God’s Word.  These are the people who paid the full cost of discipleship… with their lives.  

But they are still alive.  They live “under the altar” in John’s vision, and they still ask the question that Christians have always asked, which is, “How much longer is this going to go on?”  How much longer before the promised final victory of truth, love, life, and light?  How much longer before we reach the promised destination?  Or, like children in the car on a family trip, “When are we going to get there?”  They’re not doubting that we’re going to get there; they are just asking about the timing.  

The souls under the altar are not asking for themselves.  They’re already on the other side; they already know that death is not the end.  They ask this question on our behalf.  We’re the ones who remain caught in time and its uncertainties; we’re the ones who need reassurance about how this is all going to end up.  But if we can keep our hope and conviction, we can maintain our patience, endurance, resistance, and faithfulness in the meantime, as long as the meantime seems to drag out.

The souls of the faithful witnesses are given white robes symbolizing purity and light, “and told to rest a little longer,” which is to say that the answer to their question about how long is “Not long!”  For God is giving more people the chance to join their number, safe “under the altar.”  

This altar was a large stone table in front of the Temple on which animals were sacrificed.  The blood of the animals would run down the sides into the ground beneath.  

Wallowing in bloody mud under a pile of rocks doesn’t sound like a very nice place to hang out, when we think of it literally.  But to be “under the altar” means being covered by the saving shield of the blood of the Lamb, which is to say the Lamb’s life.  It is like the Israelites on the first Passover who paint lamb’s blood over their doors to protect them from the angel of death, or the blood of the Lord’s goat which the High Priest sprinkles around the whole interior of the Temple on the Day of Atonement.

Blood is life, and to be covered by God’s blood or life is to enjoy God’s  protection and preservation, and to receive God’s power.  The souls of the witnesses have passed into a safe space of blessing and peace together, in which they relax in a kind of vacation.

III.

What John sees happening when the sixth seal is broken begins with a massive earthquake followed by a bunch of other mainly ecological disasters which he calls “the wrath of the Lamb.”  

For the fact is that if we have invested our time on the earth in violence, selfishness, and injustice; if our existence has been one long reaction in fear and anger to what we perceive as a hostile world; if instead of relying on the protection of God’s life shed over us, we have decided to take whatever steps we deem necessary to protect ourselves… then we will bring down upon ourselves the consequences.  The harm we do by thinking and acting this way will come back on us.  

“The wrath of the Lamb” is a way of talking about the fact that if we are not busy letting go of our own agenda and our old, false self, we are busy doing violence to others of the sort that Jesus himself endures on the cross.  Jesus forgives those who crucify him.  But his offer of forgiveness does not exempt us from the consequences of our own actions.  That’s why he weeps over Jerusalem; he realizes that they will not not accept his offer and live lives of forgiveness and peace.    

We cannot avoid the consequences. But if we change our ways of thinking and acting we can bear those consequences and emerge intact on the other side.  We can graduate to a secure place “under the altar” with others who make a good and faithful testimony to the Word of God by following Jesus in lives of compassion, service, humility, and non-violence.  We can emerge through this into a better place.    

The main recipients of those consequences are those who perpetrated and benefitted from the from the violence and injustice that brought them on. John sees first of all “the kings of the earth and the magnates and the generals and the rich and the powerful.”  These are the ones who have obviously done the evil that attracts the disasters.  These are the leaders who set the agenda and organized the violence, who made both money and war, who wielded the power.  So we definitely don’t want to be them or be associated with them.      

But then he goes on also to include “everyone, slave and free” as suffering under these catastrophes.  Unfortunately, in a fallen world everyone suffers, even those the system relegates to the bottom, like slaves, even those who bore no personal responsibility for the situation, even those who witnessed to the redeeming love of God revealed in Jesus.

The only question is whether we let our challenges consume and defeat us, or whether we stay faithful to the Lamb, protected by his life, and let him carry us through.  Sometimes people say that God never gives us anything we can’t handle.  I suggest that God never gives us anything that God cannot handle.  The answer is not relying on ourselves but on God’s power, revealed in the Lamb.

IV.

The point is how we witness, empowered by God’s Spirit, by our words and actions, in the midst of a world falling apart, to God’s new world of peace, justice, and love.  We are called to live together in the power of God’s Truth, even while falsehood and lies blare and echo around us.  We are called to live in the power of God’s inclusive love and forgiveness, even when fear, hatred, and bigotry still rage.  We are called to live as witnesses to God’s triumphant life, cherishing everything that has the breath of life, and everything that God breathed into being, even when people have sown the sour seeds of extinction across God’s blessed creation.  

And we are called to proclaim and inhabit God’s Kingdom, where Jesus alone, the Lamb of God, is Lord.  

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