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.
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