Deep Magic.

Revelation 11:1-14

June 23, 2019

I.

What is the good news, really?  If we could boil it down to a few words, how would we communicate what the Way of Jesus is really about?

Sometimes, in the statement that follows the Prayer for Wholeness in our liturgy, I make some broad proclamations about the reversals God brings into the world.  I talk about how God is always bringing life out of death and light into our darkness, that God heals our brokenness, and overcomes evil with good.  God’s truth banishes falsehood, God’s love is stronger than hate.  We also often sing words like this at the end of our service.

All these are things that Jesus makes it his business to do in his ministry.  I see them as a kind of summary of the gospel of the Kingdom of God.  When we say with the early church that “Jesus is Lord!” what we are doing is placing our trust in the ultimate reality of God implicitly over-against the ignorance, fear, hatred, and violence that seems often to dominate in our world.

Because of the colossal mess we humans, in our egocentric blindness, paralysis, rage, and paranoia have made of the world, our God is necessarily a God of reversal and contradiction.  When God’s Word of truth collides with our world of lies, sparks fly, to say the least.  It is traumatic and convulsive.   

God’s Word always wins, of course, because reality always overcomes illusion.  And so it is here.  John is instructed to measure the Temple as a way of protecting and securing the inner sanctum, even while letting the outer courts go to be trampled and defiled by the godless and clueless “nations.”  There are necessary and beneficial boundaries to the Kingdom of God.

In the early church, there is a strict boundary, a fence around the communion Table.  There is a need for protection and preservation of the truth, keeping it secure from corrupting and compromising influences.  The early church also has very high standards for participating in the Sacrament; only those actively showing repentance and discipleship are admitted to share in the Lord’s body and blood.   

In his ministry, Jesus is generally breaker of the stultifying boundaries imposed by human authorities.  But there remains this stark distinction between God’s Kingdom and human empires, between serving God and serving money, between the Way of life and the freeway of death.  There remains this one significant boundary that must be maintained between life and death, truth and falsehood, goodness and evil.

Some of you have no doubt read of the Presbyterian minister in Linden who transgressed those boundaries and did some truly bizarre, idiotic, and evil things in the name of spiritual healing.  In the end, he renounced the jurisdiction of the church, which is to say, he placed himself outside the borders and discipline of God’s Kingdom.  In a sense he wandered out of the Temple into the marketplace overrun by agents and drones of the nations.

There are boundaries that Jesus insists we keep.  In his Way the boundaries are drawn in pleasant and beneficial places and everyone benefits from them.  The Torah is full of boundaries intended for the good of all.  But in the Empire of human selfishness, they are drawn only for the good of the few, the wealthy, the powerful, the celebrities.  They are walls that separate and imprison, rather than membranes and interfaces that filter, protect, and preserve. 

II.

In John’s vision, “two witnesses” emerge outside the Temple boundaries, in the secular plaza, to serve as public prophets delivering God’s Word of truth.  The Word cannot be hermetically sealed in the secure provinces of the Temple; it is, like everything of value we receive from God, given to be shared.  And that means being sent and going out into the public square.  The boundaries are not impenetrable walls.

Just as the Lord sends his disciples out by twos, the two witnesses represent the mission of the Church in the world.  They offer God’s Word of hope and shalom.  They echo Moses and Elijah in the effects that people experience from them, which are plagues and drought.  

But from the perspective of the ordinary people hearing them, they are nuisances.  All tellers of the truth are.  Like when you take away an addict’s drug, they’re going to feel inconvenienced and angry.  Or when you encourage a child to eat something nutritious and they act like you’re poisoning them.  Or when you keep them from eating something harmful and they claim you’re starving them.  If you suggest any helpful boundary or discipline, people tend to scream that you’re imprisoning or even killing them!

Humans vastly prefer the confines of their own egos, and of their own invented traditions and institutions, to the liberation, forgiveness, and redemption of God, which seems to them like painful, burning bondage.  People would rather wallow in the fleeting, familiar, and superficial pleasures of the status quo of sickness and addiction than risk changing.  A seemingly comfortable and secure tomb is preferable to the unknown of God’s promised home, which sounds to the egoic brain like a torture chamber.

When members of the annoyed mob try to harm these two witnesses, the fire of God’s Word pours out from them and kills them.  In other words, the words of the witnesses are toxic to all self-serving, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, delusional agendas.  The truth always burns away the lies upon which we build our lives.  Love kills hate.

God’s Word is Jesus Christ, and its content is always the cross and resurrection.  It is always about losing one life to gain another.  It is always about giving up in order to receive.  And what we do obtain is always far greater and more wonderful and delightful than what we let go of.

That the witnesses testify wearing sackcloth — the garb of penitence and poverty — means that they do not minister from a position of superiority and domination, but that they model the life of repentance and humility, gratitude and generosity, transformation and renewal.  This is not the powerful, established, wealthy institutional/imperial church.  These witnesses identify with and testify to the self-emptying God we know in Jesus Christ, the Lamb.

III.

Once they have said what they are called to say, a big, new enemy appears: an inhuman, monstrous “Beast” gets discharged from the “bottomless pit.”  This beast attacks the witnesses, the Church, and conquers and kills them.  

In its engagement with falsehood and evil the truth often gets quite comprehensively defeated.  It reminds me of the scene in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where the good and gentle lion, Aslan, allows himself to be humiliatingly bound and slaughtered by the grotesque assembly of nasty characters who had kept the world locked down in a deadly winter.  But this path of self-offering is the only way to unleash the “deep magic” that restores the land of Narnia.

The Church has experienced repeated attacks, persecutions, and defeats.    Starting with the Lord himself, and extending to today, when disciples of Jesus are under violent attack by Islamist terrorists in Africa, Communists in China, Brahmins in India, and even by Israelis in the Holy Land.  

In our context, the Beast is manifested in the more subtle tactics of luring people into the temporary highs of addictions to various kinds of self-gratification.  These are no less effective in destroying the witness to God’s love.  The reductive rationalism and corrosive secularism prevalent in our culture eclipse people’s knowledge and trust of God.  They overwhelm Jesus’ message of equality, simplicity, and humility with a blizzard of selfishness and cancerous “growth,” degrading the whole creation and spawning an epidemic of extinction.   

The Beast leaves only the lifeless and rotting corpses of the two witnesses, left exposed in the street as a kind of warning and desecration.  The “great city” symbolizes urban existence generally, as epitomized by, on the one hand, Sodom — infamous for its injustice, inequality, and lack of hospitality — and, on the other hand, Egypt — the ghastly pit of slavery.  These are the forces which had corrupted and defiled even the holy city of God’s choosing, Jerusalem, as shown by the way that city treated Jesus. 

The “inhabitants of the earth” treat the demise of the holy witnesses like it’s Christmas!  They exchange gifts in celebration!  Without the witnesses’ testimony to Jesus, they double-down on their consumerism.  They hold “Good Riddance to Those Pesky Witnesses” sales at the mall.  Without a voice of conscience, the people imagine they are free to indulge every desire.  Without a brake, they step on the gas.  

The bodies of the witnesses rot in the street; the Church is reduced to empty buildings and mostly false memories.  It appears to be all over.  We enter a “post-Christian” age.

IV.

But the heart of the good news is that this is precisely when that “deep magic” comes on line.  Even before what would be considered the fullness of time, the dead witnesses receive new breath from God.  They rise up and are reanimated like the dry bones in Ezekiel, and are called home in triumph.  And they ascend, which is to say, they expand in presence and influence, and their testimony permeates the whole world.  

The Way of Life in Jesus Christ brings us through death, to a more profound and true place, grounded in God’s love which is far more fundamental and basic to reality than the surface turbulence that consumes most of our attention.  The paradox of Christianity is that the more they kill it, the more it comes alive.  

The early church writer, Tertullian, famously noted that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”  The places of the most withering persecution are often the places where the church subsequently flourishes.  This unexpected renewal shakes the foundations of the secular City.  Death is supposed to be the end, not the beginning.  People’s expectations are shattered.  People’s lives are transformed.  And in the end they actually glorify God!

The point is that we rely on that “deep magic.”  Jesus Christ reveals to us the meaning and purpose and direction of all that is, and it is a love and life that we simply cannot lose.  God’s living, saving Presence is embedded and encoded in everything.  All our supposed “losses?”  They really open us up to a more direct experience and knowledge of the truth.

That’s why Paul says to give thanks in all circumstances, and that everything is working together for good, even though it rarely seems like that is the case.  In the economy of God, nothing is ever lost.  All our changes, even our death, serve only to reveal something deeper and stronger at the heart of all things.  That is the overwhelming, deathless, pervasive, and liberating love of God, to which Jesus Christ, the Lamb, is the full and final witness.

+++++++    

"No More Time."

Revelation 10

June 16, 2019

I.

In the center of this chapter, this great and good angel from heaven proclaims that “there will be no more delay.”  The word here translated as “delay” is “chronos” which is one of the Greek words for “time.”  The angel is stating that “there will be no more time.”  Time, in this case the linear, chronological understanding of time as moving inexorably from past into the future, in which one set of events is gone forever except in our imperfect memories, and the other set of events is unknown and yet to come, this kind of time, is over.  There is now only the fulfilled mystery of God, which is the good news of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ.

This is actually the same proclamation that Jesus makes at the very beginning of his ministry, which we often intentionally repeat at the start of our Lord’s Day worship services, when he says, “The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has come near.”  In effect, the Lord says that one corrosive kind of time is over and a different, life-giving understanding of time is now fulfilled, revealed, manifested, and available.

We do not have a clue about what is going on in the book of Revelation, and in the New Testament generally, if we do not change our way of thinking about time.  For Revelation does not look ahead to the future so much as look within to the meaning and purpose of events.  There is a sense then that the events described in Revelation are not just about the past or the future; they are always happening.  

They depict in symbolic and figurative terms the fundamental collision in our lives and in our world between, on the one hand, the world-as-we-know-it, seen through and generated by human egocentricity, and, on the other hand, God’s blessed and good creation.  On this side we have human empires built on fear, anger, hatred, sin, and violence, and on the other side we have God’s bright Kingdom of love, hope, shalom, compassion, and goodness.

In this encounter what is real will always and necessarily overcome what is false, unreal, imaginary, and illusory….  But it might take a while and will definitely involve some spectacular and violent special effects.  Truth will always defeat lies, but lies have great power when people choose to follow and base their whole lives on them, and even build whole institutions and civilizations on them.

In the meantime people have a choice.  We can exist according to the ideologies of egocentric human empires, which promote fear and violence based on false assumptions about past and future, where memory and desire are mixed, in which we are encouraged to get, extract, acquire, steal, and take what we want by any means necessary.  Or we can live by Jesus’ example and teachings, approaching life with humility, forgiveness, simplicity, welcome, joy, and peace, where we share with each other and have enough.

One ideology has driven us to useless wars and global environmental catastrophe, which spreads death, destruction, and even extinction abroad.  The other is the only way to live in peace with each other and our Creator.  One is a highway to death, the other is the Way of Life.  That has always been the human choice going back at least as far as Deuteronomy 30, when Moses presents these two alternatives to the Israelites.  Death or life?  Follow the dictates of your own ego?  Or follow the laws of God?  Exist according to a past and a future of your own imagining?  Or live in God’s eternal now?

II.

This mighty angel appears here, between the sixth and the seventh trumpet, as another interlude in the series of catastrophic consequences of human sinfulness, where people are once again reminded that it doesn’t have to be this way, we are bringing this all on ourselves, these disasters are not God’s positive will for the world, there is another way to live, which is according to “the mystery of God, as announced to the prophets.”

We know this angel is an emissary of pure goodness because of John’s description.  The angel is wrapped in a cloud like God on Mt. Sinai, having a halo like a rainbow, reminding us of God’s covenant with Noah.  The angel’s legs are each like the pillar of fire guiding the Israelites in the wilderness.  The angel’s face is a source of light like the sun, and is mighty like a lion.  This angel straddles land and sea, and connects to heaven with a raised hand, and speaks in thunder like the voice that comes to Jesus a couple of times. 

The angel is a special representative of God, the One “who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it.”  God is manifest in the creation itself which bears the voice-print of the One who speaks everything into being at the beginning, including earth, sea, and sky.  Indeed, it is in the act of preserving and protecting creation that the angel declares time to be over, for it is our literally chronic, pathological corruption of time, permeated with our perverted memories and our fear about the future, that has driven the creation to the point where this great correction and reckoning is necessary and inevitable.

But in this case the words are not about destruction and calamity.  John is forbidden to translate and share what the thunder says here.  Instead, maybe he is to do what the thunder says to do, which is to eat a little scroll which the angel carries in the left hand.

This business of eating a scroll simply means to digest and internalize the message of the scroll so that it becomes second nature and a part of the one who eats it.  The words of the scroll literally become one’s body; the prophet becomes identical with the words in a deeper way than even memorization would accomplish.  In a sense he becomes the scroll.  His life reflects and expresses the content of this scroll.

This little scroll might be the synopsis or the executive summary or the thumbnail, as we might say today, of the larger scroll that the Lamb has already opened in previous chapters.  It probably contains the account of the mystery of God that is being fulfilled, the good news of God’s love for the whole world revealed in Jesus Christ.  It gives John the core message, the elevator speech, the central tenets of what he is called to communicate.

III.

John obediently eats it and discovers it is as sweet as honey in his mouth… but that when he swallows it, his stomach grows sour and upset.  Thus indicating the dual character of the message which is at once very good and at the same time very disturbing to people who have invested their lives in the maintenance of the status quo.  It is delicious to the mouth that will have to talk about it; it is sickening to the stomach, which is the organ of consuming, devouring, assimilating, and extracting.

Countless Christian prophets and missionaries have found this to be the case, where they preach joy, peace, blessing, and goodness, but people find it distasteful and nauseating, existentially threatening to their way of existence.  And they treat missionaries often like people treated the Lord himself, with rejection and violence.

The words used by the angel in giving John the scroll are identical to the words we often use in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  “Take and eat.”  There is therefore a strong implication that the contents of the scroll, the words of God, are related to the eucharistic bread, which becomes the Word of God, the Body of Christ.  Jesus does command us to remember him by eating his Body and Blood in the Sacrament, with a similar effect: he becomes melded into us, he becomes us, his Body literally becomes our physical body, his ministry becomes our ministry, his salvation and even his relationship to God gets shared with us as we become by grace what he is by nature.

Our eyes are opened and we are awakened to the living Presence of God in ourselves and in everything God has made, and we are inspired to act according to this new knowledge and insight, living in God’s eternal now lives of compassion, forgiveness, simplicity, humility, gratitude, and love.  This is something we may do because we are not crippled by self-serving fantasies about the past or blinded by a fear of the future.  

Thus our main relationship is not a horizontal, linear understanding of time or even of others in society and the world; rather, in Christ we gain a vertical grounding in God who is always the same, yesterday, today, and forever.  That is what living according to Jesus’ life and teaching does.  It frees us from fear and anger, it dissolves our motivation to hate and steal, because we realize that in Christ we have everything we will never need, and we have it now.  

As John eats the scroll and we eat the bread of the eucharist, we internalize God’s message of love and truth.  We become the message, as embodied in our actions, witnessing to a new and different way to live, in the Presence, in the Now, in the today which is always the only Day of salvation.

IV.

One of the great classics of Christian spirituality is a little book called The Practice of the Presence of God, by a simple, medieval monk named Brother Lawrence.  In it, Lawrence talks about finding God in our regular, daily, hourly work, simply by paying attention.  Simply by listening and being present to what is happening.

Christian meditative disciplines do the same thing.  We focus on the now, usually through something like the breath or the heartbeat, or using a short, repeated phrase.  This is not what is often ridiculed and dismissed as “navel gazing,” because the point is not to rest in such practices as ends in themselves, but to become aware through them of how we are connected to others and to the whole creation.

To be truly present means to get out of our minds, which would have us dallying in memories of the past and desires about the future, and into our bodies which are always present, always participating in the material world, all of which is inscribed with God’s voice-print from the beginning.  This is the flesh that the Word becomes.  This is our point of contact with the Word, with Jesus Christ, and therefore with God.

When I lift up the bread and say the words Jesus instructs us to say, “This is my body,” he means the bread… and he means the whole world that the bread represents… and he means us.  Each one of us.  Here and now.  We are his body.

+++++++

"New Wine."

Acts 2:1-21

June 9, 2019

I.

On that special Day of Pentecost, when the apostles are gathered in the same upstairs room where Jesus had celebrated the Passover with them 50 days earlier, after the Holy Spirit falls on them in the form of “tongues of fire” ululating over their heads, enabling them to speak and be heard by people from all over the known world in their own languages, some of the observers scoff at them.  They think the disciples are drunk.  “They are filled with new wine,” they quip.

This is not something that Presbyterians are often accused of.  Only rarely does anyone look at us and dismisses us for acting like a bunch of inebriated carousers.  We tend to be pretty staid, controlled, sober, and dignified (with a few individual exceptions I will not identify).  Not that there’s anything wrong with that….  I mean, we range from decent-and-in-order on a good day, to frozen-chosen on our worst days.  No one ever refers to “Those wild and crazy Presbyterians.”  With the possible exception of seminary parties.

When he hears this critique, that they are all drunk, Peter says, “Yo, we can’t be drunk, it’s only 9 o’clock in the morning!”  (Peter had obviously never been to a some parades I've been to, where you’re wading through empty beer bottles by 8:30.  But I digress.)

The thing that the disciples are doing that makes them seem drunk is… communicating.  They are talking, and the miracle is that all language barriers are broken down, and people actually understand them.  Sometimes I wish this miracle would happen when we all speak English!  I recently had someone complain about a sermon being too political because I talked too much about immigrants.  In the actual sermon I didn’t even allude to immigrants.  But clearly that was what was on this person’s brain so much that everything they heard was somehow about immigrants.  

Communication is always a miracle when it happens, and it doesn’t happen that often, believe me.  It’s like we each have our own private language, and the words we say and hear are mainly about ourselves — our fears, our anger, our desires, our hopes, our memories.  And what we say only makes sense to someone else when they can make it relate to their fears, anger, desires, hope, and memories.  It’s like we’ve got these internal monologues going and sometimes some of it leaks out in actual speech, which someone else might hear and connect to their own internal monologue.

But what gets communicated?  What information gets transferred intact from one person to another?  Very little, I fear.

And yet here we get the impression that there is this mystical miracle in which what the apostles say gets immediately comprehended by the hearers, cutting through language barriers and internal monologues, conveying directly this new information about God’s work in Jesus Christ.  And it is nevertheless so disconcerting to some that they defensively dismiss it as drunken craziness.

It like a bunch of people proclaiming: “God loves you all!” and some responding with, “Woah, that’s crazy; have another cup of wine.…”

II.      

Then Peter, in an attempt to explain what is going on, delivers a long quote from the prophet Joel about how “in the last days” God will pour out the Holy Spirit, God’s own Breath, the creative force the universe, upon “all flesh,” which is to say, everyone.  People will have visions and dreams; they will deliver ecstatic prophecies.  They will, in other words, communicate.  They will be empowered to tell the truth, and speak words that will somehow cut through our ego-centric filters and actually inspire and inform people.  They will point-out what’s what.

This will be accompanied by spectacular signs in the sky and on the earth, which sound more like the Book of Revelation. 

The thing I want to draw your attention to here, is that Peter is under the impression that “the last days” are now.  He is saying that “the last days” have arrived, as evidenced by this outpouring of the Spirit on the disciples of Jesus.  They are just the vanguard of a more general distribution of the Spirit.  This is only the beginning.  But like the apostle Paul says, “Look, now is the opportune time; today is the day of salvation!”  

Peter is saying that God’s future has broken into the present.  Linear time is an illusion; the future isn’t far off so much as always available and present to us, if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.  The way to experience and know God’s future is not by prognostication or analysis of the past and projecting trends forward.  It is by waiting… it is by getting in touch with the present where God is always alive… it is by going inward and finding that the future, the last days, is in a deep sense already here, with, within, and among us.

This is what Jesus himself proclaims at the outset of his ministry: the Kingdom of God has come near.  It is not something that only happens when we die or when Jesus returns at some far off conclusion of time.  It is near, it is available, it is touchable, it is present, here and now.  We do not have to wait for God to be present to us, that is a given.  Our waiting is for us to let go of enough of the baggage we are holding on to so that we may be present to God.

This is what the Holy Spirit has been teaching the disciples over the last 50 days as they at first cowered in that room in Jerusalem, where the risen Lord Jesus appears to them.  The resurrection of Jesus reveals our true human nature and destiny, it reveals the truth beneath the turbulence of our corrupted experience, it shows that the true and eternal life which we always imagined to be far away and inaccessible, is right here. 

If we were to suggest that, no, the last days have not yet arrived, Peter would give us an argument.  He would just point to this glorious and joyful noise emanating from his friends, all testifying to God’s amazing, redeeming love, and say, “Don’t believe me, then; but believe the words of the prophet Joel who predicted exactly this!”

III.

In conclusion, Peter remembers Joel’s words: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”  Joel’s book, you may recall, is about a devastating plague of locusts brought on by the people’s injustices.  In the end God does restore the appropriately purged people.  It is after that that Joel says the words Peter recites.

And the urge that people “call on the name of the Lord” in order to be saved seems to mean that it is this act, calling on God’s name, which is to say, calling on Jesus Christ, the One True God, who reveals the divine nature and presence to us, in itself is instrumental in cutting through the ravages of time and history, and grounding us in eternity.  Calling on his name makes present God’s future, it brings God into our lives today.

Some of you know that one of the pillars of my own spiritual practice is something called “The Jesus Prayer,” or “The Prayer of the Heart,” which involves a simple repetition of Jesus’ name or a short prayer about his name.  “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” is the standard form.  The point of this calling on the name of the Lord is to ground us inwardly in the eternity his name represents, thus bringing us to a deep trust in him.  It is to make present the future of his coming, realizing that he is always here and it is we who need to show up.

To call on the name of the Lord is to realize that God is reconciling the world in Jesus Christ.  The name is about God’s love and compassion and forgiveness, and letting that enter us to be expressed and shared by us.  That’s why Jesus has us pray to keep the name holy and not misuse or abuse it, because if we lose the true meaning of his name and let it be cluttered with other associations, some of which are truly contradictory to God’s purpose, it ceases to serve as this doorway to eternity, and becomes just another dead-end in our morass of useless verbiage.  It stops communicating.

The power of the name is also that it is expressive of Oneness and unity.  Jesus is God’s Word by whom God breathes creation into being… all creation.  He is the truly human one and at the same time “true God of true God.”   His name therefore brings together everything and reveals that we are all siblings together.  Just as there is that list of nationalities and languages encompassing a representative selection of the whole known world, God in Christ speaks to all because God is in all.  Even animals, birds, fish, trees, and rocks are, in the insight of the people who once inhabited this land, “all our relations.”  This is what his name reveals.  This is what we are invoking when we call on the name of the Lord.

IV.

So let’s go out into this world filled with the Spirit.  Let us call on the name of the Lord with confidence, and bring by our acts of compassion, sharing, forgiveness, acceptance, non-violence, generosity, and love, God’s name into the lives of people with such vigor and confidence that they do not recognize us as Presbyterians, but wonder what we’re on… and want some of it.  It’s new wine indeed, the wine of God’s promised future, and it’s available now.

+++++++     

 

Attack of the Nightmare Cavalry.

Revelation 9:13-21

June 2, 2019

I.

In my first church there was a young woman whose father died when she was 16.  Apparently, when the minister came over to comfort the family, he said her father’s death was “God’s will.”  To her mind, this made God a murderer.

It is possible for someone to hear these alarming and violent stories from the book of Revelation and have the same opinion about God.  Who wants a deity who would release this kind of grotesque catastrophe upon people?  We want a nicer god!  Where’s the forgiveness?  What happened to the love?  Should not a God who asks us to have compassion for others, also be expected to, well, have compassion for others?

These kinds of questions lead people to atheism or at least agnosticism.  In the 18th century, the French philosopher, Voltaire, decided God was not worth much because of the death and devastation people suffered in an earthquake that hit the city of Lisbon.  Like him, many refuse to accept a God who lets bad things happen.  And a lot of bad things have happened since then.  It is, and has been, the go-to argument of non-religious or anti-Christian people to point out how messed up the world is.  If God is so great, why doesn’t he fix all this?

It doesn’t seem to help when a pastor solemnly pronounces how this or that disaster is God’s will.  Or when insurance companies refer to natural catastrophes as “acts of God.”  Or when someone decides that your dad’s death, or that of your grandmother, or best friend, or baby, was God’s will. 

I know what that minister was thinking.  He was trying to bring comfort and reassurance into a situation of sharp grief.  I know that, from the perspective of faith, saying something is God’s will is supposed to help you see that God is in charge and “all things work together for good.” 

This assumes that people have a modicum of theology and understand that at the core of everything God is good, God is love, God is always bringing life out of death and light into our darkness.  To say something is God’s will means that, in spite of how it feels now, everything is really going to be okay.  God is in charge, and nothing can ever separate us from God’s love, and God’s will is always to heal and to save and to deliver and to redeem.

But for people who don’t know this, then the very idea that someone’s death or any other cataclysm is God’s will makes God out to be a very bad force in the world.  God becomes this evil monster sitting in heaven throwing lightning bolts at people, punishing us for every transgression, or even just for the heck of it, like a boy who tortures bugs and animals, even abandoning and demanding the blood of his own Son to appease his mindless, pathetic honor.  According to one perverse piece of traditional theology, unfortunately often identified with Presbyterianism, God even created some people just to torture them for eternity.  Nice guy….

II.

Is it any wonder that people find other ways to spend their Sunday mornings?  Take a walk in the park.  Play with your kids.  Read a book.  Workout.  Watch Netflix.  Anything seems way more edifying than worshipping a great psycho-killer in the sky.

What people often fail to notice is that bad things are still happening.  You don’t become exempt from them just because you stopped believing in God.  These things are a part of life.  And what faith seeks to do is not to escape or avoid those things, which is impossible.  But to help us to frame them and interpret them in the most positive and helpful ways we can.  It’s not about how to get out of the challenges of existence, but how we get through them.  How do we grow from them?  How do we adapt and learn and become better able to handle them, especially for the next time?

To say something is God’s will means that it is part of a much larger and very good purpose.  Doctors do not prescribe drastic treatments like amputations or chemotherapy in order to kill us or purely to inflict pain.  They do it because they know that if some part of us or something inside of us is killing us, it has to go, and removing it can be very traumatic.  

The plagues that God sent upon Egypt in the Exodus story are always behind John’s visions.  Those events, violent and lethal as they are, are not gratuitous, cruel, and meaningless.  They have a point.  And the point is the liberation of the people from an even worse situation of slavery, which is about the worst condition a person can be put into.  God didn’t put them in bondage; the Egyptians did.  But it takes a lot of energy to break a destructive and oppressive cycle like that.   

The fact is that the things we do in this existence have consequences, just like sticking your hand in a fire is going to burn you.  Do we get angry with God because God doesn’t suspend the laws of nature for our comfort and convenience?  The laws of nature are designed to keep alive the most beautiful and abundant planet in the universe as far as we know.  The only place where life is even possible.  God’s been working on it for 13 billion years or so.  Do we expect that we will be allowed to mess with it with impunity?

No.  If we do stupid, selfish, and destructive things, expect appropriate results.  If we threaten the balance of life, expect the balance to be restored at some cost to us.  If we do evil we will get evil back on ourselves in spades.

  

We matter to God.  And the “we” that matters to God is everyone, all of life, all of creation.  If one part of that “we” starts harming and destroying some other parts, well, the larger, more inclusive “we” is going to be protected.  If we have decided to exist according to egocentric, personality-driven, selfish values, spawning idolatry, injustice, oppression, pain, and misery in others, we should expect to get clobbered when we encounter the Truth.  The evil we put into the world will come back to bite us.  Because God’s love for everyone is more important than God’s love for some who think it’s all about them… which is the root of idolatry.

  

III.

And that’s what’s going on here.  There is a beautiful verse in Ezekiel that I quote a lot.  Ezekiel is also a book full of horrendous catastrophes; John knows it well.  At the end of Ezekiel 18, God calls on Israel to repent and get a new heart and a new spirit.  “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God.  Turn, then, and live!”  

The message for that girl whose father died is: God didn’t kill your father; that’s not what God’s about, really.  God is about life!  God is about love!  God is about joy and goodness!  So cherish the good memories.  As much as you miss him, your dad is free, and light, and, in other more subtle ways, he is still here with and in you.

This is important because we tend to view death as the worst thing.  But when death starts, back in Genesis, after the disobedience of Adam and Eve, God says they will now return to the dust from which they were made, and even sends an angel to keep them from accessing the Tree of Life.  This is not a punishment so much as a mercy, because the debased new existence the humans dug themselves into would be intolerable if it lasted forever.  They are allowed out of it; they are permitted to die and move on.

In the meantime, God has to see that the balance in the good creation is restored.  God is cleaning up our mess.  God is purging the creation of our injustices, our inequalities, our proclivity to violence, our selfishness, and our destruction.  God is destroying the destroyers so that the people and the creation may be restored.  In this case God is doing what Jesus predicts when he says that “those who live by the sword will die by the sword.”  Those who lived by war, will die by war.  And empires have always lived by war.

Last week we witnessed the cloud of demon-locusts.  Today it is a horde of demon-horses, cavalry.  If the locusts represent the ravages of wanton consumption, the cavalry brings the ravages of war.  In those days, that’s what cavalry meant: war.  

To the Romans, cavalry brought one thing to mind: Parthians, the great enemy of Rome who lived on the other side of the Euphrates River, famous for their invincible cavalry.  They were the enemy tribe that Rome could never defeat.

  

Only, the cavalry that John sees are not normal; they are nightmare cavalry where the horses have lions’ heads spewing a deadly fire, smoke, and sulfur — like napalm dragons — that kill a third of the people.  And for tails they had poisonous snakes.

And even this does not move the survivors out of their debilitating addiction to self-serving idolatries.  They continue to engage in murder, drugs, sexual abuse, and theft.  Part of John’s point being that the so-called “living” are not any better off than those massacred by the demon-cavalry.  They are still stuck in a cycle of corruption, ignorance, and violence, as they wait for the next trumpet to sound. 

IV.

God desires the death of no one.  Yet, in the course of the Creator’s preserving and protecting life on earth, many die because of the ignorance, selfishness, and violence of humans.  But this is not the end either.  There remains way more to life than we can know and see from our mortal, temporal vantage point.

Remember in that Ezekiel passage, God says, “Turn, then, and live!”  There is always in Revelation this undercurrent calling for repentance and discipleship.  No matter how bad it gets out there, we can still “turn and live,” which is to say, turn our lives over to the Lamb who is overseeing this whole mess, who has been through it and borne its worst, and who yet lives forever. 

It’s like God is saying, look, I don’t like this anymore than you do.  You can go through this horror you have brought on yourselves if you like.  Or you can follow my Son, the Lamb, and live in peace, justice, compassion, forgiveness, hope, joy, sharing, equality, and love.  That’s what’s going to win in the end anyway.  Why not start now?

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