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.

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