"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.

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