Woman v. Dragon.

Revelation 12.1-6

July 28, 2019

I.

I once heard it said that Jesus comes to bring in the Kingdom of God, but what we unfortunately ended up with was the Church.  We Protestants, who historically tend often to have a very low view of the Church, usually nod our heads in sober agreement.  The Church as we know it seems to fall far short of what Jesus has in mind.  It would not occur to most of us to say that the Church and the Kingdom of God are in any way the same thing.    

Our history, of course, began in the 1500’s with a rebellion against the corrupt Roman Catholic Church of the middle-ages.  That has made us suspicious of the institutional Church from the outset.  And it also led to our present situation where there are at least 30K separate and independent Protestant denominations and churches.  While I appreciate the value of diversity, I also worry that we just don’t take the Church with very much seriousness.

We easily jump from congregation to congregation and from denomination to denomination.  We tend to treat churches like we treat any other consumer product: we look for one that suits us, where we are comfortable, where we feel spiritually fed, where we get along with the people.    

These days we even have many who imagine they can worship God just fine without the Church at all.  Indeed, they don’t like anything smacking of “religion,” which is considered a debased, flawed, and nasty institutionally throttled and doctrinally strait-jacketed version of some more pure spirituality. For people to claim to be “spiritual but not religious” is a thing.  

I understand that and, to a degree, respect it.  The Church is, on the one hand, a human institution and like all human institutions it is fraught with the addictions of our egocentricity, and is too often a place of judgment, exclusion, hypocrisy, and even bigotry, that has comprehensively caved in to the nationalism, nostalgia, and greed that dominates the establishment of whatever culture it is stuck in.  Many are alienated from Jesus because of bad church experiences.  Others find that their love for Jesus remains in spite of the church, not because of it.

But for us the Church is also an article of faith.  The Nicene Creed says, “We believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.”  The Church is something we believe in and within.  We can cynically dismiss this as a self-serving stipulation that church leaders of the time inserted into the creed for their own benefit.  But that ignores the fact that Jesus himself formed communities, centered around his 12 core disciples.  The gathering of disciples has been just that, a gathering, a community, a body, since his time.

And he is simply continuing what God begins first in working through the family of Abraham, and then in working through the band of Israelite slaves liberated from Egypt.  Like it or not, God has always called and used communities of people to embody the good news of God’s love.  This means that the Church is not an unnecessary or optional appendage to discipleship; it is the essential framework through which discipleship happens.

II.        

This is the basic truth that John sees in his heavenly vision of the “woman clothed with the sun… wearing a crown of 12 stars.”  The sun is symbolic of God who is Light, and the stars remind us of the 12 tribes by which Israel is organized, and the 12 apostles of the original Church.

The woman clothed with the sun is a personification of the People of God who are called by God to participate in God’s work and reveal God’s Presence in the world by their obedience to God’s Word.  In other words, she is at the same time Israel and the Church, which is a continuation of Israel.  

Therefore, she, in a sense, represents us.  For we are the ones who are called to give birth to the Word of God in the world.  Just as God chose Mary, who represents the culmination of Israel, who assented to God’s emerging into the world in and through her, we, by the quality of our repentance and discipleship, are also called to bring Christ into people’s lives.  

Unfortunately, this is not an easy process.  That’s why the woman in the vision is depicted as in labor.  God does not come into the world through us easily and painlessly.  It requires discipline, breathing, pushing, and suffering even in the best circumstances.  And we seem never to be in the best circumstances.  For after introducing us to this woman, John then presents “another portent,” which is a “great red dragon” representing the power of evil loose in the world, especially in the Roman Empire.  And this monstrous entity situates itself in such a way that it can grab and devour whatever the woman gives birth to.

Our bringing God into the world is difficult both because of our own limitations as mortal, temporal creatures, and because the forces of evil always stand ready to kill whatever we do finally manage to squeeze out.  That can be a huge distraction!  The people of God will always be met with fierce opposition from the powers that dominate our world.  Pharaoh orders the death of all the baby Israelite boys in Egypt; Herod orders the death of all the infant boys in Bethlehem.  Both represent the snarling red dragon attempting to cut off God’s emergence into the world from the start.

The red dragon stands for the corrosive ego-centric temptations that accost us all the time.  Jesus faces them in the wilderness when the red dragon appears in his true form of Satan, the Adversary and Accuser.  These temptations are summarized in terms of wealth, fame, and power; and these are precisely the lures to which we are always subject which would snuff out our mission and ministry from the beginning.  When Christians or the Church cave in to these considerations, that is, when we are in it for the money or the power or the popularity, it’s all over and the dragon has killed our witness.

The red dragon appears to us as the cultural, social, political, and economic powers that rule  in the world.  That’s who is trying to convince us it’s all about getting ahead and acquiring things and competing with others.

If the Church has failed it is because and to the degree that it succumbs to these 3 temptations, the same ones that are aimed at Jesus.    

III.

But when the woman’s child is born he is immediately snatched up to heaven to God’s very throne, out of the clutches of the waiting red dragon.  The child, of course, is Jesus the Messiah, as we see from the description from Psalm 2 of One who is to rule the nations with a rod of iron.  In the gospels, Jesus’ life is a “lifting up,” beginning with his coming up out of the waters of baptism and his overcoming Satan’s temptations, and finally culminates when he is crucified, resurrected, and ascends into heaven.

The woman flees “into the wilderness” which reminds us of the years spent by the people of God in the Sinai desert after escaping from Pharaoh, and the actual history of the early church which escaped to the desert town of Pella in Jordan after the destruction of Jerusalem, a couple of decades before John’s vision.

In Scripture, from Moses to Elijah to John the Baptizer, the wilderness is both a place of physical challenge and extremity, and at the same time often a place of renewal and gestation, where God nurtures us and we grow in intimacy with God.  It is a place where the people of God learn, sometimes the hard way, to rely on God alone.  It is a place where the people are forged together from being a collection of unrelated individuals, to being a cohesive, mutually dependent, mutually supportive group or community.  The wilderness represents the liminal space between our situation of isolation and bondage and the fulfillment of our liberation as a united people ready to enter the Promised Land.     

John is suggesting that the Church of his time — and perhaps our time as well — is in a wilderness.  It is a wilderness “prepared by God” for the woman’s nourishment… but it is nevertheless a wilderness, a desert.  And that does describe the place the Church, at least the mainline Protestant church, finds itself these days, and for the last half century.  Maybe the Church is always in a wilderness as long as it is called to make a witness in a difficult world.  Maybe the church that thinks it is not in a wilderness is only a pseudo-church that is not taking its witness seriously.

Which is why our knee-jerk approach to get back to the glory days hasn’t worked very well.  Maybe what we need to do is receive the nourishment of the wilderness and use this time to regroup and restore our relationship to God, which means our relationship to each other.  Maybe this is where we are supposed to get over the ideology of individualism that the dragon has always used to divide-and-conquer.  Maybe the point is building relationships and community in which we learn to support, forgive, nurture, correct, and learn from each other.  

IV.

The answer to bad churches is not to jettison the community altogether and allow the dragon to pick us off as individuals, one by one.  It is to recover Jesus’ vision of the Church as the beloved community, the gospel community, the gathering of disciples, the People of God.  It is to use the challenges of the wilderness to forge stronger and deeper bonds with each other.  For it is only together, with each other, that we are able to bring God into the world by the quality of our repentance and discipleship.

The Church needs to take on more of the characteristics of a 12-step recovery group, realizing that we cannot do this alone.  We need to present ourselves as the antidote to the strong trends in our society towards isolation, alienation, loneliness, and self-help; we need to be a place where people find the love, affection, forgiveness, acceptance, gratitude, and affirmation — in personal contact with others — that they need to emerge and remain connected to the Truth.

It is less convenient, messier, more difficult, and requires more vulnerability than imagining that we are on our own and functioning as separate individuals.  But it is through strengthening our connections to each other as members of Christ’s Body that we also become members of God’s creation and even of God. 

Together we are called to be the eternal faithful witnessing community, the woman clothed with the sun, by whom the love of God in Jesus Christ touches the hearts, minds, and bodies of people in need.  Together may we realize in our own interactions and relationships, beginning in the Church, the Kingdom of God, which Jesus proclaims and embodies and hands over to us by the power of his Spirit.

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Spoiler Alert.

Revelation 11:14-19

July 21, 2019

I.

With the sounding of the long-awaited seventh trumpet, and the wonderful hymn of the elders in heaven, we reach the center, the heart, of the Book of Revelation.  The victory of God is no longer in the future; it has happened, it is present, it is now.  God is no longer “the One who is and was and is to come;” now God is and was, but the future, the One who is to come,  has arrived.

In one sense this is the end of the book.  But at the same time we notice that there are still like 10 chapters ahead of us.  This is because the structure of the book is such that linear time breaks down.  We get repetitions, foreshadowings, and anticipations, so that it is not a neat, chronological account, but shows how we live in a time of mixed memory and desire, where the past and future impact the present even as present concerns shape the way we imagine the past and future.

We exist in a confused world where we cherish our rosy or nasty memories of the past and our optimistic or fearful expectations about the future.  Both approaches are basically fantasies we invent in our brains having nothing to do with reality.  What we remember and anticipate are based on our egocentric reasoning, distorted by the fear, shame, and anger that exert so much pull in our lives.  So they are always in some sense self-serving.  

John wants us to trust instead in the larger picture he is presenting, especially here, where we encounter a vision of the End of the story before it is fulfilled and experienced directly.  It’s like skipping to read the end of a novel but instead of a “spoiler” it grounds us in a sure and certain hope that everything works for good in the end.

Christian faith is thus a living today in light of a future we hold in faith, trust, and obedience.  We are called to live as if God’s triumph is already a done deal… because it is.  It is we temporally conditioned mortals who are still on the way to realizing it, but from the perspective of eternity, “it is finished,” as Jesus says on the cross.  The story is over: God wins, love wins, life wins.  “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign for ever and ever.”

There is a lot more to go in this book, just like there’s a lot more to go in our lives and history.  But the one thing upon which we may depend, the one thing that gives our continued existence meaning, direction, and purpose, the one thing that ensures our life forever, and the one thing that actually makes that future start to emerge and be realized among us, is that we hold to the Truth that the God of life and love always stands victorious.  We are people who live now in the light of God’s promised future.

And God’s future is fully revealed in Jesus, and his life of compassion, peace, equality, welcome, humility, and love.  That is what the future looks like, and the more we participate in these qualities, the more we resonate to the frequency of the future God has for us.

II.

And this revelation of the future also stand in stark contrast with the way the world is.  The story of the Book of Revelation is the collision between God’s Truth and human falsehood, between God’s certain future, humanity’s sure destiny, and the world we have made for ourselves based on our sinful, egocentric, selfish, fearful, violent agendas.

One way to talk about this collision is in terms of judgment.  God’s judgment is always forgiveness and love, acceptance and peace.  However, if we are in a state where we cannot accept and live in that goodness because we are addicted to retribution, hatred, exclusion, and violence, that is how God’s Truth and mercy is going to be felt by us.  The grace that God brings is toxic to our self-interest and is perceived as harmful to us.  It hurts.

The first thing the elders’ hymn talks about here are raging nations.  Those nations who live according to rage, will experience God’s love as just that: rage, anger, wrath.  This is what is going on in a lot of this book.  People, by their injustice, cruelty, retribution, threats, and greed, bring down on themselves from the Lord of the universe what they have been investing in their whole lives.  If you put rage into the world, rage is what you will get back.  If you live by the sword you will die by the sword, says Jesus himself the night before he is executed by Rome’s sword.

We need to be very conscious, alert, sober, and humble about this.  We cannot rationalize, deny, justify, or defend violence and greed just because we are the ones doing it.  The consequence is the same.

Not even the Israelites were exempt… indeed, for “the nation whose God is the Lord” the standards and expectation are even higher.  If we put “In God We Trust” on our money, and claim to be “one nation under God,” and decorate our churches with national flags, we are raising the bar for ourselves.  We are claiming a very high standard and we will be expected to live up to it.  We better be perfect, is all I’m saying.

We will be judged according to the categories that are important to God, as we know from the Word.  How did we treat the sick?  The poor?  The strangers, aliens, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers?  How did we treat the weak, the imprisoned, the destitute?  Were we guided by God’s Truth and compassion as we see it in Jesus?  Or did we follow our own paranoia, nostalgia, hysteria, anger, sin, and self-righteousness?  Did we help those in need, as Jesus does?  Or did we smugly pontificate about the law and who is or isn’t “illegal,” like the Pharisees did?  

Another thing that happens in this judgment is the reward and commendation of those who do serve God, the prophets and saints who live according to God’s will, who fear God and no one else, who seek first God’s Kingdom.  Their reward is to live in God’s Kingdom.  It is to inherit the Earth according to their gentleness and poverty of spirit, their grief and peacemaking, their willingness fo suffer for righteousness.  The reward is that the commonwealth we anticipate in the humility, forgiveness, non-violence, and  compassion we experience now, will be realized in full. 

III.

The elders then make one last point.  In addition to the judgment of nations and God’s servants, their hymn concludes with a summary of God’s ultimate victory.  It kind of sums up this whole book.  The final revelation of God’s Truth and Presence means, as it says in verse 18, that “it is time to destroy those who destroy the Earth.”

Apparently, the Earth is more important than those who destroy it.  God will destroy them to preserve the Earth.  I’m going to let that sink in.  How we treat the Earth is a major factor governing how the Creator treats us.

Jesus tells at least one parable about a vineyard left in the care of tenants who proceed to trash it.  What will the owner do when he comes back to his vineyard?

From the climate crisis, to the plastics crisis, to the mass extinction crisis, to the moral and intellectual crisis of people who deny, suppress, ignore, or even celebrate these other crises, do we really have to ask to whom the elders are referring here?  Do we really want to know who “the destroyers of the Earth” are? 

In the old days the urgency behind Christian evangelism was often fear of hell.  Hell is an abstraction compared to what we face now.  Which means that now the urgency of Christian evangelism has to be about avoiding the hell we are literally constructing as we remake the planet in our own image.  To put it directly, the fate of the Earth depends on people following Jesus instead of their own desires.

That is, it depends on our living as Jesus lives: in simplicity, sharing, generosity, wonder, humility, compassion, gentleness, communion, and non-violence.  Which means living according to the coming triumph of God that John sees and the heavenly elders in his vision proclaim.

Living by God’s values and practices, as we see them realized in Jesus, is not easy.  It is a continual awakening that always involves sorrow over what we have done and continue to do, and the joy of repentance, which is the opportunity to turn to God and change.  It is nothing less than a continual dying of our old selves, and emergence of our True Selves in God.    

That emergence is also at the same time a matter of finding and accepting our real place in creation as caretakers, preservers, stewards, and agents of the Creator in whose Image we are made.  “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”  If that is so, then we need to treat it as the Lord wills that it be treated.  Which would not include extraction, waste, exploitation, poisoning, and degrading the Earth in the name of the profit and convenience of a few humans.

Just saying.

IV.

After this magnificent hymn, John sees the gates of the heavenly Temple open, and he can even see the Ark of the Covenant inside.  The Ark, of course, was a golden box containing the original Ten Commandments and some other sacred Israelite objects.  Not only was it carried into battle by the Israelites representing the saving Presence of God, but the lid of it was called the Mercy Seat and was considered the literal place where God chose to dwell with the people.  The vision is accompanied by a battery of meteorological and seismological fireworks, as if nature were flexing its muscles.

The Ark had been lost like 600 years before.  It has never been found.  There was no Ark in the Jerusalem Temple that Jesus preaches in.  What John sees is the Temple in heaven.  The Temple ritually represents the creation, and the Ark represents God’s abiding, saving, victorious Presence at the heart of creation.

This vision reiterates what John has been saying and what he heard the elders singing.  The true situation — Reality — is that the Creator remains with and in the creation, and always will.  Our job is to I’ve up to that vision, that Truth, and dwell together on the Earth in the knowledge that the whole place is charged and full of God’s glory.  It is the sole possession of the God of life, and if we want to live we need our lives, our actions, to be in tune with that. 

The Ark visible in the Temple means that God is here, with us, within us, among us, around us.  The Ark goes ahead of us as both inspiration and protection.  And when the destroyers are themselves destroyed, the Ark means that we will remain in the new, cleansed land of God’s Promise, the Kingdom of peace, where God is all in all, forever.

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