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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