Look Again.

Revelation 14:1-13

September 1, 2019

I.

Just as the situation seems most grim, with the spectacular success that the forces of evil have in chapter 13, seducing the world’s people into self- and ecological destruction, John suddenly adjusts his vision so that he sees from a broader, wider, deeper, higher, and more inclusive perspective.  He sees differently.

Learning to perceive the world from this alternative vantage point is part of what Revelation specifically, and faith generally, is about.  The Empire-Beast and the false prophet want us to limit our vision to just what concerns us, personally as individuals.  They want us to judge everything according to how good or bad it appears to be for me and mine, now.  They want us to sever and ignore every connection and concern for others, and focus purely on our own self-interest and private well-being.  They want us to disregard the bigger picture in which we are all integrated into God’s blessed and good creation together and responsible for each other and for the whole.

John adjusts his perception so that now he sees something else that is going on, something that is even more true and important and meaningful than the locally experienced catastrophe of institutionalized selfish greed and violence that he describes in the previous chapter.

And from this perspective he sees not the Accuser’s perverse anti-trinity, bent on destroying the planet and people.  No.  He sees, much to our surprise perhaps, “the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion!” surrounded by the gathered  representative multitude of God’s people who have God’s name and that of the Lamb inscribed on their foreheads.  That is to say, whose minds, as in the old spiritual, are “stayed on Jesus.”  And this choir of 144,000 voices is singing like thunder a new song.

Those about whom we heard last week, who bear the mark of the Beast-Empire, the 666 of imperfection and certain doom, need it to buy and sell.  Their lives are defined by their competition in the economy.  They have turned the planet and themselves into commodities for consumption.  They are lost in the dogfight of grabbing and keeping, stealing and devouring.  They have embraced Satan-the Accuser’s ideology of manufactured scarcity and descended into the pit of yelling and fighting with each other to get the best deal for themselves.

But the seal written within the new minds of the followers of the Lamb is a license, not to fight and devour, but to sing!  And they sing the song that is ever new, the song of praise and thanksgiving to the Creator and the Lamb for the amazing gift and miracle of life.  

These people have not defiled themselves with self-serving idolatries and adulteries, lost in their own mania for self-gratification.  They have not sold themselves and their souls to the Accuser so that they have to live off of his meager wage.  They have not approached the world and other people as inanimate objects, “resources” to be taken, used up, sucked dry, thrown away, and replaced by the next dish.  This is what John’s talk of defilement and virginity is about.  It is that those sealed with God’s stamp have separated themselves from corrosive orgy of using and abusing people and planet for their own ephemeral pleasure.

II.

Instead they “follow the Lamb wherever he goes.”  They are the disciples of the Lamb, Jesus Christ, who live in imitation of him, who listen to his Word, who study his teachings, and who seek only and always to live the life he gives us to live.  His is the life of simplicity, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, healing, justice, equality, welcome, and love.  These are the vanguard, the representatives, the first fruits of a redeemed humanity, the implication being that many will follow.

This is what John perceives when he broadens his vision.  Embedded within the world he had just described as all but lost and doomed under the Beast-Empire’s domination, the people intoxicated by enticing, self-serving propaganda, each struggling for her or himself, he sees the contrarian presence of the Lamb’s bright cohort, singing together a very, very different song.  God is never left without a witness.  There is always a remnant of God’s people, seeds of the Truth and the future.  There is always a new world ready and waiting to be disclosed.

And the choice is presented once again.  Which people are we?  The ones lost in the snake-pit of commercial competition striving against each other according to the values of the Beast-Empire to get what we want for ourselves?  Or the ones singing in unison, filled with gratitude, and following the Lamb because we know God has already given us everything in him?  Which imprint shapes our minds and guides our actions?  

John then sees three flying angels that offer in loud voices God’s interpretation of this situation.  The first proclaims to everyone on the earth, “every nation and tribe and language and people,” to fear, glorify, and worship the Creator.  Apparently this is always an option; no one is forever lost; the mark of the Empire is not indelible.  But God’s claim on the whole creation and everyone in it is permanent.

The second angel declares, against all evidence to the contrary, that the Empire — here called “Babylon” referencing another historical power that attempted to destroy God’s people — is fallen and defeated, its doom is sure, its failure is a done deal.  It has poisoned all nations with its self-centered, violent, materialistic, mercenary values.  It seems contradictory, that it has conquered all nations but is somehow also “fallen.”  But I think the angel is saying that it has run its course, overextended itself, and is subject to the radical contraction that is the destiny of all empires.

And the third angel offers another final warning to those who nevertheless still follow the Beast’s doomed regime.  The longer you hold on and identify yourself with it, the more surely will you suffer its fate.  The more profoundly you separate yourself from God, the more you will experience God’s love and redemption as wrath and fury.  The tighter you have bound yourself to the Empire, the harder it will be to pry yourself free of it when it goes down.  If you have ingested and intoxicated yourself with the bitter wine of the Empire, God’s new wine is going to taste very, very bad to you.  It will in fact do to you what you intended to do to others and the creation: it will burn, consume, devour, and destroy you.

III.

John concludes this section with another “call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and hold fast to the faith of Jesus.”  We are to endure even at the cost of our mortal lives.  John’s perspective is much broader than even this temporal existence we tend to think is everything.  There is life beyond the death of the body which needs to be taken into account.  Jesus demonstrates this by his resurrection.  Not even death can separate us from God’s love.

The challenge of human life is that we keep broadening our perspective.  It is that we keep awakening to a higher and more inclusive point of view.  It is growing and expanding beyond the little bubbles of our ego-centric perception and thinking, limited to what we think matters directly to our physical bodies.  Paul calls this “the flesh,” this concern for keeping our temporal organism, with its desires and needs, alive and fed.  It is what the Empire plays on and convinces us is all that is.

To begin to place this aspect of our existence in context and see from a wider and more inclusive point of view is the influence of the Spirit that fills all things.  The more we can begin to see that what we do does not happen in isolation, but affects people and life all over the world, the more we are awakening to God’s perspective.  The more we identify with the suffering of people on the other side of the planet, and see our complicity in their lot, the more we are living into God’s heavenly point of view.  

This is what it means to “hold fast to the faith of Jesus.”  Jesus, the Lamb, the Word who becomes flesh to dwell among us, shows us this universal, eternal, all-inclusive perspective, beyond ethnicity and nation, beyond tribe and clan, beyond religion and politics, beyond even gender, class, and race.  When we who are baptized “put on Christ,” we have awakened to the higher and deeper identity we share with everyone.  We have become woke to our own true human nature in him, the One who is at the same time God-with-us.

In him we become “participants in the divine nature,” says Peter.  In him we are given to see from God’s perspective so that even the death of these wonderful bodies is but a graduation, a liberation of them to union with all in and as light.  And from that perspective all the conflicts and trauma of this existence appear as dopey, trivial, and silly as high school seems to me now.  Because we will know the whole story, including the glorious ending.

That is what gives us the juice to endure, to actively resist, to follow Jesus and witness to his life of goodness and peace now.  It is the knowledge that life is a way bigger adventure than can be reduced to just getting what you convince yourself you want this moment.

IV.

Our deeds follow us, says the voice from heaven, the Word from the highest and widest possible perspective.  And our deeds either cut us off from the Truth and keep us spinning in a meaningless rat-race of consumption rooted in paranoia and resentment, weighing us down in a pit of despair… or our deeds resonate with the life of the Lamb, Jesus Christ, and thereby connect us to the Truth allowing us to emerge into an eternal life we can not even imagine now.

This is really why we come here to church.  It’s not for the coffee and donuts. It’s so we can learn together to “keep the commandments of God and hold fast to the faith of Jesus.”  It is a matter of life and death.  Whether out of fear of death we will crash into the endless extinction the Accuser desires for us, or out of love we will give our lives for others and thereby awaken to a new kind of life, the true life, seeing and knowing God as all in all.

+++++++ 

The Other Beast.

Revelation 13:11-18

August 25, 2019

I.

Last time we heard about the new approach the Accuser, Satan, has to take, after being finally thwarted by the Earth itself in his scheme to flush away the Messiah in chapter 12.  He resorts to an elaborate campaign of turning the humans against God.  To this end he first summons a great Beast from the sea.  The Beast represents the glory and power of human Empires, especially, in John’s time, Rome.  But this is a strategy the Accuser takes in every generation.  And it is fantastically successful.

To explain and clarify how this happens, John sees a second Beast claw its way up out of the earth.  Together these three were like an anti-trinity, mimicking in opposition to the true Trinity.  At the top was the Accuser, Satan, the Red Dragon, the Evil One.  Then secondly there was the great Beast from the sea, representing the glorious Empire.  And thirdly there was this new, smaller Beast from the ground.  

This second Beast was also called the False Prophet.  Elsewhere in the New Testament he was the “antichrist.”  He was the effective implementation arm of the Beast.  He was the one who sold, enforced, and applied the will of the first Beast and the Dragon in actual cities and individual lives.  He was the local face of the Empire.  He was the way the Beast and his godless agenda were made real in people’s daily existence.

We have a saying that, “All politics is local.”  It means that politics stays abstract and theoretical until it gets applied in people’s actual lives.  In the Roman Empire this was done through the councils of business and government leaders which met in each municipality.  It was the job of these local councils to keep people in line with the Empire’s agenda… and to organize ways to exclude or even persecute those who dissented.  Like the Christians.

John sees these groups as manifestations of this second Beast.  This Beast looked harmless.  He describes it as a lamb with 2 cute, nubby little horns.  It looked like a bunch of civic-minded, responsible community leaders doing their best to keep the system functioning well for everyone.  

But John notes that though they may have looked benign, they spoke like the evil Dragon himself, which is to say, they used the tempting and corrosive language of egocentric selfishness, self-interest, self-gratification, achievement, progress, development, and growth, along with the undercurrent of paranoia that was always identifying and condemning enemies, scapegoats, losers, and others who may threaten the system.

These groups had the function of making the Empire look good.  They put on amazing spectacles, rituals, plays, concerts, all lifting up the benefits of Rome.  And they issued propaganda that on the one hand framed Rome’s actions and accomplishments as splendid miracles that improved life for everyone: the roads, the water projects, the monuments, the military exploits and security, the laws.  They encouraged people to be proud of being subjects of the greatest Empire ever. 

On the other hand, they stood ready to spin any apparently negative news about Rome.  They would play down or explain away or just plain deny the atrocities, the poverty, the wars, the slavery, the inequality.  Anything that made the Emperor appear at all less than great was given this treatment.  And anyone voicing opposition?  They would have to be silenced or eliminated.

II.

John says that this Beast, as a perversion of the seal of blessing God’s people receive in chapter 7, placed an identifying mark on people’s heads and hands.  This is to say that he left a deep imprint in people minds and actions, their thinking and behavior, so that they reflexively obeyed and followed the values and practices of the Beast.  This mark was so deep that it didn’t even occur to most people to think or act any differently.  The Empire was considered inevitable; there was no alternative.

This was the point: to so ingrain loyalty into people that they would imagine that the things the Empire demanded were simply human nature.

The values that the Beasts pressed into people were what the Church calls sins.  The Empire, as an agent of the Evil One, the Accuser, lifted up behaviors that were the precise opposite of discipleship of the Lamb, channeling people into self-destructive opposition to the Creator.  That’s why one of the names for this Beast is “Antichrist.”  Sins got reframed as “virtues.”  The planned end of this project was the annihilation of the creation itself.

For the Empire greed was good.  It whispered in people’s ears that it’s okay to get something for yourself.  Be ambitious!  Get what you can!  And watch out for that other guy who wants to take it from you.  Measure your life by your credit score, your assets, your bottom line.  If Jesus says no to Satan’s temptation to make bread, Satan says make and get and keep and store and control as much “bread” as you can.  That’s what it means to be a success!  

For the Empire, lust, gluttony, envy, pride, and resentment were all good and natural feelings to be cultivated.  It was good to want more and more!  It was good to desire what others have, it was motivating, it was inspiring, it was an expression of your own power to be able to take and have what you want.  If Jesus rejects Satan’s offer of fame, popularity, admiration, and adulation, the Empire said that this is what you’re supposed to have. 

And for the Empire, most especially, fear was good.  Fear of not having or being enough.  Fear of not having as much as the next person.  Fear of losing what you do have.  Fear of the external enemy to the east, those evil foreigners that want to invade and take our way of life.  Fear of the internal enemy next door who wants to undermine your prosperity and take your stuff.  Fear of death, which is the mother of all fear, and which Rome manipulated with dextrous and brutal skill. 

If Jesus says no to Satan’s temptation to worldly, coercive power, the Empire said: “We have that power and we will loan it to you if you pay with your absolute loyalty, gratitude, and devotion.”

   

III.

The Accuser and his agents the Beasts went so far as to make this perverse mark, this perversion of our minds and actions, a necessary condition for participation in the economy, the market.  You needed this imprint, you needed to be thinking and behaving according to these acquisitive values, in order to be successful in economic activity, in buying and selling.  If you thought otherwise, if you had not given yourself in loyalty to these values (which are really sins), then you would at least be unsuccessful in the market, and perhaps even excluded.

In John’s time Christians often were excluded from participating in commerce because it was a requirement to actually, literally bow down and worship the Emperor and the Emperor’s gods in order to gain access to the market.  Today we are a bit more more subtle.   

Every Empire has always said all these same things, and they have always worked.  And they continue to work.  These values are what advertisers and politicians have always appealed to.  “You can have it all!” is the public message.  The implied and secret message is: “Just worship me, which is to say, your own ego; feed your fears and desires, and just keep consuming!  And eventually you will deplete, degrade, and destroy this lovely garden and therefore yourselves.  And I,” said Satan, the Accuser, the Father of Lies, the Red Dragon, “I will win!”  

With people’s thinking and acting under control, with people actively and enthusiastically — however unwittingly — participating in their own enslavement and suicide, the Beast thus dominated their economic life.  

Finally, John talks about exactly what this demonic mark was that the Beast carved into people.  It was the infamous and crazily misunderstood number: 666.  The people at the time know who John means… but we don’t.  The best guess is that the number refers to the breathtakingly bad Roman Emperor Nero.  

At the same time, using the biblical symbolism of numbers, 666 also means — because 6 is one less than the perfect number 7 — that the Beast was always falling short of goodness.  Which is to say it was always and repeatedly collapsing into evil.  Ironically, the ideology that told people to imagine they never had enough, is itself not enough.  It perpetually misses the mark, which is the literal definition of sin, and falls short into oblivion.  Which is where everyone bearing that mark, everyone buying into the ideology of insufficiency and want, everyone therefore reacting in violence, ended up.  Lost.  Forever.  

It is something that we need to be aware of, as we read about the arctic heating up, and out-of-control fires deliberately set in the Amazon, and other circumstances of our self-inflicted global climate crisis.  The plans of the Beasts and the Dragon are being fulfilled as we sit here.  Human greed is systematically demolishing the planet, apparently endangering not just human life, but all life.

IV.

But the sixes are also the only shred of good news in this passage.  Because the sixes mean failure.  That’s the code.  Christians could take hope from the knowledge that in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the Empire of the sixes is doomed.  It isn’t real enough; it will collapse into the nothingness which is its destiny when the Truth comes.  John has already foreseen this victory, which is what makes this chapter and some of what is to come palatable.  And he is telling the church that the current turbulence and chaos is evidence of this.  The Empire is not stable.  It is not sustainable.  It is really a fragile edifice, held together by egocentric lies and fantasies.  It will fall.  

Our calling in the meantime is to stand as witnesses to the Truth, as anti-antichrists, who know the eventual and eternal victory of the Lamb.  And to live therefore according to his life of compassion, humility, forgiveness, generosity, hope, gentleness, simplicity, honesty, justice, and especially love.  To dwell together in the Beloved Community, gathering around his Table of abundance and liberation, dancing with joy as we celebrate his coming.

+++++++  

The Beast.

Revelation 12:18-13:10

August 11, 2019

I.

Having been foiled by the earth in his plan to exterminate the church and then obliterate creation, the red dragon, a/k/a Satan, the Accuser, goes to the beach.  He looks out at the great sea which represents the primeval chaos that God subdues in the beginning when creating the world; Satan goes there because he is about chaos and annihilation.  And he conjures from the waters of the sea an ally, a tool, a perverse helper.  

Since he could not defeat the church directly, he is going to use his deep knowledge of human psychology to lure people over to his project, so that they basically and willingly do his job for him.  The kill themselves, each other, and the planet.  This new threat is a monster or Beast, which John describes in symbolic terms as having many heads, powerful horns, and blasphemous names.  Satan gives the beast his power and authority. 

The people go gaga over the Beast; they are infatuated with the Beast.  They enthusiastically follow the Beast and even offer thankful worship to the red dragon for concocting it.  They treat the Beast like a rock star and savior, the answer to all their prayers.   

And the Beast basically conquers the whole world in the name of the red dragon, Satan, the Accuser.  It even conquers the church.  Satan’s plan works spectacularly well.  These are indeed dark days for the earth and for God’s people.  John does not sugar-coat it.  The Beast and the dragon win.

What John has in mind here is based on the visions of the prophet Daniel about the rise and succession of violent and brutal empires.  John sees this culminating in the eruption of this Beast which represents the Roman Empire, which invaded his part of the world from the western sea.  

For us it is the murderous, thieving power of every empire and world order, every colonialist, conquering, extractive, repressive, and hegemonic secular authority.  They are all based on blasphemy, which is the rejection, mockery, and misrepresentation of the good God.  They all feed and tempt the human ego with daydreams of power, fame, and especially wealth, if we will only serve and worship the red dragon.  And they deliver!  That’s the thing.  For the people at the top, Empires do generate lots of wealth.  They do exert seemingly invincible power.  They do make for glorious stories in history books.

The Beast is a supremely effective agent of Satan’s narcissistic nihilism, the mission of which is to consume, deplete, degrade, and destroy the creation, and snuff humanity in the burned-over wasteland that inevitably results.  The Beast turns us against each other, and against the planet, in competition and violence.  

The Beast, as the tool of the dragon, the Accuser, has engineered a whole global system to remind us about what — or who — we don’t have, about who has more than us and who wants to take away what we have, about what we deserve, about what we should want and really need, and constantly sticks in our face images of the life we could have if only we worshiped and gave ourselves over with more enthusiasm and devotion to the greed, gluttony, lust, fear, envy, resentment, and vanity the red dragon inspires in the human heart and which the Beast institutionalizes.  

II.  

• When millions of people are conscripted into slavery to make others rich, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When mountains are blown apart to get at the coal inside them, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When the Amazon rainforest is mowed down at a prodigious and increasing rate, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When great nations flush their resources into preparations for and perpetration of war, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When our lifestyles spawn epidemics of cancer, heart disease, addiction, and depression, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When our homes are shattered by divorce and domestic violence, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When children are victims of sexual predation or pawns of political agendas, allowed to go hungry or receive inferior education, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When species of life on this planet are going extinct at a rate unprecedented for millions of years, that’s the work of the Beast.  
• When hateful people can easily obtain military grade weapons and slaughter scores of unarmed people at whim, and this is something that happens regularly and only here, and we cannot motivate ourselves to do anything about?  The Beast.  
• When we are in the middle of the hottest year in recorded history, glaciers are melting, and we have unprecedented wild fires, floods, hurricanes, and droughts, and can’t seem to do anything about that either even though we know what to do and have the ability to do it?  

The Beast even presents itself in Christian-like garb so effectively that many think the Beast is Christianity.  The Beast mimics Christianity by apparently recovering from a death-blow, sort of like the Lamb, and therefore claims to be the real resurrection force.  It points to the way it can turn a profit from disasters, the way it can “make the desert bloom,” the way it can raise standards of living.  The Beast is always about what it calls “progress,” “enlightenment,” and “development.”  That’s what makes it so tempting and powerful.  It feeds and appeals to our ego.

The cost of all this supposed advancement is always the sacrifice of someone else.  A scapegoat.  An enemy.  A loser.  This seems to work in getting people together.  But John suggests that eventually we all pay the cost of an unsustainable regime.  Eventually, under the Beast, the whole creation gets sacrificed, annihilated, exterminated… which is the ultimate agenda of the red dragon.  

John says, “Let anyone who has an ear listen: If you are to be taken captive, into captivity you go; if you kill with the sword, with the sword you must be killed.”  If you live by the Beast’s law and justice, then you get to suffer the Beast’s consequences.  If you’re going to continue to be captive to the Beast’s ideology of violence and retribution, of might makes right, then be prepared to suffer this yourself.  If you’re so ready to sacrifice others then get ready to be the next sacrifice, because that’s the deal with the Beast. 

III.

Paul says “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”  Other people are not the problem.  They’re just mortals like us.  Neither Paul nor John blame ordinary humans for this global catastrophe.  Neither of them ever even suggests that the people of God may use violence against others.  For that would play into the claws of the Beast who is always about dividing us against ourselves and each other.  

Jesus, on the other hand, rather than blaming people, gives us the example of forgiving those killing him while they were doing it.  He shows us a new way to act based on a way of thinking that is diametrically opposed to the ignorance and fear that the Beast is pushing on us.  Jesus begins his ministry by calling for repentance, a different way of thinking, literally having a new, transformed mind, leading to the transformed actions of discipleship.  

This new mind John says has to do with turning away from the Beast and his patron, the red dragon.  It means turning away from the fear, anger, hatred that he inspires and stokes in us.  It means turning away from the delusion of our separation.  It means turning away from selfish violence that seeks to take and hoard and keep and consume.    

In letting that all go, as Jesus does on the cross, we come to see that our names have been written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, that is, the roll of people who participate in the death and therefore in the resurrection, of the Lamb of God, who was slain and yet who now lives: Jesus Christ, who gives his life for the life of the world, who absorbs and transfigures the full force of the Beast’s  violence on the cross, disarming it, neutralizing it, exhausting it, and finally using it as a way to identify with all of us who are subject to death, and through it leading us all home.

We are witnesses that  death no longer has power over us, and neither do fear or anger or shame.  For in him we have died to our separate, divided, deluded, selfish existence; and in him we are raised to a life of oneness with all.

That’s why he calls for endurance: active resistance; and faith: a continual acting out of our deep trust in the God of love and life.  That’s why we gather together to be the church, to enact in our own lives here and now his Kingdom of love, peace, and justice.  Here and now we turn from selfish to selfless, from hostility to compassion, from taking to sharing, from winning to giving, from enmity to community, from hatred to love, and from death to life.  Here and now we become by his power and Spirit a refuge of compassion, a haven of forgiveness, a garden of joy, a home of healing, and an open door of acceptance and welcome to all.

IV.

Meanwhile, the Beast keeps winning.  And those who follow Jesus keep losing.  It can get discouraging, which is why John feels the urgency to write this book.   

The irony of Christian faith is that in losing we win.  Because to lose means we are, on the one hand, letting go of our old selves and the fear, shame, anger, and selfish violence that characterized them and that kill us and the world.  And on the other hand, our losing means we are offering up and contributing and allowing to flow through us the love of God, which is being poured into our hearts in Christ Jesus.

It is this life of letting go, of forgiveness, of release and relinquishment that guarantees that our names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and that we do inherit together the true life of eternity with and in the living and good God who creates, redeems, and sustains the universe in sovereign love.

+++++++    

The Accuser Loses.

Revelation 12:7-17

August 4, 2019

I.

There is no place in heaven, which is to say, the place of widest and most universal inclusion and vision, for the Accuser.  Apparently, there had been a subordinate place for him in God’s realm.  He had a subsidiary role in testing God’s people, like a Prosecutor in court.  But he overplayed his part, so that instead of merely trying the weaknesses of the people in order to strengthen them, he threatens to wipe them out altogether.  

There is in all of us what we might call an “inner critic.”  At best it is our conscience, pointing out right and wrong, warning us against potentially bad actions, revealing negative paths taken so that we do not go that way again, reminding us of what happened to someone else when they went the wrong way.  The inner critic can also hold up our ideals and goals, encouraging us when we backslide and expressing approval when we make progress.  The inner critic is like a good Prosecutor who knows her job is to protect the community and repair damage done to it and its members.

In the Old Testament we might see that Satan, the Adversary, had a particular role in the heavenly council, which was to test, to probe, to prove the faith of people like Job. 

But the liability with critics and Prosecutors is that they can degenerate into over-zealous, self-righteous, fanatical, and heartless perfectionists, who no longer work for the common good, but start pursuing what they see as “error” with murderous, psychopathic, destructive wrath.  Like the officer in Vietnam who reported that he had to destroy a village order to “save” it.

The Accuser forgets that he is an angelic emissary of the God of love, and instead becomes a vicious, snarling, ravenous red dragon, hell-bent on obliterating God’s creation because of all its supposed imperfections.  That spawns what John calls a war in heaven, because there is no place in God’s world for condemnation, cruelty, retribution, punishment, or annihilation.  It would be like when the immune system turns against the body itself; and the body’s protector becomes its mortal enemy.

God creates everything and declares it all very good.  God does not create anything bad.  A bad thing is just an originally good thing that somehow gets made into the only or the ultimate thing.  It stops participating as a part of God’s system, and starts destroying it in the name of its own, small agenda.

This “war” also gets reflected in the human soul.  We all have the potential to entertain the subtle, nasty voice of the Accuser telling us we are bad, we are not enough, we are failures, we are perverts, we are imperfect, we are losers, that we are unloveable, unworthy, vile, putrid sinners whom God hates and who deserve only to perish and be forgotten.

That is when we need to remember that God threw the Accuser out of heaven.  His voice of condemnation is not a true voice, and it has no place in heaven, in creation, in the church, or in our hearts.  It is a voice that only tells lies.  God’s Word, on the other hand, is truth and that truth is revealed in Jesus as compassion and love.

II.

When the Accuser gets evicted from heaven, he lands, unfortunately, on the earth.  He’s only going to be here for a time, but it is a difficult and challenging time while it lasts.  The real war is over, God’s love has conclusively and decisively won, but the Accuser knows that humans will be slow to get the memo.  Many, indeed, nearly all, will nevertheless still listen to him.  And if he cannot turn heaven against them, he can at least still labor to turn them against themselves.

And we find ourselves again witnessing the collision that the book of Revelation — and indeed the whole Bible, and indeed all of life — is about: between truth and lies, goodness and evil, the way of life and the road of death.  

People are faced with a choice.  We may follow the way of God’s victory, the way of life, the way of love, which unfortunately seems to us like death because we must give up to our own egocentricity and and selfishness.  Or we may follow the way of death, which unfortunately seems to us like a wonderful life saturated with wealth, fame, and power.  In one way we follow the Lamb who was slaughtered and yet whom we know by faith now lives.  On the other road we follow the red dragon, who seductively and convincingly promises us everything we ever wanted, the gratification of all our desires.

To follow the Accuser is to become accusers ourselves, and dedicate ourselves to identifying scapegoats and enemies upon whom we stick the blame for our problems.  We come to believe that if we can just control, or exclude, or even kill these pernicious others, then everything will be wonderful.  This argument gave us the holocaust, lynching, genocide, war, slavery, and it is being enacted as we speak with the ongoing atrocities on our own southern border.  

This is the way of unspeakable violence that victimizes weaker people in the name of power, prosperity, and pleasure for a few.  It turns people into enemies and competitors, and the earth into commodities for exploitation and wasting.  It becomes all about winning, taking, gaining, stealing, cheating, and lying about it.  It is about doing whatever you have to do to get what you want.  

 

And frankly, any church that goes along with this and teaches exclusion, condemnation, and bigotry is loyal to the Accuser, not to the God of forgiveness and love.  This is John’s point in critiquing churches of his own time back in chapters 2 and 3.  Churches that compromised with the Empire back then, or with nationalism, white supremacy, eco-cide, injustice, and inequality today, have dedicated themselves to the angry, fearful, hateful red dragon.

III.

But the way of Jesus is the exact opposite of the way of the red dragon.   To follow the Lamb of God is to become lambs ourselves.  John talks about the followers of Jesus as those “who have conquered [the Accuser] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.”

The way to conquer the Accuser, the vicious red dragon, is to participate in the victory God has already won over him.  That victory is revealed in the lifting up of Jesus Christ on the cross where he absorbs the full blast of accusation, hatred, fear, and violence of Rome’s power, and neutralizes it in his resurrection.  He shows Rome, and therefore all the Empires inspired by the Accuser, to be ultimately powerless in the face of his omnipotent forgiveness and love.  

The most powerful weapon the Accuser has is the threat of death.  If that stops working then he is finished.  If the dragon can’t kill us he’s got nothing.  Thus the Sacraments of the Christian Church are always about reframing death as a transition and transformation from a small, false existence into true, expansive, and eternal life.  In Baptism we participate in Christ’s passage through the water from death to life.  And in the Lord’s Supper we are nourished in that new life by ingesting his body and blood so that we become him.  We are thus inoculated against perishing so that even the death of our mortal bodies only serves to strengthen our unity in him.

The faithful witnesses do not cling to this limited, mortal, temporal existence.  They do not hold on to their egocentricity.  They are able to let that go.  Instead of accusation they choose forgiveness, and so they emerge into a larger, immortal, eternal life with and in God.  They are able to endure even the death of their bodies, realizing that they are essentially integrated into God’s people, God’s creation, and even God, and that death is but a graduation into a broader resurrection life.

IV.

When the red dragon crashes to the ground, he proceeds to pursue the Woman Clothed with the Sun, whom we talked about last week as representing the people of God.  The only thing stopping his complete conquest and destruction of humankind and creation is the continued faithful witness by her children to a Way of Life utterly distinct from the dragon’s pathetic, vile, accusatory, suicidal regime.  

The people of God are men and women “from every tribe and language and people and nation,” that is, they are multi-racial and multi-cultural.  They work in concert with “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea,” which is to say, all life on this planet.  They testify to a oneness in Christ which resists all schemes to divide us against each other.

In the end, the red dragon attempts to flush away the people of God with a great torrent of water, representing the unbridled, disordered chaos from before creation.  It is his last weapon, to undue creation itself.  But this fails  because the earth opens up to absorb the flood and protect the Church.  The earth, the creation, comes to the rescue and saves God’s people. 

It is this cosmic solidarity that may be the secret to the Church’s witness.  If even the Earth intervenes in our favor, it means that our life is integrated into creation.  As with Jesus himself at his ascension, when we leave this life we don’t go somewhere so much as everywhere.  We let go of our limited bodies and inherit the vast body of the universe.

Witnesses to God’s love can’t ultimately be killed because they are united in Christ to everything.  There is a sense in which the saints are always present.  To share in Christ’s death is to share in his life, which is everywhere and eternal.

This then is our choice, because the dragon continues to make war on God’s people: We can perish with him when his Empire made of nothing but lies finally dissolves and collapses.  And it will.  Or we can live forever with and in God by keeping the commandments of God and holding the testimony of Jesus.  That is, we can reject the Accuser by living according to forgiveness and love.  

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