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.

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