Wearable Truth.

Revelation 16:10-21

September 29, 2019

I.

In China, between 1959 and 1961, Chairman Mao, decided to set agricultural policy on political ideology rather than science.  A famine resulted in which 36 million people died.  The consequences are severe when we lose sight of the Truth and decide to make up our own “facts” and live by them.  

The Modern world is full of this kind of thing.  How many people died because the tobacco industry denied and suppressed the truth about cancer?  How many people are dying right now because the pharmaceutical industry decided to tell everyone that their new opiates were not addictive?  It doesn’t matter whether we are lying in the service of Communism or Capitalism.  In any contest between lies and facts, guess what’s going to win?  Nature, which is to say, God’s creation, always prevails over our self-serving ideologies.      

That is what’s going on in John’s vision.  Nature, Truth, the Creator prevails.  The angels continue to pour out the plagues of God’s wrath which remind us of how God hammers the Egyptians until they let the Israelites go, in Exodus.  These plagues are the natural, necessary, inevitable consequences of human injustice, greed, fear, self-righteousness, lust for power, and other forms of sinfulness.  But their purpose is emancipation.

The fifth angel dumps a plague upon the very throne of the Beast, which is to say, it corrodes and degrades the power and authority of the monstrous Empire itself.  And.  The contents of this bowl eat away like acid at the Empire’s power and legitimacy.  For the strong solvent that the angel pours on that throne is Truth.  And what the Beast told us was progress and enlightenment, liberation and justice, really turns out to be barbarism, famine, war, and murder.    

With the Empire’s ability to project its delusions through propaganda and sustain them by means of conventions, laws, threats, and violence  weakened, the regime is plunged into the darkness of ignorance.  The true Light of all, Jesus Christ, who is himself the Truth, in whom true God and true humanity are essentially united, by whom creation is made and declared very good, who gives us enough to share equally, is not perceived.  Instead, we are in the darkness of a system in which each individual is out only for him- or herself.

The Truth is not perceived because humans, under the malignant influence of the Beast and the smooth talking of the False Prophet, have chosen instead to rely on whatever counterfeit light they manage to squeeze out of their own egocentric imaginations, which is to say, none at all.  They pretend to see.  They think they are seeing what is real when really they are only seeing what they want to see; they only see what validates their own desires and fears, memories and expectations, ideologies and loyalties.  They only see what their methodology allows them to see.  They only see what is in their interest to see.

That people gnaw their tongues is perhaps a way of saying that their speech is twisted into self-destructive hysteria.  It also implies that the Beast’s projected world is almost purely rhetorical and verbal, made and held together by words forming the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, as if lies somehow become truth if we repeat them louder and more often.  Until eventually, like someone having a seizure, we are in danger of biting off our own tongues.  We can’t sustain a false narrative forever, especially in the face of its bitter consequences.    

II.   

In such a situation John notices that it does not occur to the people to turn to the living God.  They do not look for God’s presence in creation or God’s Image in themselves — let alone in others.  Indeed, why would they?  They only know God through these catastrophes.  So they double down on their blasphemy.  They blame God, they blame others: they blame their enemies, they blame the poor, they blame the weather… they blame immigrants and Muslims, Gays and the media, or whoever we project as the usual suspects, for the chaotic confusion, the collapse of norms and standards, the deflation of the rule of even the Empire’s corrupt, unjust, and self-serving law.

The next angel, with the sixth bowl, pours it out and the Euphrates River dries up.  The Euphrates was considered the boundary of the Roman Empire.  It was a natural barrier against the much feared enemy to the east, the Parthians with their infamously murderous cavalry.

We ministers are required to attend every three years something called “boundary training.”  It’s mainly about learning to set and maintain good personal and professional “boundaries” in terms of respecting our limits and propriety, and recognizing power dynamics with others, and so forth.  The implication being that we live in a society in which the boundaries that used to regulate acceptable behavior are breaking down.  Without boundaries a culture disintegrates into anarchy.  Boundaries are part of a society’s immune system.

Boundaries are supposed to be good.  But the Empire uses them to separate and oppress people to maintain its power and control over them.  Empires do boundaries with a vengeance.  For them, boundaries are about keeping people suspicious and fearful of each other and themselves, and forcing people to pay more attention to meticulous rules and regulations, standards and mores, conventions and laws, than to each other.  Empires thrive on rigid caste systems with insiders and outsiders, chains of command, and pecking orders.  

When these boundaries break down we become subject to epidemics of things like sexual assault, even on children.  Without boundaries the weak are in a situation of permanent victimization at the whim of the strong. 

This boundary-less existence is expressed in these demon frogs that the Beast and the False Prophet spit out.  Frogs were unclean to the Israelites, and there was a plague of frogs in Exodus.  Here they are evil amphibian spirits that incite the rulers of the world to war, assembling them for a convulsive, pointless, and catastrophic battle in an infamous place John calls Harmegedon.  The Empire’s boundaries are bad and oppressive, but without them we fall into the ultimate chaos of a war of all against all.   

III.

Jesus, in his ministry, is known as a boundary-breaker.  He confronts and deliberately shatters social boundaries in the hyper-kosher regime imposed on people by the religious and political rulers of his day.  But the Lord doesn’t therefore favor a boundary-less, hedonistic, libertarian existence.  The boundaries he rejects are about exclusion and condemnation; they are about maintaining the wealth and power of the wealthy and powerful.  The boundaries the Lord advocates, on the other hand, have to do with love, compassion, humility, and forgiveness.  These are the new boundaries, the new law, he gives us.

In fact, Jesus himself appears to offer a comment at this point in John’s vision, where his voice interjects: “See, I am coming like a thief!  Blessed is the one who stays awake and is clothed, not going about naked and exposed to shame.”  

On the one hand a thief is a definite boundary-transgressor, breaking and entering someone’s house, even as he himself breaks into our world and undermines the power of those in control.  Yet on the other hand he gives us a new boundary by dressing us in himself.  He has come to liberate us from the artificial arbitrary imposed boundaries of Empire, while dressing us in his love, acceptance, and goodness, which become our new interface with others.

  

When the Israelites were liberated from slavery in Egypt, God does not let them wander on their own in the desert.  God gives them a law to institutionalize their freedom and prevent power to accrue to a few again.  True emancipation is not to have no boundaries; it is to have boundaries appropriate to our true nature as creatures made in God’s Image.  It is to have boundaries that preserve and protect and enhance our freedom and equality before God.

The seventh and final angel appears with lots of dramatic and spectacular special effects.  This plague splits in three pieces the evil city — now called “Babylon” to remind us of the site of the people’s captivity, and how they were miraculously set free to go home when that Empire fell.  What vanquishes the city is whatever the angel pours into the earth’s atmosphere, apparently changing the climate.  So the air itself turns against the Empire, which cannot endure the climatological and even geological upheavals, and begins to disintegrate.

IV.

Anyone, any system, that denies the Truth of Jesus Christ, which is to say, separates from God’s love, joy, compassion, and forgiveness, is living a lie.  Lies do not survive their inevitable encounter with Truth; if we base our lives on lies, neither do we.  In the meantime, those who trust in the Truth find themselves clothed with the Truth.  Paul talks about it as having “put on Christ” in Baptism, as we mention most Sundays at the font.

Being clothed with Christ means that our words and actions stay true to his Word, no matter what is going on around us.  In a world of darkness, we live by his Light.  In a world of lies we live by his Truth.  In a world of war we live by his peace.  In a world where the very sky is broken, we live according to the values of his heavenly, which is to say, all inclusive, Kingdom.  In a world where the boundaries are being erased, leaving many open to harm, we live by the parameters of his commandments, which are to love one another as he loves us.  +++++++  

Collateral Damage.

Revelation 16:1-9

September 22, 2019

I.

It is the will of the Creator God that the creation be protected and preserved.  To this end, the Creator gives to creation what it needs in order to survive.  The Creator, who in and as the Lamb actually takes on, absorbs, and neutralizes the destructive violence that threatens the creation, inevitably wins.  But in the meantime, there is this struggle between good and evil that convulses the creation.  

This is the meaning of the bowls of God’s wrath as they get poured out by the angels from the heavenly temple.  Like the active immune system of a living organism, the pathogens attacking God’s creation are systematically identified and destroyed.  Just as organisms use tactics like a fever, which raises the body temperature in an effort to kill invaders, God’s wrath basically turns against those who destroy the earth, using the same weapons they have been using.

To review: The evil, destroying power in the story is Satan, the Red Dragon, who was thrown out of heaven and crash landed on the earth.  Since he could not defeat God’s angels or the Messiah, he now devotes himself to the destruction of God’s creation, including humanity.  And he has managed to enlist people in this project by convincing them to follow the temptations and desires of their own egos in consuming and destroying the earth, and acting in fear and anger against each other.

The supreme agent of this is the Beast from the sea, representing the power and glory of human empires, which is to say, massive, centralized political and economic organizations designed to conquer, colonize, control, and coerce subservience from people.  An empire is basically institutionalized, mass selfishness, the purpose of which is to degrade, deplete, despoil, and destroy the earth in the name of short-term gain for a few.

The main agent of this Beast is the False Prophet or Antichrist, whose job it is to fill people’s minds with self-serving, self-righteous, paranoid propaganda, so that they willingly and enthusiastically do their jobs of mass exploitation and destruction.  They proudly wear the Beast’s mark on their foreheads, which is to say they cherish in their minds the Beast’s self-centered values of lust, gluttony, greed, envy, and violence.  They are able to rationalize any behavior, no matter how evil — whether it be torture, theft, rape, mass murder, or wanton ecological destruction — by saying that it was done in the service of economic growth, self-defense, or their own personal, national, or religious gratification and glory. 

II.    

Therefore, the first bowl of God’s wrath is poured out on those who reject God by wearing this mark and thinking and acting according to these perverse motivations.  The wrath in the bowl turns the mark of the Beast into a painful, festering sore.  That is, our way of thinking attracts harm to us.    

Jesus says that those who live by the sword will die by the sword.  That logic is taken up by the angels here who basically say that those whose minds are conditioned by a basic concern for what they can get, keep, consume, and profit from, will find themselves devoured by the same attitudes turned against them and which will eat them alive from within.    

Perhaps we can see this internalized avarice in the way we are subject to physical diseases like addiction and cancer, often brought on by what we have chosen, or been given, to consume.  Indeed, we often make such choices because of the pain, anxiety, and confusion we feel just from living in an anxiety-producing society, which is part of the point.     

Just as the strategy of the Evil One is to take something that is good and encourage us to make an idol out of it, we can ingest perfectly good and helpful things that when we bring them into the center of our lives can kill us.  What we take into our bodies that make us feel temporarily safe, comfortable, euphoric, energized, nourished, or pain-free, eventually can turn deadly if we blow them out of proportion and make them the main thing.  They can be transmuted into an open wound inside of us that spreads until it kills us, in the process wrecking our families, communities, and planet. 

Speaking of the planet, the next two angels apply their bowls to the waters of the earth, the oceans and the springs and rivers, making them like blood.  This reminds us of one of the plagues against Egypt in Exodus, in which the water of the Nile River becomes blood.  The waters thus rebel against the evil forces, becoming a visual reminder of the lives lost and the blood spilled, not to mention the way the empire pollutes, exploits, depletes, dams, diverts, commodifies, and defiles water.  Water is life!  But when water is abused it will turn against its abusers and become unusable and even toxic.  

Such carelessness and irresponsibility have generated water crises around the world.  In our own country we have old lead pipes that make water poisonous in places like Flint and now Newark.  In my neighborhood we have well water, so it makes me nervous when I see my neighbors regularly soak their lawns with pesticides.  Can’t these chemicals percolate down into the water?  Meanwhile, the oceans are becoming congested with plastic waste, killing marine life.  Coral reefs are in crisis.  The waters of the earth increasingly remind us of the injustices that have been wrought against them.  

Blood usually represents life in the Scriptures; but here it is more like the white blood cells that attack an infection.  John seems to be saying that the loyalists of the Beast are the infection, and, as a result of their misuse, water will be turned against them into a means of their eradication.   

I do not need to remind anyone that without clean, fresh water, human life is finished.     

The fourth angel pours a bowl of wrath on the sun, which gets hotter and scorches people with severe heat.  Seriously.  We are enduring the hottest year on record, with glaciers melting and some places becoming uninhabitable.

I believe it was Richard Rohr whom I regularly quote as reminding us that we are not punished for our sins but by our sins.  That’s how these angels are working.  Human sins rebounding in a backlash against us.

III.

On the one hand, these plagues are targeted at evil doers, but on the other hand there is a lot of what we might call collateral damage.  The ones who suffer are not necessarily those who perpetrated the crisis.  It is definitely not the case that only bad people get cancer or end up addicted to opioids.  It is definitely not the case that only bad people get lead poisoning from defective water pipes.

  

No.  The Beast set up his system in such a way that it is the poor, the disenfranchised, the workers, and the marginalized who bear the brunt of any  disasters.  In the Exodus story, the Israelites were not exempt from all the plagues visited upon Egypt.  The people of God do not live in a hermetically sealed protective bubble; the outpouring of God’s wrath falls on everyone.   

At the same time, the division between those bearing the mark of the beast, whose thinking and acting is determined by greed and violence, and those bearing the seal of God, whose thinking and acting is determined by love and justice, often splits communities, families, and even our very souls.  In actual practice it can seem like that mark is kind of in flux, almost like we have both, because we can at one moment participate in the earth’s destruction and in the next moment work for its preservation and restoration.  

Our existence is deeply ironic and contradictory.  That’s another thing the Beast has engineered.  Everyone is compromised.  Everyone participates in the Beast’s system to a greater or lesser degree.  The Beast wants to be able to accuse us of being hypocrites if we, who are still thoroughly enmeshed in his economy, advocate for the alternative Way of Jesus Christ.     

In my experience anyway, people are not always one thing or the other.  I mean some people are, I guess, but most of us live on a kind of continuum, sometimes moving in one direction, sometimes moving in the other.  The point that John is getting at, I think, is that we have to practice moving and living into our essence as disciples of Jesus Christ who witness to the unity and goodness of God’s creation, and always work to reject the temptations to move in that other direction which puts creation at risk.

IV.

It appears that from such comprehensive plagues as John describes, everyone suffers.  And what will distinguish people is how they interpret their suffering in these times.  

For those who prosecute and perpetrate the mindless disasters, whose response to their own suffering is to curse the name of God by rejecting God’s reconciling love, and double down on their sinfulness instead of changing, who are always looking for someone else to blame, who have no problem shedding the blood of others, who remain loyal to the Beast and the ideology of greed and violence, they will go down.  Suffering that does not repent and give glory to God the Creator participates in the endless consuming fire of destruction.

But for those who suffer and remain faithful witnesses to the Lamb’s coming inevitable triumph, that is, who offer resistance to the Beast’s agenda and program of ecological destruction, the blood they shed is their own, and it is a participation in the death of the Lamb, and therefore in the Lamb’s life; these folks stand and rise to wait together in joy for the Lamb’s final victory.

We have always to choose which way we’re going to go.  When I served a Methodist church I used to attend Annual Conference and there was some liturgy in which everyone was asked: Are you moving on to perfection?  Presbyterians don’t usually talk that way.  But we do need to continually ask which way our life is headed.  Because every decision is a witness to something.

Is it a witness to the power of death and hatred, fear and rage, oppression and violence?  Are we showing our loyalty to the Beast who is angling to destroy the whole place?  Or are we witnessing to the life of the Lamb of God, who shows comes as a humble and gentle servant who gives his life for the life of the world?

+++++++  

Bowls of Wrath.

Revelation 15

September 15, 2019

I.

The primal, seminal, source event of the Scriptures and of the whole Hebrew and Christian tradition is the liberation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt.  That experience echoes through and in everything else.  It is encoded and embedded deeply within our faith.  Jesus himself fulfills and universalizes that fundamental act and revelation of God, which is why he chose to die and be raised at Passover.  So we would not miss this essential connection. 

It is therefore not an accident that John’s visions repeatedly recall the Exodus story.  So when we hear of “those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands” we specifically remember the Israelites standing on the east bank of the Red Sea as the waters return and destroy the Egyptian army.  John even sees them singing “the song of Moses,” a reference to the song that Miriam led the people in singing at that time.

This is the moment of triumph and salvation, of redemption, liberation, and release, that epitomizes the living present, the eternal now, of God.  In seminary we learned that this hymn, Exodus 15:21, is the first verse, the seed, out of which the whole rest of the Bible grows.

And here John gives us a reimagined version of it which he calls “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb.”  It is the victory song of the people of God.  It is the end of the story that keeps getting proclaimed, even though at the same time there is a lot more to come.  We are able to stand firm throughout what is going to happen even as we understand what is necessary for us to go through in order to arrive at this place of miracle, triumph, joy, thanksgiving, and promise.  

John repeatedly reminds us of the Lamb’s ultimate victory, and of how everything else that happens needs to be framed and interpreted in terms of this deliverance.  And he continues to describe the violent and horrible implosion and collapse of a world dominated by the Pharaohs and Romes, the Beasts of human Empire, subservient to the Dragon who is Satan, the Adversary, the Accuser, the Evil One who intends and works for the annihilation of God’s good creation.

For immediately after this beautiful song, John sees seven angels emerging from the “temple of the tent of witness in heaven.”  And each one is carrying a golden bowl.  And each bowl contains plagues representing the implementation of God’s wrath.  And the temple is filled with so much smoke that people can’t even enter it.

The last time we see these bowls is back in chapter 5 when they are filled with incense representing the prayers of the saints.  No doubt the smoke is from that incense, and the bowls now contain God’s answer to those prayers, to be distributed on the earth.  The people, suffering under persecution, pray for liberation and deliverance.  God, here as in Exodus, responds with destructive contagions and disasters designed to break the Empire, so that it relents in its systematic oppression, bondage, exploitation, and murder.

II.

Talking about God’s “wrath” is a problem for many of us these days.  It can feed into the nasty image that some have of God as an oppressive despot with an anger-management problem.  Or some treat God like their own pet monster that they can sic on people they don’t like.  Or still others think that attention to God’s wrath seems so far from what we see in Jesus that they just dismiss it.  God is love; how can God be vindictive and wrathful?  But the New Testament does talk about God’s wrath and we need to understand what that means.  

In Psalm 18 we read that to the loyal God appears loyal; to the blameless God appears blameless; to the pure God appears pure; and to the crooked God appears perverse.  In other words, how we see God depends on our own attitude and actions.  Violent, hateful, vindictive, nasty people perceive a violent, hateful, vindictive, nasty God.  The apostle Paul writes much the same thing when he says that God appears differently according to the direction in which we are headed.

These and other passages indicate that life, the world, and reality look different to us depending on who we are and what we are doing with our lives.  It’s like how we only experience forgiveness to the degree that we are ourselves forgiving of others.  

I believe it was C.S. Lewis who suggests that heaven and hell are the same place, experienced radically differently by people according to the way they lived.  Those who were in tune with God’s love, know a heaven of joy and peace.  But some people are so distorted and twisted, that God’s love feels to them like a hell of fire, wrath, and punishment.  If that’s what they have put into the world; that’s what they will get out of it.  If you did judgment, exclusion, condemnation, retribution, bigotry, resentment, fear, and hatred in your mortal existence, that’s what eternity is going to feel like to you.  That is what you have trained and equipped and shaped yourself to know and experience, forever. 

The point of the Christian life is to get ourselves in tune with God’s Kingdom now, in our thinking and behavior as followers of Jesus in this life, so that in the end, when the Truth is made apparent to us, it feels like a joyful homecoming, a merging into the infinite, a glorious reunion.  If we live in love now according to Jesus’ example of humility, compassion, gentleness, and generosity, we will know God’s Presence now as endless love and delight.    

But if we have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of self-interest and personal gain, doing violence to others in the process, if we have been about theft, greed, taking, and punishing, then when we encounter the Truth, it will reflect those destructive qualities back on us.  If we tether ourselves to the Beast and the Dragon, that is, if we give ourselves over to the paranoid narcissistic nihilism that lays waste to the world in the name of private profit, we will know God’s love as consuming, destroying, annihilating, burning wrath.

III.

John sees these angels emerge from the heavenly temple in his vision. The 4 guardians of life around the throne have given them golden bowls brimming with the smoking wrath of God.  These constitute the answers to the prayers of those who had "conquered the Beast and its image and the number of its name” by standing fast and giving their lives.  For God hears such prayers.  

God hears the prayers of the enslaved Israelites, and calls Moses to lead them through the sea to liberation.  And so God hears in every age the prayers, the cries, the lamentations, of the weak and the poor, the broken and the outcast, the displaced and persecuted, the tortured and the murdered with whom the Lamb identifies in sharing their death on a Roman cross, whose faithfulness and hope are expressed in times of extremity by steadfast prayer to the God of life.

And those golden bowls of wrath that the angels bear are a way of assuring the faithful that the Beast/Empire’s reign of terror is exhausting itself.  It is attracting its own destruction.  It is imploding.  Its days are numbered.  Those who seem to be winning, who perpetrated and prosecuted and gained from the suffering of others, are doomed.  They have, knowingly or not, ordered these bowls of wrath for themselves by their own complacency, ignorance, vindictiveness, injustice, and self-righteous rage. 

God’s triumph is certain.  Life and love always win in the end.  Truth and goodness prevail.  The Lamb rules.

In order to avoid the wrath of God in our existence and destiny, it has to start within us.  We have to get the fear, anger, lies, and hatred out of our souls.  We have to lose our addiction to resentment, and get over our allergy to forgiveness.  We have to identify with the losers and the victims, as God does in Jesus.  We have to acquire the mind of Christ, the Lamb who was slaughtered but who now lives.  Having his mind means seeing from a higher  perspective, perceiving that not only are we all one and dependent on each other, but not even the death of our mortal bodies can separate us from God’s life.  We have to trust in the Lamb, Jesus, and give our lives over to him in humility and compassion, gentleness and generosity, non-violence and joy.  

And this transformation within us, away from the pull of our ego and towards the Light of Christ our essence, also only happens among us.  It is something we do together, with each other, as the beloved community, gathered around the Word, hand in hand.  Here we pray for and with each other.  Here we share our stories.  Here we find acceptance and forgiveness.  Here we come to dwell in God’s Presence as God’s people, fed by God’s Body and Blood, witnesses to God’s love.

IV.

For we have passed through the waters.  And we have seen the armies of evil washed away.  We follow the Lamb who has neutralized and absorbed and negated the power of hatred and fear.  And we have turned to the rising sun and begun our walk together to the Land of God’s Promise, singing the song of triumph to the One whose judgments have been revealed: life for ever! 

+++++++      

Discerning the Body... and the Blood.

Revelation 14.14-20

September 8, 2019

I.

The two scenes in this part of John’s vision are united by the figure of a sickle.  A sickle, of course, is a sharp, curved, metal knife used in harvesting.  A farm worker would use a sickle to cut the stalks of grain in the field.  The same tool may be used to cut bunches of mature grapes from vines.  A sickle symbolizes the need to cut our ties to our old existence in order to come to new life.  

Both kinds of produce are also subjected to a further degree of violence in processing.  Harvested grain would be threshed to separate the good grain from the useless chaff.  The grain was gathered and ground into flour to make bread; the chaff burned.  People would literally stomp on the collected grapes.  The resulting juice would then be allowed to ferment into wine. 

People understood these processes as analogous to God’s transforming, redeeming activity.  The grain harvest was seen as a metaphor for the way God saves people and brings them home into the heavenly barn, while sending the chaff, which is to say the unsaved, bad people, to the fires of perdition.  Jesus talks about this, and we still sing hymns with this kind of imagery.  

Grape juice looks like blood, so grape harvesting and processing sometimes gets related to sacrifice and violence.  Wine, of course, can also cause inebriation and addiction.

But wine is also a good thing.  Jesus begins his career by making a large quantity of wine out of water prepared for a Jewish wedding ceremony.  He refers to his gospel as potent “new wine” that would explode the “old wineskins” of traditional religion.  And finally he lifts up a cup of wine at his last supper and declares it to represent — to be — his blood, and that his disciples should all drink it to receive his life.  

These two harvests — of grain and of grapes — also remind me of the two elements of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper: bread and wine.  In the holy meal we are put in touch with both the death of Jesus, who gives his life for the life of the world, and his giving his life to us as we are fed by his Body and Blood.    

The sacrament is the sign of God’s abundance, generosity, liberation, forgiveness, healing, and deliverance.  The apostle Paul says that this sacrament’s efficacy for us depends on our attitude and expectations.  He says that we have to be “discerning the Body.” 

I wonder if we don’t need to listen to passages like this from Revelation sacramentally.  For the Word of God is indeed a two-edged sword depending on how we hear it.  It works on the one hand for redemption, and salvation.  But it also exposes the pervasive influence of judgment, condemnation, separation, violence, and destruction among us.  How we experience it is going to depend on whether and how we “discern the body.”     

II.

Discerning the body means asking how we see ourselves in relation to Jesus Christ.  Is he just an ancient historical figure?  Or are we somehow individually members of him?  Are we related to each other in and through him as members of his Body, the church?  Do we see ourselves as having been clothed with him, and that therefore now all divisions between people have been dissolved?  Do we see ourselves in him united to everyone and all creation, and that his Body extends to include all that God breathed into being at the beginning through him, the Word?  Do we see all people as neighbors?  Do we treat all of life as a divine gift to be cherished?  To “discern the body” really means realizing in Jesus Christ our connection and integration into all things.  That is what we discern when we take the bread and wine of the sacrament.

When hearing this passage, we have first of all to recognize that the One who is assigned to do the grain harvesting in verse 14 is the “Son of Man,” Jesus Christ, the Lamb.  If he is the reaper, then the harvest is about his setting us free from the bondage of the world, liberating us to rise into God’s heavenly household where we see everything from the highest, broadest, widest, and most inclusive perspective.  This reaping then is our healing, forgiveness, and release from whatever stems from our mortal, egocentric condition.  We are being called home, not to some other world, but to the true world as God created it which is always here.

His reaping symbolizes our emergence from an existence limited in time and space, to a new eternal, timeless, inclusive life of sharing, generosity, delight, and love.  Jesus is not a dark, hooded “grim reaper,” cutting us off from life and sending us to the grave of decay and dissolution.  Rather he is a joyful liberator who releases our tether to our invented, egocentric, imaginary world of pain and fear, anger, shame, and failure, releasing us to “fly away” to our true home in God.  This home is not another world so much as it is the hidden essence and real nature of this one.

He is the bread of life, and in reaping us he gathers us as well for the same purpose.  By eating the sacramental bread we become him, the true bread, ourselves, and we are now to feed all people with the knowledge of the truth of God’s love for the world.  As the gathered disciples of Jesus we are his Body, and the world will know we are Christians by the way we share his love with each other and with all.    

All creation bears the imprint of the One who speaks it into being at the beginning.  This Word of God by which the universe is created also becomes flesh to dwell among us in Jesus Christ, whose blood is poured out for us on the cross.  

III.

Which brings us to the second reaping in the vision, that of grapes.  This harvest is done not by Christ, but by two angels from the heavenly Temple.  One has authority over fire, who orders the other to gather the grapes.  The collected grapes are then thrown “into the great winepress of the wrath of God,” from which flows a huge river of blood.

If we are still perceiving things through the distorted lens of our own egocentricity, our own selfishness, aided and encouraged by the forces of evil who show up in the story as the Red Dragon, the Empire/Beast, and the False Prophet, then all this talk of reaping and harvesting and blood sounds truly frightening and nasty.  It usually inspires in people only more fear, more anger, and more doubling down on the need to control and dominate others.

But the key thing to note about this winepress is that it is located “outside the city.”  John’s hearers may have understood this as code, pointing to the cross of Jesus, who was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem.  There, Jesus, the Lamb, was slaughtered by those principalities and powers, agents of the Red Dragon and the Beast — Rome — people who only knew God’s love as wrath, retribution, and punishment, which they administered with heartless brutality.  

That is what the Bible really means when it talks about the wrath of God.  For we know that God is love.  But when we place ourselves outside of that love by our self-centered, self-righteous, ignorant violence, we experience God’s love as something that it is not, which is wrath.  In other words, to the wrathful — the pathologically fearful, angry, hateful, resentful, lying, and deluded — God’s love is known and felt as what they themselves project by their actions: wrath, judgment, and condemnation.

The reason that the Son is not the reaper of the grapes like he is of the grain is that he is himself the One cut down and trodden upon like grapes by the rampant forces of evil.  He is the One whose blood is poured out for the life of the world.  He is the One who identifies with all those whose blood has been spilled by the Red Dragon and the Beast and their agents.  He is the One who lifts up the cup of salvation, the wine of Passover, and says, “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for all people for the forgiveness of sins.”

He is the One who, after dying on the cross, has his side pierced by the thrusted spear of a Roman soldier, and out of whose body blood and water flow out onto the earth.  Here in John’s vision that blood becomes an overwhelming river, sweeping away all demonic forces.  Thus his blood, which is his life, restores, renews, infuses, and permeates the whole creation, redeeming and restoring it.  

The winepress of God’s wrath, the meat-grinder, the roller-coaster, the rat-race of human culture and economy, any place where anger, resentment, bitterness, fear, and violence reign, that is all washed away.  The blood of the sacrificed which was shed with the intention of terrorizing people and forcing compliance, is transformed into the vast deluge of God’s own life, given for all.  

IV.

Remember that in Scripture blood usually represents life.  If the blood of a sacrificed goat could sanctify the Temple, how much more, then, is the blood of the sacrificed Creator sufficient to sanctify the entire creation?

God saves by taking on the wrath of the wrathful in Jesus, absorbing its violence and hatred, and then offering his own blood which is his life, to all.  It’s like he transforms and redeems all the blood of all the innocent victims of Empire’s terror throughout history.  And he turns it into an ocean of blessing and peace.

This is the blood we drink in the sacrament.  This is the life we ingest and the love we receive.  In this sacrament we participate in, we in a sense  become, this flood as it washes over the whole world.  God’s life is spread by us when we proceed to share that life with others in terms of healing, forgiveness, compassion, generosity, and love. 

As the grains of wheat are harvested and gathered into the one loaf of bread we share together, and as the juice of many grapes is collected into the one cup, so we who are God’s people also witness to how we are gathered, collected, harvested out of our separate, individual existence into one Body of Christ the Lord.  Out of many we realize oneness: in the elements, in the church, in the world, and in the entire creation.  We are one. 

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