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?

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