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.  +++++++