"Halleluia!"

Revelation 19:1-10

October 27, 2019

I.

The movie, Independence Day, is about an alien invasion that threatens the survival of life on the Earth.  There is a scene near the end where — spoiler alert —  the huge alien vessels have crashed and burned, and Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith are smoking triumphant cigars.  And the world erupts in celebration.  Those aliens tried to wipe out the human race, for heaven’s sake!  There was no negotiating with them!  An unbridled victory celebration is warranted.  Hopefully it will lead to a new unity and hope in humanity going forward.  (Apparently not because Independence Day 2 was terrible.)

Or in another even more famous movie, The Wizard of Oz, after her house falls on a Wicked Witch, Dorothy is horrified that she accidentally killed someone.  But not so the little people who had been the witch’s victims.  They throw a party!  “Ding-dong the witch is dead!” they sing, which is kind of a paraphrase of the Hebrew word, “Halleluia!”  It is a song of liberation and life!  But of course there is still one Wicked Witch to go….     

This is the kind of energy John is tapping into here in Revelation 19, when he depicts the great celebrations in heaven over the defeat of the evil, vioent, mercenary system that was oppressing the world.  When the victory comes we celebrate with particular fervor and enthusiasm simply because we survived to do so.  The Earth is saved!  People are redeemed!  We have a future!  We’re not dead and gone!

We see this primordially when the Israelite people are liberated from slavery in Egypt, a victory finally nailed down at the Red Sea when Pharaoh’s army was inundated and destroyed by the returning waters.  It is, as I have said before, the central, basic event in the whole Bible.  The exultant hymn of Miriam on the beach as the waters settle and the army is gone, is the taproot of the entire Western spiritual tradition.  

The word that summarizes the human response to this victory is “Halleluia!”  It means, of course, “praise the Lord,” or literally, “praise Yah!” (“Yah” being an abbreviation of God’s proper name which was so holy that it was forbidden to be pronounced in full).  

Therefore, many Psalms begin with this word.  The most basic and concise expression of our faith is praise and joy over what God has done.  In this case, in John’s vision in Revelation, it is the final fulfillment of the promise of the Exodus, the final emancipation of the whole creation, from the corrupt and violent forces of evil we saw first in the murderous, enslaving regime of Pharaoh, and we see here in the bloodthirsty colonialist machine of Rome.  Both of these, along with the other powers that oppressed God’s people — Assyria, Babylon, Greece — represent the way human egocentric sinfulness spawns the systematic reign of terror and death that is Empire, what John calls the Beast.  That is something that has repeatedly happened throughout history and continues to happen now, even if we are reluctant to call it that.

II.

Unfortunately, like many biblical terms, it has been overused and trivilized in our language, so that it has just come to be a general exclamation we use when we think something good has happened to us.  “Halleluia!” I found a parking place!  “Halleluia!” there’s a sale at Target!  “Halleluia!” the Giants won last Sunday!  We use it ironically or even cynically.  “Halleluia!” my son finally cleaned his room.  

But “Halleluia!” is a far bigger deal than that.  First of all, it is about praising God.  The victory at the Red Sea has nothing to do with the military prowess of the Israelites.  They do not win this battle.  They do not even fight!  All they do is follow Moses through the separated waters of the sea, the water miraculously standing like walls to either side of them.  This is God’s victory, not theirs.  

Our victories are meaningless and ambiguous, because our fights are always corrupted by self-interest.  “Halleluia!” means we are the undeserving beneficiaries of God’s victory, often by means of something unexplainable.   

Secondly, we sing “Halleluia!” to praise God primarily for something.  And that something is victory, liberation, emancipation, deliverance, and salvation.  Conversely, as we see here, it is the defeat and destructions of evil.  Whenever God wins, it means that the powers of darkness, ignorance, lies, violence, and death lose.      

So the thing about “Halleluia!” is that it is an inherently political exclamation.  It is the song of triumph over the fall and collapse of a worldly Empire, sung by those who had been its victims.  They had suffered greatly under its predatory brutality, and they were targeted to be killed and exterminated by it.  But now that it has been destroyed, they have been given life and freedom.  And so they sing, “Halleluia!”  Praise the Lord!  

Empire, what John’s vision calls the Beast, is any pervasive, expansionist economic and political system in which power and wealth are centralized among an elite few, which is organized to extract by threats and violence resources from the earth and labor from people.  It is a system to which the world has been addicted for like five-thousand years.  

The book of Revelation is about the coming collapse of the Empire that happened to be dominant during the time of Jesus and the early church.  Indeed, that Empire, Rome, is the force that executed the Lord himself and was beginning to persecute Jesus’ ongoing followers.  It is the motivation for the people’s joy and praise of God.  The whole book is written to reassure the Christians that this system is going down, therefore they need to stay faithful and stand fast in God’s love, and not attach themselves to it and therefore go down with it.

III.

Of course, when John has his vision and sends it in a letter to these churches, Rome was not falling at all.  The Empire was at the height of its power.  It would not collapse in the West for another few centuries, and that was after it became Christian.  It would hang on in the east until 1300 years after John wrote.  Indeed, the era of persecution was just beginning and many Christians would die at Rome’s hands in the next couple of centuries.

The case may be made that even if Rome did eventually fall, a world system based on empires, imperialism, colonialism, conquest, exploitation, slavery, and all the other things that John identifies in his vision as the Beast serving the Red Dragon, continues even today!  It’s dressed up and presented a bit differently, but the basic structure of Empire still dominates the planet.  It still victimizes people and it still pursues its deepest agenda of snuffing the creation.  It still inspires narcissistic nihilism as the dominant force in people’s lives.  It still encourages an egocentric, paranoid selfishness as the basis for our actions and institutions.

So what is John writing about when he proclaims “fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!”?  We don’t exactly see the victory realized among us in history.  This is the great critique of Christianity generally: If the Messiah has come why is the world still so messed up?  If the Beast is defeated and the Red Dragon vanquished, why are things still so bad?  Is John delusional?  Is he kidding?  Is this just a wishful-thinking pep-talk to encourage his people?  Or is it real?  And if it’s real, in what sense?

What John is getting a glimpse of is the ultimate Truth of history and life.  In one sense it is the certain future we know by placing our trust in it.  But in another sense it is something that is always present, always available, always happening, always now.  Jesus says somewhere that when we pray we should trust that we have already received what we are praying for.  We should pray as if it is a done deal.  We should pray as if what we need and desire is already happening.

Because it is.  John’s vision is a Truth we live into and make real by our own convictions and actions.  We praise God, not because we have the visible, empirical, provable evidence of God’s Truth, but because praising God itself is what connects us to that larger, deeper, higher Truth.  

When I was growing up my dad had a record album that I listened to a lot and it had a great effect on me.  It was a live recording of Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall 1963.  The highlight of the album is when he gets the whole place to join him in singing “We Shall Overcome.”  In the middle of the song he talks to the audience about the next verse, which is “we are not afraid.”  And he says, “like everybody else we have been afraid; but you still sing it!  We are not afraid.”  It is the singing itself that banishes the fear, especially when done together.  Singing “We Shall Overcome” is precisely how we overcome.  To sing it is to see it start to happen.  

IV.

“Halleluia!” is what we sing, and how we live, so that we can see what God is already, always, and forever doing all around, within, and among us.  Praise itself opens the doors of our perception, enabling us to experience the reality we are praising.  It is the singing that makes the song come true, first in us, then through us in our world.  We sing God’s future into existence.

Then we see that the real world is not this perverted, corrupted, mercenary, violent existence that rages around us, where everyone and everything is for sale, for use, for depletion and exhaustion.  That is only the world humans have invented out of their own paranoia, craving, and hoarding.  It is killing planet and people… but it isn’t true or real except in the damage we do because we think this way.

“Halleluia!” means that the real world is made for communion and love.  The real world is a place of beauty and goodness, healing and blessing, abundance and joy.  John’s new image is the Bride of the Lamb: a world that attains fullness and wholeness, healing and perfection in unity with Jesus Christ, the One who created her, the One who has come to carry her home.

+++++++

Bright Light, Big City.

Revelation 18

October 13, 2019

I.

Another powerful angel comes down from heaven, one so aflame with God’s Light that the whole earth is illuminated.  By this bright Light we are given a view deep into the belly of the Beast, the dark heart and core of rapacious and consuming human Empire, the hub of the regime of greed, lust, and gluttony, what he calls the great city, Babylon.  600 years earlier, Babylon had conquered, deported, and attempted to annihilate God’s people.  He’s saying: Babylon, Rome, Sodom, Tyre, Jerusalem, Ephesus… you name it.  All cities are by nature manifestations of the same sour, depraved, godless, mercenary ideology.  And they all fall.  

The Bible is everywhere suspicious of urban existence.  It contains this keen awareness that cities, and the agricultural revolution that spawned them, are a big sign of what has mostly gone wrong in human life.  In Genesis, it was  Cain whose offering of grain was not accepted by God.  Cain murders his brother out of jealousy.  He then went away to found… cities.

For one thing, cities mean inequality.  Even today one of the places with the widest spread between very rich and very poor is Manhattan Island.  And many cities are much worse, with luxury, high-rise condos next to sprawling shantytowns teeming with destitute and hungry people.

The list of disasters that urbanization brought into the world include constant wars of conquest, crippling poverty, epidemics of disease, corrupt government, economic injustice, slavery, the subjugation of women, and moral degradation.

John calls all this a wasteland full of death and decay: “a dwelling-place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit,” which indicates a place ravaged by addiction, hatred, fear, violence, and disease.  It is “a haunt of every foul bird, a haunt of every foul and hateful beast.”  He is describing the Big City as a barren and dangerous Death Valley.  The vile and vicious animals may be metaphors for the kinds of violent and lying humans that roam urban areas, conniving both in seedy back alleys and in the carpeted offices in skyscrapers.

This is a global problem; he says it has to do with “all the nations,” which means no one is exempt.  All nations participate in the economy of the Empire and the Big City.  They have all “drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication,” meaning the commodification and reduction of everything, including human beings, to mere things to be sold or exchanged for profit.

“The kings of the earth,” of course, have enthusiastically caved in to this mentality and practice.  Even more obviously is this something to which “the merchants of the earth,” always in league with the kings, have made an obscene amount of money over.  The kings and the merchants and the nations have all managed to fill their own pockets from this ideology of buying and selling.  The entire regime is complicit.

II.

Then John hears a voice from heaven issuing a final plea for people to abandon the doomed city, to get away from the regime that is on a collision course with the Truth, the Empire that is going down like the Titanic.  Even at this late, perhaps last, hour, God is still calling people out of the disaster zone.  People still have the option of refusing to share in the dubious and ephemeral benefits of the Empire; they can still get out of the complicity in the Empire’s violence and injustice.  People can still rely upon God’s grace and be saved.

“Render to her as she herself has rendered, and repay her double for her deeds,” the heavenly voice says.  It sounds a little like payback time.  But I think John is just saying that, if the Big City and the Empire were all about selling us and others, then maybe we need to sell our interest in them.  Maybe we need to divest ourselves of our entanglements in that toxic and lethal system.  Maybe for once it’s okay for people to act out of their own self-interest and sever their connections to the crashing edifice.

In effect, the angel is saying to these common people: Remember that it was the theft of your labor that made the regime so wildly wealthy in the first place, and when you stop working it will produce “torment and grief” in the nations and kings and merchants whose luxury their efforts, your blood, tears, and sweat, were paying for.  Those who assumed they were immune from grief and loss will know pestilence, mourning, famine, and finally fire when you cease propping them up and feeding them, protecting them and fighting for them.  When the people decide to stop working it’s all over for the Empire and the Big City, it’s the ruin of the Beast and the Red Dragon, it is the end for the Accuser and the Adversary.

Meanwhile, the rich merchants have no compassion for the Big City that helped them gain their wealth.  They just watch from afar and mourn… not for the Big City or people in it but for themselves and their losses.  They hold on to the ideology of ownership that “it’s all about me and my profits,” to the end.

John gives us a fairly long list of the products they traded.  And we notice that these are all luxury items.  There are no staples here, nothing that ordinary people could afford to buy or own.  It includes “gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron, and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves—[that is,] human lives.”  

The Big City economy was working really well for people who could afford all this stuff.  But for everybody else, the ones who actually did the work of mining and processing and transporting and raising animals and manufacturing?  Not so much.  The list concludes with the abomination of slavery.  John dramatically stops there, to remind us that this is trading in, buying and selling, human lives, human “souls” is the literal Greek word.  The most valuable of all God’s creations, reduced to a commodity, given a price in the market, and sold like any other object.

III.

When this ghastly engine of death, degradation, depredation, and destruction goes down in awesome flames, the angel says: “Rejoice!”  Heaven, saints, and apostles, rejoice! 

The Big City is going down because of the merchants who were the “magnates of the earth.”  Magnates.  I remember this Laurel and Hardy routine where Hardy brags to Laurel that, having married a rich woman, he has now become a magnate.  "Do you know what a magnate is?" he asks.  Laurel gets a quizzical look on his face, hems and haws a minute while Hardy proudly preens.  Then he offers, “It’s a little white thing that eats rotten cheese.”  Stan Laurel has the same opinion of magnates — in Greek the word is literally “big men” — as John: he doesn’t see the difference between them and maggots.

John says the Big City had its own kind of sorcery, probably because it  was so good at convincing people that these leaders really were important men, too big to fail, who needed to be kept satisfied, and not slimy, disgusting parasites.

The final sentence delivered against the Big City by the angel is to point out that it has on its hands “the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slaughtered on earth.”  The prophets and saints, who died for their faith, are identified with “all who have been slaughtered.”  This is something  Jesus the Lamb himself does.  He also died at the hands of the same machine, identifying with the executed, the lynched, the murdered, and the tortured of every age.  

Only, of course, he does not stay dead but is raised to new life.  The big men and the Big City threw their worst at him, to no avail.  He even uses his time in the realm of death to liberate the souls imprisoned in Hell, which is kind of like the model and prototype of the Big City.

IV. 

The world that John describes in Revelation is our world.  The global regime he shows us simply has not changed that much in 2000 years, except to get more sophisticated, universal, and top-heavy.  But the basic principles we have been talking about remain the same.  It’s still based on greed, violence, and inequality. 

When the angel calls on people to get out of the Big City, this, like so much in Revelation, doesn’t necessarily mean physically relocating.  It is more a matter of escaping the corrosive, hectic, harried, anxious, and frantic mindset and squalid practices that often rule urban existence.  It is more about leaving behind and letting go of the dog-eat-dog hustle and the rat-race: qualities we have been addressing in Revelation for weeks: the reduction of human life to an egocentric, selfish scramble for commodities in which everything and everyone is just an object for sale.  We don’t have to get out of that Big City as much as get it out of us.

The revelation of God’s Truth in Jesus Christ, the Lamb who was slain but who now lives, gives us an alternative way to live… indeed, the only Way to live, because, as he has been persistently depicting, the other path leads inexorably and inevitably to ruin and extinction.  That other path is the highway to hell, into the mouth of the ultimate consumer, the Red Dragon, whose goal is the silent scream of universal death.

The irony is that early Christianity flourished primarily in the cities of the Roman Empire, as people finally found a Way of faith and life that drew them together in forgiveness, equality, justice, peace, and especially love.  They gathered around the Lord’s Table as one body, and learned to follow Jesus’ example of cherishing each other and the whole creation, in lives of humility generosity, healing, and blessing.

+++++++

From Selling to Sharing.

Revelation 17

October 6, 2019

I.

Back in chapter 12 we saw the blessed and beautiful Woman Clothed with the Sun, representing the People of God, who gives birth to the Messiah and has to flee to the wilderness to escape the Dragon.  Here we have the opposite character in another woman, one who rides on a beast and makes the earth into a desert by the predations of what the text calls her “fornication.”

The word here in Greek is porneio, which means sexual immorality.  But the interesting thing about this word is that it is derived from the word pernemi which means “to sell.”  So the thing that makes sex, or any other good thing for that matter, immoral is when it is sold, exchanged for gain, that is, when it becomes prostitution.  And the “fornication” of this harlot character is seen as more than just sexual: it has to do with how we try to sell any part of ourselves, and any part of God’s creation, including other people, in our selfish greed for profit.  The “many waters” upon which she sits represent the world as it is involved with commerce and trade.  John sees all that as a vast network and culture of fornication, in every sense of that word.  

“Fornication,” then, is when we take any aspect of God’s good creation and turn it into an article of trade, manipulation, pressure, or quid pro quo (which is a Latin term simply meaning “this for that”).  It means that things or people have no value in themselves but are only worth what you can get for them.  This, the sinful and careless diminishment of things and people into items for sale in the marketplace, benefiting whomever enters into the exchange with more to begin with, is the larger and deeper meaning of fornication.  It is the spirit of commodification in which everything, including human beings, gets reduced to its economic value, everything is subject to exchange for money, and everything is haggled over in a spirit of competition, exploitation, swindling, theft, and eventually often war.  This is what the woman in this part of John’s vision stands for.

We totally understand this.  We know what it means when we hear that someone has “prostituted himself.”  It means that he caved in and abandoned his principles for the money.  It means he sold himself — his mind, his time, his energy, his talents, his reputation — to the highest bidder, or at least to someone who would pay him for it.  It is what we say when a great actor or musician starts doing lucrative deodorant commercials.  And it is frankly what most of us are doing all day long because it is the very basis of our economy.  

And we have no business claiming any superiority over others, especially those who are forced into perhaps the lowest form of this kind of degradation, which is sex work.  Because we are neck deep in this kind of thing all the time ourselves.  For we are under the spell of the prostitute in John’s vision whenever we do anything for the money.  

And we are making such calculations so constantly that we are not even conscious of it.  We rationalize it and justify it so perpetually and naturally that we are not aware that there is anything at all wrong in it.  For instance, why would I go to get air in my tires at one gas station where it costs me 4 quarters, when I can go to the QuickChek on Route 9 in Howell and get air for free?

II.

I use a deliberately harmless and trivial example to show that we are always doing these cost/benefit analyses in our heads.  We are always assuming without even any consideration that, well of course we’re going to go for the lowest price and of course we’re going to go for the highest salary and of course we should try to get the best return on our investments and of course….

And it is that “of course” that shows how sucked into the orbit of this prostitution mentality we are.  It is veritably pre-conscious for us.  Why would anyone think any other way.  It’s inconceivable!

Indeed, the idea and practice of buying low and selling high is so automatic and reflexive in us that we assume it is just a natural feature of the way things are.  How often do we approach relationships this way, even to the point of making lists of pros and cons?  Do the benefits outweigh the costs?  Does what we get out of something outweigh what we will have to contribute?  Does this cost more energy than it’s worth?  What is the “bottom line”?

Our whole economy runs on this.  I mean, for example, what is a job but an arrangement in which we sell ourselves to someone else?  We give them our time and energy in exchange for money.  It’s just an extremely sanitized and (hopefully) non-sexualized form of prostitution.  And so on.

In our decisions we habitually analyze the spread sheets showing past data and performance, and we strive to produce a budget projecting priorities for the future.  This is what the text means when it says that the beast “was, is not, and is to come.”   The beast gets his energy when we focus on the past and the future, and ignore the living present.  This is about memory and desire, it is about nostalgia for the past and fear of the future… but it has no idea of where it really is or what it is really doing now.  

Indeed, the ones who manage to live now in lives of compassion, equality, inclusion, and justice following the Lamb, Jesus Christ?  It is their blood on which the whole system is drunk.  The life and labor of those who address real, present need, as Jesus does, fuels everything.

The consequences of this attitude are perpetual conflict, as we see here in how the whole system is consumed by hate as the “kings of the earth” rebel against the “great city” the woman represents.  The great city which is really a wilderness is where we find her, because that is what her regime is turning the whole planet into: a wasteland.

The Lord says we may serve God or we may serve money, but it is not possible to do both.  He sets this irrevocable opposition, this absolute either/or, between the two that also deeply characterizes the attitude of John in Revelation.  John would say we may follow the Woman Clothed with the Sun, or we may follow this harlot in chapter 17 who represents the spirit of selling yourself to the highest bidder.  There is no compromise between these two. 

III.

But what other way is there for us to live?  I mean, come on!  Are we expected to give without expecting anything in return?  Are we expected to work for free?  Are we expected to not get as much as we can for what we have?  That was Martin Shkreli and other pharmaceutical executives’ question when they raise prices of one of some drugs 400%, beyond the ability of many sick people to pay.  

Is there some other way to live?

The Christians in John’s day know that there is indeed another way to live.  They know that the regime of the beast and the harlot and the antichrist is not really a way to live at all, but ultimately a way of extermination, annihilation, and extinction.  They know because of their trust in the Lamb of God who demonstrates abundant love in giving his life for the life of the world… and revealing the true life of resurrection in and though all things, which they experience in the Church.

The Lamb shows us God’s continual self-emptying in love for the world.  This indeed is the meaning of the cross in which God’s life and love — in the shed blood of the Savior — is poured out for creatures who cannot possibly deserve it.  This is what Jesus means when he says things like we should give to people precisely because they will never pay us back.  In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus repeatedly advises against doing anything for the sake of what you will gain from it, whether it be money, or power, or popularity. 

Jesus is saying that if we imitate the free grace of God in freely giving to others what they need we will be rewarded.  But he doesn’t just mean rewarded in heaven after we die.  He means we are rewarded in this life in this creation because we will thereby live in a better world together.  Instead of the beast’s selling economy, an economy based on prostitution in which we exchange what we have been given for money, and which puts lethal strain on the creation, the Lord offers a different vision and model.  He offers and exemplifies a sharing economy in which we give what we have and receive what we need.

In his economy no one is so devalued that they are not worth receiving adequate health care, or decent housing, or clean water, or nutritious food.  No one is so devalued and rendered so worthless that they do not deserve friendship, empathy, or concern.  Indeed, not only is everyone valued and cherished and held in his economy, but the ones most attended to are those with the least, like the people be declares blessed in the Beatitudes: the poor, the grieving, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, the gentle, the persecuted.  

IV.

The Kingdom of the Lamb does require a rather comprehensive and thorough change of heart and mind.  We call this repentance.  We cannot inhabit the Lamb’s Kingdom if our souls are still intoxicated with the ideology of the beast and the harlot of this story.  We cannot dwell in God’s garden in peace if we are all about ourselves and what we can get and how we can get more, especially more than that other guy. 

This is the great urgency of our evangelism.  Will we go down with the world that the beast and the dragon and the harlot are consuming and destroying?  Or will we be raised up with the Lamb in the world, the true world, that is coming and is now here, and which the Church is supposed to be representing, anticipating, and embodying?  Will we perish in the doomed, squalid existence of selling and being sold?  Or will we emerge into the pure Light of God’s world of sharing and giving?  +++++++