"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.

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