"Like a Thief."

Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44

December 1, 2019 + 1 Advent

I.

Like the book of Revelation, the season of Advent has to do with the end of this synthetic world humans invent and project out of their fearful egocentricity, and the dawning of God’s new world, which is really the true world, revealed in Jesus Christ. 

In his prophecy about the coming “day and hour,” the Lord Jesus likens himself to a thief.  I always thought that was remarkable.  He understands himself to be breaking into our homes when we least expect it.  He says he is coming to take our stuff, that is, to steal what we have and value.

Jesus comes to liberate the world, lifting it away from those who corrupted it and profit from its corruption.  His first example is about the time of Noah, when people were blithely and cluelessly going about their business, “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.”  In other words they were consuming.  First, they were gobbling up creation — food and water.  Secondly, they were objectifying, distributing, and consuming women.  The main agents in marriage being the husband who “took" a wife and the woman’s father, who “gave” her away, like livestock. 

Thus Jesus describes in a very few words a system of mindless utilization, reducing the creation and other people to objects to be dispensed according to the whims of powerful people.  It is the kind of society that disgusted the Creator so much that he enlists Noah to build a giant boat, so his family and the animals would survive the inevitable reckoning when the whole place got washed clean in the Flood.

Those participating in, perpetrating, and perpetuating that system self-servingly assumed that this was just the way the world is and that it would go on like this forever.  So when the clouds gather and the rain starts to pour, and that weirdo Noah and his family collect all these animals and shut themselves up in the ark, the rest of the people “knew nothing,” Jesus says.  They knew nothing.  Nothing but their own greed, lust, power, gluttony, and pride.

Then he talks again about people going about their business, in this case farmworkers and bread producers.  Some are arbitrarily “taken” and some are left.  We don’t know whether it is better to be taken or left, just that there is this division, this separation, like the sheep from the goats, or the wheat from the weeds, or the grain from the chaff in other parts of the gospels.  The criteria in those separations is whether our work is serving the whole community, or only ourselves.  Those whose work communicates God’s abundance and life to everyone are saved.  Those who are only in it for themselves, who do not serve people in need, only earn themselves a ticket to the fire.

This is why some experience the coming of the Lord as a burglar breaking and entering.  They have founded their identity on their possessions and hold onto them with all their might.  When they hear the good news of God’s Kingdom, it sounds like theft to them because they are only thinking about what they lose.  Jesus understands that when wealth gets redistributed from the poor to the rich, that’s just considered normal.  But when wealth gets redistributed from the rich to the poor, as in the Kingdom of God, that’s called “theft.”  

II.

Paul is writing about the same thing to the church in Rome.  He wants them to wake up and stay woke from their former sleepwalking existence.  The images of sleep, night, and darkness stand for ignorance.  In the night we can’t perceive what is there; we proceed out of fear.  Fear causes us to react by grabbing what we can when we can by whatever means necessary.  Fear places us firmly in the doomed company of the chaff, the weeds, and those who only suck up the gifts of God in creation for themselves and their people.  

The apostle characterizes their behavior as reveling and drunkenness — corrosive, wasteful luxuries that most poor and working people could not afford; debauchery and licentiousness — practices that often included the sexual abuse of weaker people;  and quarreling and jealousy — toxic modes of communication that express hatred and bring division into the community.  All of these are self-serving, self-centered, careless, ignorant practices; all of them degrade the quality of life for everyone.  In effect he says, “Do not imitate the excesses of those whom the world calls successful, who are really all about feeding their faces and gratifying every desire, urge, compulsion, and craving, at everyone else’s expense.”

The apostle suggests that these are the works of darkness, the behavior of those who do not know or see the truth of God’s love for the world revealed in Jesus Christ.  They do not see or care about the consequences of their own actions, either to themselves or to others.  They are all about what they can get and consume and enjoy now.  The cost is invisible and irrelevant to them.

Paul is reminding them that when they turned to Jesus and began to trust in him, the orientation of their lives shifted, they did a 180 away from the darkness of night, and began to face and await the sunrise.  In effect, it occurred to them to join Noah’s family and get on the ark, which is the Church.  By living in the light of God’s love together they prepared themselves to perceive and welcome the coming of the Light.  “The night is far gone; the day is near,” he says.

He understands, as John does in Revelation, that this is not an easy, comfortable, painless, or convenient choice to make.  The darkness still rages outside.  The coming of the Light is burning away all that is false and evil like the waters of the Flood purified the planet.  Our continued participation in the orgy of self-gratification going on all around us only welds us more firmly to the imploding social order, ensuring that we will go down with the chaff, the weeds, and the goats.

The criterion is always whether we are givers who contribute generously and join in the flow, emptying ourselves in overflowing love in imitation of the God revealed in Jesus, or whether we will be takers, little knots of congestion and blockage, collecting and hoarding, keeping and saving the good gifts of God’s creation for ourselves alone.

III.

Finally, the prophet Isaiah offers a stunning vision of the world to come, the true world of God, the future which is always breaking into our present.  He uses the image of God’s Temple, “the mountain of the Lord’s house.”  We know the true and final Temple of the living God to be, not a stone building on a physical mountain in Jerusalem, but Jesus Christ himself worshiped in spirit and in truth.  The raising up of this “mountain” above all others means that he will be recognized as the Center and Source of Wisdom and Truth.  The whole world will come to him, and seek to be taught his ways and “walk in his paths.”

What are his ways?  How do we walk in his paths?  The one thing Isaiah lifts up as the primary example is the famous statement about beating metal weapons into farm implements, banning and refusing to teach war.  Agriculture feeds people.  It brings life and joy.  It strengthens bodies and communities.  War, on the other hand, is good for… “absolutely nothing.”  (“Say it again!”)

War becomes obsolete when instead of having to fight to settle differences, Jesus Christ will “judge between the nations.”  And notice that it is the actions of “nations,” not individuals, that get judged.

In chapter 25, we will see Jesus as the King who judges the nations.  And we see that nations will rise and fall based on one set of criteria.  It is not how much of the planet’s wealth they managed to extract for themselves.  It is not how widespread their culture — like if everybody listens to their music and watches their movies.  It is certainly not because a nation has the most advanced, expensive, widely deployed, and lethal weapons.  It isn’t even because a nation has the right religious rituals, scriptures, and institutions.  That’s not a consideration for Isaiah.  

The only standard by which nations are judged is whether they gave aid and comfort to those in need.  Did they organize themselves to ensure that all are provided for?  Did they give food to the hungry?  

That is what is going on in the swords-to-plows image.  In God’s Kingdom, nations take the godless ideology and practice of militarism and melt it down in the fire of God’s justice and remake it into tools to feed the hungry.  They relentlessly hammer at their own hatred until it is unrecognizable, and reshaped into love.  They immolate their own dependence on violence, until what emerges is the goodness and blessing of God’s shalom, or peace. 

That is how a nation gets to participate in the future.  If not — that is, if they sink their wealth into preparing for war while allowing people to go without food, clean water, healthcare, and shelter; and fail to welcome the stranger and visit prisoners — then they get consigned to the fires of judgment.  They condemn themselves with the condemnation they delivered on the needy.

IV.

Isaiah’s final invitation is, “Come, O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord!”  The season of Advent is about our walking in the Light of the One who is to come.  For he illuminates our path and shows us what is true.  We are destined for God’s Kingdom when we resonate in advance according to the life and teachings of Jesus.  That is, when we start to live now, today, according to the values and practices he shows us.

We walk in the Light of the Lord Jesus when we learn to renounce our fear, our self-centeredness, and our craving, and devote ourselves to embodying his generosity and compassion in our own lives.  Starting here and now, with the mission of the Church, we need to become a nation which sees that everyone is fed, healed, housed, free, forgiven, and loved.

Even if it means being like thieves in the night.  For what seems like theft in the darkness of a dying world, is actually justice in the Light of the Lord.

+++++++

"The Bride of the Lamb."

Revelation 22

November 24, 2019

The Bride of the Lamb.

I.

I meet a lot of people who were harmed by their church experience growing up.  Unfortunately, some churches have done a lot of damage.  Polling suggests that the things churches are best known for, are not good. 

Apparently there are a lot of abusive churches out there.  They preach hatred of Gays and Muslims; they tell women to stay with their abusers; they reject you if you’re not wearing the right clothes; and they defend and rationalize all kinds of evil done in the name of Jesus: war, lynching, witch-burning, segregation, slavery, torture, colonialism, genocide.  It’s pretty awful.

It leads people, even many Christians, to ask: Why does there have to be a Church at all?  Why can’t we just follow Jesus?  Why can’t we worship the Creator out in the creation?  Why do we need all this churchy stuff, like creeds, liturgies, clergy, seminaries, hierarchies, rules, and so on? 

Why do we need to attend church?  Why not commune with God on the golf course?  Why not just take a meditative walk in the woods?  Why not just relax with your family on Sunday mornings?  If God is everywhere then why do we have to go to this particular place with these particular people?  Isn’t it just a racket?  Isn’t it just a control thing?

For us the Church is just this fallible human institution like the other institutions in our culture that are in crisis.  It’s divided into countless little denominational or “non-denominational” pieces, many of them claiming to be the only true one.  It experiences horrible corruption like the on-going child abuse scandal in Roman Catholicism.  It continually does dumb and destructive things.   

And the problem is that we’re actually okay with that.  In our minds and in our practice we act as if the Church should reflect… us.  It should be what we want.  And if a particular church doesn’t suit us, we shrug and wander off to shop around for one that does.  We expect a church to be shaped to accommodate our preferences.

Once when I was serving in another church a member came up to me after worship all irate, huffing indignantly that “we had 14 musical events in that service today!”  He didn’t like it.  I was so taken aback that I wondered if he was right… but I only counted 13.  His assumption was that the worship service needed to suit him.  It needed to fit with his preferences.  It needed to fit with his tastes.  

The Church, by this reasoning, is not the Bride of the Lamb, but our “bride,” our possession, our plaything.  When it degrades into a human institution, infected with the politics and egocentricity of powerful people, when it becomes an expression of arrogance and complacency, it sours into the corrupt, debased, nasty place that many experience.  When the Church doesn’t radiate God’s Presence, it starts glaring with our agendas.  It expresses our fears, our anger, our bigotry, and just becomes an agent of what John calls the Beast.  It is when the Church does cave in to what people think they want and need, that it becomes a toxic, corrosive, oppressive, and violent place, especially for precisely the people Jesus comes to serve: the weak, the victims, the odd, the broken, and the sad.

II.

But in my view the problem is not that the church is too important; it is that the Church is not important enough.  We’re not taking seriously enough what the Church and its function really are.

In the Nicene Creed we say that, “We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.”  The Church is an article of our faith.  It is something we believe in.  To trust in God, Jesus, and the Spirit is also to trust in the Church.  Salvation happens in and through the Church.  The Church is not a human-made institution.  

So, when we read about the new creation that emerges at the end of Revelation, after all this turbulence and destruction, we might ask why there has to be a New Jerusalem — the Church — in it at all.  Why can’t God be all in all?  Why can’t just the whole creation shine with God’s presence?  Why does there have to be a special place?  Why can’t all places be special?

Well, all places are special, and God is all in all.  The whole creation does shine with God’s holy Light.  But it is God’s holy Light.  And God’s Light is not neutral, but it has a certain frequency, color, and character.  It is not determined by what we want to see, but by what is True and Real. 

The Church does not generate God’s Light.  That Light comes from God.  It is the Light of the Creator.  This is stated in John’s vision by the fact that the lamp that is the Source of Light in the city is the Lamb.  And Lamb-light has the shape of the cross, which is to say it is love-light.  It is the Light of self-offering, generosity, compassion, healing, and forgiveness.  This is the Light that then gets refracted, reflected, amplified, and shined abroad by the city that is the Church.  This is the Light that fills, creates, and is the real world. 

The New Jerusalem’s function within the new creation is to serve as kind of a 1500 cubic mile lens that focuses and conditions and filters the Light so that it can be a benefit to the whole creation.  And the New Jerusalem is the Church, the Bride of the Lamb.

As the whole universe is finally revealed as God’s Temple, the Church is the Holy of Holies within that Temple.  It is the center of God’s Presence.  It is the place where God most literally, directly, and actually dwells.  It is the hub, the transmitter, from which the Light of God radiates into everything.

So the real Church in John’s vision is not something we human creatures invented, concocted, dreamed-up, or synthesized.  The Church is — that is to say we are — destined and formed from the beginning of time to be nothing less than Jesus’ Bride, the Bride of the Lamb.  

It is a powerful and charged image.  It means we are the very partner and even intimate lover of God.  Whatever God brings into the world grows and emerges through us.  We are chosen, selected by God the Creator, not for worldly honor and power, but for service.  We are the place where God’s loving Presence is received, welcomed, knit together with our essence, given shape, and finally born into life.  Our works are the fruit, the offspring, the extended activity of God.

III.    

By calling the Church the Bride of the Lamb, John reminds us that this is not a place of privilege or status but that we are wedded to the cross, the place where the Lamb offers his life for the life of the world.  The Bride of the Lamb shares in the marginalized and suspect place of the Lamb, which means that she makes her home with and actively serves those who suffer at the hands of power, injustice, and cruelty.  

The 12 gates and 12 foundations of the wall are the tribes of Israel and the apostles of Jesus.  These define the boundaries of the city, which means that the Scriptures and tradition of Israelite faith, as fulfilled in Jesus’ ministry, become the defining membrane determining what comes in and what goes out.  This tradition gives shape to the city; it is not amorphous but formed and structured within the Scriptural message of liberation from slavery, and the equality we share in the New Community.   

The image of the New Jerusalem “coming down from heaven” means that we are emissaries of God’s maximally inclusive realm where all are seen, known, embraced, and valued, where there are no divisions between powerful and powerless, rich and poor, privileged and disenfranchised; there are not even meaningful artificial boundaries and divisions between nationalities, races, classes, and genders, because in God’s eyes we are all one in Jesus Christ.  The real Church as the Bride of the Lamb witnesses to this by its refusal to create arbitrary pecking orders or chains of command but stubbornly and graciously cherishes every person as a transcendent miracle and equal to everyone else.

The fact that there is no Temple in the city means that God is present everywhere within it.  The nations will walk by its Light, which means that the teachings of the Church will serve as a good guide to the nations.  Jesus himself says to his disciples, “You are the light of the world,” shining as he does in the   broken places where business as usual breaks down and breaks people.

The great River of the Water of Life flows from God’s throne which is also the Lamb’s throne, for we know by now that the Lamb and God are One.  What can this water of life be now but the blood — the life — of the Lamb?  The river flows through the city feeding the Tree of Life, which is a single species now apparently with many different individuals bearing 12 kinds of healing fruit, one emerging every month, the leaves of which will be for the healing of the nations.

IV.

The Church needs more than anything to live into this vision of itself as the Bride of the Lamb.  It is a place of healing and wholeness, it is a place of forgiveness and grace, it is a place of acceptance and welcome, it is a place of compassion and service, it is a place of humility and joy.  There is no curse, no condemnation, no vindictiveness, no bitterness found here at all.  

It is a place of worship, and “there will be no more night,” which is to say, no more ignorance, darkness, blindness, or fear, because we live by the Light of the Lamb.  To the extent that we are filled to overflowing with that Light, we reign.  To reign in this sense is to rain down upon all people and the whole creation the goodness, blessings, peace, and delight of the Creator.

In the end, Revelation is a cosmic invitation: “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’  And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’  And let everyone who is thirsty come.  Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”

For in the Church we come with the One who is coming, for whose continual arrival we pray by living into his vision.  “Amen.  Come, Lord Jesus!”

+++++++  

The New Jerusalem.

Revelation 21

November 17, 2019

I.

The Man in the High Castle is a great novel by Philip K. Dick.  Lately it has been heavily adapted into a mini-series just entering its 4th and final season (which I have not yet had time to watch).  Briefly, the premise of the story is that the Allies lost World War II.  The action takes place in 1962, when the US is divided between Japanese and German sectors.  But then evidence, or at least hope, emerges of an alternate timeline, in which the Allies really win the war.  The implication being, perhaps, that we may actually live into this other version of reality, and somehow thereby make it true.

This idea is a not insignificant stream in science fiction, that we are somehow living in a false, mistaken, badly off-the-rails world, and there is another, truer, world available to us.  As Morpheus says in The Matrix, “there is something wrong with the world.”  Or the way that Guynan, the resident psychic on the Starship Enterprise, suddenly realizes that the historical trajectory they are on, is wrong.

We have been reading through the book of Revelation now for about a year.  The main message of this book is not that different from these stories.  It is revealed to John that the world-as-we-know-it is messed up.  The truth is out there, and our job as the people of God is to witness to and live in this other version of reality revealed in Jesus, in which God, not Caesar, wins.

Here in chapter 21, we have finally arrived at the consummation of the vision.  John has been hinting at it and reassuring us all along that God wins in the end.  Here he finally sees what that victory looks like.  At long last and after much catastrophic, seismic, convulsive fireworks, we see the real world, the world as renewed and purified and reconstituted by God.  This is the world we are charged to bear witness to, anticipating, expecting, and living in it even now, by the power of the Lamb.

The nature, meaning, and purpose of a story is determined by its ending.  In the theater, it is the difference between tragedy and comedy: at the end of the play is everyone dead or laughing?  

This book, like our whole existence, has been a battle between two endings as well.  On the one hand there is Satan, the Red Dragon, who, having been expelled from heaven comes down here to wreak havoc among the humans.  His main agenda is, since he couldn’t defeat God, to destroy God’s creation, enlisting people in the project by sucking up to their fragile and fearful egos.  His victory would make the story an unspeakable tragedy, a cynical, nihilistic saga of death, pain, and ultimate universal extinction.

On the other hand we have God’s victory, which John insists is never actually in doubt.  And here, in this the last book of the Bible, the ending is wonderfully good!  Everyone is laughing with joy and delight.  Everyone has what they need and more.  We discover that all the causes of death, pain, hunger, and misery have been eliminated.  And we are left bathing in the awesome, overflowing glory and love of God.

II.

It is important to note that Revelation does not depict a restoration of some primeval, perfect world of the past.  It is a vision of the future… yet it is also somehow present, which is how John is able to see it.  He is not a time-traveler.  Rather, he is given a glimpse into a future that is already accomplished, already shaping our lives in subtle ways.  It is like skipping ahead to read the final chapter of a mystery novel.  This whole book is basically a spoiler.  It is intended to remove the suspense about the ultimate destiny of life.  

I feel I have to state this because we too often fall into a corrosive nostalgia that looks back and tries to recover some imagined former time.  In my career I have had to deal with many people who wallow in grief and anger, daydreaming about the 1950’s.  That’s when we couldn’t build churches fast enough!  That’s when Sunday Schools were full!  That’s when everybody saluted the flag!  That’s when men wore ties and women wore dresses!  That’s when smoking didn’t cause cancer!  We need to get back to that!

But the book of Revelation is not about looking back at anything.  Neither is Jesus, who says that if we put our hands to the plow and look back we are not fit for the Kingdom of God.  Looking back is a cancer that will kill you.  I am not denying the importance of tradition.  John himself is always employing images and themes from the Hebrew Scriptures.  His vision is not an innovation.

God’s future has always been breaking into our time, and the words of the Bible have always pointed ahead.  They reveal the presence of God’s future.  Our faith looks ever forward to the end of the story; and we live now in the power of that ending, as it is reflected and experienced in advance, as it begins to make itself known even today.  Because God’s eternity is always present, even if we don’t directly see it. 

The first thing John shows us about this the vision is the whole creation being made new.  Heaven and earth are not destroyed, disposed of, and replaced, so much as renewed, resurrected, purified, and redeemed.  There remains a continuity connecting the old creation and the new, just as there is between the acorn and the oak tree, which are like the metaphors Paul uses to talk about the mortal body and the resurrected body.      

The creation is liberated from its oppression by the Red Dragon and his agents: the Beast of human Empire, oppressing people and planet with economies based on exploitation and war, and the False Prophet who kept people bamboozled and narcotized with his seductive propaganda insinuating itself into our consciousness.  Now that these destroyers of the earth have themselves been destroyed, the creation is allowed to emerge into its true nature and destiny.  Even the sea, as a symbol of chaos and disorder, is gone.  There is nothing to fear, no capricious forces that can rise up and wreck your life with a hurricane or a flood, no aquatic highway conveying the ships of pirates or conquering armies to your shores.  God removes all cosmic danger so we may live in shalom: wholeness and peace.

III.

The second part of the vision is, of course, the spectacular New Jerusalem, descending from heaven, materializing, emerging out of the place of God’s most inclusive and expansive vision.  Like the Holy of Holies in the Temple, the New Jerusalem is a perfect cube, only a lot bigger.  This indicates the presence of God in the world.  No Temple is necessary because God will be directly accessible everywhere.  

The New Jerusalem, it must be said, is a city!  So God redeems urban life from the corruption and predations of Rome.  Instead of a “Babylon,” dominated by exploitative commerce rooted in greed, a place of injustice, violence, oppression, and anxiety, the New Jerusalem is a community of astonishing abundance and wealth.  It is made of the purest gold!  It is filled with God’s light and transcendent beauty!  It is a place to which people willingly and joyfully bring their gifts to be shared for the good of all, rather than a place where the rich steal from the poor and build monuments to themselves.

The city has a nominal, decorative wall, though its gates are open, indicating that it is indeed a safe space for all.  And the wall, the boundary or parameter, is the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles of the new Israel, the church.  The membrane constituting the interface between the New Jerusalem and the new cosmos is the tradition which has Jesus Christ at the center.  

John reminds his hearers that, to be a part of this vision, they have to be thirsty for true, eternal life.  You have to want it.  The Beast has been indoctrinating us from birth to want things like money, fame, power; comfort, security, convenience, pleasure….  We have to want more than anything to share in this new life and joy that comes from standing in God’s Presence.  We have to want to lose ourselves in that oneness.

Inhabitants in this new city have to have courage.  They have to trust in God.  They have to be single-minded and compassionate, non-mercenary, humble, and dedicated to the truth.  John can’t help but inject this exhortation into his story, reminding the church that we only get into this glorious city by resonating with, and being shaped by the values and practices of Jesus Christ.  

And when we live in these values and practices, when we reflect and express the life of the Lamb in our lives, when we live together in a new kind of community, anticipating the glory and joy of this city, then we start to see the city of God emerge among and within us.

IV.

This has always been the function of Christian worship: to witness to that other world and open a space that correlates to that vision.  For here, this very  room, is supposed to be a small outpost of God’s Kingdom.  In our Baptism we are claimed by God, and separated from any allegiance to the other powers that rule in this world; we belong to God alone.  We are citizens of that New Jerusalem.  And in the Lord’s Supper we gather around the Table of God’s love, nourished and empowered to witness to how in Jesus Christ God’s life is given for us and to us. 

This witness has always been the purpose of Christian mission: to open up a space in the world that expresses the abundance, the glory, the beauty, the generosity, the forgiveness, and the welcome of the new creation of the living God.  This happens by standing with and providing for those in need, and saying to everyone: “I love the face of Christ I see in you.” +++++++ 

The Lake of Fire.

Revelation 20

November 10, 2019

I.

For people in recovery from addiction, no matter how clean and sober they may have been for many years — and I personally know people who have maintained their sobriety for decades… and they still attend regular meetings — they know that they will never be in this life so totally cured that going back to substance abuse is impossible.  This illness will be a part of their life until they die.  They never get over it.  

I thought of that when I read this chapter about the thousand years.  Why does John’s vision include this puzzling interregnum, a long period of time when the dragon, Satan, the Accuser, is locked up and immobilized?  And then the even bigger question: Why not just leave him there?  Why does he have to “be let out for a little while”? 

The reason is that Satan has weaseled his way into human existence and infected us with the fear, shame, and anger that totally flavor our consciousness, resulting in selfishness, rebellion, violence, and cynical hatred of God and God’s creation, especially other people.  Even when he has been neutralized and removed from our lives, there remains a sense that the Accuser is still out there — or down there.  And the time will inevitably come when his temptations erupt again, and we will feel his gnawing, sour seductions again in our souls and in our world.  

We don’t have to be addicts to understand this dynamic.  All of us have slavery to sin somewhere in our consciousness.  We may not suffer from chemical addictions, or even compulsive bad habits.  But we all do suffer from the more general form of this disease: we are all liable to fall into a deep egocentricity that cuts us off from others, from God, from creation, and even from our true selves.  We are all susceptible to the suggestions that we should devote our lives to getting and keeping money, fame, and power, and relying on the violent, self-serving, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, self-gratifying practices that follow from them.

It is like a bad gene in our interior make-up that, even if it gets turned off, may still be turned on again.  There is always this potential for us to fall into evil and start thinking and acting as if we were separated from, and at enmity with, God.  We may start imagining ourselves at the center of creation at any time.  We may resume thinking that it is all about us.

That’s the downside of this, that we always carry this tendency within us.  That’s the bad news.  But the upside is that we also carry even more deeply within us the ability to turn to God and witness to God’s love in Jesus Christ.  We may also let God’s compassion, generosity, forgiveness, and acceptance flow through us into our world.  This is our true nature.   

For when we have emerged from the cruel regime of the one who is always our Accuser, feeding us negative and destructive stories about ourselves, and when we live instead under the beneficent, forgiving, and gracious judgment of those who are seated on God’s thrones, and live with those witnesses in the power of the resurrection, we get restored to a life of freedom and dignity, authenticity and joy with and in God.

II.

Even when the Accuser is released and does become an influence again within and among humanity, even to the point of seeming to threaten the very life of those who trust in God, God never abandons the people.  The image that John uses is rooted in the prophecies of Ezekiel 38, about these symbolic enemies of Israel, called Gog and Magog, coming down from the north, as did almost every conquering power.  

Gog and Magog are, of course, not “Russia” or any single, particular historical power, as many who waste their time disobeying Jesus’ warning about not trying to figure out the day or the hour have dreamed up.  Rather, they represent the gathered ignorance and violence of the nations which have in every age sought to snuff out God’s people, the witnesses to God’s truth.  Gog and Magog fill the role of the Beast, or  Empire, in the story, now that the Beast has already been dispatched to the Lake of Fire

On them at the last moment the pure fire of God’s holiness descends from heaven.  It consumes all who would hurt or destroy, and only then does the dragon, Satan, the Accuser, himself get thrown into the Lake of Fire forever.  This does not happen until now because God has to point out with persistent consistency the futility of relying on our own devices to save us.  The last temptation is that thousand years of good times.  Exactly the kind of situation in which people would start to imagine it was due to their own virtue and industry, and become susceptible to the Accuser’s temptations again.

People do not save themselves.  People do not save the planet.  People do not save each other.  God does that and only God.  Our job is to be open to God’s work and let God work through us.  

Having been cast into the Lake of Fire, the Accuser, like his proteges the Beast and the False Prophet, receives as recompense the stored up pain and horror that he brought into creation.  And since he is not mortal and cannot die, he gets all this misery back on himself for eternity.

The Lord Jesus also bore the sins and pain of the whole world on the cross.  He is the perfect vessel through whom the infinite grace of God passes into the world, healing, forgiving, and washing away all this death, pain, and guilt, dissolving it in the ocean of God’s love.  It is not this way with the Accuser.  The Accuser never lets go of anything!  He is never about giving up or renouncing or divesting.  Satan always grabs, takes, controls, keeps, collects, stores, and hoards.  He’s all about what he can gain.  Which means that here, in the end, he has no choice but to consume and digest the horrors, terrors, and acute misery he so cruelly doled out when he could, when people were listening to his condemning voice in their heads.

III.

The final scene here is the Last Judgment in which everyone who ever lived is assessed according to what they had done in their earthly existence.  It is the same story that Jesus tells with different imagery in Matthew 25, where he explicitly spells out the criteria for salvation.  People go to live forever with God who served the needy, because in serving the needy they were actually serving Jesus Christ.  The ones who get dropped into the Lake of Fire are those who failed to provide for the needy, and thus failed to serve Jesus.  

I mention that because it is apparently very easy for some to assume they are among those whose names are written in the Book of Life, who like to prognosticate about Gog and Magog, and the thousand years, and the lake of fire, and the rapture, but who fail to see and minister to Jesus Christ, the truly human One, in the bodies of suffering people.

If you make excuses about why we should not feed the hungry?  If you say we should not give water to the thirsty, in places like Flint?  If you say we should not help but harass and deport strangers, immigrants, and asylum seekers, even though the Bible and Jesus are absolutely direct and unequivocal about that, repeatedly?  To date over 5400 children have been separated from their families at our own border for no stated reason but the imagined deterrence value of cruelty.  If you’re content with a system that leaves 47% of our own population in economic and financial stress, with half a million homeless?  If you’re trying to actually keep people from getting the health care they need?  If you’re about building and filling prisons, when we already have the highest incarceration rate in the world?   These are just the categories Jesus mentions.  I wonder if there aren’t others.

If you do these things, or excuse and defend leaders who do them, how are you not agents of the Beast?  How are you not yourselves like Gog and Magog, oppressing God’s people?  How is that a witness to Jesus Christ, exactly?  How will you avoid the fire?       

This whole book, with all its pyrotechnics, mayhem, spectacular imagery, and cliff-hangers, is about the gradual, continual, inevitable collapse of the false and brutal world we have generated — both within ourselves and extended into our time and space existence in society and institutions.  That world of bigotry, inequality, injustice, and violence is finished.  Our job now, in the midst of this chaos, is to live as witnesses to the truth of God’s love, revealed in Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, who gives his life for the life of the world.  

Witnessing to Christ is not a merely verbal thing.  It has content in what we do, in how we act, in the way we relate to each other and to God’s creation.  It says here twice that we are judged according to what we have done, our works.  Our behavior is what ratifies whether our name appears in the Book of Life.

IV.

In the end, Death and Hades also get personified and thrown into the Lake of Fire that consumes and annihilates all evil.  The Lake of Fire means that nothing opposed to God’s reign of goodness, love, peace, justice, hope, joy, and healing is allowed to roam around at large, destroying God’s creation and people.

I’m not going to say that it is not John’s purpose to scare us; I’m pretty sure that it is.  Just like it is a parent’s role to make sure children have a healthy respect for the street, the stove, the lawnmower, and other dangers.  There are consequences for messing around with some things, and love means issuing a warning.

But John’s purpose is mainly to inspire and to strengthen.  Because as awful as much of what we have been reading for the last year has been, starting next week, he starts telling us about the promise and the delight, the deliverance and the deep peace of God, which is the ultimate goal of our witness and of the whole creation.
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"The Great Supper of God."

Revelation 19:11-21

November 3, 2019

I.

We see this other aspect of Jesus Christ, the Word of God.  Earlier he is presented as the sacrificial Lamb who was slaughtered but who now lives.  The other side is this vision of a victorious warrior on a white horse, the “King of kings and Lord of lords,” bearing the sword.  

It is important that we realize that this is still the Lamb, and that the Lamb imagery has priority.  It is only as the Lamb that he is the warrior and King, which is to say that his final victory is based on his primal sacrificial love.  Otherwise he would just be the kind of military messiah that the people wanted, one who would allow their nation to triumph.  But because he is “the Lamb who was slaughtered” we know his victory is not about the winning of a particular “side.”  Rather, his is a victory won by what the world sees as abject defeat.

The blood on his robe is his own blood, and the blood of the witnesses to him who were killed in his Name.  Blood in the Bible mainly means life, and it is this life, his life, given for the life of the world, that decorates his clothing like the medals displayed on the chest of soldiers today.  These indicate authenticity; they show that the person has paid their dues, been through the worst, suffered and made the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.

This is not just about defeating Rome, a particular military/political system that burned and devoured its way across the Mediterranean Basin for a few centuries, long ago.  John’s vision is much, much broader, wider, deeper, and higher than a mere historical event.  He sees the defeat of the Beast and the false prophet as representing the fate of Empire itself and its propaganda machine.  He sees the downfall of the cancer of violent egocentricity that infects the human heart and gets extended into institutions and therefore into history.  He sees the collapse of war and injustice themselves as principles and practices that dominate human life and kill the planet.  Indeed, he sees the end of history.  

We need to remember the key verse at the end of chapter 11, when everything changed and the tide turned, the verse that perhaps sums up the whole book: “It is time to destroy those who destroy the Earth.”  This is the ultimate defeat of nothing less than the reign of terror and sinfulness that threatens God’s whole creation!  

That is what the Lamb accomplishes.  That is why John sees the Lamb now in this new guise, as the conquering warrior riding the white horse.  By now we have heard enough to know that he is really the anti-warrior.  His appearance does not give validation to the arrogant men who rode literal white horses into villages of people and thrust literal steel swords into human bodies.  For it is precisely that murderous impulse to conquer and enslave by force that this Warrior, the Word of God, the Lamb, defeats.

And he is accompanied by the armies of heaven, the heavenly host, all in pure white linen, also riding white horses.  The color white represents here the purity of a light that contains the full spectrum.  White shines as inclusive light, embracing the fullness of the light God makes on Day One, with the words, “Let there be light.” 

II.

In this battle, the only One who engages the enemy is the Lord, and he does it by wielding his sword, which we know from other passages in the New Testament represents the Word.  The sword is, then, an extension, and application, of who Christ is.  This Word has the ability and potency to overcome all those who oppose it. 

In other words the Word of God is the weapon used by the Word of God in overcoming and defeating the powers of evil.  This is not a literal, physical fight to the death, so much as a theological/biblical debate.

Perhaps it was similar to the debate Jesus gets into with Satan in the wilderness, right after his baptism.  Jesus rebuffs Satan’s first two temptations by quoting Bible verses, but then Satan comes back with a Bible verse of his own as part of the third temptation.  “Scripture says that the angels will bear you up so you don’t even dash your foot against a stone,” he says.

But of course it doesn’t work.  Jesus is the Word, he is the author of the Scriptures and the Creator of the universe.  The Adversary cannot successfully use the words of Scripture against him.  They’re his words!  It’s like that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen settles an argument about the teachings of Marshall McLuhan by actually hauling the real person of Marshall McLuhan into the conversation.  The author is always the ultimate authority, and Jesus is the author of everything.

What John describes is not an even a fight so much as a collision between God’s eternal Word and the mindless, lying chatter of the rebellious powers of falsehood, ignorance, hatred, fear, and shame.  It is a contest between ultimate Reality on the one side and illusion, delusion, fantasy, paranoia, and craving on the other.  There is no doubt about the outcome.  The Word does not win by fighting; the Word wins by simply showing up.

The sword Jesus uses here against the Beast and the false prophet and their minions is himself, the Word, the very power by which the whole creation is spoken into being at the beginning.  It is the power and authority of the Real, against which the small-minded, fearful, pathetic lies of these other two clowns don’t stand a chance.  It’s like expecting a holographic projection to stop a freight train. 

Jesus says we may build our house, that is our life, on the soft, unstable, contingent, shifting sand of self-serving lies we are continually fed by our egos and our culture, represented in the Beast and the false prophet.  Or we may build our house, that is, we anchor the foundations of our identity and practice, on the bedrock that he gives us in his life and teachings.  And that bedrock is the overflowing, self-emptying, sacrificial love of God of which everything is made, embedded and encoded with the signature of God’s very Voice.  That love is in the end the only Reality, the only Truth, the only Way, the Source of Life.  

III.

The Beast and its false prophet, the Antichrist, are not killed in the great final battle.  They are not mortal humans but spiritual entities.  Thus they cannot be killed, but they will continue to howl in people’s imaginations in some form.  What they do receive is a fate even worse than death.  They are thrown alive into a lake of fire that burns with sulfur.  Which is apparently really hot.  Almost 1000 degrees, Fahrenheit.  And rather smelly, I would think.

In this way they get back upon themselves the pain they brought into the world.  The Beast and the false prophet — the Empire and its PR director — get immersed in the agony of every lynching victim, the despair and brutality endured by every slave, the hurting of every exploited worker, every animal tortured in a lab, every tree reduced to toilet paper, every woman burned as a witch, every soul beaten up for who they love, everyone burned alive in firestorms of carpet bombing, everyone shot by assault weapons, every victim of every pogrom and genocide, every life form driven to extinction, every whale skinned for its oil, and so on.  These two are plunged into the fire-pit of their own invention, a planet mangled by their greed and hate.  

The rest of their followers simply cease to exist, having hitched themselves to lies, hatred, fear, and injustice, their intentional, conscious, consistent rejection of God’s love separated them from the truth, and when they meet the Truth, they just perish.

Then happens the opposite of the great wedding banquet of the Lamb that John alluded to earlier in the chapter.  Instead of the joyful feast of the people of God, sitting at table in God’s Kingdom, we have a different sort of meal, which the angel describes as the descent of vultures and other birds, to start picking at the bodies of the Beast’s dead army.  And the angel refers to this as “the great supper of God.”  All the people who had given themselves over to the Beast — kings and captains, the mighty and their cavalry, free and slave, small and great — have their mortal remains meticulously and carefully devoured by the birds.  

Those who sought to exterminate and kill God’s creation are devoured by the birds of God’s creation.  They remain subject to the basic facts of physics and biology, laws which the Creator placed within the creation itself, which is the inexorable circle of life in which nothing is wasted and everything feeds everything else.  This is another way that life and God wins.  And we participate one way or the other.

The choice is either to serve God and others now by witnessing to and sharing in the outpouring of God’s love, in generosity, compassion, joy, healing, and love we see Jesus Christ, the Lamb who gives life for us and to us.  Or we may serve others in a different way.  We may be served up when our bodies in death literally become food for others, represented by the solemn gathering of birds in John’s vision.  But as Bob Dylan sang, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.”

IV.

But we do not have to be a feast for the birds, or the worms, or the microbes.  Yes, our physical bodies return to the dust and our elements get reconfigured, recycled, reused, and re-membered.

At the same time, we have been called to the marriage supper of the Lamb, the celebration of union and unity between the Creator and the creation.  That’s is what we represent when we gather at this table.  That is why we call it “communion.”  For in finding, in this broken bread and filled cup, the oneness we share with Jesus Christ as we remember him according to his commandment and example, we also celebrate our oneness with each other, with all things, and with the living God.

We choose to serve him.  And we mean that two ways.  We serve him to each other in this Sacrament.  And in him we are sent out to serve others, giving ourselves for the life of the world after his example and according to his Word.

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