"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!”

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