Everything Belongs.

Revelation 5:11-14

May 1, 2022 + Smithtown

I.

In his spectacular vision that we call the book of Revelation, the Apostle John sees Jesus in the heavenly throne room in the form of a slaughtered Lamb who is nevertheless alive and victorious.  The lamb image comes mainly from the book of Exodus where God instructs the people to take the blood of a lamb and paint it over the doorways of their homes as a sign to the angel of death to pass over them and preserve them from the final, terrible plague descending on the Egyptians. 

John's vision includes both uncountable thousands of singing angels swirling around God's throne, and “every creature under heaven and on earth and in the sea, and all that is in them,” together singing that the Lamb is worthy “to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing,” building to a crescendo.  

We rationalistic, sophisticated, modern people may find it easy and convenient to dismiss angels as mere archaic, mythic decoration.  But angels — in Greek the word is literally “messengers” — serve the important function of mediating God’s will to the world.  Perhaps we could say that, if God is Light, then angels work like photons or rays conveying that Light to our sight, if we have the eyes to perceive it.  

As creatures of heaven, angels deliver, express, represent, and reveal the vast universality and inclusive vision of the Most High God.  The angels point to the Lamb because the Lamb demonstrates the essence and nature of God as infinite, unconquerable, self-giving, self-emptying, self-offering love.

Still bearing the deep gashes of sacrifice, the Lamb shows us how God triumphs over, absorbs, and neutralizes the violence and hatred endemic in the world.  In Exodus, the final plague represents the culmination of the terrible consequences, mostly in the form of ecological disasters, the Egyptians brought down on themselves by holding a people in slavery for 400 years.  Injustice always brings catastrophe.  By the sign of the lamb's blood, God acts graciously to preserve the Israelite people from getting swept away as collateral damage in this comprehensive and unspeakable disaster, the sudden death of every first-born.  Thus the life of the lamb, offered up for the people and brushed on their doorways, protects them from judgment and death.  

In the gospels, John the Baptizer declares Jesus "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world," anticipating how Jesus would give his life "for the life of the world," protecting the people from the violent and inevitable consequence of sin in the same way as the Passover lamb protected the Israelites.  Only, because in Christ the Lamb is God, this happens on a cosmic and universal scale and is effective for all creation.  The book of Revelation is about the cataclysmic consequences brought down on any polity or regime that privileges one group, divides others, spawns flagrant inequities, inequalities, violence, and oppression, and destroys the earth.

The point, the meaning, is the same: we get preserved and protected from the violent consequences of sin by the life of self-giving love exemplified in Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, and poured into our hearts by the Spirit.  The angels therefore declare the slaughtered Lamb as worthy “to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”  

II.

The Lamb reveals God's truth and goodness in the good news of radical reversal; in which the losers of the world, the broken, bereft, victimized, disenfranchised, marginalized, weak, and rejected, like the abject slaves in Egypt, suddenly win.  By the offering of his own life/blood, the Lamb redeems and saves humanity, disclosing the love that is the meaning and destiny of all creation.  

The most basic and also most deliberately hidden fact about the Bible is that it is written by and for a bunch of escaped slaves and their descendants.  We cannot understand Scripture at all unless we relate to and identify with the situation of those who remember how they were “slaves in Egypt,” but who now know themselves to be, through no efforts of their own, delivered, liberated, redeemed, and saved.  

Those who were nothing, God delivers into everything; while those who make themselves everything, like the Egyptians, inevitably get reduced to nothing.  To know God is to live in praise and gratitude, deeply conscious of what we have received.  It is to say with the old hymn, "I once was lost but now I'm found, was blind but now I see."

That good news is always that life is not about what we gain in terms of power, fame, and wealth, or any of the things society would have us believe it is about.  Life is not about what we get for ourselves.  In the Lamb we see that it is really about what we renounce, what we offer up, what we lose.  It is about what we give and share and contribute.   As Jesus says, it is only when we lose ourselves that we are able to receive what God is always seeking to give us.

In response to the angels’ song, in John's vision he then hears “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them” also singing a similar refrain.  Every creature refers to literally everything: every grain of sand and every mountain, every fungus and plant, every microbe and insect, every animal and bird and fish, every molecule and electron, every rock and tree, every cloud, river, puddle, and ocean, everything that God breathes into being by the Word, everything stamped with God's imprint of Holy Wisdom, which is to say everything that is, lives to praise the Creator, who is “the One seated on the throne and the Lamb.”  

The Lamb and the One seated on the throne have become melded together in praise, so that the cross, where God — the Lamb — pours out his life in his blood for the life of the world, the final act of God’s self-emptying, is revealed as the modality by which God does everything.  Even creation itself, which happens by God’s speaking, is God’s self-emptying, as the infinite love of the Trinity overflows and pours into the nothingness to make something, everything.

Everything is thus breathed into being by God, bearing God’s seal, God’s signature, God’s frequency, and God’s identifying mark.  Everything participates in the same eternal outpouring and flow of life and love.  Everything is made out of the precipitation of God’s breath for the purpose of sharing in the goodness, joy, blessing, and praise of God together.  As theologian Richard Rohr as said in the title of one of his books: Everything Belongs.

III.

John sees in heaven the raucous, bright, shining, colorful, wild, diverse, explosive, ecstatic rave of joy and praise, which sets the tone for what is to come.  In some ways it reveals what is in the scroll because it is a blissful celebration of God’s love which is permeated in and through everything.  

This truth has to be established; it has to shape our consciousness, filling us with hope and joy, to give us fortitude and courage to face what is to come later in the book, when the Lamb actually starts opening seals and the awesome goodness of God collides with the twisted and foul corruption, illusion, violence, and hatreds that have pushed toxic tendrils into out souls and through our world.

It is also at the same time a vision intended to govern and inform our approach to the world in which we live.  For if everything is created to praise God, if every voice of every creature is specifically shaped by God for the purpose of participating in the glorious dance of goodness and love, if God designs the whole place and every piece of it to function as a great mosaic of blessing and shalom, then we need to live in response and partnership and communion with others, no matter who or what those others are.  In that knowledge we can only affirm the whole place, and everyone and even everything in it, as a spectacular and miraculous gift, the pinnacle of which perhaps is our very ability to know this and consciously join in the chorus of thanks and praise.

We have to approach “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them” with the respect, compassion, gratitude, and wonder they deserve as instances and expressions of God’s love and wisdom, manifest in time and space.  We must address and cherish everything as an unspeakable miracle with which we only engage according to the sovereign will of the One who created it.  

That means that we may treat no part of creation as a mere object that we may dispose of as seems best to us.  Not people, not animals, not bugs, not trees, not rocks, not water, not air.  Yes, we need to interact with and engage with creation; life is a network of interactive, complementary sharing.  But we only access other created beings for the glory of God, with deep humility and thanksgiving.  We take no more than we need, and we ensure fair and equitable distribution so that no one has too little and no one has too much.  We reduce what we take; we replace what we have taken; we reuse and recycle what we have used; we repair what we have broken; we restore what we have degraded and replenish what we have depleted; we correct imbalances we have made.  We clean up our messes.  We leave the place as we found it if not better.

For we are guests here on this planet, in this creation.  Every Sunday I have reminded you that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all those who dwell therein.”  The world does not belong to us.  We need to behave here only according to the will of our Host, who makes the whole place for joy and praise, love and communion, compassion and blessing, delight and peace, for all.

By what right do we silence, out of our own selfishness, any voice that God created for praise?  By what right do we hoard, commodify, extract, and exhaust beings God fashioned for the benefit of all?  By what right do we poison land, water, and air, kicking the chemistry of the atmosphere out of balance?  By what right do we trash the magnificent vineyard that God has generously placed in our care?

IV.

The Book of Revelation will continue and display in horrendous and gory detail the consequences of not living according to the life of the Lamb... but even all that horror is temporary.  Because God inevitably triumphs in the end with the emergence of a new heaven and a new earth.

Often overlooked in the Exodus story is the fact that once its blood gets smeared over the doors, the people consume the lamb.  They eat it as part of the liberation meal that became both the Jewish seder and the Christian Sacrament.  Thereby we become the lamb; we take on the lamb's life and mission.  We participate in the Lamb's self-offering, compassion, humility, generosity, simplicity, and inclusion.  We become together the sign of God's love, witnessing in our relationships, actions, words, and thoughts. 

Our Westminster Shorter Catechism begins with the amazing affirmation that “the chief end of human life,” that is, our main purpose and function as humans here on the earth, “is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever.”  This is what the angels are doing with their song; this is what the whole creation does in singing as well.  And it is the whole reason we exist at all.

May everything we do, everything we say, everything we even think, be an expression of this awesome sentiment; and may that joyful, humble, awestruck, thankful hymn be ever in our hearts, guiding every thing we do: 

“To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb 

be blessing and honor 

and glory and might 

for ever and ever!”

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