Revelation

Scripture Readings

May God be merciful to us and bless us,
show us the light of his countenance and come to us. Amen.

Well, folks, we've done a good job of avoiding it so far this Easter season, but the time has come to face up to Revelation. It's been in our lectionary now for five weeks in a row, and there's one more installment next week. Revelation is, at best, a strange and confusing part of our Bible. At least in Easter we're focusing on the positive and more understandable parts of the book – there are no beasts or horsemen or dragons. Over these five weeks, we have read about Christ's return, and we have gathered with multitudes robed in white, singing to the Lamb on his throne. There have been a lot of confusing 'Amens' in the middle of the readings, as you might recall. Last week we heard about a new heaven and a new earth coming down from heaven, and now we hear more about the new Jerusalem, glittering and golden, welcoming, clean, fruitful, free of pain and suffering, with the river of the water of life and the tree of life. It's filled with light and color and goodness. It reminds us of Willy Wonka's factory or Disneyland or Eden.

The new Jerusalem is supposed to dazzle us in this way, and to circle us back around to when the world began the first time. The word 'apocalypse' means 'unveiling,' and as part of the apocalyptic genre, Revelation unveils a vision of the good to come, as a remedy to suffering that's happening around us. Revelation was written to Christian churches who were being violently persecuted for their beliefs, urging them to look forward to the time when this world would pass away and those terrible things would end.

These days we have no shortage of terrible things, do we? During this week especially I've begun to avoid news programs, because I can't bear to hear any more reports of car bombs or the rising death toll in my home state, which is submerged under freakish and devastating flood waters, or this massive and seemingly interminable oil spill moving toward the Gulf Coast, killing creatures and livelihoods in its path. This all sounds a lot more like beasts and horsemen and dragons – surely some of this week's events would qualify as signs of the end times. A new heaven, a new earth, and the "river of the water of life, bright as crystal" all sound pretty appealing right now.

Well, we may be in luck. If you go to the web site raptureready.com, you can view the "Rapture Index," which keeps track of 45 different "end time" indicators and assigns each one a point value, based on current events. An explanation of the site reads: "You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, but it would be better if you viewed it as a prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture." Right now the Rapture Index is 173, which issues the site's very highest warning: "Fasten your seat belts."

This is all to say that we are not the only ones reading Revelation, friends. And there are widely varying ways to read it and react to it. Those "end time" categories on the Rapture Index are straight out of this last book of the Bible (or at least the most literal interpretations that can be cajoled out of the symbols presented there). And I'm afraid that many folks who follow the Rapture Index are not as much mourning news events of the past week as they are cheering them on. If floods and economic downturns and oil spills are signs of the end times, if they are ushering in the new Jerusalem, if our seat belts are fastened, then what is the point of strengthening our watersheds in Tennessee or pushing for more sustainable and less disastrous forms of energy or taking a closer look at how global warming disproportionately affects the world's most vulnerable people? The collapse of our planet's ecology and its humanitarian consequences, in this view, should be welcomed, because they are sure signs that before long we will receive our replacement earth.

I hope this sounds misguided to you. But not everyone who subscribes to this reading of Revelation is a member of some strange cult, holed up in the Deep South somewhere. A lot of them work right across the river in a big white building with a dome on top, shaping our national policy. How you read this book of the Bible – it matters. It matters in a big way. If we avoid it, we are letting the Rapture Index reading of Revelation prevail. But how then do we hear this book differently? How do we re-claim its message in a way that is faithful?

For starters, we can pull back for a wide-angle shot of how our lectionary as a whole is speaking to us during this Easter season. We've had a lesson from Revelation every week, but we've also been given lessons from the Gospel of John and from the Acts of the Apostles. The author of Revelation writes: "Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come." In this season our lectionary is helping us remember Christ as he is now (acting in our lives today), as he was (in the gospels and in the original church, described in Acts) and as he is to come (in Revelation). If we base our theology and our practices solely on the Christ to come, we lose sight of the Christ who was, and the Christ who is among us now. And the Christ who was – in his teachings during his lifetime and in his resurrection appearances to the disciples – sure didn't tell us to just sit around and fasten our seat belts and wait. He assigned us a lot of homework.

A couple weeks ago, on Earth Day, I had an interesting conversation with my friend Sonley, a seminarian from Haiti. Sonley was wearing a "Save the Earth" shirt that he'd made himself by drawing with permanent markers on a white t-shirt. Earth Day is so important to him, Sonley explained, because many Christians in Haiti view Revelation in a different way. They believe Christ will return – absolutely – but not with an entirely new earth. There will not be a replacement. No, Christ will return to this earth: floods, oil spills, and all. So the church there has been very involved in proclaiming the message of care for creation, a prophetic message in a country that has experienced more environmental devastation than most. Haiti is a place where God's creation has been almost systematically dismantled, especially in widespread and ruthless deforestation that only increases Haiti's extreme poverty. I have seen some of this devastation with my own eyes – whole hillsides converted from forests into bleak, eroding masses of mud.

Our fellow Christians in Haiti are onto something. Last week's Revelation passage describes the new Jerusalem coming adorned as a bride for her husband and says: "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes… And the one who was seated on the throne said, 'See, I am making all things new.'" It sounds a lot like Jesus in today's gospel reading: "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them." Jesus taught us to pray "Thy kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven." What if this world is not disposable, but is rather the bridegroom waiting to welcome the new Jerusalem, preparing to become the dwelling place of God?

Bishop and theologian N.T. Wright says: "Jesus' resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven…The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong." The one seated on the throne has already begun to make all things new. That work began on the cross, and it's what this season is all about. And you and I have our own roles in that work. Some of it is big – like reforestation in Haiti – but most of it is on a smaller scale.

Wright also says: "The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom."

So let's build ourselves a kingdom, St. Aidan's. Let's get this place ready to be the dwelling place for God. Let's sing and love and recycle and plant gardens and sign up for the big outreach day later this month and, if we're so inclined, write or call those folks across the river every once in awhile. And above all, let's pray to the one who was and is and is to come: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.