“Anything can make us look, only art makes us see.”~ Archibald
MacLeish
Blessed is the one who
reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who
keep what is written in it; for the time is near. John to the seven
churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was
and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and
from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the
ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins
by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father,
to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Look! He is coming with
the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his
account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen. “I am the
Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come,
the Almighty. ~ Revelation 1:3-8
Stand and sing a new
song, written by Bob Gross, which incorporates our text called “Amen” (Check it out at www.mcchurch.org under the resources tab)
This sermon has already lived up to its title – speechless.
Speechless is how I have found many of you as I excitedly told you about the
Easter season preaching series on the book of Revelation. Many of you gave me
that glassy eyed stare that said – but were not crazy. And yet you’ve already
been blessed and taken a critical step toward rightly understanding this book –
you’ve offered it back to God in worship. You’ve rightly used it as a hymnbook,
and not the Mad Hatter’s day planner. Still, I suspect, many of you would
rather this book were not in the Bible.
Today I would like to change your mind, to give you my pitch
for why we need this book, why it’s in the canon of Scripture and why we need
to take it back from its abusers. Why we don’t need to simply throw up our
hands, close our eyes, and keep this book under lock and key because it is,
John tells us, a blessing. So today’s sermon is meant to excite you about the
Book of Revelation. Not surprisingly, my first point is that . . .
1.
Revelation
is a gift of blessing from God
In verses 1-3, John states that this book is a gift, given by
Jesus, through an angel, for a blessing. So right off the bat, we are
confronted in our unwillingness, our fear of this book, by God’s emphatic
declaration, “I have a gift for you.” And when you’re given a gift the most
appropriate response is “thank you” not “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” I’m not saying
that there aren’t noticeable dangers associated with this book but I also
believe there is an inordinate fear, a disproportionate dread – take our fear of sharks, for example.
Now, it’s not bad to be afraid of sharks.
Do you know how many people die annually from shark attacks? – 5 people. More importantly, do you know what kills more
people every year than sharks? Hippos, ants, icicles, shopping on Black Friday,
falling out of bed, deer, hot dogs, jelly fish and vending machines, to name a few.
There are about 40,000 car related deaths each year in the US but we don’t
blame the car – the car is not the problem.
The problem is user error – most of see the car as a great blessing once you
learn how to use it, and follow the laws and proper safety procedures. My point is that every blessing of God can
be twisted into a dangerous thing. There is no safe gift from God.
The first question we
need to ask is, “What is this gift?”
Eugene Peterson refers to Revelation as a theological work
of poetry and that’s not a bad definition. The actual genre of Revelation is apocalyptic
literature, which literally means unveiling. Like poetry it aims to invite us
into an experience, to peel back the façade of what we believe the world is, and
to look at the world from the vantage point of God’s throne - not in the language of objective logic but the
language of imagination. Prophets, like John, were not wide-eyed crazies nor
systematic logicians – they were beat poets and masters of the imagination who
sought to convey the experience of reality and truth through evocative language
that engaged all five senses. John sought not so much to explain the finer
points of future challenges but to immerse us in the worshipful experience of God.
John is much more a Bob Dylan than a Nostradamus.
Revelation is a summation of the scriptural witness not a
revision nor a prognostication of it. Of the 404 verses found in it, 275
include one or more allusions to the OT without any direct quotes. It’s a new
and present way of seeing the same old God. We need to read it aloud with
wonder, not with graphs and charts. We need to read it with the Bible and its
story in mind and not some future outside of it. We need to read it with the
same poetic spirit that Billy Collins offers to anyone who wants to read
poetry. He writes:
I
ask them to take a poem
and
hold it up to the light
like
a color slide
or
press an ear against its hive.
I
say drop a mouse into a poem
and
watch him probe his way out,
or
walk inside the poem’s room
and
feel the walls for a light switch.
I
want them to waterski
across
the surface of a poem
waving
at the author’s name on the shore.
But
all they want to do
is
tie the poem to a chair with rope
and
torture a confession out of it.
They
begin beating it with a hose
to
find out what it really means.
Revelation is not a book to torture a confession out of.
It’s a poetic theology that meets the evening news. It’s critical thinking set
to music. It’s imaginative, colorful, dramatic, a bit flamboyant, even a bit
over the top. It’s a poem about what is true. And the best poems, are not
literal interpretations of truth but nuanced, subtle expositions of reality.
They grab our heart and not simply our head.
“What does it say?”
The whole of Revelation is basically a vision of the first
three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed by your name, your kingdom
come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Our text today – is an introduction and table of contents for
the entire book. And they are clear on one main point. This is a book about God
- a God who is with us, for us, over us, and who has won. Its emphasis is not
about some ominous end, not about secret timetables, not about the machinations
of demonic armies and dangerous dragons. It is primarily a kaleidoscopic vision
of God. It’s about a . . .
A God who is diverse, motley and multi-faceted. I like the
movement of pronouns in our text that slide effortlessly between one another,
leaving us not sure always which person of the Trinity is being referred to –
the him, he, and I are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are the faithful
witness, the firstborn of the dead, the one who is and who was and who is to
come, the Almighty, the seven spirits who are before his throne. God is the
first last and letter of the alphabet and every letter in between. He is verb
and noun, here and there, now and not yet, who loves us, who freed us from our
sin. I count 16 descriptors for God in this passage alone that don’t repeat and
all of this in just 5 verses! Moreover, a critical feature of this God that
helps us read Revelation is that . . .
He is a God who is “near and at hand.” – Rev. 1:3.
Revelation 1:1 connects our God to “what must soon take place.” And that Greek root
word for “soon,” “at hand,” and “near” is a very important word because when
you look at its etymology it means “soon, at hand, near.” That’s why the order
is important. God does not say, “I am the One who was, who is, and who will
be.” No, he says, “the one who is, who was, and who is to come.” He is first
and foremost the God who is. The prophetic call of Revelation is not, as many
so often misunderstand, a prediction but a declaration that God speaks to us,
now, God makes his will known to us, now. Eschatology a word which means “last
things” is a pregnant awareness that the future is breaking upon us. So we need
to remember the original audience who encountered this book – this God was near
and at hand. There are some predictive elements in some of the prophecy in
Revelation but they are always in service to a God who is present to us,
speaking to us now. It’s words are aimed to make you sit up, to care about the
present, and when you care, you really see.
“What’s the point?”
The goal is not bewilderment or long range planning so much.
The point of reading Revelation is worship. That’s why the command is given to
read it aloud in church and why it declares us to be “priests serving God,” in
vs. 6. The battle in Revelation is not a literal battle of armies but a battle
for our worship. Revelation argues that it’s worship of God that reveals the
world for what it is and will be! The point of Revelation is what we do here
today in God’s presence.
2.
Revelation
is about uncovering the mystery that God is mysterious.
The word “revelation” in Greek literally means “to uncover.”
But the point of such uncovering is not so that we can understand all mysteries
but that so that we understand that everything is mystery. The apocalypse of
John aims to manifests the startling truth that everything is spiritual,
everything is overseen by God, the world is infused with mystery. That’s why
it’s God’s last word to us.
By the time we read Revelation at the end of the canon there
is no danger that we are inadequately informed. We certainly know about
salvation, the Trinitarian life of God, the Christian life, and the grand
narrative of God with his people. Truth be told, we could get along quite
nicely without ever having to crack open this disturbing little text. But, the danger of not reading Revelation
is not that we might not know something critical for our faith. It’s more that
we might become simply too comfortable with what we know – we might actually
begin to think that’s all there is to know about God. Why should we read
Revelation? We need the strange images of Revelation to remind us that God
cannot be reduced to a checklist of explanations, a moral code, a life plan, a
theological scheme. I think a good hermeneutic for the book of Revelation actually
comes from the former enigmatic chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan
who once told reporters,
“I
guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably
misunderstood what I said.” 1988 speech, Alan Greenspan as
quoted in The New York Times, October 28, 2005
The problem with the Revelation predictors like the Left
Behind series – those who with sincere faith and ingenuity attempt to chart a
vision of the future by shuffling around in Revelation - is not their desire
for the mysterious, the imaginative, or the dramatic. It’s that in the end,
their visions are not mysterious and dramatic enough but comes across like a
cheesy whodunit in which every mystery is laid bare in a logical step-by-step
fashion. In the end, their problem is that they make it too easy to speak about
God.
Revelation aims to knock us out of easy God-talk by
reorienting us away from our fantasies about the divine. God’s glory, power and
holiness are manifested in smoke, thunderstorm and earthquake – but God himself
is almost never seen or heard. God, according to John, is simply nothing like
us. He is the God of sevens, fours and threes, a voice like rushing water, a
sword in his mouth. He’s lion and lamb, the voice from heaven, who holds stars,
and is surrounded by creature covered with eyes, wings, and music.
We need John’s
Revelation to remind us that God is good but always surprising, God is known
but always mysterious. We need Revelation so that any person who stands up and
says “God is . . .” stops and thinks very, very carefully. We need Revelation
because I am more and more of the belief that we need to be left speechless.
Yet, the Catholic theologian Robert Barron puts our dilemma this way, “We
cannot speak of God, and we must speak of God. It is as simple and as strange
as that.” We are, he says, not so much rational animals, or productive animals,
but animals who speak of God. We need Revelation so that we understand that sometimes
the most theologically significant, spiritually sensitive thing that we can say
is “I don’t know.” Or, if you truly want to use the language of Revelation, “Holy,
holy, holy, the Lord God Almighty, who is and was and is to come.”
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