Apocalyptic Christmas: A Wonder-watching story ~ Revelation 12:1-12

 

Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor in Colorado, tells the story of her church that would put on a living nativity each Advent. Members of the congregation would take turns dressing as Mary, Joseph, shepherds, and angels, to create a little manger scene in the church’s parking lot where locals could drive by and see live animals hanging out near a feeding trough filled with a baby doll Jesus. Because it was cold, the church members would do this in shifts lasting no more than 20 minutes at which time another Mary and Joseph or Angel would step in to brave the cold. On one occasion, Nadia was helping volunteers get dressed when a seven-year-old-boy came in from his shift. She asked him how he liked being a shepherd. “It’s okay,” he answered, “but next year I think I wanna be a pirate.” You know, the pirate that was at the birth of our Lord. That’s absurd, right? But is that any crazier than many traditional carols or Hallmark creches? Is it sillier than a drummer boy, or nativities with a pious little Santa Claus kneeling down or a pig as one of the animals? Anyone of these things is a perfect example of weird things creeping into Nativity scenes. And who knew that even the Bible would get in on the action with a dragon?

The Biblical account of Christmas is quite scary. It’s far more HBO than Disney. It’s a story about sex (or lack thereof), fear, political tyranny and violence, homelessness, the challenges of the working-class poor, the plight of refugees, pagan magicians, angels, and now, apparently, a dragon. And while many Christians worry about keeping Christ in Christmas, I believe that Christians might have more to worry about keeping the Bible in it as well. My son, the actor, recently turned me on to a YouTube channel called Corridor Crew where these special effect artists remake movies. One of the things they sometimes do is take movies that are PG and turn them into Rated R movies by making the violence realistic. So they’ll take the Marvel movies and redo them so that Thor’s hammer doesn’t knock someone over but obliterates them, and Captain America’s shield doesn’t bounce off someone’s chest but cuts them in half. The point is not to be gross but to actually make the violence explicit. That’s what John’s retelling is trying to do for us as well. By adding special effects, so to speak, the Apostle is trying to render the Christmas story in a more realistic way.  So why do we need a dragon?

It's a wonder watching story for this difficult and dark world – “now.”

The Biblical story of Christmas reveals a God who enters our world as it actually exists rather than as we might wish it would be. Someone this week told me that the redemptive story that I read last week from the First Nation translation of the New Testament sounded like it was a story happening in the present. And, in a very real way, it is and John wants to scoop us up in that story. God’s love is too radical to enter a fantasy world, even though this is often how we treat Jesus, like we are trying to shelter him from reality. We often behave as though Jesus is only interested in saving and loving a romanticized version of ourselves and so we hide behind cute mangers in clean stalls. But friends, there is a dragon!

The fact of the matter is that the real world of Jesus’ birth was as messed up as ours with people as weird, wearied, bored, and hurting as ours. If we’ve lost the plot of the real Christmas story it’s simply because many of us have imagined that Christianity is the thing we use to escape from difficult realities instead of the place where those difficulties are acknowledged and faced. And let’s be real honest, there are many ways of pretending that things aren’t broken in ourselves and in the world and escapist religion is a classic option. A Christmas story without a dragon aims to offer a place where we have endless opportunities to pretend everything is fine. But Christ wasn’t born into a Norman Rockwell world but entered the real one. Christmas is a story of hope and joy in a dangerous world. That’s why this story needs a dragon. What’s your dragon as you enter into Advent? What threatens to eat you? What do you need “hope” for now?

It's a wonder watching story about one monster and strong mothers.

Our story is allegorical, biblical, and political. And the most important thing to know, to see what John is doing, to understand the book of Revelation, is not to try and predict the future rightly but to know your Bible well. That’s why it’s important to remember that of the 404 verses found in Revelation, 275 include one or more allusions to the OT with evocative, poetic language meant to jar us awake. It doesn’t so much aim to inform us about some conspiratorial end but reinvigorate our worship and passion for the mission of God by telling an ancient story in a new way. John’s vision of is not some futuristic prediction but an art house, heavenly remake of three Biblical classics – Creation, the Exodus, and the Christmas story! It’s an epic story about one monster and three mothers.

According to John, our present and future victory is found in the past. It hearkens to . . .

·       STORY ONE: Creation / Mother Eve / and a prophecy that her offspring will crush the head of the snake and it will strike his heel  - Genesis 3:15

·       STORY TWO: Exodus / Mother Zion / promised Messiah

Exodus = “wilderness”, and worship of God (Ex. 9:1); Exodus 19:4 – “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on wings of eagles . . .” is referenced in Rev. 12:14; and Isaiah 66 - in which Zion, the Jewish community, is the mother out of which God’s purposes are birthed, out of which Israel will find redemption. But also important is the added point that even God himself is like a mother that comforts her child, in Is. 66:13. And these find their fulfillment in . . .

·       STORY THREE: Nativity / Mother Mary / Jesus, the Lamb & Messiah - Ps. 2:9 – messianic psalm

Our story, our salvation, our hope, “the power and the kingdom of God” came about because a peasant girl faced a dragon. This is visual picture of Mary’s Magnificat. This historical, concrete event, allegorized by John, reveals its cosmic force. So our story has this powerful feminist impulse. That it is the faithfulness of warrior woman through which God will birth redemption. I’m reminded of the exchange between the African-American Christian and Suffrage activist Sojourner Truth and a white clergy man about the authority for women to preach. Sojourner truth said, “Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with it!”

We also discover a monster. John’s vision expands a single text (Genesis 3:15) into an extraordinary apocalyptic struggle between good and evil. This monster, we are told, is serpent and dragon, deceive and accuser, the devil – though it seems incredibly significant to go back to the Gospels and notice that the threat of the devil there came from human actions, like King Herod. Whatever we are to make of this figure a few comments are worth noting: 1. It raises the stakes. John’s genius is to take Jesus in a manger attended by shepherds and magi and put him in a cosmos attacked by a dragon. Our response to the Christmas story cannot be reduced to shutting the door against a wintry world, drinking hot cocoa, and singing carols. This is not a story about souls saved in the end but about good winning over evil and remaking of the world now. The dragon reminds us that our Christmas story isn’t about Ebenezer Scrooge merely having a change of heart. It’s about evil waging war and ultimately being defeated. 2. Second, it defangs the devil. It also aims to remind us that evil rages on earth not because it is so powerful, but because it is so vulnerable. This version of the Christmas story has Satan being expelled, silenced, knowing “that his time is short!” Friends, there is no war on Christmas. Christmas is the war and Jesus won, John tells us, when he was born.

Finally, friends, a wonder watching story is how we win.

 “But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.” (12:11) John offers us here a way of life that goes against the grain of our national, political story – conquering takes place though story not manipulation, through dying not killing. What if we don’t need so much to convince people but tell a compelling story? What if we don’t need to cling to our rights but refuse to cling to our lives? What if we don’t need a more persuasive point but a story that names the challenges of our world and reminds us that the meek are not weak? What if the real enemy of our world isn’t even a dragon but a world in which we think there aren’t any? What if the real problem that John and the gospel aim to address are boredom and weariness? What if the gospel is less like a political stump speech and more like Lord of the Rings? J.R.R. Tolkien wrote an essay called, “On Fairy Stories.” In it he says that the power of these tales isn’t that they are “make-believe” but that they help us practice seeing and paying attention. They train us in attitudes of perception. Enchantment, he notes, isn’t seeing things as they are” but “seeing things as we are meant to see them. Stories aren’t concerned with a scientific description of the world but with beholding its sacred meaning. Friends, let’s be honest with one another, I sense in us a bit of disenchantment, a bit of boredom, a lackluster story. We need dragon stories. We need the enchantment of children and dragons.

Zion last year exclaimed to Caitlin, “Mom, mom, it’s a miracle. Zebedee laughed at me.” We need eyes that see laughter as a miracle. We need to be reminded that we live and die by the stories we tell. A good story can lift you up and give you strength but a bad story, a wounding story, a worrying story, can kill you slowly. When I was a grad student at UCSB working on my history degree I boned up on all of my apologetics reading from seminary. Apologetics is about learning how to handle and address thorny questions about God, the Bible, good and evil, miracles, and as I prepared myself to study with incredibly smart people I armed myself with every arrow of logic I could find. But I never used them. That’s not to say that people didn’t come to my office seeking answers, or asking questions, or needing to cry. They did – often. But when they came they didn’t come with pointed questions but heavy stories. I’ll never forget when one of the smartest people in the department came to my office. He asked me if really believed the claims of Christianity about Jesus. When I told him that I did, I asked him to sit down and he told me a story about how he used to believe but the other kids in the youth group called him fat and made fun of him so he no longer believed. In his story, the church had forgotten “the word of their testimony” and the story that created it. They actually spoke like the dragon.

Our weapon is story of enchantment of a dragon defeated by a savior. Why do we need a dragon? The danger of not having one is that we might forget that the “word” of our testimony and its story of enchantment and redemption is how we win. We need the strange image to remind us that the spiritual life cannot be reduced to a checklist of explanations, a moral code, a life plan, a theological scheme. We need a dragon in order to truly see and a better story to tell.

Beloved, Fragile, and Fearlessly Fearful: What are Spiritual Practices for? ~ Psalm 103:13-18

  

We’ve come to the end of our series on Spiritual Practices for Exhausted People. We’ve looked at sabbath, solitude and silence, prayer, Bible-reading, fasting, friendship, discernment. And I thought it best to end by considering once again the purpose for engaging in any of these things. What are we hoping to accomplish? How are we being healed and transformed? Well, the Psalmist will help us this morning peak behind these disciplines to understand what they are for and what they do.  Their purpose and work is to help us see that . . .

We are beloved.

As a father has compassion on his children,
    so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; (vs. 13)

Our text is truly about an expansive, jaw-dropping, persistent, love. Earlier in the Psalm we find verbs describing the actions of God like: forgives, heals, redeems, crowns, satisfies, and renews. This love works righteousness and justice for the oppressed. God’s love, it says, is as “high as the heavens are above the earth.” The Hubble Telescope has given us breathtaking pictures of what the highest heavesn looks like - a galaxy 13 billion light-years from Earth. A light-year is 6,000,000,000,000 (6 trillion) miles. That would put this galaxy at 78 sextillion miles from earth (78,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)!

Now, I can drive for a good 8 hours without needing a break. If we were traveling 500 miles per hour nonstop, 24 hours every day, without a moment’s pause—it would take twenty quadrillion years (20,000,000,000,000,000) years to reach the farthest heavens. That’s how much God loves us – “everlasting to everlasting,” the Psalmist says.

But it’s not just mind-boggling expansive love. It’s also familiar and intimate. In vs. 13 it’s the relationship between parent and child and the beauty of flowers.

And yet I imagine that a few of you hear something different in our passage. Perhaps you hear favoritism or something even worse – the sinking suspicion that God only loves some and not others, the good and not the bad, the right and not the wrong, the ones who fear and not the ones who don’t. I get it. I want to sit with it for just a moment and ask the question, “Does God really love us – all of us?”

Some might have us not believe so but sometimes reading the Bible means prayerfully and carefully discerning the right problem. And we must be careful for we are talking about God and we are talking about us. I just watched a video of homecomings. One of the interesting elements is always surprise, even disguises, in which loved ones, who’ve been away, unexpectedly show up, and for dramatic effect hide behind walls, come in after everyone else, or even sidle up during a picture, waiting for the person to see them, recognize them. I want to tell you this morning that God is present, compassionate, and loves you deeply, fiercely, always, but this God also loves surprises and we need to learn how to see him and experience that love. That’s why it mentions the need for keeping covenant and its parallel “fearing the LORD.”

Let me switch analogies for a minute. The love of God, expressed throughout Scripture and displayed through the life and teachings of Jesus, is a lot like radio waves – ever present, continually being transmitted – but it’s only when one is attuned to the frequency that one can hear it, dance to the music, and receive the gift. That’s what spiritual practices do. They don’t make God love you. They simply allow you to hear the music – it’s a love song by the way, I’m thinking Frank Sinatra but I’ll let you decide. We’ve been learning about practices for exhausted people not because they make the music but because they “tune our hearts to hear and sing God’s grace.”

But we are more than beloved.

We are fragile.

¹⁴ for he knows how we are formed,
    he remembers that we are dust.
¹⁵ The life of mortals is like grass,
    they flourish like a flower of the field;
¹⁶ the wind blows over it and it is gone,
    and its place remembers it no more.

The spiritual practices also help us by reminding us how we are formed, helping us remember how breakable we are, how delicate our mind and bodies are. We’ve been talking about spiritual practices but for a moment I want to talk about “exhausted.” For the most part, I imagine that we’ve understood that word negatively, achingly, as a kind of life that’s, well, tiring, and I’m not suggesting that’s wrong. But I also want to suggest that the spiritual practices remind us that we are fragile beings made of dust. They help us remember that the originating sin of Adam and Eve was there refusal to be human, their loathing of fragility, their desire to know everything. Spiritual practices, thus help us remember that we hunger, feel lonely, misunderstood, experience hurt and pain. They help us practice that it’s okay not to be God. This is the “we” of the text. This is who we are and this is a universal condition – not the condition of a select few.

The good news is that we can feel exhausted as a reminder that we don’t have to save ourselves, transform our lives, become righteous. We can engage these spiritual practices in order to help be totally, guiltlessly, human. And that once again brings us back to our experience of beloved and vs. 17.

Vs. 17 is a weird verse. It doesn’t say what you would expect, perhaps that’s why we should fear God. You would expect the logic to work as follows: We are finite, mortal, like grass but God is infinite, divine and eternal. But that’s not what it says. It says we are finite and God is everlastingly loving. That’s what spiritual practices aim to do – they aim to help us fully reflect on who and what we are and who God is. We can feel shattered and yet fully loved.

We are fearlessly fearful.

¹⁷ But from everlasting to everlasting
    the Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
    and his righteousness with their children’s children—
¹⁸ with those who keep his covenant
    and remember to obey his precepts.

What is this “fear” that we are to have? And how does it help us experience the love of God?  It feels counter-intuitive, if not a little bonkers.

The fact that fear-of-the-Lord cannot be precisely defined is one of its glories--we are dealing with a God that we cannot pin down, who inhabits mystery, we can't be glib. In that spirit, presumption recedes, attentiveness increases, expectancy heightens. So on one hand, “Fear of the LORD” is the deeply sane recognition that we are not God.

A quick Biblical tour of the concept can help:

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” ~ Proverbs 1:7

“So now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you? Only to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul” ~ Deut. 10:12).

But this is not merely an OT idea.

“Meanwhile the church throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and was built up. Living in the fear of the LORD and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it increased in number.” ~ Acts 9:31

“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” ~ Philippians 2:12b

"Fear-of-the-Lord," as we notice the way our biblical writers use it, turns out to be a term that is plain without being reductive, clear without being over-simplified, and accurate without dissolving the mystery inherent in all dealings with God and His world. It also has the considerable advantage of evading the “control” that we could use to locate ourselves along a spectrum of goodness that would feed our instincts for coziness with God.

So there appear to be two aspects to the “fear of God”: 1) One is our response to God’s awesomeness and otherness; 2) The other is about the experience and expression of our fragility, a dependency on God.

The writer Brian Russell reminds us that the Biblical writers are thoughtful practitioners of the human condition. The need for the fear of the LORD finds its roots in human nature. Modern psychology defines human drives by two primary motivators: fear and love. Fear plays a crucial role in helping us to avoid pain and harm. Fear keeps us alive in moments when we face life-threatening scenarios. But the problem lies in the objects of our fear. If we fear the wrong things, we can harm ourselves and harm each other. So it’s not a matter of eliminating our fears but rather aligning fear with its only legitimate object - God. To fear any part of creation hurts me and the only way forward is to properly fear the LORD. The irony is, if I want to live freely without fear, I must only fear the LORD. This is not because God is scary or vindictive or cruel or unhinged. Fear of the LORD, keeping God’s covenant, engaging in spiritual practices, help keep us from the two things that destroy us: idolatry and injustice.

Always remember this – the only Being that Scripture commands us to fear is the One who loves us everlasting to everlasting. When the only object of our fear is that God who loves us, we are free. Free from cruel taskmasters. Free from the manipulation of ideology. Free from the cultural pressures that suffocate and promote a false conformity or an indifference to expedient cruelty.

So what should do we do?  Launch into this life of following Jesus. Fear-of-the-Lord is not studying about God but living in reverence before God as a beloved, fragile human being. Fear-of-the-Lord is a way of living authentically nurtured in worship and prayer, silence and quiet, love and sacrifice, and turns everything into an encounter with the living God. So let us commit to tuning our radio to hear the love song of God and remember that though we are breakable, we need fear nothing on this earth, not our failures, nor our inadequacies – not those things that seem to shatter us, not even our own death.