5th
Sunday of Easter — 28 April 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar
Falls – 9:15 am
Acts 11:1-18 | Psalm 148
| Revelation 21:1-6 | John
13:31-35
"I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first
heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”
Some preachers love to preach on the Book of
Revelation. They are not usually
Episcopalians. Other preachers never preach on the Book of
Revelation. There are lots of
Episcopalians among them! I don’t preach
on the Book of Revelation very often myself!
But we’ve been hearing a few passages from Revelation in this Easter
Season of Year C. This is about the only
time in three years that we read from Revelation at the Sunday Eucharist, and,
I might note, we hear a rather narrow selection, mostly hymns of praise offered
before the throne of God in heaven.
Which is fine, although as I expect many of you realize, that leaves out
a whole lot of stuff, especially the violent and gory stuff. Though we might keep in mind that the
passages we do hear this Eastertide, and especially today, next Sunday, and the
Sunday after, really are what this book is all about! I don’t know whether others have talked about
the Book of Revelation this season, but I thought I would say something about it!
A popular phrase these days—a devastatingly
accusatory, condemnatory phrase—is “You just
don’t get it!” You young people – how many of you have ever
thought in regard to your parents, and if you’re kind of sassy maybe even said
out loud, “You just don’t get it!” And parents – how many times have you told
your kids, when they are resisting your parental wisdom, “You just don’t get it!” The
truth is, most of us, about a lot of things much of the time, and about a few
things most of the time, “just don’t get it!”
High on the “just don’t get it” list, you will probably not be surprised
to hear, is the Bible. But we need to
realize that those who “just don’t get” the Bible are not just “those other folks”
of denominational traditions other than our own (I won’t name names!), but we also!
It doesn’t take a lot of study of Church history to realize that in
regard to the Bible, much of the Church, throughout the centuries and around
the world, “just didn’t get it.” But
that’s another very long sermon for another time.
The Book of the Revelation to John may well lead
the whole Bible on the “just don’t get it” list. And at this point perhaps you are saying to
yourself, “Well, I guess I must be one of those who just don’t get it, because
I have no idea what the Book of Revelation is all about!” It’s okay, you are in good company!
Let’s admit that the Book of Revelation is hard
for us. In some respects it’s probably
the hardest book in the Bible. But
actually, it isn’t so much that it’s hard
(like a textbook in quantum physics is hard, especially if like me you don’t
count physics and math among your strongest subjects) as that it’s alien.
It’s foreign to us. (Actually, quantum physics is not only hard,
it’s also alien!) The rhetoric of the
Revelation is very different from anything we normally encounter. However, it was quite familiar to
first-century Jews and to Jewish Christians and to the Gentile Christians who
had a substantial exposure to the Old Testament and other Jewish religious
literature. The Book of Revelation is steeped
in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Daniel, and all that gang, as well as a number
of late second-temple Jewish writings that the rabbis excluded from the
canonical Tanakh. If we were Christians,
particularly Jewish Christians, in Asia Minor
in the last decade of the first century, John’s Revelation would probably be
fairly clear to us. But we aren’t, and
so it isn’t. The problem is not so much
the text itself, but the fact that we
are so far removed from its cultural context, by which I mean both its literary
genre and its social and political historical setting.
The Book of Revelation is an account of visionary experience, akin to the
language of dreams. Thus we are in a realm of highly symbolic discourse. Part of our difficulty with this is that we
are not familiar with the apocalyptic symbol system which the Revelation and
other writings of this genre take for granted.
Another part of our difficulty is that our post-enlightenment,
rationalist, technological, left-brained culture tends to have problems with
symbolism or metaphor of any
sort. We just don’t get it.
But in any case, we need to understand that the
symbolics of the Revelation are not cold hard ciphers, where this translates to this and that translates
to that, and once you figure out the
key the meaning is unambiguous. On the
contrary, the symbolic imagery is intended to be evocative, to call the reader or hearer into a dialogue with the
text at an imaginative, creative, poetic level where mood is more important
than concept, the affective more than the cognitive, and meaning is
multivalent, multi-layered. I am
reminded somewhat of dream sequences in movies, which give important insights
into what’s going on in the character development or the plot of the drama, but
which are not meant to depict literal reality.
(An example that comes to mind is the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s
film Wild Strawberries, about an old professor reflecting back on this
life. I first saw it when I was a
college student, pretty much into my head, and I didn’t get it at all. Thirty years later I found the film a much
more profoundly moving experience, and even more so two days ago when I watched
it yet again.) (While I was at it,
thinking about the Book of Revelation and Ingmar Bergman, I also watched The Seventh Seal again, which explicitly
draws on Revelation. But that’s another
path that I won’t go down right now!) What
I am suggesting is that the Revelation to John is the New Testament’s great
final dream sequence.
The other thing to keep in mind is what’s going
on in the lives of these Christians in Asia Minor
at the end of the first century of the Christian era. What the Revelation is finally about is faith in the ultimate victory
of the Rule of God despite the present tribulations and persecutions which the
Christian community is suffering. Some
of the visionary imagery about the struggle against the godless Roman Empire is pretty wild and woolly stuff. A lot
of the imagery about pagan empires reflects similar concerns from about 250 years
earlier in the Book of Daniel. But the
final assurance is that God, and God’s Son and Messiah the Lamb – will in the
end triumph. So hang on! “The one who was seated on the throne said,
‘See, I am making all things new.’”
And this is all still true. This is all still valid for us. The big difference, I think, is that we see
the world – still God’s world, but God’s world as we see it and live in it – in
a very different way, and with very different imagery. For most Christians throughout history, and
for many people still today, the world we live in was thought to be only a few
thousand years old. And thus the idea of
this world coming to its final conclusion sometime soon was not all that far
out. And I suppose we do have to grant
the possibility that God could end the world this afternoon. But it does seem to me that this would be out
of character for the God we have come to know.
God has been about the creation and sustaining of this universe for, at
last count, 13.8-and-change billion years, which leads me to suspect that God works
on a very long timeline! So for us, to
think and talk about the ultimate destiny of the world requires new and
different imagery, which I’m not sure we have yet conceived.
But the basic point of all this, and of the Book
of the Revelation to John, is still true.
Ultimately the Rule of God will triumph, and we will share in that
victory. We do not know, we cannot know,
exactly or even approximately what the new heaven and new earth will be like,
and the question of “when” is effectively off the table. But we are called to believe and trust that
in the end God will indeed make all things new.
