Fairhaven UMC

I wish we’d all been ready, but you tell me over and over and over again, my friend. Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction. Don’t get left behind. Over the years, I’m sure we’ve all heard some version of the tale that the Book of Revelation predicts the events that will happen at the end of time when God will judge the inhabitants of the earth. When true Christians will be caught up in the so-called rapture before the fabled Great Tribulation, followed by God and the Lambs destroying the environment and slaughtering everyone who opposes them, that is, yes, left behind unless they convert. And then there will be a huge battle at the Mount of Megiddo, and the forces of the Antichrist will be destroyed by the Lamb. Then there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and the bad guys get tossed into a burning lake of fire, and the good people get to watch and rejoice, and live happily ever after in a cubicle-shaped city, fifteen hundred miles on a side, with exactly one tree in the middle, a river flowing out of the city, and Jesus in the form of a lamb beside it forever and ever. And anyone who doesn’t believe that will be banished outside the city to live with the dogs. Yes, this is in the Book of Revelation. And those people outside the city are dogs, and that is the word that John uses for people who are idolaters and witches that do sex sins and practices falsehoods. There are a lot of variations depending on whether you’re pre, post, or mid tribulation, and for the rapture, and whether you think the millennium and so on will happen.

But there’s just one little problem, and I’m going to quote the learned sage Luke Skywalker to sum it all up. Amazing! Every word of what I just said was wrong. Now I realize that’s a controversial opinion, but bear with me here. The Book of Revelation itself states that it was written by a man named John on the Isle of Patmos, and it was about sixty miles from the city of Ephesus in Asia Minor, which is what we know today as the country of Turkey. Some think that he was the Apostle John. He doesn’t make that claim in the book, but we don’t know. It seems likely that he wrote this book sometime in the late first century, around 90 AD. That’s important because it means a number of things for how we interpret this book. Before we discuss today’s passage, let’s dispel a few myths about the Book of Revelation. And note, there’s no S on the end because there was only one Revelation. I think this will help us understand some of what’s going on.

First, the rapture never appears in the Book of Revelation. It only shows up in one passage in First Thessalonians, and this was written by Paul. Now, in the 1820s, there was a gentleman named John Nelson Darby in Ireland, and he took a bunch of passages from Daniel, Zechariah, First Thessalonians and yes Revelation to try to prove that Jesus’s return was going to be imminent. That got published in the Schofield Reference Bible, which has become one of the best-selling Bibles of all time. Then in the early 70s, we had a very popular book published: Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth. And that launched a whole industry of people trying to prove that when Israel was founded in 1948, Jesus would be here any day now. So Lindsey predicted that Jesus would return in 1988, then 2000, then 2012, And the Mount of Megiddo, which is in the book, there’s no mountain at Megiddo. It’s a flat plain. So all of this could be dismissed as silly, except that the people who see Revelation as predicting the future course of history are now making decisions that affect the actual course of history, and they’re doing it based on a false interpretation of the book. An interpretation, mind you, that is less than two hundred years old, and called dispensationalism. And worse, many people are using this as an excuse to persecute Jewish people or convert them at the point of a sword or a gun. And that’s not all. They’re using it to condemn Muslim people to death. But that’s not what the original message or the point of revelation was then or now.

So okay, okay, Carly. If revelation doesn’t predict the end times, what does it do? Well, I knew you were going to ask, so I’m glad to explain it to you. So, Revelation was written as a work of protest against Rome by a Jewish Christian. We’re not sure when the book was written, as I said, but it may have been written with the memory of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in mind, as well as the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Nero. You may have seen some of the movies or heard the stories about how he used them for torches, threw them into the Colosseum to be eaten by animals, things like that. Sorry, trigger warning. The famous number 666 that everyone tries to decode. If you use the ancient Hebrew alphabet, the way that they used it, as well as ancient Hebrew numerology, is called gematria. The letters of Nero Caesar add up to, you guessed it, 666. That solves that mystery. Nero was assassinated in the year 68 CE, two years before the temple was destroyed. And for many years, there were rumors that circulated that he wasn’t really dead, and that he would return at the head of armies from the east, where Parthia was, and Parthia was one of the big enemies of Rome. So, in the book of Revelation, we have a rumor that one of the sacred heads was wounded of this beast, and that this beast, the head, would die and come back to life, and an army from the east would come and lay waste to the so-called great city of Babylon. This is where that comes from. John couldn’t use the actual name of Rome because they would have executed him for saying that. So he uses symbols and metaphor. And as I noted, the beast with the wounded head and six six six stand for Nero. Babylon, the empire and city that destroyed the first temple in Jerusalem, stands in for Rome. And of course, we have the lamb for Jesus.

John is angry with Rome because it destroyed the temple, it leveled Jerusalem, and it killed a lot of Christians under Nero. And he is convinced that Rome will do it again soon. And we have evidence that this did happen. He’s also a purist, and he believes that Christians should keep the laws of the Torah. Unlike Paul, he does not believe it’s okay to eat meat sacrificed to idols. Now, for John, there can be no accommodation to empire, and anyone that does is not a true follower of Jesus. So extreme are his views that he describes his martyrs as all men, and they have never been despoiled by contact with women. Because after all, he lives in a time when patriarchy is rampant and households are ruled by the pater familias or men. And here we have a contradiction, because on one hand John insists that Christians must resist the Roman Empire and not copy its ways; they must instead live the way of Jesus, the one who gave his life for all of us. But on the other hand, John’s description of God’s empire sounds an awful lot like. Rome’s John seems enamored by Rome’s military might and its pomp and circumstance, and he transfers this onto God and Jesus. And the humble man from Nazareth becomes a fearsome warrior on a blood-soaked horse with a sword in his mouth, consuming his enemies, presumably by fire.

And that finally brings us to today’s passage. Today’s passage in the lectionary begins at verse nine, but we’ve left out verses one through eight of chapter seven, which, as one commentator puts it, serves the unfortunate purpose of completely erasing the list of the Jewish tribes. In those verses, a lot happens. Now we’ve just entered a pause between the breaking of the sixth and the seventh seals, where terrible judgments on the inhabitants of the earth have been happening. During this pause, four angels stand at the corners of the earth, holding back the winds to prevent damage. And another one rises from the east and tells them to keep doing that until all of God’s servants are marked. Now, most Bibles they use the word servant, but in the actual Greek, the word is slave. And slaves back then were horribly mistreated. John has apparently never been a slave, and we have to be careful when we read this passage to remember that. Typically, the mark that the angel is referring to would have been a tattoo, or worse, a brand from a hot iron. Sometimes you could tell a slave by the marks of the whip or from badly healed broken bones where they had been beaten. Now we would obviously hope that being a slave of God would not entail that treatment, but we might wish that John might have chosen a better metaphor here, especially as human trafficking still continues today.

But in any case, the four angels continue to hold back the winds in a moment of divine restraint, giving more time for converts to be gathered from the four corners of the earth. We can note that even though the faithful here are marked as God’s own, this doesn’t protect them from persecution on Earth, as we all know. This does ensure them a place in God’s family. Now, John hears the first group, which consists of 144,000 individuals, equally divided between the 12 tribes of Israel. These are not Christians; they’re not Jewish Christians. They are the Jewish people gathered from among the nations. They kept the Torah and remained Jewish their whole lives. This 144,000 is symbolic, and in Jewish numerology, it’s symbolic of completeness. Paul tells us that we Gentiles have been grafted onto the original tree of Judaism, the people of God, the Jewish people, the twelve tribes. Here we can see this original root at last reunited before the throne of God, where they worship God and the Lamb.

And that finally brings us to the lectionary passage. John now sees a vast multitude of people from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages. John uses the word “nation” first here, and that’s rare in the Bible. Nation is usually used to refer to Gentiles. And so we now see that Gentiles are included in the faithful that stand before the throne. Gentiles would be us. They become part of the group of Jewish people that stand before the throne, grafted onto the vine. And so they have no reason to boast, as Paul wrote. In this way, we see that the Jewish people have been a light to the nation, as Isaiah prophesied. And that’s why the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue or the cry of “Jews will not replace us” are against the word of God. This multitude of Gentiles and the Jewish people are clothed in white, and waving palm branches, and are shouting, “Salvation belongs to our God, who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb.” Worship is in the air. In a scene taken right out of a play, an elder asks John, “Basically, so do you know who these folks are?” And John is smart enough to answer, “I think you probably know better who these people are than I would.” And an elder explains that these people have come through the great ordeal, the tribulation, in the King James version, and washed their blood in the robe of the Lamb. And the robes are now white as snow. Now, mind you, it was the clothing, not the people, that was washed in this verse. These people were willing to face violent death, which in that time was seen as dishonorable. But Jesus’s own death and resurrection turned that dishonorable death into an honorable victory. They have stayed faithful to God and the Lamb, and they now attribute their salvation to God and to Christ rather than to the Roman Empire and its imperial rule.

Rome claimed to be the ultimate provider of salvation and of comfort and of shelter, but instead, empire brought poverty, persecution, exploitation, and misery. God’s world turns all this on its head. He promises them a time when they will have shelter and protection. They will not lack for food or drink, and they will have life. John’s message, even though it’s tainted by its association and mixed metaphor with empire, still tries, in the end, to show us a different world, a better world, a world of love rather than hate. It shows us a world where all are welcome, where the peoples of every nation and tribe and language will mix, where people will lack for nothing, and where the only rule will be that of love.

Today we have read the roll call of the honored dead, our loved ones who have passed on over the years. What does this passage have to say to us about them? At first glance, it would seem nothing. But this isn’t true, because they too are part of that great multitude before the throne. They have gone on to inherit imperishable bodies and are standing in the presence of God. In a bright land where there is no sickness, toil, or danger. At the same time, they will be with us because we are told in the Book of Hebrews that we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, and they are part of that great assembly now, witnesses to the glory of the Triune God, and having been told, as Paul writes, “Well done, my good and faithful ones.” Similarly, the author of Timothy writes, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on, there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on that day.” Similarly, our loved ones have fought the good fight, finished their race, and kept the faith, and now they have received their well-deserved crowns.

And finally, it is up to us, the living, although we will miss and mourn them, to go on, to dedicate ourselves to living our lives in a way that will honor them and their legacies. We know that Jesus, when he rose, did so in the wee hours of the morning, when all was dark and still, because the women went to the tomb just before dawn, and he was already gone. Jesus was resurrected in the dark, and thus it is that, as Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber says, it is when we are faced with the nothingness of death that we are closest to resurrection. It is while it is still dark that God does God’s most wondrous work. But for us, it is still right before dawn. But in the darkness, thanks to Jesus, we have hope—hope that death is not the end. And so we honor these loved ones for the life they lived: sisters, sons, brothers, daughters, fathers, mothers, siblings, husbands, wives, companions, friends, and so much more. And children of God—they were all of these. And with their passing, candles have gone out here on earth, but new ones shine forth in heavens. And may their name be written in the book of life. And may their memories here be blessed. Amen.