He Is Coming (Still) (Revelation 1:4b-8, Reign of Christ B, November 25, 2012)

He Is Coming (Still)

Revelation 1:4b-8
Reign of Christ B
November 25, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

The countdown is on!  No, I don’t mean the countdown until Christmas.  I mean the countdown until the end of the world.  According to some—who don’t happen to be archeologists[1]—the Maya calendar runs out on December 21 of this year.  Or maybe it’s December 23.  There’s a whole cottage industry that has grown up around this claim.  Never mind that the Maya calendar doesn’t actually end, but instead “rolls over” like a car’s odometer.  Never mind that the Y12 doomsayers make all sorts of claims about things about which the ancient Maya had not the slightest interest.

But as long as we don’t take it seriously it’s harmless fun to watch.  I like watching people.  We do such interesting and absurd things.  And this is just one more for my list.

So according to the Y12’ers we have just twenty-six or twenty-eight days to do whatever it is we were going to do.  Or maybe we have just twenty-six days of enjoying not doing whatever it is would have done if the end of the world weren’t just around the corner.  I’m wondering how many Y12’ers there are and what they are going to do when December 24 dawns and we’re all still here and the world looks pretty much as it looks now.  Will there be an unusual uptick in retail sales on Christmas Eve as they realize that they need to shop for Christmas after all?  We’ll see.

I’m not surprised that yet another doomsday, end of the world scenario has captured our imagination, whether we take it seriously or not.  We in the United States are great fans of the end of the world.  Remember the alien mother ship hiding behind the Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997?  Or the Y2K computer crisis of late 1999?  It doesn’t surprise me much that the most recent end of the world plots involve technology or various kinds of pseudo-science, since our ultimate source of authority today is science.  But it wasn’t always so.  In days past it was the Bible that was the final authority, so our doomsday scenarios came from the Bible.  In particular they came from Revelation.

We mainline Protestants tend to hold the Revelation at arm’s length.  We sing some of it in hymns like “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty” and “Crown Him with Many Crowns.”  But we don’t preach it very often.  In the three-year calendar of readings, there are only twelve readings from the Revelation.

We have in essence surrendered the Revelation to fundamentalists, the crazies and the kooks.  But it should not be so.  True enough, the Revelation is not easy to read.  Its images are strange.  In places it is a violent text.  And perhaps most important of all, it has been abused for so long by so many that it is hard for us to come at it afresh and read with an open mind.  

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.  There are some things in it that we do not understand, but not so many things as you might think.  The rest can be worked through with the help of trustworthy guides.  And when we are patient and open-minded the Revelation has a lot to offer to us even today.

It is best not to read the Revelation as if it were a set of coded predictions, as if the writer had seen the events of our future or even of his own.  If you do read it that way you end up with something embarrassing like Whisenout’s 88 Reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1988[2] or Harold Camping’s 1994?.[3]  (By the way, the answer to his question is, “No.”)  

I believe that the Revelation, like much of the Bible, is best read as a poetic expression of the writer’s sense of justice.  I emphasize the “poetic expression” part.  We do not expect that the truth of poetry will be found in whether or not it is historically accurate or scientifically provable.  Poetic imagination is a way of perceiving truth that is not an expression of fact.  When we lay the result of poetic imagination alongside the ordinary world, we find that some parts of the ordinary world no longer seem so important and some of the parts that we have ignored or neglected suddenly seem very important indeed.

The Revelation was written to and for Christian communities in the cities of Asia Minor—located in what is now western Turkey.  The Christian assemblies—usually translated as “churches”—of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea were at this time probably small groups of only a few dozen households.  But they were just big enough and visible enough to come to the attention of the authorities.  The Christians were odd people who held themselves aloof from much of ordinary civic life.  They didn’t participate in the religious festivals or attend the games.  They didn’t eat meat.  They were careful about their speech.  Their meetings happened before dawn and they did not welcome visitors.  Rumors about eating and drinking “the body and blood of Christ” led some to conclude that they were practicing cannibalism.  “The kiss of peace” which they exchanged sounded improper.  Young men and women who became Christians sometimes refused to obey their parents claiming that their allegiance to God came first.  Wives sometimes refused to obey their husbands for the same reason.  

In spite of their small numbers Christians were starting to be regarded as a threat to society, as unpatriotic and anti-Roman.  From time to time in one place or another Christians were being persecuted: arrested, interrogated—the slaves by “enhanced” interrogation methods, whipped and ordered to renounce their allegiance to Christ.  In a few cases Christians had been put to death.

The Christians of Asia Minor were frightened, unsure of how to respond to this pressure, and in some cases demoralized.  Some had given up.  Others were deeply confused.  The Revelation was written for them.  It’s written for us, too, whenever we are frightened and unsure of how to respond to the pressures that our culture puts on us.  It’s written for us whenever we are demoralized or confused.  At one time or another that’s us, that’s all of us.

Our reading begins with a prayer that the Revelation’s readers will have grace and peace from “the one who is and who was and is to come.”  It ends with a declaration from the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come,” that God is “the Alpha and the Omega.” 

Here is the central message of the whole book: No matter where we are, God is there.  No matter where we have come from, God is there.  No matter what will happen, God is there.  We can see the ordinary world in which our daily lives unfold.  Behind it, above and below it, in front of it and on every side, God is there.  If we live, God lives with us.  If we die, we live with God.  If we are well, God walks with us.  If we are sick, God suffers with us.  If we mourn, God weeps.  If we rejoice, God exults.  If we stand, God sustains us.  If we fall, God helps us back to our feet.  

What is happening in the seven cities in Asia Minor matters much less than the readers fear.  What makes the headlines, what leads the evening news, what goes viral in blogosphere matters far less than we suppose.  The real news is that God is the beginning and end, that God is and was and will be.

To the Romans Jesus was a minor criminal, just another Jewish rebel.  He was executed callously, casually, with hardly a thought.  His followers will be treated in the same way.  But that is not the reality that the Revelation sees.  Jesus is “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.”  Among those rulers is counted the Emperor himself who imagines himself supremely and confidently in charge of the Empire, endowed with the divine spirit that entitles him to divine treatment.  But Jesus the executed criminal is the Emperor’s ruler.  

On the festival of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the year, we remember that whatever authorities or powers there may be, whether they are bosses or parents or preachers or governors or presidents or commanders or investment bankers or whatever, it is God who holds history, God who is with us and for us.  And we know the shape of God’s rule for we have seen it in the life, the teaching, the death and life among us still of Jesus.  The festival of Christ the King is our last laugh on the world at its oppressive and neglectful worst.  It is our poetic imaginative celebration that we assert against the violence that so disfigures our world, against the hatreds that warp human hearts, against the greed that dresses up in expensive Italian business suits and gloats over those who are not so fortunate.

We celebrate because the God of Jesus is, and was, and is to come.

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[1] See Anthony Aveni, “Apocalypse Soon? What the Maya Calendar Really Tells Us About 2012 and the End of the World,”  Archeology 62, 6 (November-December 2009),  http://www.archaeology.org/0911/2012/, for a debunking of the claims of Y12 adherents.

[2] Edgar C. Whisenout, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988: The Feast of Trumpets (Rosh Hash-Ana) September 11, 1988, (Whisenout/World Bible Society, 1988).

 [3] Harold Camping, 1994? (Vantage Press, 1992).