Alpha & Omega
John 13:31-31; Acts 11:1-10; Revelation
21:1-6
April 24, 2016
When I was in
junior high school, so far back that they still called it junior high school, I
was in a production of the musical Bye
Bye Birdie. Last week, for no particular reason, one of the well-known
lyrics from that play was running through my mind, “What’s the matter with kids
these days? Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way? What’s the
matter with kids these days?”
Yes, kids, be like
your parents were – perfect in every way. That is, I suppose, the common
instruction from every generation of parents to each succeeding generation of
kids. The good old days were better, our movies were better, our music was
better, and we were pretty much perfect.
Can I get an “amen”
… from anyone under 30?
“Can I get an
‘amen’” is, of course, a trope of the African-American church tradition.
Another, similar, phrase from that tradition – “can I get a witness” – is the
title of Brian Blount’s commentary on the book of Revelation. Blount’s
subtitle: Reading Revelation Through
African American Culture.
Blount is president
of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, and from that post he has offered a
prophet’s perspective on preparing leaders for the church of Jesus Christ. His
work on apocalyptic literature stresses, in his words, “how God’s end-time
revelation has meaning for our present-time living.”[1]
I don’t preach
often from the book of Revelation because, frankly, it just takes too long to set
it up. It’s a part of scripture that I’ve always felt was better for a
classroom conversation than as text for preaching, so I’m stepping into it this
morning with more than a little trepidation, but I’m stepping into it because I
believe there is still a word for the church in this strange apocalyptic text. Perhaps
the easiest interpretation is simply to say Revelation has a lot to say about
what’s the matter with kids these days – so long as we understand that, in
terms of a 2,000 year-old text we are all kids.
We would do well,
when we turn to Revelation, to listen for a word of instruction from a
perspective different from our own. Not only is the text 2,000 years old, but,
more to the point it was written way back then as an attack on Rome, on the
Empire, and, in particular, on the emperor. Thus it’s difficult to hear a word
from God in this text when we listen from Washington, DC. We are the empire now.
Blount quotes South
African anti-apartheid leader and Reformed Church pastor Allan Boesak, who, in
his own commentary on Revelation, wrote, “People who do not know what
oppression and suffering [are] react strangely to the language of the Bible.
The truth is that God is the God of
the poor and the oppressed. … Because they are powerless, God will take up
their cause and redeem them from oppression and violence. The oppressed do not
see any dichotomy between God’s love and God’s justice.”[2]
Our fundamental
call, as followers of Jesus and as those who would stand in the same line in
which he stood, is to stand on the side of the vulnerable. Last week I attended
a talk by Union Seminary Bible professor Rodney Sadler. Rev. Sadler is also one
of the leaders of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement that has seen faith
leaders bring an urgent and prophetic voice to the midst of North Carolina’s
wrenching political upheaval during the past several years.
Sadler opened his
talk saying he wanted to speak about sodomy, and, in particular, “the sin of
Sodom.” He put it that way, I’m confident, to make a room full of progressive
pastors squirm.
Like the good Bible
professor that he is, Rev. Sadler went on to quote scripture on scripture, that
is to say, he quoted the prophet Ezekiel, who warned Jerusalem that it faced
the same fate that Sodom endured way back in Genesis. Ezekiel said, “This was
the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of
food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were
haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I
saw it.”
In other words,
they did not care for the most vulnerable citizens in their midst, and God
judged them for that sin. Indeed, throughout all of scripture, the most
virulent condemnation is reserved always for those who do not care for the
widows and orphans, the sick and the poor – that is to say, the most vulnerable
ones in any society.
How we respond to
the needs of the socially and economically vulnerable, how we care for them,
how we show compassion to the least of these, is, in the final analysis, how we
shall be known, and how we shall be judged. That is the story of all of
scripture, and it is the story of Revelation. The emperor does not know this
story, and he has no clue about the powerless.
These days, I fear,
we who occupy the places of power and privilege in this society are coming up
woefully short in grasping this story, as well. And we cannot claim ignorance
as an excuse.
We know who the most vulnerable members of
our society are, because they are the same ones who have always been the most
vulnerable members of our society. That simple fact should raise all kinds of
questions for those who want to “make America great again.”
Who are our most
vulnerable sisters and brothers? Surely that list includes the poor, gay kids,
gender queer kids, trans sister and brothers, women, people of color. In other
words, those who have been labeled, at one time or another in American history,
as other, as different, as “unclean.” All of them are victims of a patriarchal
system that has been shaped by America’s original sin of white supremacy.
We stand at a
critical moment in American history, and this week – like most weeks – suggests
that our politics are not up to the challenge. You know we are still far from a
grace-filled reckoning with that original sin when one of our two major
political parties’ leading candidate for president can decry as “pure political
correctness” the announcement that abolitionist and feminist Harriet Tubman
will replace on the front of the $20 bill the visage of Andrew Jackson,
slaveholder and author of more than his fair share of the genocide of Native
Americans.
Now there are
plenty of good and legitimate reasons for criticizing all of the current
presidential candidates, but they are also reflections of a far deeper crisis
than would be the election of any one of them. Thus the Trump candidacy on the
Right and the Sanders candidacy on the Left are products of a deep rift running
through the middle of the country.
In the same way,
the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, each, in
its own way, reflects concern with and offers criticism of contemporary
American political, social, and economic institutions that have failed far too
many of us.
Of the contemporary
movements, Black Lives Matters speaks most honestly to me precisely because it
rejects any romantic notion of an imagined past when America was great.
As Brian Bantum,
who teaches theology at Seattle Pacific University, wrote recently in Christian Century:
“As I read and
listen to BLM activists, I hear a more profound demand – the assertion of their
full and unequivocal humanity. It is not a call to be more deeply embedded in
or participants with the American economic or political system. It is a call
for economic and political systems that will honor their inherent humanity.”[3]
The church is
another system called to change in the present moment. Writing in the same
issue, Brittney Cooper, who teaches at Rutgers, notes,
“Meanwhile, the
movement has issued a clarion call to the church […] to affirm a theology of
resistance rather than a theology of respectability. This movement demands
reckoning with who Jesus is. Is Jesus only a savior come to deliver us from
punishment for personal sin? Or is Jesus a savior who joins with us in the work
to end racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia?”[4]
Who is Jesus? He is
the great physician, the one who offers healing. We need some healing these
days. In his most recent book, America’s
Original Sin, Sojourners’ editor
Jim Wallis returns to the issue that drove him from his conservative
evangelical roots almost a half century ago: racism and white supremacy.
White supremacy is
often looked at as a problem primarily for black folks, because they have been,
obviously and historically, the people most victimized by its effects. But
white supremacy is not a problem of black folks, it is a sickness of white
folks, and one that infects all of us white folk. Until we recognized it as
such, I am afraid, we will continue to pass it along. Unfortunately, most of
the time we don’t even know that we carry it.
I was reminded of
this last Thursday, when my Facebook timeline blew up with memories of Prince.
A 30-something friend posted a comment that underscored this poignantly for me.
He wrote:
This time five
years ago, I was preparing the dance mix for our wedding. On a whim, I decided
to download a best-of album for Prince. I wasn't really familiar with his work.
But each track blew me away. And then I realized something:
Growing up, I looked up to [David] Bowie for
his weird, artistic, non-conformist, androgynous, sexy bad-ass self. Bowie was
a hero to me.
But for all the reasons I loved Bowie, I had
resented Prince. He was always sort of a joke to me. The weird costumes. Going
by a symbol. His...blackness.
This is what
the insidious logic of white supremacy does. It creates double standards and
then justifies them by saying they are preferences. White privilege means that
your preferences are "objective" and "logical" and not at
all based on race.
There is no reason to love Bowie and resent
Prince, unless you remain ignorant of the racist messages handed down since
birth. For nearly 30 years of my life, I did not think I liked Prince. In
reality, I would have loved him if I had given myself the chance. The past five
years has been a time where I have been listening to as much Prince [as
possible], appreciating his many personas in the public, and wishing I had not
wasted so much time. And now that he is gone, I am even more upset that White
Supremacy had not allowed me to love him.
Who is Jesus? The
one who heals, from the beginning to the end.
Who is Jesus? “I am
the Alpha and the Omega,” Revelation answers. When the Son of Man is glorified,
in the words of John’s gospel, we will be known for how we have loved one
another, every other, and, in particular, those who are and have been
oppressed, marginalized, the socially and economically vulnerable, those that ideologies
of race, gender, sex, economy, would teach us to hate.
“I am the Alpha and
the Omega,” is not a campaign slogan, and this election will not “make America
great again” no matter who wins. For, you see, we never were that great to
begin with – at least not if by great you mean somehow fundamentally different
from any other collection of human beings, somehow exceptional with respect to
our own human nature.
Leaders who try to
sell you on this idea of fundamental difference and a need to return to some
imagined past when that equally imaginary difference made us great might as
well be singing, “why can’t they be like we were – perfect in every way.”
Against that false
proclamation, we proclaim a new heaven and a new earth, and we join our lives
to the cause of making all things new, of co-creating with God the Beloved
Community in which love and justice come together, in which freedom, love, joy,
and peace become the song we sing. Amen.
[2]
Allan Boesak, Comfort and Protest: The
Apocalypse from a South African Perspective, quoted in Brian K. Blount, Can I Get a Witness: Reading Revelation
Through African American Culture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press,
2005) 32.
[3]
Brian Bantum, “Black Lives Matter,” Christian
Century, March 16, 2016, 26.
[4]
Brittney Cooper, ibid. 27.
posted by David Ensign at
11:32 AM
