Revelations and Revolutions

Revelation 1:4-8; Psalm 150; John 20:19-31

April 28, 2019

“To the seven churches, here comes one weird letter. I hope you’re ready.” If I’d been ghost writing for John of the Apocalypse I might have proposed that opening.

But if I’d been aiming for a more descriptive and accurate beginning, I would have proposed something along the lines of, “John, to the seven churches, here’s a long strange song I sing of thee.”

I find it helpful to read the book of Revelation as poetry, because it is nothing but misleading and dangerous to read it in any straightforward or literal way, and it’s not particularly helpful to read it as an acid trip.

The Revised Common Lectionary actually points in this direction, too, by pairing the words Psalm 150 with these opening words from Revelation. The lectionary for Year C, which we’re in, includes a set of passages from Revelation during the season of Eastertide, and I appreciate that, on the Sunday when the brief trip through the final book of the New Testament begins, we’re also invited to read these words:

Praise God with trumpet sound; praise God with lute and harp!

Praise God with tambourine and dance; praise God with strings and pipe!

Praise God with clanging cymbals; praise God with loud clashing cymbals!

Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!

Revelation is a song of praise to God – “the Alpha and the Omega … who is and who was and who is to come.”

It is also a song of warning to the church, and a song of protest to the empire.

It is not, however, a funeral dirge, though it is filled with death. For it is also filled with resurrection, and, in proclaiming resurrection, revelation becomes an anthem of revolution – a siren song proclaiming the imminent turning of the world catalyzed by God’s dramatic and singular intervention in raising Jesus from the dead.

This is the song we need to sing.

We, the church of Jesus Christ, need to sing this song of life because we live amidst a culture of death. As Brian Blount, president of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, puts it in his Invasion of the Dead,  “We know death. We are death. What we do not get, what strikes us as unfathomable, as foolishly beyond our reach, is life.”[1]

We are all Thomas. We know death. We saw Jesus crucified. We know he’s dead. We saw Malcolm and Martin murdered. We know they’re dead. We saw Mandela imprisoned and we know he was silenced. We’ve seen Angela Davis handcuffed and harassed. We know she silenced. We’ve seen Harvey Milk and Yitzhak Rabin assassinated. We know they’re dead. We’ve seen climate activists harassed and jailed. We’ve seen truth assailed, peacemakers mocked, and justice denied time after time after time. Dying messiahs are nothing new to us.

Indeed, we can make a fetish of the deaths of our heroes, and sell the t-shirts with their images emblazoned on them. But, like Thomas, we don’t believe life even when it’s standing right in front of us still bearing the marks of death.

As Blount puts it, “Resurrection stands out in this world because resurrection is not normal: it makes no true sense in this world.”[2]

It makes no sense, that is, so long as we see no need for the revolution that God intends to wage by means of resurrection.

Perhaps that’s why the apocalyptic revelation comes to John in exile. The author of Revelation writes from Patmos, the island where he has been exiled for preaching the radical message that Jesus is Lord in the midst of an empire that reserved that title for Caesar.

As Allan Boesak put it in a sermon to his South African congregation in the midst of Apartheid, “precisely on this point the faith of the Christian congregation would have to prove itself. They would have to rise above their slave mentality and exchange their fear of the authorities for the fear of the Lord. The conflicting loyalties were clearly spelled out: God or idol; Lord or emperor.”[3]

For Boesak’s congregation, the news that God was about the work of revolution could only be heard as good. For the churches to whom John of Patmos wrote, the great turning of the world was good news. For the folks to whom Martin and Malcolm and Mandela preached, liberating revolution was good news. Resurrection was good news because they were dying.

How do we hear such news? We who are so comfortable, so clearly and closely aligned with the empire? Where do our loyalties lie?

Scripture regularly puts the choice in clear, black and white terms: I put before you life and death; choose this day whom you will serve.

Friends, the empire with which we are so clearly and closely aligned is, like every empire in every age, an empire of death. We could recite specifics, but it would begin quickly to read like a coroner’s report. Cause of death: rampant consumerism driving climate catastrophe; unrestrained militarism compelling countless and ceaseless wars; unrepentant racism driving a culture enraptured by violence.

In such a time, how do we choose life? How do we live into resurrection?

I’m not certain, though I believe this has some deep connections to all that we talked about with respect to generative church. After all, what we’re talking about is generating life. What does that look like in such a time as this?

Fortunately, we’ve got models. We are, in fact, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who have gone before proclaiming life in the midst of unimaginable suffering and death. Think of enslaved African-Americans. As Brian Blount puts it, “These people envisioned and embodied resurrection. And they used it as a weapon. They preached exodus when they were in Egypt. They drew education down from the sky when there was no legal opportunity for it on this earth. They faced down dogs, police, water cannons, and entire regions of hostility when there seemed to be no safe way forward. […] They lived resurrection until they participated in the unleashing of resurrection.”[4]

Oh, and they sang, too. Because to generate new life, to generate resurrection, you have to sing the revolution into the world. No position paper is going to get you there. No talking points, no TED talks, no amount of preaching – you have to sing revolution into the world.

The turning of the world from death to new life begins when we refuse to be turned by the lies of a culture of death and attend to the truth of the God of life. That’s the revolution waiting for its song.

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round.

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[1] Brian K. Blount, Invasion of the Dead: Preaching the Apocalypse (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014) 30.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Allan Boesak, The Finger of God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989) 88.

[4] Blount, 29-30.

An Idle Tale

Luke 24:1-12

Easter Sunday, 2019

An idle tale, told by fools; sound and fury signifying nothing?

And that’s what their closest friends thought; that’s what his closest friends thought.

Not an auspicious beginning for changing the world.

But, then again, world changing never sounds promising when it’s first proposed.

As it’s been said of such proposals to engage ambitious efforts to change the world, “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.”

It was true of Cady Stanton when she set out for Seneca Falls. It was true of Gandhi when he set out to march to the sea. It was true of King when he set out to march from Selma to Montgomery. It was true of Mandela when he set out to go from a prison cell to the president’s mansion.

On that first Easter morning, when the women returned from the empty tomb and told what they had seen, well, first they were ignored, and then they were laughed at.

It’s not difficult to imagine that, even when Peter and the other disciples became convinced of the truth of the women’s witness, most everyone else around continued to scoff at the whole small band of disciples. And when a few others joined them, and then, after that, a few more still, history tells us that they were resisted, abused, and kept in their place by the powers that be.

Nevertheless, they persisted.

On that first Easter, they began to witness to the reality that another world is possible because they had seen their own expectations turned upside down over and over again. They had seen the lame walk, the blind regain their sight, and the poor rejoicing at good news. They had seen sinners forgiven. They had seen the tables turned. They had seen life emerge where death once reigned.

Another world emerging, right before their eyes – why not tell this story to the world!

Well, to begin with, it is a foolish tale. Everybody knows that the way things are is the way things shall remain. The rich will get richer and the poor will get ignored. The powerful will remain enthroned and entrenched no matter which way the wind blows; the weak will inherit crumbs and the meek will inherit the whirlwind.

The dead and buried will remain that way, and nobody will listen to the testimony of women.

Everybody knows.

If there was a soundtrack to this morning’s story it would be Leonard Cohen, and it would be dark. Indeed, any soundtrack to our particular time in history would have to be dark, because it surely feels all too often that those things that everybody knows are, in fact, the simple truth.

Everybody knows that the rich get richer, and, heck, just to ensure that we’ll enact tax policies to reinforce it.

Everybody knows that the powerful will remain enthroned and entrenched, and, just to make sure, we’ll make it harder for people to vote, and we’ll bury evidence of the lies and misdeeds of the powerful beneath piles of propaganda and pages of redactions.

Everybody knows that the weak get crumbs, so we’ll systematically destroy the public safety net and bow down to the great god of the market whose invisible hand seems always to be empty when it comes to taking care of the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the most vulnerable members of our society.

Everybody knows that the meek inherit the whirlwind, so we’ll ignore all evidence of climate change and hope for the best as the storms rage and the waters rise around us hurting first and foremost the world’s poor.

Meanwhile, if powerful men have powerful friends it doesn’t matter what kinds of abusive behaviors they engage in because, everybody knows that nobody will listen to the testimony of women.

Everybody knows.

If I told you that another world is possible, it would sound like an idle tale, told by a fool, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Nevertheless.

Friends, another world is possible.

More than that, another world is inevitable.

Right now, in our very midst, another world is being born and born again.

There is actually nothing at all unusual about this. In fact, it is simply the way of the world.

I spent a little time in the garden this week, and a little more time with Mark Schnarr – and Mark Medrick and Cheryl Lederle – creating this “garden” for today. Some of these plants sprang up from single seeds that we planted during worship a month or so ago.

There was some soil, then there was a single seed. There was a bit of water. There was light – and it was good.

And now, where once was no thing, there is something, where once there was just some empty soil, soon there will be food.

The old world has not disappeared, but a new one is rising up from the soil.

The New Testament word we translate as “resurrection” simply means “rise.” Every morning we rise up. There is resurrection all around us.

The question is not, will resurrection happen again, for it does happen over and over and over again. The question always is “what for?” To personalize that: what will we rise up for? What will you rise up for? What will I rise up for?

You see, resurrection is not an idle tale. Telling it again this Easter Sunday may not feel like an auspicious beginning for changing the world. But changing the world is what we are about.

Don’t tell me that it’s impossible because I know it is inevitable. The first time I preached here on an Easter Sunday, back on April 11, 2004, Facebook was two months old, G-mail was 10 days old, and Mayor Gavin Newsome had just directed the city of San Francisco to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Meanwhile, I seriously doubt that anyone now in this room had ever heard of Facebook or G-mail, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was still seven years away from ordaining gay and lesbian pastors, and a decade away from sanctioning same-sex marriages even though our session had recently drafted its first overture on ordination and was preparing to send me and Travis to Richmond to advocate for it.

Offering an advocacy statement for such a change in 2004 might well have seemed like telling an idle tale. Such a change was inconceivable to the vast majority of the church. We were laughed at and scorned.

But we were rising. Again and again and again, to tell a story of the new thing God was doing in our midst, and to witness to the same old thing God has always been doing: bringing new life where people expect to find nothing but death and decay.

What are you going to rise up for?

Friends, we are witness to the reality that another world is possible because we have seen our own expectations turned upside down over and over again. We have seen the lame walk, the blind gain new sight, and the poor rejoicing at good news. We have seen sinners forgiven. We have seen the tables turned. We have seen life emerge where death once reigned.

Another world is emerging, right before our eyes – why not tell this story to the world!

Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed! Hallelujah! Amen.