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.

---

[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.