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Pentecost 3
26/6/2022

Revelation 6:1-11
Psalm 16
Luke 9:51-62

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In a sentence:
The witness – “martyrdom” – of Christians is against the powers which dehumanise the world.

The book of Revelation is a violent book, deeply marked by antagonism, conflict, threats, and death.

It is the violence of God in Revelation which is the most problematic. God’s four horsemen of this morning’s reading “conquer”, take away peace “so that people would slaughter one another”, and are given authority “to kill with sword, famine, and pestilence, and by the wild animals of the earth”: not everyone’s idea of a God of love. While the violence of God catches our attention, less obvious is the violence which has preceded the blood-letting of the narrative: the violence against the people of God. We might return to God’s violence before we finish with Revelation; today we’ll look to the martyrs in the text.

In today’s reading, John identifies “those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given” (6.9). The word “martyr” doesn’t appear in our usual translation of the book of Revelation, although it is present throughout the text in Greek. The Greek word marturia means “testimony”, so that a “martyr” is “one who gives testimony”. The later notion of martyrdom extends from this root to understand the death of persecuted believers as being because of, or as giving testimony to, the truths of God. The original context of Revelation is still debated, but part of that context is likely to have been the persecution of Christians, even to death. It’s not always clear why they were persecuted. Just being different can be enough to cause the powerful to scapegoat a community, as Nero is said to have done when he burned a large part of Rome. Here, the sheer difference drives the persecution rather than the content of a community’s belief. Scapegoats can be politically useful.

But other times it is the belief itself which causes the persecution. We have a record dating from early in the second century (AD 112), which describes the test put by one Pliny the Younger – a local Roman official – to Christians:

I interrogated them as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed. ^[1]

Pliny elaborates further, but the threat of execution in the interrogation was clear. Given that threat, are these believers themselves not being a little extreme, a little fanatical? What is lost if one softens a bit, especially if we keep our fingers crossed – if God knows we still believe even if we tell the Romans we don’t?

But we can’t begin with this question until we see what Pliny describes from another critical angle. We might think it extreme to die for convictions and creeds about something which can’t be seen. But we should also wonder: What is it about these “mere” beliefs which makes believing them reason to execute the believer? The death sentence reveals that what is at stake is not merely “religious” – not merely about what we might believe and others might reject. Pliny the Younger was sane and measured. He observed and investigated – if by torture! – and found only that Christians were deluded by “depraved, excessive superstition”. But these were for him no mostly harmless late-afternoon nutters on public transport. Pliny held the delusion of the Christians to be utterly dangerous to the community, the temple and the local economy. And so the Christians were executed if they would not sacrifice in the temple or worship the emperor’s image. Christian belief had consequences which threatened to break the social and political order.

In a decision to execute over “mere” belief, faith is revealed not merely a “belief” thing, as distinct from a political or social matter. Pliny killed Christians because the social and economic consequences they drew from their “deluded superstitions” were perceived to be positively dangerous. This is clear. But let us also see that if we consider the martyr to be a little unreasonable in her refusal to change her beliefs “a bit” under threat of death, we should also hold that it is unreasonable to threaten and execute her over such things in the first place. We might lament this clash of worlds and the blood it spills, but we should not do it too loudly, for Pliny might mistake us for Christians. No well-meaning “wish” that we could just get along better together is going to overcome the fact that, even today, people are killed because they see the world differently – often rightly – and such vision is dangerous. We might think here of those crushed in dark, faraway places by the interests of large corporations, or those who see the lies in despotic politics, or those who expose to us where we benefit from overlooking inconvenient truths. The history wars playing out in Australia are caught up in a similar dynamic; we’re just not as bloody-handed about it (anymore). To say “it all happened so long ago” is not unlike saying “it’s just something you believe”.

There is a lot of blood spilt in the book of Revelation – the blood of the martyrs and the blood of the perpetrators. This is because there is a lot of blood spilt in the world. The witness – the martyr – says, against too-easy claims about peace, justice and life, that is not peace, that is not justice, that is not life. The need for wide-ranging judgements about life and death, peace, justice and life are not as distant as we imagine. How will we handle the needs of the millions living on low-lying coastlines when rising sea levels render them homeless? There is no technological solution to this question; solar panels don’t float. How will we handle increasing hostility in the superpowers we don’t like or understand? Will there be true peace or the more likely return to killing as a means of “peace”? What truths will require witnessing – “martyring” – in these contexts?

We “hope”, of course, for less blood than more. By this, we usually mean that we have our “fingers crossed” because we know that the powers of darkness are very strong, for all our effort against them. We don’t need the book of Revelation to tell us this but opening our eyes to the world around us should at least explain why Revelation is violently dark and red. Indeed, revelation tells the story of the God of love, but it is the story of God’s love for us who are too familiar with blood.

For this reason, we gather around the table not merely to receive “the bread of life” and a “cup of salvation”. Indeed, this language is appropriate, but it doesn’t tell the whole truth, and here of all places, let us tell the truth. We are given what is named explicitly as tokens of the body and blood of Jesus because the very people of God – people like us – are capable of making a martyr of the Lord of life. “Bread of life” and “cup of salvation” are Christ broken “for” us; “body” and “blood” are Christ broken by us. Salvation is salvation from this “having-broken” another. The mystery of Christian faith is that, without justifying the violence, God uses it for the revelation – for the apocalypse – of God’s persistent love for his enemies.

Christians do not “wish” for peace. We “hope” for it. That is, we confess a God who exceeds the possibilities of a world of predictable cause and effect – the cause which is violence and the effect which is more violence. To hope “Christianly” is to say that violence is not the only thing which can follow violence. The violence of denial does not have to follow the violence of dispossession or neglect. The violence of war does not have to follow the violence of escalation. Yet Pliny shows how, in a violent world, even such suggestions seem violent, a challenge to the prevailing order: depraved, excessive superstition. Christian hope – not mere belief – can be costly.

To hope Christianly is to live as if we have done the worst and been forgiven, and to relate to others who have done badly in such a way that we become the means by which they do better. It is in this that we “martyr” – that we give testimony to a truth which is not known until someone points to it by being it. “This is what truth looks like”, says the risen Son of the Jesus hanging on the cross.

In none of this is there any revelling in the possibility of martyrdom – that martyrdom which is dying. This corruption has certainly infected the church and many other movements at times, but it is a corruption. Death is never a means to an end with this God.

In reflecting on the martyrs, there is only the invitation to open our eyes to the violent ways of the world. This is not easy for those of us served well by violence. Nevertheless, testimony – martyring – in word and deed – speaking the truth about God and the truth about ourselves – is our purpose as a church and the expression of our faith. Violence might be the way of the world but it is not to be our way.

Let us, then, be willing witnesses to the peace of God, for the sake of all world, believing and not.

Related sermons

• 28 November 2021 – On mistaking death for God
• 3 July 2016 – Why did Jesus die?

[1] The text of the letter can be found at https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/pliny.html.

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Pentecost 2
19/6/2022

Revelation 21:1-6a
Psalm 42
Luke 8:26-39

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In a sentence:
Heaven is where we are made by other people, not the absence of other people.

History has delivered many images of what heaven is like, which are usually connected to certain notions of what hell might be like, the one contrasted with the other. Hell is a place of fire and punishment; heaven is a place of sunshine and bliss – so the story typically goes. The book of Revelation has contributed considerably to these expectations!

Our Revelation text this morning provides a vision of heaven with elements of the blissful existence we might be hoping for: God will dwell with them, will wipe away every tear from their eyes, death and mourning and crying will be no more. These are things we all long for.

But there’s another aspect of John’s vision which may be more troubling if we consider its fuller ramifications: heaven is a place where others are. We might take some comfort in being in heaven with others if we could choose who else is there: friends, the family members we actually like, perhaps our favourite artists or musicians or thinkers. Yet not only they are there if heaven is a city. As a city, heaven is a communal place and not a place of isolated individuals with their narrow desires. This means that heaven may be a place where there will be people we don’t like or have even learned to hate and who return that favour. And there doesn’t seem to be very much heavenly about that.

Of course, if it’s a city, we expect heaven to be pretty large. Perhaps we could be in heaven without running into those people who rub us up the wrong way. Yet, given that that’s how we do things already here and now, there’s still nothing very heavenly about this vision if we have to plot when and where we’ll be to avoid being annoyed or threatened by others. If heaven is a city full of people, it could be just plain hard work. So, after a lifetime of being commanded to love people whom it’s hard to love, we’ll go to heaven and meet more of them. Praise the Lord.

This is all a bit silly but unpacking the ideas of the text in this way shows how they can be misunderstood. There are a lot of half-thought wishes and dreams about heaven (and hell) which have little relationship to scriptural imagery. Whatever heaven is, it is not our favourite things.

Day after day, our televisions, newspapers, radios and social media feeds fill the space around us with the cacophonies, the dissonances, the traffic of city life. What would it take for life in a city to be a harmonious reality, for the heavenly city John describes actually to be heaven?

The answer is that we cannot imagine. By this, we mean that we do not know how this could be possible and so we can’t create this Utopia. The bad news the church has is that we are unable to save ourselves, to the extent that we would have to be alone in heaven if we were to be there on our own terms and not be hassled by other people – even by those we love and yet who are still quite capable of driving us up the wall. Every dream of a new city, every vision of a new society, every “solution” for some communal problem creates just another problem. This is the dynamic between the left, the centre and the right in our politics, each crying out in turn “That didn’t work”, after every social and economic pendulum-swing solution.

But let’s turn all of this towards something more concrete and specific, and closer to home. What about us and our search for a solution to the problem of our future as a congregation? What do we dream of here? What is our vision? How will the next thing for MtE be “heavenly”? For indeed, that is what the next thing must be to be worthwhile.

In another reflection on our situation late last year, I quoted from a little book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Life Together – in which he makes a powerful statement about ideals and human community:

“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who fashion a visionary ideal of community demand that it be realised by God, by others, and by themselves.

They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge the fellowship and God himself accordingly… They act as if they are the creators of the Christian community, as if their dream binds people together.

When their ideal picture is destroyed, they see the community going to smash. So they become, first accusers of the fellowship, then accusers of God, and finally the despairing accusers of themselves.” (SCM 1954, 17f)

This is to say that it is not a brave person who declares “this, and only this” is how to give shape to heaven, is the future of a Christian community. It is not even a fool who says this. It is a blasphemer who declares that God’s home is not with mortals (Rev 21.3) – that God’s home is not with those whose existence is indelibly marked by brokenness and death, who are prone to get it wrong: even us.

We worship a God who justifies sinners. This is not a declaration that there is a safety net for when we break the rules. To say that God justifies sinners is the rules. “Who-justifies-sinners” is God’s name and not merely what God sometimes happens to do. “Home-is-with-mortals” is God’s name.

The shadow-side of this is that if this God is our God, then we are those in need of being justified. Why? In relation to the need to decide our future together, it is because we mistake planning for hope, our work for God’s.

It is, of course, necessary that tomorrow have some particular shape in our imagination: we must plan. This is so that we have something worth doing today. But we can have no confidence that our planned tomorrow will not amount to a crucifying of the Lord of glory. Instinctively, we know this. It is what causes us so much anxiety in the whole process. We wonder, Will we get it wrong?, with particular ideas in our heads of what “wrong” looks like. That is, we have a clearer sense of hell than of heaven. And we wonder, how will we account for ourselves? Who will accuse us for what we choose and how it works out? Perhaps those who went before us, giving us so much, only to see it lost? Perhaps the Presbytery or Synod, which imagine they could have put the resources to better use? Perhaps those sitting in the row in front of, or behind, you, who advised that we go a different way? Perhaps most powerfully: Does God have a plan for us, which we are supposed to guess? Do we risk failing God in this?

To put the question differently: what is the relationship between what we have to do and what is said from the throne in John’s magnificent vision: It is done? What is done? The “done-ness” is the revelation that God’s home is with mortals. God home is with those who built all this, and then died, leaving it to us to sort out. God’s home is with us who will decide what to do with it all, and will then die. God’s home is with those who will have to live with our decisions before they die.

All this is to say: our decision is not the source of our life. The God named home-is-with-mortals – this God is the source of life.

We are a baptised people. The only death which matters we died in that baptism; there is no condemnation of those whose lives are hidden with Christ in God. Weekly we are fed with the signs of death – broken body and spilt blood – not because we are a cannibalistic death cult but because with this God death has no power but what God gives it.

The decisions before us cause us so much trouble because we are afraid that something will die, that tomorrow will be less than heaven. But God’s home is with mortals, with those who die. There is nothing to fear.

“It is done” declares that death has no power; it is overcome, and there is nothing to fear.

What then are we to do? There is only one option. Let death be behind us by choosing life.

What kind of life? Life together: God’s will done, on earth as it will be in the impossible, promised heaven.

Based on a sermon
preached at MtE April 2016

Related sermons

• 6 October 2019 – The life which is really life
• 27 October 2013 – To decide

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Trinity Sunday
12/6/2022

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a pint of beer. The second one orders half a pint of beer. The third asks for half of the last order. The fourth orders half of the last order. The next orders half of the last order and so on it went. The barman pulled two one-pint glasses of beer. Gave one to the first mathematician and told the others to share the other pint among themselves. They didn’t argue about this arrangement because they knew that the halving of each order even an infinity number of times, the amount of beer would not quite reach one pint. It is when thinking of puzzles like this that I don’t feel quite so bad when I can’t get my head around the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

The human mind likes to picture things. We make pictures of things that cannot be seen.

Mindful of our love of visualising everything, God told Moses there had to be a limit to this desire. God got Moses to include this injunction into the Ten Commandments. God decreed thou shalt not draw pictures of me. A little aside – such is our love of images that Cecil B. DeMille made a film in 1956 of the Ten Commandments. Of course, anyone who had read the Bible realised that the film missed what the Bible is about by a long shot. This is the problem. When we make an image of anything or anyone we only get a little bit of it right and most of it wrong.

And God said, ‘Thou shall not paint me!’ So what possessed me to have an icon of the Holy Trinity on the cover of our order of service? There was a season in the history of the church when painting any kind of icon was against church law. Thou shalt not paint any kind of image of God or God’s Son or God’s followers. There shall be no images. Then John of Damascus said:

I have seen God in human form, and my soul was saved… In former times God, who is without form or body, could never be depicted. But now when God is seen in the flesh conversing with humans, I make an image of the god whom I see. I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take his abode in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter.

So the church said OK you can paint icons, but THOU SHALT NOT PAINT ICONS OF GOD THE FATHER!!! For the most part icon artists have obeyed. They have sneaked a hand poking in from the top to indicate that God the Father is causing the story in the picture to unfold. There have also been a few blatant acts of disobedience. We were visiting old churches in Mystras in the hills above Sparta and I caught a glimpse of a triangular halo. I looked closer and there was an old man with a triangular halo sitting beside a younger man with a halo traditionally associated with Christ and a white dove fluttering between them.

Other examples of this disobedience occurred in Russia despite an injunction of the Acts of the Great Council of Moscow of 1666-1667 that said, ‘To paint icons of the Lord Sabaoth (that is, the Father) with a white beard, holding the only-begotten Son in his lap with a dove between them is altogether absurd and improper…’ Sure enough, I saw an example of this indictment being ignored as late as the early years of the twentieth century when it appeared in an old photo atop an icon screen in a church built in St Petersburg to commemorate 300 years of the Romanov dynasty. The church was destroyed during the Soviet era and is now restored. The offending icon atop the screen has been replaced with one resembling the famous Rublev icon of the Holy Trinity?

How did Rublev get away with painting God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit when it is against church regulation to paint God the Father. He got away with it by painting the three messengers from God who visited Abraham and Sarah to announce they were going to have a baby who would be the father of a nation. He wasn’t the first to paint this bit of scripture. Early versions go back to the early fourth century. Some of us have been to Ravena and seen a mosaic of the story from before 547 CE. Over the centuries some artists put the same kind of halo over the central messenger as was usually given to Christ. In others, Christ’s halo surrounded the three heads – they were interchangeable. There were many other variations to the image according to the imaginations of the artists. In many, Abraham and Sarah were still present bringing food to the visitors.

Theologians, poets, musicians, ecumenical church councils have joined with artists to help the church say what there is to be said and sung and seen about who God is. We know that human minds and senses are way to puny to begin to grasp all that God is. God reveals God’s self to humankind and, by God’s grace, we can see and hear and feel God with us. But if we ever imagine we have perceived it all we are kidding ourselves and our god is much too small.

And yet, on Trinity Sunday, the church pauses to grapple again with this great mystery that the omniscient, omnipotent, invisible, and all other superlatives that might be associated with God and wonder that this God cares for us. It is a kind of genius that prompted the church to abbreviate what it can know about God into statements we call creeds that describes one God as three persons.

When Rublev painted his icon of the hospitality of Abraham, the Russian church decreed that icons of the Holy Trinity would henceforth be modelled on the one painted by Rublev. The church recognised that of all the attempts to paint or sing or describe God, Rublev had got some things right. I will mention only two. Firstly, the table the three are sitting at with a chalice looks remarkably like every communion table or high alter where the Eucharist is celebrated. There is also a space at this table, a place where the worshiper may join in fellowship with the three who are in eternal unity.

Of course all these attempts to understand God are too small. In his hymn, King of glory George Herbert concludes his praise with the line, ‘ev’n eternity’s too short to extol thee’.

In my student days, a visiting theologian from America told of his late-night conversations with a fellow theologian as they grappled together with the mystery of God. He explained that what they had to say on the subject was never complete but always came to a halt, whereupon the host put his recording of JS Bach’s B minor Mass on the turntable and played the Credo, Credo in unum Deum (I believe in one God). No more words. No more argument to finds no winners or loser. Just time spent together enjoying a great artistic composition celebrating God.

On Trinity Sunday the church grapples again with the mystery of God. On every occasion when the liturgy of the church celebrates the Eucharist the worshiper is met again by the mystery of the Holy Trinity in the recitation of the creed and receiving the body and blood of Christ at his table.

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Pentecost
5/6/2022

Revelation 21:1-6a
Psalm 104
John 14:12-17, 25-27

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In a sentence:
Heaven is no escape from the command to love

Whatever other benefits the lockdowns of 2020-21 might have delivered to us, one was the possibility of driving down the wrong side of the road entirely safely, if still illegally! The traffic disappeared, and getting to the few places we were allowed to go was a breeze.

Alas, the traffic has returned with a vengeance. Yet, though we say “alas”, the traffic jam is surprisingly important for understanding the nature of the promised future we hear about in the book of Revelation.

In Revelation, we have a seer’s vision of the consummation of all things: the end, the goal of God’s work in Christ. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth”. This is fairly straightforward so far as apocalyptic visions go, and something like it is to be expected at this point of the story. But then comes the strange thing: “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”

Why is this strange? The city is the human way of being. The city is the teeming human mass. It is extraordinary and tragic. The city is coffee shops and crazy people on public transport. The city is park benches and sirens in the night. It is soaring architecture and backstreet graffiti. It is movement and exchange. The city is the traffic jam.

The traffic jam is a sacrament of human interconnectedness, although we experience the sacrament in its fallen state as a clash and a choking. The traffic jam is a sign of the way and the degree to which we are all inextricably interconnected and interdependent. The traffic jam occurs because my being at work is made more effective by your being at work at the same time. This is, in turn, more effective if our kids are at all at school at the same time. As the city becomes more successful through this honing of mutual effectiveness, creating more opportunities for interconnection occur, making the traffic worse. The distance over which I can provide my services increases (meaning more time on the road), as does the possibility of being able to afford to send the kids somewhere other than the local school (meaning more time on the road). Each extra dimension of interrelatedness in the city makes it more successful as a city, and harder to be in the city.

The size of the city doesn’t really matter. Theologically, a “city” needs only two people for John’s vision of the new Jerusalem to be pertinent. How can two people have a traffic jam, you ask? Well, marriage, for instance, which also features in our passage today and to which we’ll return in a moment. (But also siblings, neighbours, business partners, etc.). The traffic jam is the sign and the burden of engaged, interactive human life. It is what happens when more than one person has to be in the same place at the same time, when we act upon the fact that we are “made for each other”. Every engaged, interactive life has its traffic jams. Only the sufficiently wealthy and the sufficiently poor are outside the requirement of the traffic jam.

If this is how cities work, John’s vision of a “new” city descending from heaven to earth gives rise to an unexpected question for faith: are there traffic jams in the new Jerusalem, in “heaven”?

The gospel suggests a surprising answer: Yes. And No.

Yes, there are traffic jams because this is a real city; heaven is not everyone getting green lights all the way, although that’s how we might imagine it. Perhaps even stranger than the fact that God sets forth a new city is that it is Jerusalem, the basket case of all cities:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus cried, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”(Matthew 23.37-39; Luke 13.34f)

This is to say nothing of what has happened there since then, and happens even now. But the point here is not to “pick on” Jerusalem but to understand why it appears here in the vision, and not some brand new, start-it-all-over Utopia. It must be Jerusalem here because God’s promises have to do with a people for whom Jerusalem is heart and soul. It must be Jerusalem because Jerusalem casts out the Christ, and so is the sign of both the failure of God’s people and of our need to be healed. What else are Jesus’ clashes with the religious authorities but gridlock – a dispute over who has the right to be here and now? What else is the crucifixion but road rage?

It is this history, identifiable by the name “Jerusalem,” which is taken up into God and descends again, cleansed. The new heaven and the new earth and the new city are a wiping away of tears, but not a wiping away of the eyes which cry them. The new Jerusalem is Jerusalem, as she should be – is us as we shall be. John expresses this by analogy with marriage: a bride and a groom, complementary and engaged, two parties necessarily in the same place at the same time in order to be their true selves, but now without competition or conflict.

Yes, there are traffic jams in heaven because our interconnectedness, our needing to be in the same place at the same time in order to be our true selves does not go away. This connectedness is the very point of heaven.

But No, this gridlock is different. In our usual daily traffic jams, the city’s purpose of making possible our being for each other becomes the city’s burden. Interrelatedness turns out to be more than we want to bear, even as it is the very thing we need to flourish. This is the communion of sinners, in which we experience the gift of the other person as a curse.

In the traffic jams in John’s heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, the perceived and experienced burden of our interrelatedness is made into a life-giving thing. This is the truly unbelievable and amazing thing, much more so than the mere proposal of a heaven, or even that there is a God who will bring it to pass. It is not “heaven” as a time or place which is to be believed in but what it is said will happen there. What happens in heaven is what connects that time and place to this one, is what allows heaven “then” an impact now: tomorrow, today.

So how is it in heaven? To be in heaven is to be happy to sit in traffic. The communion of saints which occupies heaven is not the collective of those who are “holy” in the sense of somehow having abstracted themselves from the messiness of the world and the kinds of exchanges a world entails. The communion of saints – promised for then and perceptible occasionally even now – is the community which rejoices that its life is a life together, with all that costs and with all the benefits it brings.

The promise of a new Jerusalem is the promise that the bumper-to-bumper grinding of the communion of sinners will be made a communion of saints: our city, our life, but not as we yet know it. The communion of sinners is a life which considers being caught in traffic to be the sign of death. There, other people are hell. The communion of saints is life “in the thick of it”, made enriching and life-giving by the grace of the God who created us for each other and who makes such a life together possible, even if now only as through a glass, darkly. Here the challenge of the needs of others becomes the promise of unexpected joy: other people not as hell but as the possibility of heaven.

This is the vision upon which we wait and towards which we point in words and deeds. The life of the church is to discern and to become, as much in the slow lanes as in the fast, the possibility of heaven.

This is so that we and the world might see how, in the end, all things will be found in God, and God in all things.

Adapted from a sermon previously preached at MtE, Nov 2015

Related sermons

• 8 May 2022 – Tomorrow, today
• 15 May 2022 – Voting for God

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Easter 7
29/5/2022

Revelation 2:8-11a
Psalm 71
Matthew 11:25-30

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In a sentence:
Christian discipleship is purposed with being “relevant” – relieving – of the burdens which deny peace and justice

It’s something of an occupational hazard that, from time to time, someone feels that a Christian minister should know, “I’m not religious; I think that when you die, that’s the end, and there’s nothing more.” In this way, religion is reduced to an interest in life after death.

This is an understandable reduction, given how the church has often linked upright living with the reward of eternal life. If we quite can’t conceive of the possibility of what is dead being meaningfully alive again at some time in the future, then the rejection of eternal life leads predictably to the rejection of religion. This doesn’t mean rejecting the moral life but does see religion with its trappings to be an over-dressed moralism. It seems clear that we can be “good” without religion, so why bother? This is a sensible line of thought, so far as it goes (although, on close examination, it doesn’t “go” as far as many seem to think). In this way, religion seems to be shown to be quite “irrelevant” to modern, intentionally this‑worldly existence.

The question of “relevance” has become a touchstone for thinking about what makes for good modern religion among those still at least loosely interested in religious things. We assess our doctrines and liturgies, among other things, in terms of their perceived relevance. Yet we’re not often clear what we mean by “relevant”. Generally, it has to do with vague ideas about whether some belief or practice “makes a difference” – a positive difference. However, things become more precise when we look into the source of the word. Something is literally (etymologically) relevant when it relieves. Relevance is relieving. To say of something – including religion – that it is not relevant is to say that it brings no relief, that it does not “lighten” what burdens we think we carry (to “re‑lieve” is to “make light again”, to bring levity, lightness). A thought, a practice, a conviction is properly relevant when it fills a need, answers a question, relieves a burden.

To reject life after death, then, is to say that it brings no relief from whatever we think weighs us down. And by this, we mean that it brings no relief, here and now, except perhaps as a kind of distraction from where we are, a turning away from the reality and meaning of the present. Indeed, the promise of life after death can make things worse before death, if that promise is used to justify pain and difficulty here and so to justify a refusal to do anything to alleviate that suffering. This reading of promised life after death in nineteenth-century Christian society led to Karl Marx’s famous critique of religion:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Religion, that is, works to stupefy the people in the present with promises of being part of a bigger picture in a future which, for most, coincides with their death. In this way, life after death can be weaponised to suppress the possibility of any good in the suffering present. What we have heard from John this morning could certainly be read this way: “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life” (2.10).

With the mention of Marx here, we see the importance of clarity about how life after death might be relevant – how it might relieve us here and now. It won’t do to reduce heaven to personal pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die for those who had little pie during their lives. Having rejected how talk about eternal life was related to life here and now in the Christian society of his time, Marx developed a powerful alternative understanding of where we are now, where heaven is, and the path between the two.

The power of Marx’s alternative is still active in our very midst today. If we want to explain why Russia is in Ukraine, we could point to Marx; if we want to explain why China is in the Solomon Islands or why North Korea keeps plopping missiles into the Sea of Japan, we could point to Marx. It doesn’t matter whether he would be happy with these developments. The point is that these are the real-world consequences of getting wrong the relationship between life now and any life which might yet come. The dominant reading of heaven’s relationship to the world in Marx’s time didn’t work, and his response to that injustice writes the front pages of our newspapers today.

The fact that, in the end, Marx rejected altogether an interest in life after death – and that we are still in the midst of death – indicates that we aren’t guaranteed peace simply by rejecting life after death. The relationship between today and tomorrow – between the life we have now and the life to come – is no mere “religious” issue. What follows today is at the heart of our life together – whether we imagine ourselves religious or secular. Every politics, whether it imagines itself as religious or secular, has a vision of life at the end

None of this is “relevant” yet, in the sense of being itself “relieving”! The point of teasing out how these ideas have worked for us is to show that, wild though its method is, the book of Revelation’s interest in the life to come is much closer to our own social and political concerns than might first seem to be the case.

Revelation was written to people who were suffering, doubtless often much more profoundly than many of us are at the moment. We might look more closely at Revelation’s martyrs in a week or two, but it is important that what is said to those sufferers is not what Marx heard and saw. Opium is for those we are not able or interested in helping but whom we want to keep quiet, resting in peace. Religion, with its promise of a coming relieving heaven, is here a justification of the wrongful present: it’s OK that you suffer, because there’s a heaven to come.

The book of Revelation, however, speaks a word to suffering people which doesn’t dismiss their suffering but names it as right suffering. It was profoundly wrong that they suffered, and they were right to experience it as such. When John writes, “Be faithful unto death”, he marks his readers’ tribulation as true suffering and deeply unjust. There is no justification of pain and loss in Revelation; those who suffer are to be avenged for the injustice of what has happened (another troubling aspect of Revelation for modern sensibilities!). The One who promises this future in Revelation has no interest in the status quo which makes life so hard. It is an offence to God that God’s people suffer, as much as it is an offence to those who suffer. This is to say that Christian visions of heaven aren’t given to distract us from hell on earth but are to mark it as hell – as wrong. The declaration of suffering as wrong from the point of view of heaven’s future is a judgement on the present and, as such, calls for a response. This means that the difference between any hell now and any heaven to come is not merely black against white but is heaven’s pull against hell. Talk of heaven becomes now not simply the expounding of a comforting beatific vision. Talk of heaven is the beginning of a struggle. Talk of heaven is resistance.

Yet this is not the resistance of the revolutionary. While the Marxists knew that a mere promise of heaven was not answer enough to death, they saw death as its own solution. The communist revolutions which flowed from Marx’ reading of history saw death not only as what we suffer but as the means – the method – for ending that suffering. This dynamic, too, contributes to the front pages of our newspapers: the imagination that the death we are experiencing can be alleviated (note: re‑lief and al‑leve…) by more death. This is doubtless part of what causes a young man to take automatic weapons into a schoolyard, for whatever “relief” it seemed such violence might bring at least to him (Uvalde, May 24 2022).

Against this, and despite the violence of the book of Revelation itself, talk of heaven is an act of peace in the midst of war. We say this because Jesus was an act of peace in the midst of unpeace. Acts of peace in the midst of war are not about life after death but life before death: life in the face of death.

This is relief which names unjustice and unpeace, by demonstrating something entirely different. It is not an easy way, but it is the way of Jesus and his disciples: enduring unto death, so that death itself will not endure. Life in the face of death – what could be more “relevant” than that?

”Come to me”, Jesus says, “all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am relevant, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11.28-30 alt!).

Related sermons

·         27 September 2020 – The Resurrection of the living

·         19 April 2020 – A living hope

·         1 April 2018 – Resurrection as forgiveness

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Easter 6
22/5/2022

Revelation 21:10, 22, 22-22:5
Psalm 67
John 14:23-29

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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‘And in the Spirit, he showed me the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God’.

Revelation 21:10

It is a happy coincidence that this text should be before us the day after an election. Our triennial excursion to the ballot box was surely yet again a triumph of hope over experience as we voted not so much for a holy city, but for a better earthly city. In this respect, Christians joined their hopes to those of their secular neighbours.

We did so in these grim advancing years of the third millennium conscious of the present Ukraine horror, not to speak of an alarming future for the planet. But equally, day by day, we increasingly experience what feels like the fraying of a once confident Western culture – politically directionless, morally decadent and intellectually shallow.

As a matter of historical record, equally grim days called forth the text before us today. For it was written at the end of the first century when Domitian was the Roman Emperor. He was successful in erasing the hopes of a sizeable proportion of his empire through persecution, death and destruction. For this reason, this subversive but encouraging text had to be written in code – precisely to prevent a culture hostile to Christian faith from knowing what it means. To which we might add – nothing has changed!

Especially is this the case as we reflect on why it is that this text is given to us in the period between Easter and Pentecost, where we have been confronted by the divine drama that is Good Friday and Easter Day. But most of all, we must not gloss over that profound silence of Easter Saturday marking the end for God’s Son and therefore the end for God. Intellectually, ours too is an Easter Saturday culture. It is unequivocally theological in nature – a culture bereft of divine presence, and indifferent to divine absence.

But be of good cheer – our text everywhere breathes life!

Now our political gaze is directed not to what is, but to the vision in the Spirit of a New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. First, we must remember that Jerusalem is the literal compound of two Hebrew words ‘Jeru/shalom’. It means ‘vision of peace’. In our day, as did Jesus himself, we may well weep over this failed vision: no peace, no vision. But there must be no permanent lament. Deathly cities will not have the last word, will not have conquered, will not be the future. Rather, the Spirit’s gift of transformed life promises nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth coming in the form of a good city – not some sort of divine fog, a formless cloud, but a solid place where the whole creation is recreated.

To this end, this city offers no cancellation of human works, but rather their elevation. Twice we hear that:

 ‘the kings of the earth bring the glory and honour of the nations into it’.

It is indeed good news to hear that despite the three-day Easter drama of the horror inflicted on God, and despite all the horrors that nations inflict on one another, it will be the secular kings and nations who will be destined to know themselves players in this reconstituted Jerusalem. Having been at the Good Friday and Easter Day centre of judgement, and there ultimately destroyed as final authorities in the world, now they are to be dispensers of glory and honour – all that has been, and still is the work of the kings and nations – all the produce of nature, all the various human cultural achievements – music and sculpture, poetry and mathematics, philosophy, politics and economics – all enter into this holy Jerusalem to become ingredient in building up this final perfect work. And they do so, not as in some museum, but as an integration into a living whole, a dynamic re-creation. Because everything here is living, and is not closed or ossified, what human beings wished to be our creation with all its problematic outcomes is now promised to be recreated for all time.

‘Everything’ is here? Not quite. Those rejoicing in the decline in our day of what they call religion might be encouraged to hear explicitly that there is no temple here – no church buildings, no ordained ministers, no Church councils, no Synod property officers. But the tension increases even more. It is not simply that with no temple there is no longer any need of a particular place to express or enclose a sacred presence – it is even that the distinction between sacred and profane itself collapses; here each of our contrived divisions become immediate to the other. And this because the triune God is finally revealed to be immediate to all.

But there is yet more. In the vision the sun too disappears, though light nevertheless remains – a reversal of the images in the Genesis creation story, where we are told that the sun appears on the third day whereas light appears on the first.  But now it is the light of God which replaces the light of the sun – that light which ultimately must pass away because it is not eternal, but rather comes from a created source.

We are, in truth, with this city – this New Jerusalem, this new vision of peace – in another dimension; in an ‘other’ universe, which has another structure which no longer fits human religious categories. Utopian? Surely not! For the gospel tells us that this city has in fact already been accomplished. We read this text in the Easter season because in a crucified human being the perfect union between God and the world has already been achieved. A new creation is already a present perfect reality awaiting the world’s performance.

In the faithful re-enactment of the worship of the Church, not least in the divinely appointed sacramental symbols of water, bread and wine we confirm the protest at the world’s present disunity which refuses to accept the truth of its own healing – a disunity in which the church also shares. For in this liturgical reality, we are given a union of things visible and invisible, a union of body and spirit, of heaven and earth – present faith raised to the vision of the new Creation.

So it is that already just here, in Christian churches destined to disappear, we not only see, but more to the point, by grace already enter the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. In other words, the joy and promise of our text is simply the assurance that endings are in sight for a humanity which surely sooner or later will find that the interminable is much harder to bear than termination.

All that remains for us now therefore is the boldness to confess: to this God, whom the vision of Revelation proposes as the One “who is, who was, and who is to come” – note the sequence of tenses, not who was, who is and who will be, but “who is, who was and who is to come” – to this God be all praise and thanksgiving, now and forever.

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Easter 5
15/5/2022

Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 148
Matthew 6:1-6

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In a sentence:
Regardless of what we believe and hope for, it is all oriented towards God’s promised peaceful kingdom

While flicking through the Australian Electoral Commission’s “official guide” pamphlet to next week’s election, I was struck by a representation of one of those cardboard polling booth set-ups we all know: little enclosed shelters in which we are able to vote without those next to us knowing how we have voted.

In what was perhaps a moment of inspiration, or just as an instance of the odd way brains work – or mine at least! – I thought of Jesus’ teaching on prayer, which we’ve heard today: “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6.6). It seemed to me that those people pictured in the pamphlet’s polling booths could have been monks praying in their cells, which led me to wonder about the relationship between praying and voting.

Doubtless, some pray while voting. This is the attempt to “supercharge” our vote. In a close electoral race like this one, those who pray this way probably include prime ministers, opposition leaders, and candidates in marginal seats.

Whatever might be said about supercharging our vote in this way, I’m more interested today in thinking about voting as praying – voting as a prayer in itself. For what else are both votes and prayers but the expression of a desire for a particular world not yet realised? Prayer springs from recognising our condition between yesterday and tomorrow. Today is received from yesterday in thanksgiving or lament – in prayer – and tomorrow is sought as an extension or overcoming of today – in prayer as petition and intercession. Voting is entirely the same, the electorate standing between yesterday and tomorrow, embracing or rejecting yesterday for some envisaged tomorrow. To vote or to pray is to express our feeling for the best future.

The campaign slogans of the major parties are revealing in this respect. In the blue corner, we have “Strong economy. Stronger future”. In the red corner, we have “A better future”. In the green corner, there is no central slogan but the first assertion you meet on their website is “The time is now to vote for a better future” (May 13). This is just what we will enact later in today’s service: the time is now to pray for a better future.

The book of Revelation, of course, concerns itself with tomorrow. Yet in Revelation on the one hand, and in a modern political context on the other, the relationship between the present and the future is entirely different. Today, we are highly conscious that the future is something laid upon us to create. In the New Testament – and not least in the book of Revelation – the future is a gift.

This is perhaps – unconsciously – one of the deeper reasons we have an aversion to the book of Revelation. While the apocalyptic genre with its fantastic imagery is difficult enough for modern minds to fathom, more offensive is that God is the only real protagonist in all the action of Revelation. If we have a role in what the book portrays, it is as witnesses – either in the role of John the Seer himself or as one in the multitudes gathered around the throne, praying: “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7.10). This is precisely not “Salvation belongs to Scott” or “to Anthony” or the “to the voting public”. The book of Revelation has no place for the political activist which most of us are, except perhaps in the figure of the martyrs around the throne. But their time is also over. Only God truly “acts” in this vision, in the sense of action we understand ourselves to be undertaking in voting or agitating for change.

Or perhaps better: the book of Revelation describes the state of affairs when every vote has been cast. It describes the culmination of all things. Everything has now happened – all monarchy and democracy, all despotism and anarchy. History – all our efforts at creating our own future – has taken place, and is red with blood.

Perhaps this seems hopelessly pessimistic, even if the historical evidence to date is on-side. But pessimism is not the point; the point is seeing more clearly what faithful action looks like. What it looks like is – voting‑as‑praying. We imagine voting to be a technique – something we do to make a political thing happen. We think this way because this is what we thought prayer was: a “religious” technique to make some personal or political thing happen. As we have become more secular as a society, we have simply switched voting in for prayer.

There is no pessimism in the book of Revelation unless we imagine that only our actions matter for our future. We are free to hold to this, but it is not the vision of Revelation. Revelation holds that all votes are finally counted as a vote for the future this God promises.

For, regardless of our political position, what do any of us vote for but John’s vision of

^7.15 […one] seated on the throne [who] will shelter them.
¹⁶ [That they] will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat;
¹⁷ for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

What does even the rabidly radical right-wing atheist want but an end to hunger and thirst and the wiping away of all tears? The only shock for modern political sensibilities in all this is “the Lamb” – who stands for nothing our political thinking can comprehend. The Lamb, of course, is Jesus, and the reference to this Lamb as “slaughtered” (Revelation 5.6,12) is a reference to the crucifixion. Interpreted through the mechanisms of sacrifice, this is enough to make the whole scenario unpalatable to modern minds.

But, to press the election theme further, the New Testament can be read to present the crucifixion as history’s “vote” on Jesus. It is a vote against him, of course, but we must also see that the vote is offered to God as a prayer. In condemning Jesus to death, the people of God pray, “Let such as him not be our future”. The crucifixion reveals that only history is bloody; prayer is too.

And this brings us to a final strange thing we might have missed in today’s reading but which interprets everything we are and do. The great multitude gathered around the divine throne “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (v.14). The crimson bloodiness of history culminates in the blood of the Lamb, which now washes history white. In this vision blood, which stains all things, which cannot be washed out and which always reveals the culprit, Now. Washes. Clean.

The real problem Revelation presents to the modern mind – and to ancient ones – is not the religiosity of its wild imagery and language. It is the proposal that, in the end, all things – all good and evil, all generosity and greed, all love and hatred – are resolved in the triumph of the one who sits on the throne, and of the Lamb.

This is to say that every prayer, every vote, desires the same thing and – by the grace of God – finally finds its desire fulfilled: life in the presence of

^7.15 …the one…seated on the throne [who] will shelter them.
¹⁶ [And they] will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat;
¹⁷ for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

So then, let us vote, let us pray, let us live, for this.

Related sermons

• 15 April 2022 – Holy, Holy, Holy! – Sermon preached by Matt Julius
• 15 December 2019 – Offended at Jesus

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Easter 4
8/5/2022

Revelation 3:14-22
Psalm 23
John 10:22-30

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In a sentence:
Biblical visions of tomorrow are about how we should be living today

(Last week, we “located” the book of Revelation in the category of “story”, seeing it as a story like any other, simply of a particular genre. Today we take the story-character of Revelation a little further).

There is a certain kind of person who, before reading the first page, likes to jump to the end of a book to see how the whole thing will end. About such people we will make no judgements today!

Concerning our personal stories, of course, and the story of the human being as a whole, the end is not as easily accessible. Nevertheless, now and again the question is put to us or a protagonist in a story we’re reading: if you could know the day of your death, would you want to know it? Take a moment to hear that question, and answer it.

Some will say Yes, some No. We might say No because we fear death, and to know that we will die, say, on the 8^th of May next year, will cast a shadow over every day between now and then, such that we die 365 times, rather than just the once. Here ignorance is bliss because knowledge would be torture.

Or perhaps implicit in the No is my being satisfied that I’m living the best life I can, and there’s nothing I would change if I did know the end. Knowledge of my death might be an inconvenient distraction from simply getting on with life.

Or maybe we’d risk knowing when we will die, hoping that it’s a long way off. If it is still distance, I can cut loose for a while and tidy things up closer to the date. The self-indulgent bucket list can be emptied, with time for righteousness later. Or, if the time is shorter than I thought, I could re-prioritise, go on the trip I’ve always put off, finally get around to writing a will, pray for forgiveness or call my mother.

There are doubtless many variations on these responses and rationales, but the point is that the silly question seriously tempts us to consider our present in terms of our future. If I knew that that is what is going to happen, then I might not do this, now. Knowing tomorrow changes today.

Of course, we already know this, although only in retrospect. If we had known 8 years ago that we were going to sell this property, we wouldn’t have spent all that time and money on trying not to sell the property. The link between now and our future becomes clearer when we look backwards from our present to our past.

This present-future dynamic is at the heart of Christian confession, not least in the book of Revelation. In the passages we heard the last couple of weeks, it was declared, “Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail” (Rev 1.7). That is, “all the tribes of the earth cried out”, “If only we had known, we wouldn’t have crucified him”.

Knowledge of the future is the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection. In apocalyptic thinking, resurrection is not primarily the resuscitation of a dead person but an appearance of the end – a sign of the present times. The risen Jesus is the declaration, “This is how it ends”. At least in the Palestinian context of the New Testament, the problem the resurrection presents is not merely that dead people don’t usually stop being dead, but that if one did, we would have evidence of tomorrow, today. And, if the one who was raised had just been crucified by people who imagine themselves to be godly, then the news about tomorrow is simply devasting. “If we knew that, we would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2.6-8).

If there are those in the book of Revelation who wail because they hadn’t seen what was coming – because they didn’t see the truth of the story Jesus lived – there are also those who did see it. These are the “martyrs”. The important thing about these for the moment is not that they might have been killed because of what they saw and believed, but that the word martyr itself simply means “witness”. These ones saw the future and testified to it, and judged the present in its light. Their martyrdom – being killed for this testimony – was they themselves being judged and condemned because of that vision of the future.

Yet, none of this is merely how ancient people thought. In the middle of an election campaign, we know that the scariest candidates are those whose vision of the future is least like our present. Incumbent governments have to trade on what they have already done. They argue that tomorrow will be like today because today is the fruit of all the good work the Government has done and will continue to do, in the same vein. The gospel – the good news – of the Government is that the kingdom has come.

In contrast, those candidates who preach a revolutionary vision of tomorrow – perhaps socialist, or environmentally radical, or “freedom, freedom, freedom” in the mode of right-wing reactionaries – these are the scarier electoral options. They are to the electorate like the book of Revelation is to Paul’s pastoral epistles: storms threatening the calm. These are the voices of martyrs – in the literal sense of “witnesses” – to different futures, wildly varying though those futures may be.

The real work of balancing the present and the future is that which Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition must perform. As the most likely alternative Government, the principal Opposition party has to appear conservative and radical at the same time. Perhaps it does not go too far to say that a failure to do this is why Mr Shorten is not Prime Minister. The Opposition has to argue that the kingdom has not yet come but is almost there – it needs just one more push.

Against the Government and the Opposition, the seemingly radical parties propose a secret hidden in today which will undermine the tomorrow we expect. This secret is the “true” tomorrow which doesn’t arise naturally out of today but comes to meet it unnaturally out of a future only partially glimpsed.

There is, then, a lot in common between the political platforms of the radicals and the book of Revelation. The question is simply, which vision of the future is the true mystery of today – the secret, the hidden thing, by which today is lived appropriately. Revelation offers a vision of tomorrow for a revision of today. We re‑vise – literally, re-see – today, as in a new light. Tomorrow has the crucified Jesus at the heart of all things, with the pressing question now being: if that is the case, how should we be living now?

There will be more to say of this in the weeks to come; it is enough for now to understand the dynamic. The fantastic imagery of Revelation is only the form of the substantial question, What is your personal and political tomorrow? In the case that you are unsure, it is revealed in how you live today.

You may have noticed that I haven’t come yet to the particular reading from Revelation we heard this morning! This is because all I want to do with that passage is de-sentimentalise one traditional reception of it in view of the dynamic of tomorrow and today we have been describing. “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock”, Jesus says in the that passage, “if any hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to them, and will sup with them, and they with me” (AV, alt). This is not about opening the door of your heart and letting Jesus in. The wider Revelation context of this image requires that the door-opening not be about enclosing Jesus in our hearts but about becoming enclosed within his own heart.

Jesus is not cast as our present possession but our calling into the future. Our testimony is not merely what Jesus might do for us, but what will be done, and the difference this will make for us now, “on earth and it is in heaven”.

If tomorrow is the God-given resolution of all injustice, then today is to be coloured not by violent revolution but patient action, in which tomorrow might be glimpsed.

If tomorrow is the day of judgement of all guilt, today is to be a time of turning towards righteousness.

If tomorrow is reconciliation and forgiveness, so also is today to be.

Become then today then, what God promises:

become peace,
become reconciliation,
become justice,
become love.

The book of Revelation is a vision of the future given to change today.

In light of that future, let us become that change: tomorrow’s resurrection life in a world yet shrouded in death.

——

Related sermons

27 March 2022 – On being a child of God

10 October 2021 – Against dreams and visions

19 April 2020 – A living hope

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Easter 3
1/5/2022

Revelation 1:1-8
Psalm 30
John 21:1-14

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In a sentence:
As strange as the genre is, an apocalypse tells a human story: our story within the story of God

With the book of Revelation, we come to what looks to be the end of the story. We will probably think many things about “the end” over the next couple of months, but seeing the book of Revelation as the end prompts another question: where does this story start?

This is less straightforward than it might first seem. The obvious place to start anything is at the beginning, but this is difficult because nothing in time has “a” beginning which doesn’t have a “pre-beginning” before it. Where does the story of the current war in Ukraine begin? Few imagine that began two months ago with the first incursion. Perhaps it began with the end of the Soviet Union in 1991? Or in 1917 with the Russian revolution? Or with the writings of Karl Marx in the middle of the 19^th century? In telling a story – a history – we have to choose a point at which to begin. We select some defining circumstance, and the story unfolds from there.

But there is another starting point of a story which is much less obvious. This is the perceived need for the story in the first place – beginning as purpose. The writer wants to tell a story. Even if this is merely to be paid and to eat, she will eat better if the story is a good one. Opinions about what makes a story good differ, but those which sell are stories which themselves justify being written and read; these are the stories which engage us.

Stories engage us by answering a question or – what is probably the same thing – by questioning answers we already have. All good stories have this in common, even though differences in genre make it less than obvious. The relationship between a Mills and Boon romance, a grisly murder-mystery TV series and a Marvel Cinematic Universe action blockbuster might seem tenuous, but they all treat the same basic thing. While the romance or the criminality or the spaceships mark them off from each other, each is deeply concerned with the actions and interactions of people like us in those very different contexts. Stories are always about us. And so Disney’s Toy Story movies are not about toys but about people who happen to look like toys but nevertheless do all things which people do. The children in the Narnia books do not interact with talking beavers and lions but with people who look like beavers and lions. A six-year-old knows that when Peppa Pig gets into trouble for being mean to Suzie Sheep, this is not farmyard ethics but schoolyard ethics. It means that she herself – the six-year-old – shouldn’t be mean to the other kids at school. The genre gives colour to the story but doesn’t change its essential purpose. Whether it is a dark indie dystopic tragedy or a mainstream children’s animated comedy, the story is told to tell us something about ourselves.

What we receive in the hearing or reading of stories, however, is no mere information about ourselves. Certainly, we learn what kind of world it is in which we live and what kinds of creatures inhabit it. But, more importantly, we learn how to navigate that space. We are given instruction and warning: this is how it should be done, or not how it should be done. We learn what we are, what we do and what we can expect. Stories locate us in the world – they tell us the nature of the time in which we live.

The point of recognising here the human purpose of stories is to “locate” the book of Revelation. Its genre is 1^st century Christianised Jewish apocalyptic. Instead of the safe combination locks of the great heist, it has scrolls and seals; instead of the superhero it has the archangel Michael; instead of the belligerent geopolitical superpower, it has a seven-headed, ten-horned dragon. Yet that’s just how you write a story in that genre. For all that is strange about it, this too is simply a story revealing something about human being.

If there is anything which distinguishes the book of Revelation (as a story) from other stories, it is only that it is explicit about its purpose. Most stories don’t tell us what they do as stories. This is implicit, but it’s also possible that the writer and the reader might not even be aware of it in the writing and the reading.

An apocalypse – as a kind of storytelling – is literally an unveiling or a revealing. It tells you what it does – with all stories – and what we are exposed to in hearing stories. This – declares an apocalypse – is what it means to tell or hear a story. And so the opening verses of Revelation declare that it will uncover what you are by uncovering what God is, in the uncovering of Jesus as the Christ. Revelation intends to tell us who we are, what we do and what we can expect.

But again, this uncovering doesn’t merely give us information, although the text of Revelation is often treated this way. Like those maps we find at a zoo or in a shopping centre, the story lays out the terrain and locates us with a glaring yellow arrow: “You are here”, the “here” being now not a location but a condition: you are like this, and you will likely do that, and this is what will happen to you.

The question then is not, Does the way Revelation locates us “make sense”? It makes as much sense as any other location a story might propose for us, whether it’s the bowels of a starship where we work out our daddy issues with a lightsabre or a garden party hosted by the Queen of Hearts.

The question to ask about Revelation is, Is this true – in the way that stories try to be true? Because stories – as accounts of how we are and act – have to do with the truth about us. And, while they propose to locate us, they can get it wrong. There is a story which says that if they are weak and we are strong, we can take what is theirs. There is a story which says that when the going gets tough, stay in bed. There is a story which says he cannot change. There is a story which says “The only way you can preserve peace is to prepare for war.” These are not good stories, at least from the point of view of Revelation.

The test of the value of a story – including the story Revelation tells – is whether it tells the truth about us, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health. Does it speak truly what we are, what we do and what we can expect? This requires honesty and careful reflection, which are not virtues to cultivate.

The apocalypse – the revelation – of Jesus Christ has at its centre the throne of God, around which the action of history flows and from which comes judgement of all that happens. The story places us in the midst of all this with a big cross and a declaration: You are here. This is the truth the book invites us to consider: Does this “You are here” – that cross on the map which is the very cross of Jesus himself – locate us truly?

We will have more to say about this in the weeks to come, but today it is enough to ask, What is the story which speaks the truth about us? Perhaps, “Life’s a bitch, and then you die”. Perhaps, “We can construct heaven, but the bricks will have to be made with bones and the mortar with blood.” Perhaps, “Fingers crossed…”

Or perhaps the story which matters is the proposal of the Apocalypse: “Behold, I am coming soon” (Rev 22.7). Blessed are those who read, and hear, and keep this story, writes John the Seer at the beginning of his apocalypse of the world in God (1.3), for this tells you where you will finally be found.

Regardless of where you find yourself now, you will find yourself with God, your story within the story.

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Related sermons

6 February 2022 – On being a true lie

16 August 2015 – Our true story

27 June 2021 – The full story

View or print as a PDF

Easter 2
24/4/2022

Revelation 1:1-11
Psalm 148
John 20:1-18

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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If the curiosities of calendars interest you, the latest date on which Easter ever falls would be tomorrow. This year we have coincided with Ramadan and with Passover. It’s interesting that we now notice such things. But the two families of the Christian Church do not mark Easter on the same date, for reasons I won’t give now; though this year we couldn’t be closer – a mere week apart. Today is Orthodox Easter. In my ecumenical days, I often attended both Easters in the various cultures and languages. So, we join our Orthodox neighbours in the cry Christ is risen!

The descriptions of worship in the Book of Revelation often remind me of Orthodox worship. At the front of every Orthodox church there is the iconostasis, the icon-stand, a wall of portraits; the worshippers are standing on the floor of heaven, surrounded by the saints. There are vestments, candles, incense, and exquisite choral music – but no organ or other instruments. There are cultural reasons behind Orthodox liturgy, including living for centuries under repressive regimes (like the Ottoman and the Soviet) and it is true that Orthodoxy never had a Reformation.

Revelation chapter 4 paints us the picture:

‘… at once I was in the spirit, and there in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on it!… around the throne are twenty-four thrones and seated on them are twenty-four elders, dressed in white robes, with golden crowns on their heads… and in front of the throne burn seven flaming torches which are the seven spirits of God’ …

In our own plain building, which has its own beauty, we may not have the furnishings of heaven (and we don’t!), but we do take care that our liturgy is ordered and theologically true to our Church’s doctrine; we take care in our preaching and in our prayers; we use space and colour and movement, and we even use ikons – in our own way. I’m sure that one reason for our weekly pattern of word and sacrament is that we add an action and symbols to the words. I’m glad we do: it is faithful worship. But I do wonder why no-one else in the Uniting Church wants to follow us?

It seems that John ‘the Divine’ (in the sense of a theologian) knew all these churches, all within 30 to 80 km inland from the island of Patmos. Many are close enough to be visible to each other across the plain of western Turkey. He names seven of them for whom he has a particular concern: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamon, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and the notorious Laodicea. They must have had tiny congregations and no buildings, and John’s about to do a thorough presbytery review of them, but he sees them through the prism of the glory of God and the Orthodox created a tradition in that light. It is truly iconic.

This is what the Risen Christ said to them in John’s vision:

‘Grace to you and peace from Him who is and was and who is to come… and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the rule of the kings of the earth.’

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God.

His vision is of the Christ in majesty, to whom he gives several titles. The first is ‘the faithful witness’ – that is, the witness which Jesus faithfully gave to the nature of God, of God’s love and grace, ‘for no-one knows the Father but the Son’ – and the whole of the Gospel of John is built around that.

Then ‘The firstborn from the dead’, by whom we have been ‘freed from our sins by his blood’ and who has opened the gate of heaven to all. This is expressed in the ikon on today’s service order. The Risen Christ grasps Adam and Eve by the hand, and with them all humankind, and rescues them from the realm of death, into the kingdom of the Father.

The Greek word for him is the ‘Pantocrator’, the All-powerful; but Easter has taught us again, that God’s power is not as other users of power are: it is ‘crucified power’.

Those of us mourning the death of our friend Wong Tik Wah, Methodist Bishop in Malaysia, five days ago, rejoice in this hope of belonging to the ‘first born’.

I leave President Putin, Russian Orthodox Christian by his own claim, to ponder what it means that Christ Jesus is already ‘the ruler of all the kings of the earth’ (1:5) as we pray that God’s kingdom will come in its fullness. And the ‘mighty will be brought down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up’ (Lk 2:52).

Finally, is the calling to the church – the people of God – ‘to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father’ (1:6). Here is the origin of that most characteristic of Protestant claims, that we, the baptized, are a ‘priesthood of all believers’. John of Patmos did not know how explosive this biblical word would become in Christian history in the west! We have often arrogantly have used this as a weapon against churches with a different practice of priesthood.

It is hard for them as for us to take an old word and give it a new, or recover an old, meaning. All agree there is one priest in the Christian tradition and only one: Jesus Christ himself, the anointed one. Any other people with the title do so because all the baptized are priests. We all have ministries. That does not mean there are not formative tasks to be done in the church which might be characterized by the word ’priest’ and by ordination.

A priest, biblically speaking, is a servant of God, who has responsibility for the true worship of God. It is not his own worship which is of importance, but that of the whole people with whom he stands. John of Patmos is precisely saying that our worship is shaped by the God we worship, and how we live our lives, and how we love our neighbour. There are gifts required for this task, which the Spirit gives for every part of the church’s life. In the church, Edward Schweizer said, ‘there is no superiority or inferiority, but only joy in one another’s gifts.’ Some are called by the church to the building up of the body and the equipping of the saints (Ephes. 4:11).

The second element is of equal importance. The kind of God we worship also determines our mission or rather, God’s mission. It too is a ‘crucified’ mission, not, as the Japanese theologian, Kosuke Koyama point out, a crusading one. It is self-sacrificial. It is service. In the mission of this God, every act of compassion and generosity, every act of justice, will express the love of God on the ground, as it were, giving God the glory.

‘Grace to you and peace from Him who is and was and who is to come… and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the rule of the kings of the earth.’

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God.

May our worship and our lives always reflect his.

To Whom be glory in the church for ever. Amen.