Revelation 1:9-10   

 

Sometimes we are tired when we come to church; more than tired, exhausted. I have lived in suburbia now for 24 years, and I have come to recognize fatigue as the most evident characteristic of suburban existence. Occasionally I ride the GO train into Toronto. On the morning trip into the city commuters appear bright-eyed and perky, enthusiastic and eager. They bounce onto the train, greet the people they see every morning, and plunge into their newspaper or paperback thriller. On the evening trip back to suburbia they are dazed and glazed; many sprawl over the seats, arms and legs akimbo. They seem stunned. Next day they will have to do it all over. The spouse they may have left behind in suburbia tears around from supermarket to arena to dental office to piano teacher in between flurries of volunteer work. When Sunday arrives those who are able to get out of bed are still fatigued when the hour of worship strikes.

Sometimes we are bored when we come to church. Can people be over-busy and bored at the same time? Of course we can. In fact on Sunday we may be bored on account of our over-busyness; we may also be bored at the prospect of worship. After all, when the grizzled, balding preacher announces the text worshippers who have listened to him over and over know how the sermon is going to unfold.

Sometimes we are distracted when we come to church. Hundreds of important matters clamour for our attention. Worship is important too; still, its demand seems less imperious than last week’s phone call from the bank manager about the change in mortgage rates.

Sometimes we are in pain when we come to worship. Relatively few of us arrive here in significant physical pain. But oh, the mental anguish! The emotional torment! We bring it here. We can’t help bringing it here. I know we do because I know what anguish I have brought here on Sunday morning from time-to-time.

John, the visionary writer of the book of Revelation, shared the human condition too. Therefore he brought to worship everything we bring, everything from fatigue to anguish. Yet he was saddled with an additional complication, an enormous complication, a complication which (so far) has been much slighter for you and me: tribulation. Tribulation is a biblical word which means one thing: affliction visited on believers just because they are believers, suffering visited on disciples just because they are disciples. Tribulation is not the pain we suffer inasmuch as our knees become arthritic and our middle-aged organs malfunction. Tribulation is pain inflicted on us just because we have vested our faith in Jesus Christ and are determined to keep company with him. Keeping company with him, we find that the hostility the world heaps upon him now spills over onto us. And yet in the very breath with which he speaks of tribulation John speaks of so much more. “I, John, your brother who shares with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance.” Yes, our loyalty to our Lord does plunge us into tribulation; and the very same loyalty keeps us glad citizens of the kingdom, glad subjects of the rule or reign of Christ, even as our immersion in the rule or reign of Christ equips us with patient endurance.

Let’s think awhile of John’s tribulation. He was a Christian living in the Roman empire. “Roman empire”: the expression calls to mind the emperors themselves. Nero, Caligula, Vespasian, Domitian: these men are infamous for their cruelty. One was as bad as another. Nero, for instance, Nero had known what to do with Christians. He blamed them for the fire which devastated large residential sections of Rome in the year 65. The effect of this was to turn hordes of homeless people against Christians. Then he entertained himself by soaking Christians in tar and setting them on fire. Others he covered in animal skins and turned lions loose on them. Those who were left he crucified.

Now I don’t expect any of this to happen to me, as you don’t expect it to happen to you. In other words, we don’t expect tribulation to become terrible. Nevertheless, to say that our tribulation isn’t like John’s is not to say that our tribulation is never going to intensify. I think it will. Take the matter of multicultural”ism.” Is multiculturalism possible? Of course it is, as long as we are talking superficially about culture only: Chinese food, Slavic dances, Japanese lanterns. But of course the culture of any society arises from the values of that society. Multiculturalism therefore presupposes “multivaluism”. (We come closer to admitting this when we speak not of multiculturalism but of pluralism. But for now let’s stick with my neologism, multivaluism.) Is multivaluism possible within one society? This is a huge question. When one group says men and women are to be esteemed equally and another group insists that women are inherently inferior there is an incompatibility which cannot be compromised away. If some people maintain that employment insurance is protection against disaster and others maintain that it is an alternative to employment we are in the same predicament. Social cohesion presupposes a shared value system; social cohesion presupposes a recognition of and ownership of the common good. When the common good cannot be agreed upon then pluralism is a polite cover-up of the first stages of social disintegration. I have long thought that public education is possible only as long as there is implicit public agreement as to the educational good. But is there? Is the ultimate goal and good of public education to educate, or is it to have students feel good about themselves? How good will someone feel about himself if, upon becoming an adult, he cannot read?

Please don’t think that I am faulting immigrants to our country and am subtly suggesting that immigration be curtailed. Immigrants are not to blame for the increasing, and increasingly evident, ungluing of the society. Often immigrants merely expose what is in the heart of us who have lived here all our lives. My vice-principal friend with the Scarborough Board of Education suspended an elementary school student for telling a supply teacher that he, the student, didn’t have to listen to or learn from any “Paki” like her. Instant suspension, insisted my friend, as he told the student’s

parents that vicious racism would not be tolerated in his school for a minute, betokening as it did a society whose members would soon be at each other’s throats. Two days later my friend was at a track meet. A board of education superintendent approached him and said, “I hope you know more about relay races than you know about public relations; the student’s parents have phoned the board offices eight times.” The value system of that superintendent and the value system of my friend are simply incompatible. No Christian could entertain for a minute the suggestion that racism is to be tolerated and a student allowed to insult a teacher just because the student’s parents make half-a-dozen phone calls.

Christians are much less quick to protest victimization at the hands of advertisers than are, for instance, Jews and Muslims. Not long ago I came upon an advertisement by Insecolo, a firm which manufactures pesticides. The advertisement is labelled “The Last Supper”. It depicts twelve insects (household pests) seated at the Last Supper: fleas, earwigs, silverfish, caterpillars. Seated in the middle of the Last Supper is a large cockroach. Jesus Christ the great cockroach. The caption accompanying the picture tells homemakers that the food at the Last Supper should be supplemented by Insecolo. Christ the cockroach is host at that supper where all pests are soon to be annihilated (including Christ the cockroach, of course). Insecolo’s vice-president of marketing insisted that the company had no intention of withdrawing the advertising. From a Christian perspective the advertisement is blasphemous, not to mention in appalling taste.

If a similar advertisement spoofed sacrilegiously what is dear to Jewish people or Islamic people can you imagine the outcry? Suppose the annihilation of household pests were compared, in an advertisement, to the holocaust. “Annihilate beetles and bugs as thoroughly as Hitler annihilated Jews: nothing left at all!” Do you think for one minute that the vice-president of marketing would cavalierly announce that Insecolo has no intention of withdrawing the ad? Tell me: do you think there is public recognition of and public ownership of the public good? If there isn’t, then social disintegration is underway.

Of course we must uphold environmental concerns; of course we cannot continue to violate land and water and air. Still, environmental concerns pushed to ever greater extremes become out-and-out idolatrous, even lethal. Let us not forget that whenever nature was regarded as divine in cultures before ours human sacrifice was demanded. In biblical times the worshippers of Ashtaroth and Baal sacrificed human beings; so did the Aztecs in Mexico centuries later; so did the Nazis in Europe only recently. A book on ecology published in 1984 (published by Random House, a very reputable American publisher) insisted that culling human beings is a moral obligation given our commitment to the earth. Another book published in 1989 (State University of New York Press) insisted that culling human beings is “not only morally permissible, but, from the point of the view of the land ethic, morally required.” Human beings, it is argued, are simply members of the biotic community and are to be controlled the way the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests controls the moose population.

Within my lifetime I do not expect to face tribulation of the sort that John knew. Nonetheless, within my lifetime tribulation will increase for Christians as we declare where we stand and why, what we cannot accept and why, what we insist on and why (even though we aren’t going to get it), and how it is that the mind of Christ and the mindsets of assorted interest groups are not compatible. (By then it will be apparent that not even the mindsets of the assorted interest groups are compatible with each other.) When Christians hold up what is non-negotiable for us we shall appear first odd, then stubborn, then fractious, then disruptive, then indictable. Let us never forget that early-day Christians were accused of atheism and punished for it just because they refused to recognize and honour the pagan deities of the Roman empire.

And yet in the same sentence where John reminds his readers that he and we share the tribulation he declares that we share also the kingdom and the patient endurance. The use of the definite article is most instructive. He doesn’t say we share tribulation (which could be construed by unwary readers as suffering-in-general); we share the tribulation, tribulation unique to God’s people. We don’t share patient endurance-in-general; we share the patient endurance, that steadfastness peculiar to disciples. We can share the patient endurance, says John, just because we share the kingdom. The kingdom is the rule of Christ. Let us make no mistake. Jesus Christ – risen, ascended, glorified — is the sovereign ruler of the entire cosmos. We who have grown up in Christendom enveloped by the British Commonwealth have unconsciously assumed that Christendom enveloped by the British Commonwealth is the rule of Christ. Unconsciously we have confused the rule of Christ with the legacy of Queen Victoria. Unconsciously we have confused the rule of Christ with favours dispensed by Canada Customs and Revenue Agency and the municipalities. What would be the effect on the pattern of church-life and denominational expostulations if church-properties were taxed and income tax receipts were not issued for church-offerings? The effect would be immense, virtually a revolution with respect to properties and clergy salaries. What would be the effect on the rule of Christ? Nothing! To say that Jesus Christ — risen, ascended, glorified — rules is to say that he is the sole sovereign of the cosmos, which is to say that nothing can affect his kingdom or kingship. Because nothing can affect the sovereignty of Christ Christ’s people may — and shall — exhibit the patient endurance in the midst of the tribulation.

The older I grow the more important I recognize grammar to be. When John speaks of sharing tribulation, kingdom and steadfastness with us he doesn’t speak of the these in a principal clause: I, John, share with you. Instead he speaks of them in a subordinate clause: I, John, who happen to share with you. Then he proceeds to what he wants to say principally. He places tribulation, kingdom and steadfastness in a subordinate clause because all this scarcely needs to be mentioned, he feels. “Needless to say” is how we should speak of it, “it goes without saying”, “of course everyone will agree”. Then what is the principal point which John makes from his place of exile? “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day”. This is the principal point he wants to make with us. The fact that he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day was the occasion of his inspiration, the occasion of the firing of those vivid visions which became his inspired and inspiring book. “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day”. It was Sunday, the day of worship. Yes, John may have initially found himself tired or bored, distracted or in pain when he came to worship. Yet at some point he found himself “in the Spirit”.

“In the Spirit”: what does it mean? It means that regardless of what he brought to worship he found something vastly greater there. It means that God himself overwhelmed him when all he was expecting was a repetition of last Sunday. It means the same visitation from God (the Spirit) which drove huddled disciples out of a fear-ridden room into the world; it means the same visitation which turned mere words about an executed Jew into the gospel, the vehicle of the Son of God’s self-bestowal; the same visitation from God which moved a highschool teacher in Yugoslavia (Mother Teresa) to India, and an unknown priest in Belgium (Father Damien) to the leprosy-ridden Hawaiian island of Molokai; the same visitation which impelled Lydia (a woman) to accord hospitality to two men (Paul and Silas) in an era when a man didn’t even speak to his wife in public lest he appear scandalous; the same visitation which brought Zacchaeus out of a tree and thawed his frozen heart; the same visitation which has brought parishioners to my door when I was in need and thought nobody else knew; the same visitation which has electrified you on occasion as it has electrified me.

Many people have told me that they arrive at worship in any mood at all: fatigue, boredom, anxiety, resentment, anger, hope, hopelessness. And then in the course of the service, whether through hymn, prayer, scripture, anthem, sermon or children’s story; in the course of the service it happens for them. One man, unquestionably a victim of extraordinary bad luck, told me he has arrived at worship again and again with a chip on his shoulder, and by the end of the service the chip is gone.

“I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day”. John doesn’t say he put himself in the Spirit. He didn’t work up a psycho-religious boil-over and call it “God”. Rather he was in the Spirit in that thatunforeseen visitation which had startled and encouraged Abraham and Sarah, Elizabeth and Zechariah, which had gently nudged Elijah and mightily prostrated Isaiah; this unforeseen, unforeseeable visitation had visited him too.

John was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. For him it meant a vision of his Lord. “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me (the right hand is always the hand of mercy) saying, ‘Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.'” In that instant John was oriented afresh to the truth and encouraged afresh in the midst of tribulation. Every bit as much will be given to us at worship, won’t it? Never mind that so much of worship is repetitive; it has to be repetitive just because we repeatedly need to be oriented to the truth and encouraged in the midst of tribulation. The  John received — “Fear not, I am the first and the last… I died, and behold I am alive for evermore…” — there was nothing new in this. John was exiled to the island of Patmos in the first place inasmuch as he already knew and had publicly stood up for the one who had died and was now alive for evermore. There was nothing new in John’s vision at all. But none of us needs novelty; all of us need reinvigoration in what we know already. We need revivification of what is now several years old in us, even decades old. As mature a Christian as John was, he was not yet beyond needing renewal himself.

And neither are we. As our society changes (make no mistake: it is changing); as it moves away from the Christendom we have found as comfortable as an old shoe; as social cohesion unravels and strident voices, contradictory voices, are heard increasingly; as it becomes evident that there is nowhere near the public agreement concerning the public good that there once was; as all of this unfolds tribulation will increase somewhat. Then we shall need fresh assurance as to the kingdom, the rule of Christ; and only then shall we be equipped with the patient endurance.

And how are we to gain fresh assurance of it all? By coming to worship, regardless of what mood we bring to worship. For if we are found here Sunday by Sunday, even if tired or bored or distracted or pained, then from time-to-time, in God’s own time, we shall also be found “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day”. And this will be enough.

Victor Shepherd       September 2002

 

Revelation 5:5         

 Rev. 21:4    Job 16:16    Psalm 30:5    Luke 19:41

 

 What moves you?  What really moves you?  I’m always amazed at how moved people can be over something that strikes me as fluff, like the latest episode in the never-ending soap opera.  Then again, I married into the Irish.  I’ve never been able to understand why one stanza of “O, take me home again, Kathleen” reduces Irish folk to tears.

   Blubbering, we know, is contagious.  So is laughter.  Comedians know how difficult it is to make people laugh the first time.  It’s less difficult the second, easier still the third.  The comedian trots out his best joke to start the programme.  Once he has people laughing they will laugh at anything. It’s the same with weeping.  Hard-shell people don’t weep easily.  But once they get started….  Before long everyone is weeping. When the TV stations broadcast pictures of people starving in Darfur (especially wasted children) I’ve heard viewers say, “It’s not right; it’s crass sensationalism.  It’s emotional manipulation. Besides, it exploits hungry people.”  But the same critics will weep when the winner of the beauty contest is announced or the athlete’s blunder costs his team the championship.  Apparently it’s all right to weep at something trivial but not all right to weep at something tragic. Then what moves you and me to tears?  Is it something of minimal human significance?  Or is it something profound?  Today we are going to speak only of the latter.  We shall speak only of the tears that matter.   I: —  First of all, there’s a weeping we cannot help.  Again and again in the gospels Jesus comes upon broken-hearted people.  They have lost someone dear to them, most commonly a child.  They pour out their anguish, unchecked, before everyone present.  No one faults them for it.  They aren’t told to “buck up and be brave.”  Their grief is allowed unrestrained expression.  (Let me say parenthetically that there’s nothing worse than the loss of a child.  I have conducted approximately 500 funerals.  Yet I can never become accustomed to the funeral of a child, even of an infant, even of the baby born prematurely and weighing three pounds.  We should remember too that when a child dies, the parents will separate 70% of the time.  In other words, few marriages can withstand the shock and distress of the death of a child.) In our society, on the other hand, we think there’s something virtuous about grieving stoically.  At the funeral parlour we say about the recent widow, “She’s holding up so well.”  “Holding up” is an expression we should reserve for five years later.  Tell me: did Jesus “hold up” upon hearing of the death of Lazarus?  I recall reading that Jesus wept.  There’s nothing virtuous, and everything unhealthy, about stifling grief.  Grief that’s suppressed now is going to appear later in much more troublesome guise.  More to the point, to expect the bereaved to appear stoical is to burden them with unrealistic expectations that can only leave them feeling guilty because they are psychologically weak (supposedly.)  And if they are believers, it’s to leave them feeling they are spiritual failures as well. If we are sensitive at all to the terrible unfairness of life; if we are moved at all by the pain some people must endure in themselves or witness in others, then we know there are tears that can’t be helped. Several years ago I wrote a magazine article, “God’s Grace Also in the Mentally Ill.”  One week after she read the article a woman in Regina sent me a letter.  At age three this woman fell ill with polio.  From that day to this she has had steel braces on both legs, and she hobbles with crutches.  Her brother, one year older than she, knew that she needed help and he always provided help. When she was six and he seven, he put her in his wagon and pulled her miles through Winnipeg to Assiniboine Park Zoo so that she too could see the animals and the beautiful park.  And then he pulled her miles back again, an all-day mission.  When he was nine he was given his first two-wheeler.  With much difficulty he manoeuvred his handicapped sister up onto the handlebars of his bike, her steel-clad limbs sticking straight out.  His playmates teased him, “We’d never give our sister a ride on our bike.”  “One day your sisters will ride their own bicycles,” the nine year old shot back, “but mine never will.”  They never teased him again, the woman told me.  Throughout her high school days her brother carried her up and down two flights of stairs, day-in and day-out.  He couldn’t have been more thoughtful. Then when he was 21 he was diagnosed schizophrenic.  He’s been deranged ever since.  He lives in a group home.  His sister has him out every week-end and takes him for a drive in her hand controlled car.  As they were driving around Winnipeg one day he saw the crowds of downtown workers and shoppers, and he cried out, “Who cares?”  Then he turned to his sister and said, “You care.”  They spend Christmas Day together as well, since she has never married and, she told me in her letter, no one is ever going to invite the two of them to Christmas dinner. As I read this woman’s letter I thought of her brother’s torment: locked up in his derangement for 35 years.  I thought of her anguish: not only her disability, not only the burden of her brother, but also the terrible unfairness of it all.  And then I thought of her parents: two children, one wounded through polio, the other wounded through psychosis.  As I read the letter the woman sent me I cried like a child.  And every time I re-read the letter for the next several days I wept again. There is a weeping we can’t help.  It isn’t a sign of human weakness. Neither is it a sign of spiritual deficiency.  It’s a sign that our hearts haven’t shrivelled in the face of life’s torment.   II: — There are also tears of a different sort, tears we ought to shed.  While we ought to shed them, most people don’t.  We ought to weep when we perceive a world riddled with evil and warped by sin; and we ought to weep above all in the face of a church, the herald of God’s kingdom, that has compromised itself pitiably. Erasmus (who came to be known as “the flitting Dutchman”) was the most brilliant figure in the era of the Protestant Reformation.  All of the Reformers were intellectual giants: Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, Zwingli, Bullinger, Calvin, Cranmer.  Yet Erasmus was special, his brilliance rivalled only by that of Melanchthon.  But Erasmus was a dilettante and a fence-sitter.  He saw the dreadful abuses in the church as well as the dilution of the gospel.  He saw what would have to be done.  He knew what price would have to be paid to get it done – and he decided not to pay it.  He sat on the fence.  To be sure, he wrote clever, sharply-worded satires that ridiculed abuses in the church (as if any of this could ever be funny.)  Others noted that when Erasmus saw the wretched state of the church he laughed and called for another glass of Flemish wine.  Luther, on the other hand; Luther, we are told, went home and cried all night. Jesus wept over Jerusalem , the city.  Jerusalem : Hier Shalem, “city of shalom,” city of salvation.  City of salvation?  It slays the prophets and crucifies the Messiah.  Our Lord’s heart broke over the city, for that city “didn’t know the things that made for its peace, shalom.”  Paul wept over the church, he tells us.  We should weep over both the city and the church. Have you ever wept over the city?  A highly-placed bank executive in my former congregation told me he had on his desk a letter from Queen’s Park explaining the provincial government’s logic in placing the first provincial casino in Windsor , Ontario .  Here’s the logic.  Casino gambling generates huge sums of money for the provincial government.  Casino gambling also impoverishes the people who frequent casinos – overwhelmingly people who are poor enough already.  A casino in a border city would attract large numbers of Americans.  Americans (disproportionately poor Afro-Americans) would come to Windsor , lose their money as the Ontario government scooped it up, and then return to the United States where they would then be the responsibility of the American government and its welfare system.  Result: Ontario gathers up huge sums of money while the state of Michigan is saddled with burgeoning welfare rolls.  We import American dollars; we export American social problems.  My bank-executive friend had the letter on his desk with these details spelled out as clearly as I have spelled them out to you.  The entire scheme was exploitative, racist as well. The next casino would be in Niagara Falls .  Another small border city.  Same logic.  The third casino would be in Rama, the aboriginal reserve near Orillia .  This time the poor people rendered poorer still would be aboriginals, and they are the responsibility of the federal government.  Import the money, export the social problem. Whose idea was this?  The NDP government of Ontario conceived it.  And what is the origin of the NDP?  The party arose from the Methodist Church in the prairies during the Great Depression. It pledged itself to speak for those otherwise unable to be heard.  The poorest were precisely the people for whom the NDP arose.  In other words, the people who suffer most from government exploitation now are the people whom the NDP’s foreparents wept over. Have you ever wept over the church?   The United Church is Canada ’s largest Protestant denomination, and its collapse is grievous.  It has taken itself down through doctrinal dilution, theological compromise, ethical subversion.  Plainly The United Church has intentionally rendered itself apostate through its denial of the Incarnation, denial of the Atonement, denial of the Resurrection, denial of the Trinity, and of course its denial of the discipleship Jesus Christ requires of his followers. Its book membership (about three times the number of people who appear on Sunday morning) is today what it was in 1927.  (I trust the Presbyterian Church is more discerning and more faithful, because the PCC is older, smaller and more fragile than the UCC, and if meanders in the direction of the UCC it will never survive.)  Weep? Recently I was approached by a Toronto woman who had become pregnant as a teenager.  Unmarried, she had an abortion.  Subsequently she came to faith in Jesus Christ.  As is always the case where faith is authentic and profound, every aspect of her life was reconfigured.  Now a lawyer, she provides legal assistance (and personal support) for unmarried pregnant teenagers.  For her, abortion is no longer the solution.  Yet she’s heartbroken.  She says that her large, city congregation shuns teenagers who are obviously pregnant; i.e., teenagers who don’t have abortions.  And it shuns with equal vehemence teenagers who do.  In other words, shunning is what her congregation does best.  The apostle Paul wept over congregations whose betrayal of the gospel was worse than the world’s ignorance of the gospel. There are tears that ought to be shed.   III: — But finally, ultimately, there are no tears to be shed.  We are not going to weep.  “Weeping may tarry for the night,” says the psalmist, “but joy comes with the morning.”  There are nights – tearful nights – that can’t be avoided and can only be endured.  But ultimately we don’t live in the night.  We are formed by our Lord’s resurrection and informed by it as well.  Therefore we live in the morning; we live for the morning. The book of Revelation has long been a favourite with me.  I’m always moved at John’s magnificent affirmation, “Weep not, for the lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered.”  The only reason for not weeping is that the lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered.  But this is reason enough. When John says “Weep not” he doesn’t mean we should sniff up our tears and deny our grief; i.e., take back what was said earlier to be normal and necessary.  John means something else.  He means that weeping doesn’t characterize God’s people.  As Christians we do shed tears, including the tears that we ought to shed.  But we aren’t characterized by our tears.  We are characterized by our Lord’s triumph.  We weep not, ultimately, just because Jesus Christ has conquered. From time to time people tell me what they expect or at least look for in a pastor.  I smile to myself, because I think that often what’s looked for isn’t hugely important; e.g., administrative gifts. (Many lay people have superior administrative talent.  Let them do congregational administration.)  Myself, I think that what a pastor must have above everything else is a conviction concerning Christ’s victory; a conviction so deep in him that it goes all the way down to his DNA, and he exhales it upon his people both explicitly and implicitly even as it seeps out of every pore.  A pastor has to be convinced unshakeably of Christ’s victory if he’s profoundly to support and sustain his people. Not every day in a minister’s life unfolds hectically, but some days do.  On one of those days I worked at a sermon until noon , then drove to Richmond Hill to bury a friend.  He was an unusual fellow.  He owned a junk-yard and made a living dealing in scrap metal.  He had shoulder-length hair and hands like a gorilla’s.  From time to time we went to a Maple Leaf hockey game together, and then cavorted in downtown Toronto until it was time to come home.  He chewed tobacco, and he had dreadful aim.  He spat and spewed and sprayed and slobbered gooey brown juice in all directions.  The day of his funeral his wife solemnly placed a package of Red Chief chewing tobacco in his coffin.  He loved me, even as we were as far apart educationally (he had left school at 14) and as far apart culturally as two people could be. After the funeral I called on a woman from two congregations back whose husband (an elder in the congregation) was forced to leave the family home when he was found committing incest with a fourteen year-old daughter.  (This incident followed two earlier convictions for sexually molesting children, which convictions had been hidden from wife, employer, neighbours, everyone.) Then I drove to Etobicoke to see a woman whose fifty year-old brother, chronically mentally ill, had just been mishandled by the courts and had been sent to a maximum security prison. Then I came home to supper.  I thought of what the writer of Ecclesiastes says: “There is nothing new under the sun.”  And then I thought of what the writer of Revelation overheard God saying: “Behold, I make all things new.”  Because the lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered he does make all things new and will.  If our faith is so slight as to be only a smidgen, it’s still faith, and therefore it binds us to him who is resurrection and life.  Which is to say, the schizophrenic man, his disabled sister, the molested children (no doubt scarred for this life) and even the molester himself – you and I and all who have trusted Jesus – all alike are to be made new.  Because the lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered he determines ultimately what no one else can determine since no one else has conquered.  Jesus Christ the Victor determines our identity, who we really are right now underneath all the layers of disguise and disfiguration.  In addition our Lord determines our destiny, what our future will be on the day of our Lord’s appearing and we stand before him without spot or blemish, wound or scar. That’s the day for which I live.  That’s the “morning” for which I live.  And that’s why weeping can never tarry for more than the night.  Our struggle will never be fruitless, and therefore we ought never to lose heart. The book of Revelation closes magnificently. “And I heard a great voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with             men… he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither shall             there be mourning nor crying nor pain – any more.”   What God has promised to do he has already begun to do in you and in me and in countless others.  The lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered.  Therefore while there are tears that we may shed, and tears that we ought to shed, the day is guaranteed, the “morning,” when no tear will be shed. The Lion of the tribe of Judah – our blessed Lord – he has conquered.

Victor Shepherd           October 2004

 

Revelation 16:1-23  

[1] Several years ago Mr. Hal Lindsey wrote a runaway bestseller, The Late Great Planet Earth. The book sold eighteen million copies. No other publication came close to it throughout the 1970s. In this book and in four others (including one with the ominous title, The Road to Holocaust, Hal Lindsey stated that God has foreordained that we fight a nuclear “Armageddon”. Immediately the word “Armageddon” entered the English vocabulary as the war to surpass all wars, the history-ending conflagration which would involve the armies of the earth and the nuclear arsenals of the nations. “Armageddon” came to mean all-out war, war from which the defeated could never recover.

Not only has God foreordained the nuclear Armageddon, said Hal Lindsey, Christians should welcome it, since Christians are going to be lifted above it; Christians will be spared the conflagration which consumes everyone else.

Hal Lindsey was supported in his statement by other well-known religious personalities. Jimmy Bakker insisted that such a war must be fought in order to bring on the final manifestation of Jesus Christ. Jimmy Swaggart said the same thing. At the peak of their fame Bakker’s TV programme was seen by six million households every day, Swaggart’s by 4.5 million households.

These men, together with all who support them, have always maintained that scripture foretells an end-time war between the USSR and the USA. Soviet forces are to move south to Megiddo, a small valley twenty miles outside the modern Israeli city of Haifa. Megiddo is a valley not much larger than a farm in southern Ontario, nowhere near as large as a ranch in Texas. In this small valley all the armies of the world are to mass, millions upon millions of troops, and the final battle will begin.

On the one hand, because you and I are sceptical of Lindsey and repelled by Bakker and Swaggart, we are not prone to take their prognostications seriously. On the other hand, we dare not minimize the influence these men have had. After all, millions of households are exposed to this scenario day after day. Plainly the public is being conditioned to support the escalation of the nuclear arms buildup. Armageddon, it must be remembered, cannot take place in a world devoid of nuclear arms. Moreover, those who hold on to this scenario are correspondingly cavalier about the domestic programmes of the US government. As one “Armageddonite” said, “There is no reason to get wrought up about the national debt if God is soon going to foreclose on the whole world.” In order to make sure that God does “foreclose on the whole world”, in order to make sure that nuclear holocaust does occur, some “Armageddonites” have stated that Jesus Christ himself will launch the first strike.

How do people come to hold such views? How can people long for nuclear obliteration? I have neither the time nor the expertise to probe the psychology of such people. I know only that they misuse scripture woefully. Let us remember that the word “Armageddon” is mentioned once only in 1,189 chapters of the bible.

 

[2] Yet even more must be kept in mind when we ponder the matter of Armageddon. We must remember that war — any war — is a contradiction of the kingdom of God. However necessary some conventional wars may have been, it can never be pretended that scripture holds up war as the primary will of God. The psalmist says that God is finally the one who makes wars to cease. Isaiah’s God-inspired vision of God’s intention for the creation includes the elimination of war: “…they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.”

We must also remember the nature of our Lord’s Messiahship. People deserted Jesus in droves, even turned on him nastily, just because he was not the strong-armed military messiah they wanted. Hepreferred the power of righteousness to the so-called righteousness of power. Where he insisted on sacrifice, they insisted on coercion. The result was that they cast him aside. It is plain that the Lindsey/Bakker/Swaggart team falsifies Jesus Christ in order to bend him to their ideology.

 

[3] It is time for us to look at the book of Revelation itself. Before we examine the 16th chapter (and the 16th verse in particular) we should say something about the book as a whole.

The book of Revelation has long been the happy hunting-ground of extremists. They reach into it and pull out any religious oddity at all. They do so inasmuch as they fail to understand something crucial. John does not communicate with his readers through abstract argument. John communicates by means of pictures. His pictures are vivid; no one could ever call them vague or bland or unremarkable. Think, for instance, of the picture of a dragon which fumes and spews and vomits at the same time as it slays Christ’s people. Not only are the pictures vivid; they are also immense, grotesque, and surreal. They would appear to come out of a science fiction novel or a horror movie. In fact most of John’s pictures he has borrowed from the books of Ezekiel and Daniel. Despite the fact that modern readers, at least initially, find John’s pictures off-putting, John expected his readers to find immense comfort and help and hope in the pictures. You see, John’s first readers were undergoing savage persecution; he wrote as he did to provide comfort and help and hope for people whose suffering was intense and relentless.

As a matter of fact there are three books in the New Testament which were written specifically to sustain persecuted Christians: the gospel of Mark, the first epistle of Peter, and the book of Revelation. In the year 65 Nero, the Roman emperor, began brutalizing Christians in a vicious outburst worse than anything which had victimized Christians so far. Several years later Nero committed suicide. By the year 95 another Roman emperor, Domitian, picked up where Nero had left off. Persecution fell on Christians once again. The book of Revelation was written to provide comfort, help and hope to Christ’s people during Domitian’s reign of terror.

 

[4] The 16th chapter opens with a vivid depiction of God’s judgement, God’s wrath. As the “bowls of God’s wrath” are emptied out, bodily sores, as loathsome as they are foul-smelling, break out on whom? — break out on those who “bear the mark of the beast and worship its image”. Now everywhere in the book of Revelation the “beast” is imperial Rome; cruel, bloody, tyrannical, cut-throat Rome. Rome is totalitarian government which operates through intimidation and torture. Its viciousness can be directed to anyone who resists it and opposes it. Its viciousness, of course, was always turned against Christians during the reign of Domitian, since Christians always named the murderous beast for what it was: evil.

Those men and women, on the other hand, who “kow-tow” to tyranny, who docilely submit to it and flatter it in an attempt to exploit it or merely survive it; these men and women, says John, “bear the mark of the beast”. They have kow-towed to the viciousness of political tyranny for so long that they have become vicious themselves; in a word, inasmuch as they have toadied to the beast, the beast has stamped its mark on them. They may have begun simply by “going along with the system”, merely “playing the game” in order to survive. But now they are poisoned with the selfsame poison which the beast embodies.

The dishonesty and cruelty and coercion and bullying which you and I flatter and play up to as a means of surviving in our turbulent world (never mind getting ahead in it) soon takes us over and puts its mark upon us. The nastiness we say we are only pretending to agree with, only pretending to conform to actually gets into our bloodstream and remakes us in its image. The very thing we say we are only mimicking outwardly in fact takes us over inwardly, and we become that very thing. We take on the character of the very thing we kow-tow to. At this point, says John in his picturesque language, we have worshipped the image of the beast, and the beast in turn has put its mark upon us.

Think of the tyranny we have known in our own century, as well as the torture and torment connected with that tyranny. Stalin, Hitler, Pot Pol (the leader of the Khmer Rouge who liquidated millions), Mao Tse Tung, General Pinochet of Chile. What have all these men done? How many “ordinary” people cozied up to them, pretended to agree to the tyrant’s tyranny, were used by them, only to become inwardly what they thought they were only pretending to outwardly? In other words, how many supporters of these wicked men came to be stamped with the mark of the beast themselves? By way of answering my own question I often think of Klaus Barbie, known as “the butcher of Lyon”. Barbie deported thousands of French Jews to extermination camps and tortured indescribably the leaders of the French resistance movement. When Barbie was finally arrested (only three or four years ago), tried and convicted, prior to being sentenced he was asked if he had any regrets. “Yes, there is something I regret”, he replied, “I regret that there is still a Jew alive in the world.”

In his psychedelic vision John imagines those men and women who play up to tyrannical Rome breaking out into loathsome, foul-smelling sores. Plainly John’s vision is rooted in the plagues of Egypt. You know the story of the seven plagues of Egypt. Pharaoh had enslaved and brutalized the Israelite people in Egypt. Through assorted instrumentalities God had pleaded with Pharaoh to let God’s people go free. Pharaoh had refused. And so another plague. After each refusal, another plague. God’s purpose in all of this was not to torment Pharaoh; God’s purpose is to relieve the oppressed and liberate the enslaved. In much the same way, says John, God is going to shake the leaders and supporters of tyrannical Rome in order that Christ’s people might be relieved.

We need not read the book of Revelation with wooden literalism; we need not think that at some point 25% of the population broke out in stinking sores, or that on one occasion the Mediterranean Sea around Italy turned into blood, the ensuing pollution killing all the fish. John, we must remember, is picturesquely telling his persecuted readers that while they may feel that God has abandoned them and their situation is without hope, God has not and their situation is not. God has not forgotten them; his judgement, poured out on their tormentors, will eventually release them. In the same way John is not, in chapter 16, forecasting the dissolution of the physical universe. He is speaking instead of God’s righteous reaction when God beholds his people tormented; he is assuring his readers that God’s righteous reaction will bring them release and relief, and for this they must wait with that patience which only God-inspired hope can bring.

 

We must be aware of a most significant difference between the plagues visited upon Pharaoh and the judgement of God visited upon tyrannical rulers in Rome and ever since Rome. The plagues visited upon Pharaoh were sent in order to induce him to repent. “Change, Pharaoh”, God shouts at him, “Change, repent, while you have opportunity to do so, and let my people go.” The judgement visited upon Rome, however, is different. It does not aim at inducing Rome to repent. John has no expectation that Rome will ever repent. None. Tyrants, together with their flunkies, plan on remaining tyrannical indefinitely; they are not about to change anything.

Think of it this way. With respect to the Egyptians God’s wrath was a warning to Pharaoh and a pleading with Pharaoh. With respect to Rome, however, God’s wrath is not a plea; God’s wrath initiates Rome’s doom. Rome will be annihilated. Tyrants cannot be pleaded with; they can only be dispelled. Only as Rome is crumbled will God’s people find release and relief.

Remember: John’s psychedelic vision is not an announcement that God plans to ruin the ecology or destroy the world; John’s vision is meant to supply his readers with fresh heart. God will do anything, enlist anything, to come to the aid of his people. “Therefore”, says John to his readers, “however beaten-up you might be, don’t be beaten-down. God has not abandoned you to your suffering”.

Then John speaks of yet another “bowl” of God’s judgement. This bowl is emptied on the throne of the beast, on the very seat or centre of totalitarian power; immediately the kingdom of the beast is plunged into darkness. What once stood, apparently invincible, is now toppled.

The Roman empire fell apart, didn’t it. The power of the mightiest state the world had seen dribbled away. The seemingly invincible was now has-been dust and litter. Where is the Roman empire today? What is Italy today? — a country whose poverty has driven millions of its people to live elsewhere.

In the eighth century the Arab conquest meant that Arabia ruled from Spain to India, and ruled with a ferocity and cruelty you must read to believe. The Arab nations today would love to go back to their centuries of conscienceless brutality and arrogant strutting. They cause a little trouble here and there today, but the bowl has been emptied on their throne, and their kingdom is in darkness.

In this context we cannot help thinking of the USSR. From 1917 on it seemed invincible. Massive armies to defend it from without, massive secret police to maintain it from within. Any citizen of the USSR who criticized it or contradicted it was dealt with as quickly and conclusively as the emperor Domitian dealt with Christians in first century Rome. Stalin executed thirty million of his own people, systematically starved farm-families in the Ukraine, and ruthlessly sent millions more to the wastes of Siberia. Since these measures were always weeding out and eliminating anything that resembled opposition, the USSR should have remained invincible forever. But it has crumbled, hasn’t it. God’s bowl has been emptied on it. It is now a has-been nation, fragmented, with a standard of living no better than that of a penurious third-world country. Possessing some of the best wheat-growing land in the world, it can’t even provide its citizens with a loaf of bread. Once the bowl of God’s judgement is emptied on the throne of the beast, says John, the kingdom of that beast is in darkness.

John has even more to tell us. In his vision he speaks of “foul spirits like frogs”. The foul spirits represent the stream of court flattery and lying propaganda which saturate any anti-human state. Oppressive regimes invariably use lying propaganda in order to deceive people and control them. Court flattery is the grovelling seen in functionaries who think that flattery will keep them alive when sincere people are put away. John tells us that the foul spirits — flattery and propaganda — eventually stir up the kings of the world and provoke them into an alliance against Rome. Of course! Propaganda incites a people to overstep itself. Flattery blinds leaders and people to reality. The blind leaders incite a blind people who overstep themselves, and their aggression galvanizes opposition from other nations.

Within our own lifetime we need think only of Nazi Germany. The foul spirits (flattery and propaganda); opposition provoked in other nations; the alliance against Germany. The result? — the Reich that was supposed to last a thousand years as a demonstration of human superiority lasted only a few years and acquainted the world with new levels of depravity. And when Nazi Germany had crumbled, when its kingdom was in darkness (in the words of John) the faithful people of God who had groaned within it groaned no more. Centuries earlier John had said to beleaguered Christians, “However beaten-up you might be, don’t be beaten-down, because God has not forgotten you and will deliver you.”

Armageddon, then, is not the world-ending nuclear holocaust which some people say God has ordained. Armageddon is any battle which the oppressors of this world provoke with other nations. Armageddon is the conflict in which other nations, provoked by a tyranny which has overstepped itself, become agents of God in releasing and relieving his people.

 

At the conclusion of Revelation 16 John’s psychedelic vision heats up one more time and he sees lightning, thunder, earthquake, and hailstones the size of cannonballs. When all of this over, “no mountains were to be found”. Rome was famous as the city that was built on seven hills — and no “no mountains are to be found”. Imperial Rome, together with its tyranny, cruelty, propaganda, boasting — no more; flattened out.

But of course when John wrote his tract none of this had happened yet. John merely foresaw it in his mind’s eye. When John wrote his tract his fellow-believers were still undergoing savage mistreatment. John urges them not to lose heart. God has not forgotten them. John also tells them to keep alert: “Blessed is he who is awake…”. God’s people must ever be alert to what God is doing, watchful, discerning, able to recognize the signs of their promised deliverance.

Because the descendants of Pharaoh and Nero and Domitian are still with us, and because they still torment all who point them out and resist them, John’s psychedelic tract will always be relevant.

 

[5] In concluding this sermon I want to leave something very important with you. Today we have probed together one chapter in a tract which aims at putting fresh heart in God’s people. Nonetheless, the chapter we have examined sounds utterly bleak, doesn’t it. Ancient Rome, Mediaeval Arabia, Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany, the USSR — written off, all of them, since all of them have been the beast. All have had the fifth bowl of John’s vision emptied on them, and their kingdoms, without exception, have become darkness. Written off.

No! We must look to the last chapter of the book of Revelation. Listen to its opening words:

Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal,
flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the
street of the city; also, on the other side of the river, the tree of
life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month;

and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

John’s vision, ultimately, is of Eden restored. And into this paradise restored come the nations; to be sure, they are wounded, bloody, bleeding still from their former hostility to the Messiah-Lamb. Nonetheless, the tree of life, in this restored Eden, is for the healing of the nations.

In the worst of the nations we have mentioned today there were many people, countless people in fact, who never did worship the image of the beast. Equipped with the truth of God born of their knowledge of God, they were never taken in by the beast’s propaganda. They have suffered too, and suffered more than we shall ever know. Anonymous though they may be to us, they are known to God, and their healing is guaranteed. Because of the “Armageddon” which they have endured, they know better than we that the conflict which brought release and relief is but a step along that road whose end is Eden restored, where nothing bars access to the tree of life, and where the creation is healed. For there swords have been beaten into ploughshares, and war is not learned any more.

 

F I N I S

Victor A. Shepherd                                                                                               February 1992

 Revelation 22:8-17      Daniel 7:9-10 

 

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I have little time for sentimentality.  And therefore whenever I am moved I like to think that what moves me is eversomuch deeper than sentimentality.  I am always moved when I read the text for today’s sermon.  “The Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come’.  And let him who hears say ‘Come.’  And let him who is thirsty come, let him who desires take the water of life without price.”

It’s a word of invitation, a word of promise, a word of profound comfort.  I find it the warmest word of scripture arising within the most violent book of scripture.

You will have noticed that this text is found at the very end of John’s treatise.  In order to grasp what it means, then; in order to grasp the overwhelming force of its invitation and promise and comfort we have to understand why John wrote his book and what he aimed to do through it.

We all know that the book of Revelation has been misused time and again.  Religious eccentrics have long cherished it as the grab-bag out of which they can pull any religious oddity at all.

Those of us who think of ourselves as non-eccentric; we still find the notions in it bizarre and the pictures bloody: a river of gore that flows up to the level of a horse’s bridle, a dragon that fumes and spews as it slays God’s people.

Paradoxically, this violent book has comforted untold Christians, especially the bereaved.  We read it at virtually every funeral or interment.  “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more…God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

The truth is, John was a pastor.  He wrote in order to lend encouragement and strength to Christians who were suffering terrible persecution.  A tidal wave of persecution had engulfed the church in the year 65 during the reign of Emperor Nero.  Thirty years later, in the year 95 Emperor Domitian was every bit as cruel.  Another wave of persecution, another wave of torture and death, was bending Christians away from their conviction concerning Jesus Christ and their public confession of him.  John wanted to encourage and strengthen the people who were dear to him.

We don’t read very far into John’s book, however, when we realize that John communicates with his people through pictures.  The pictures are immense, grotesque, and surreal all at once — almost as if they came out of a science-fiction novel.  But they don’t.  They come from the older testament, particularly from the books of Ezekiel and Daniel.  John takes the pictures that his foreparents drew and applies them, in the light of Christ’s truth and triumph, to his suffering congregation.

 

I: —  I have already said that John’s chief purpose is to encourage his people.  But encouragement is not the same as mollycoddling.  John knows that if people are to be helped profoundly they must first hear the truth about themselves.  And so John opens his book with his “Letters To The Seven Churches In The Province Of Asia.”

Now there were certainly more than seven congregations throughout Asia .  But seven is the biblical symbol for completeness or wholeness.  In speaking of the seven churches John is writing about the entire church of Jesus Christ throughout the world.

The church at Ephesus possesses energy and endurance and a sensitive nose for sniffing out theological error.  Good.  Unfortunately, says John, the church at Ephesus also lacks love.  Rightly hating error and evil, it has come to have a frigid heart.  The church at Ephesus is both praised and blamed (as are several other churches, albeit for different reasons.)

The church at Smyrna is praised without qualification.  It has suffered terribly and yet has remained steadfast.  John urges it not to give up.

The church at Thyatira is cautioned: it is currently tempted to compromise, and it must not.  John did not have our modern, cavalier attitude to compromise. Truth is truth; righteousness is righteousness; faithfulness has to be faithfulness and nothing else.

Our foreparents were possessed of greater conviction here than we.  John Bunyan, the best-loved Puritan writer (Pilgrim’s Progress, among 60 other books); John Bunyan was imprisoned in a festering jail for thirteen years.  He had four children, one of whom, Mary, was blind.  Day-by-day Mary, a young teenager, groped and stumbled her way to her father’s cell in order to bring him more food than the jail provided.  Bunyan was near-frantic about Mary.  “If I die in here”, he said (and it was likely that he would) how will my blind daughter survive in the world?  Who will look out for her?” Authorities who saw his concern told him he didn’t have to remain in prison; he could go home that afternoon.  All he had to do was sign a paper saying he would never preach again.  And so Bunyan remained in jail for thirteen years.  Compromise?  The word disgusted him.  After all, the gospel is the gospel; and betrayal is disgraceful.

The church in Laodicaea isn’t praised at all; it is simply blamed.  Nothing good can be said about it.  “Neither hot nor cold”, says John, “about as attractive and useful as a bucket of tepid spit.”  (John’s speech is never dainty; he prefers to be effective.)  Yet there is still hope for the church in Laodicaea.  Jesus Christ has not yet given up on it.  “Behold I stand at the door and knock…”  —  one of the all-time favourite verses.  But not the stained glass picture of the gentle Jesus tap, tap tapping.  He’s hammering on the door.  The congregation in Laodicaea has to wake up.  Our Lord needs to knock loudly enough to wake the dead.

Seven churches.  In other words, you can find churches throughout the entire world just like these.  More to the point, in any one congregation you can find all seven represented.  In any one congregation’s life there are features to be praised, features to be blamed, and sleeping people who need to be awakened.

 

II: —  But if they are awakened, what are they awakened to know?  John tells us in his vision of the sealed scroll.  The question is asked, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?”  The scroll contains God’s plan and purpose in redeeming the world.  Until the scroll is opened God’s redemption won’t be known; more importantly, until the scroll is opened God’s redemption won’t become operative.  Until the scroll is opened, then, the world will only lurch and stagger as it has since the Fall, one step removed from chaos, human beings locked into their depravity and only worsening things whenever they try to wrench the world right.  John is so upset at the prospect of the world’s hopelessness — since no one is worthy to open the scroll — that he weeps.

Then he hears a voice.  “Weep not; lo, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah has conquered; he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”  John looks up, expecting to see the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Messiah.  He looks up and looks for a lion, and instead sees a lamb.  The Messiah is a lamb.  And this lamb is haemorrhaging.  This lamb is worthy to open the sealed scroll.

Now the bleeding lamb that John sees is no ordinary lamb; it has seven horns and seven eyes.  Horn is the Hebrew symbol for strength, power, might; eye, the Hebrew symbol for wisdom.  In other words, it is in the crucified one that the world will ultimately be rescued from chaos and bloodshed, for in the crucified one are found the whole wisdom and the whole power of God.

 

III: —  Make no mistake.  It will require the whole wisdom and the whole power of God to save God’s creation from the evil that afflicts it, for evil is unspeakably evil.

How evil it is John tells us in his vision of the plague of locusts.  There are seven plagues in the book of Revelation.  (In other words, the world is whollyafflicted.)  We shall look at one plague only, that of the locusts.

These locusts or grasshoppers are unusual grasshoppers.  They don’t devour grain; they devour men and women.  How can they?  Just look at how big they are: as big as horses, John says.  Their tails have stingers, like a scorpion.  Their antennae are as long and as numerous as a woman’s hair (in other words, nothing escapes their sensory apparatus).  Their scales are like armour-plate.  When they beat their wings they sound like an army of chariots or tanks. John is telling us that evil is immense, evil is a power beyond our imagining, evil is a supernatural power that only the visionary with supernatural vision (like John himself) can describe.  There is one last feature to these fearsome, horse-sized locusts:  THEY HAVE A HUMAN FACE.  “Never forget”, says John, “that while evil is a cosmic power, it wears a human face.”

In my reading of biography and history I have become acquainted with some of the most cruel people the world has seen.  As I read of these people I expected to find men and women whose appearance was subhuman, ogreish, even men and women who appeared monstrous, unrecognizable.  In every case I have been sobered to learn that they were ordinary; so ordinarily human.  They didn’t appear grotesque or nightmarish.  They have been as ordinarily human as you or I.

Adolf Eichmann was noted for the tenderness he had for his family.  Heinrich Himmler was no more notable than the clerk at Mac’s Milk.  Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyons ”; before he perfected his torture-techniques Klaus Barbie was undistinguished.

Speaking of Barbie; when he was extradited from South America and brought to France to stand trial for his wartime torment of French citizens it was assumed that he would be convicted and given the severest sentence possible.  Then the lawyer defending Barbie began letting French skeletons out of the closet.  “You say that Barbie tortured and maimed people in the French resistance movement”, said the lawyer, “but only 1% of France ’s people joined the resistance movement.  Among the other 99% were many who collaborated with the occupation.  The politicians and church-leaders and educators whom we esteem today; many of those who assisted Barbie were among the 99% who didn’t resist.  If the government of France tries Barbie, why doesn’t it try countless French citizens who supported him?”  Evil, however monstrous a power, always wears a human face.  “Furthermore”, continued Barbie’s lawyer, “as bad as German treatment of French people was, French treatment of Algerians has been as bad if not worse.  If you proceed to convict my client, I will name (and ruin) prominent French people who secretly permitted or authorized shocking atrocities with respect to the Algerians.”  All of a sudden many highly placed people in France decided that Barbie’s trial should be concluded as quickly and quietly as possible.

In the 1920s and 30s journalists from Britain and the United States went to Russia .  They saw the Stalinist purges first-hand.  They witnessed Stalin’s systematic starvation of the Ukrainians.  They then wrote newspaper and magazine articles telling the world that Stalin was a good man.  To be sure, he was a bit rough around the edges, but an effective leader nonetheless; what he aimed at was good.  Why, Stalin had even been a theology student at one time.  And so the British and American intelligentsia willfully blinded themselves to what was happening and wrote well of him.  Why are intellectuals (so-called) so very stupid?  Because they cannot believe that evil is evil when they see the smiling human face.  Naively, intellectuals assume that the smiling human face can’t be evil; they don’t realize that a human face is the principal face evil wears.

 

IV: —  Then what is to be done in the wake of this?  How are Christians to act?  We move now to another of John’s visions, the vision of the little scroll.  The big scroll, we saw a minute ago, the big scroll only the slain lamb could unseal and unleash.  The little scroll contains the same message as the big scroll. John is told to eat it.  He eats it and finds that it tastes sweet as honey.  A short time later, however, he has a dreadful stomach-ache.  Christian people find the truth of God sweet to their palate; we rightly love the taste of the gospel and the truth by which the gospel exposes illusions and the integrity that the gospel lends us.  But Christians find too that as much as we savour the gospel, the gospel collides with the world and brings suffering upon us, as it did for our Lord before us.

Those journalists who kept telling the world that Stalin was a good fellow even as they witnessed his carnage; an American journalist with the New York Times who lied extremely well was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his deliberate falsehood.  There was one British journalist, however, who saw the truth, told the truth, and kept on telling the truth in defiance of his superiors: Malcolm Muggeridge.  And because of his dedication to the truth born of his own integrity, Muggeridge was fired.  Not only was he unemployed, he was unemployable.  Angry British officials saw to that.  And all he did was tell the truth?  The little scroll tastes sweet, as it should, since gospel-righteousness is sweet.  Yet as we eat it, which we must, it gives us stomach-ache.

V: —  Who, exactly who, is the occasion of the Christian’s stomach-ache?  The monster from the abyss, plus the great whore.  (I told you earlier in the sermon that John was never dainty.)  The monster from the abyss and the great whore collaborate, says John.  The great whore is affluence, the affluence that John saw in affluent Rome and the city’s empire.  Affluence seduces people away from single-minded devotion to Jesus Christ, says John.  It did then and it does now.  Concerning this whore John writes, “The merchants of the earth have grown rich with the wealth of her wantonness.”

Affluence fosters an addiction to greater affluence.  As a nation’s energies are given over to making its people affluent two things happen.  In the first place, ever-increasing affluence becomes the preoccupation of the people.  They will give up anything for greater affluence.  They become shallow, shrivelled in spirit, cruel, coarse and insensitive.  In the second place, a few of the nation’s people become astoundingly rich.  As colossal sums of money become concentrated in only a few hands, those few hands become tyrannical.  For this reason John tells us that the great whore (affluence) rides around on the back of the monster from the abyss (tyranny).  Doesn’t it make you nervous that 80% of the stock traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange is owned by only twenty families?

John insists, however, that we not point the finger.  No one has the right to say to a high-profile family, “You are extraordinarily corrupt.”  In an affluent society everyone is beguiled by mammon, says John, everyone is spiritually corrupted and impoverished.  We can resist this only as we turn our gaze from the seductions of the great whore and look upon Christ alone.

 

VI: —  “Is it all bleak?”, someone asks, “doesn’t John recognize a genuine human good in life somewhere?”  Yes he does.  In fact, John is as quick to acknowledge genuine human achievement as any humanist is.  When John speaks of the New Jerusalem (which is the kingdom of God or the creation of God healed) he tells us that the kings of the earth are going to bring their glory into it.  Not God’s glory (they have no jurisdiction over that), but their glory; the profoundest human accomplishments are going to have a glorious place in the New Jerusalem.  John knows that human cultural achievements are glorious indeed.  He knows that the very best of human creativity will be honoured in the kingdom of God .  Nothing of genuine worth in God’s sight will ever be lost.

John knows that however cruel tyrannical Rome might be, however shallow and decadent affluent Rome might be, there remains in it much that is humanly good.  And this good, of genuine worth in God’s sight, God will preserve.

Then what is the human glory that will find its place in the kingdom of God ?

— the philosophical wisdom of ancient Greece .

— the legal and administrative genius of ancient Rome .

— the architectural genius of mediaeval Europe .

— the painting of the Dutch masters.

— the dramas of the profoundest dramatists.

I often quote a line from Elie Wiesel, one of the premier writers of the past fifty years and a Nobel prizewinner.  Wiesel says, “A poet’s word is worth a thousand pictures.”  Then the poet’s word will be preserved as well.

What about music?  Myself, I am especially fond of the music of Mozart.  So was Karl Barth, the most prolific theologian of the twentieth century.  Barth was strictly an amateur when it came to music.  Yet he had his opinions, like the rest of us.  In his opinion Bach and Beethoven were excellent musicians. Bach, however, said Barth, tried too hard to make a point in his music.  Beethoven wrote about himself; his music was overtly autobiographical.  But Mozart; Mozart gave expression to sheer joy, sheer delight.  In a 1955 article Karl Barth wrote, “…our daily bread must also include playing.  I hear Mozart …at play. But play is something so lofty and demanding that it requires mastery.  And in Mozart I hear an art of playing as I hear it nowhere else….When I hear Mozart I am transported to the threshold of a world that in sunlight and storm, by day and by night, is a good and ordered world.”

Nothing of genuine human worth will ever be lost in the kingdom of God , the New Jerusalem.

 

VII: —  It’s time to return to our text.  “The Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come’.”  The Spirit is the Spirit of God, the power in which Jesus Christ speaks and acts.  The Bride is the city of God , the New Jerusalem, the kingdom of God , the entire creation healed.  The Spirit and the new creation that God established in the triumph of his Son over the myriad plagues of evil and sin; the Spirit and the new creation call to us, even as God himself renders it all believable and desirable.

The Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come’.  Let all who are thirsty take the water of life without price.  For from this city flows the water of life, and this life-giving water will

strengthen our fellowship,

magnify our redeemer,

arm us to resist the plagues of evil,

equip us to fend off the seductions of affluence,

and even move us to treasure that human accomplishment which God will preserve.

The Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come’.  Let all who are thirsty take the water of life without price.

 

There comes from the most violent book in the bible an invitation that couldn’t be warmer.

Victor Shepherd
March 2008          preached Sunday 9th March in St.Andrew’s United Church, Markham, Ontario