Revelation 21:10, 22:1-25

Apocalyptic

In the Spirit the angel carried me away to a great high mountain and showed me

the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God…. Nothing accursed will be found there anymore. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

Today, when we think of our world, with its thousands of barrels of oil spilling daily into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening marine life and people’s livelihoods, when we think of the flooding in Nashville taking lives and washing away homes, when we think of the Taliban-inspired terrorist planting explosives in a parked car on Times Square, when we think of the seemingly never-ending, hatred-arousing conflict between Palestine and Israel, when we think of the continued killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, of the threat of a nuclear build up in Iran, of the way we continue to pour heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with its eventually disastrous temperature changing consequences, when we think of the Wall Street meltdown and the over-reaching greed of big banks and large investment firms which brought economic devastation to so many, when we think of these things, and the all too many more like them, can we not weep over a vision in which God will be our light, in which there will be no more night, in which we will live forever and ever, in which, finally, as this apocalyptic vision has earlier promised us, God “will wipe every tear from (our) eyes; and death will be no more; and mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

When we find ourselves, if we find ourselves, weeping over this vision, is it not because we have such a strong inner yearning for peace and justice and social harmony? I remember back in the sixties and early seventies, during the days of civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests, how Blanche and I, sometimes with our children in tow, would march along the streets, carrying signs of “Peace Now” and singing the Beattles song, “All we are asking is give peace a chance.” But it is not simply a desire for peace that lies behind an apocalyptic vision but a desire for meaning and a search for truth; and, of course, here, I am not talking about ordinary meanings and ordinary truths, such as what does it mean for people’s lives that we are running such a high unemployment rate or what are the true causes of our current recession, important as these questions are. No, I am talking about ultimate meaning and ultimate truth: what is the meaning of life that bursts so explosively into being, particularly what is the meaning of human life and history, the rise and fall of peoples and nations and empires, with their great outpourings of creative genius in art and music and literature and architecture and a corresponding horrifying outpouring of death and destruction and unbearably evil cruelty to human life and other species. Is it all, as Shakespeare has Macbeth say, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” or is there finally a meaning to it all, a meaning that eludes us, but the truth for which we continually search? The search for ultimate meaning, for ultimate truth, does not of course, in itself, establish the truth of the meaning we yearn for or even that there are such realities as ultimate meaning and ultimate truth. There are some, actually many, who say that belief in an ultimate dimension to reality or belief in an ultimate truth is an illusion fostered by the wishes of the psyche or that it is an abuse or trick of language, so that the mere existence of the word ultimate falsely leads us to believe in the reality of an ultimate. On the other hand, there are those, very few, who think that we would not have this strong yearning for ultimate meaning and ultimate truth unless we already participate in an ultimate dimension of reality. I myself like this argument of participation but I have to admit that in my thirty five years of teaching I’ve never convinced anybody of it, so let’s move on to further analysis of the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic vision and see if we cannot find firmer grounds for our faith in ultimate truth and ultimate meaning.

This morning’s vision of “the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God,” a city lit by the light of God, and ruled by God and the lamb, that is, by God and Christ, where none are accursed and all the people have the name of Christ written on their foreheads, that is, where all the people live by the spirit of Christ, this picture of light and love and peace and healing comes as the climax to a vision of a dark and terrible time of judgment where God’s wrath finally shows itself against the wicked, the unjust, the oppressor, the demonic, the evil, the rich and the powerful, the rulers who “shed the blood of saints and prophets.” There are earthquakes, scorching heat, and great fires throughout the world, hundred pound hailstones fall from the skies, the waters of the rivers turn into blood, there are great battles against the armies of all the ruling nations, including the battle at a place called Armageddon where the demons assembled for battle “the kings of the whole world.” It is only at the end of this devastating time of judgment where all who are dark and wicked have been purged from the earth, that the holy city of Jerusalem comes down out of heaven from God —- and the “remnant,” to use a phrase from the prophet Isaiah, or, in the words of today’s lectionary reading, “those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (only then do the holy, those washed in the blood of the lamb) enter into it.

Of course, we are not dealing here simply with the visionary hopes of a past religious world. Apocalyptic religious hope —- with its belief in a day of judgment, where darkness and devastation precede light and love, where the holy are separated from the unholy —- ( this apocalyptic hope) is still with us today, though it takes many forms. We see one of those forms in those who believe in The Rapture, a day when the holy will immediately be taken up to heaven, and the remainder will have to decide, before the great battle, whose side they will be on, God’s or the ungodly. We see another in those who believe that the restoration of the state of Israel and the appearance of a red heifer in the holy land will be a sign of the second coming of Christ and the final day of judgment. We see another in some orthodox-believing Jews who look for the coming of the “true” messiah, and we see another, perhaps,in jihadist Muslims, and here I speak with fear and trembling, for I do not know enough about Islam to venture an authoritative word on it —- but perhaps the explosive-armed jihadist who gives his own life in order to destroy the lives of infidels, the unholy, faith-threatening westerner, and who believes he will be immediately lifted to heaven in the company of seven beautiful virgins, (perhaps this jihadist)is a cousin in spirit to apocalyptic believers. I know this is a terrible thing to say, and even if I add the caveat that in genuine apocalyptic belief it is God not the holy who do the destroying, it is still a terrible thing to say. But I say it to get more emphasis into my next point, which is that there is a great puzzle in apocalyptic belief, and the puzzle is this: how does a vision, such as the one we heard read to us this morning, a vision which knows so much of human anguish, a vision which contains some of the most beautiful lines in scripture —- I do not know words more lovely or heartfelt than the words: God will wipe every tear from our eyes; mourning and crying and pain will be no more —- how does this vision which makes so much of peace and goodness also generate such frightful inhumanities as great battles where whole armies and kingdoms are destroyed, where fires and killer hailstones and deadly scorching heat pour down from heaven, where earthquakes destroy cities, fields and homes, where mountains are leveled and rivers run with blood. How does the holy desire for love and peace open itself also to an affirmation of violence and bloodshed so overwhelming that it takes our breath away? There may be some who believe that question can be fully answered; I’m sorry to say that I am not one of them, but I can offer a way into the beginning of an answer —- and that is by going back to an old distinction between types of faith that the theologian Martin Buber famously made well over half a century ago. Buber distinguished the apocalyptic form of faith from the prophetic form. We’ve had this morning a good dose of the apocalyptic form of faith so I need only point out now that in this view humanity is divided into the holy and unholy, that history runs towards a catastrophic event brought about strictly by divine intervention and that, following the destruction of the anti-godly forces, God brings in a new age of unambiguously good life for the holy saved. The creation gets a fresh start; unlike the fresh start in the Noah and the flood story, which can be understood as an early form of apocalyptic, this time God’s will is written into the hearts and minds of the saved, or as the Book of Revelation has it, Christ’s name is written on their foreheads. In a turnaround of Saint Augustine’s words regarding sin, the saved now are “not free to sin.” The saved can only do the good. We can safely say then that the apocalyptic mind is driven by a desire for life under God in which only goodness is humanly possible. We need to look for something in this desire, perhaps some unconscious weakness, which opens up the floodgates of the violent imagination.

I have a friend, a retired professor, married to a Japanese woman, and so he has come to live half the year in Japan and the other half in the city of his birth and upbringing, Madison, Wisconsin. He recently returned to the US with mixed feelings: uncomfortable with the anger and hate entering into our political life, with the increasing power of corporate wealth in this country, with our aggressive, militaristic foreign policy, and so forth. He writes that perhaps he feels too comfortable in Japan, in part because Japan no longer seeks to exercise great national power so that its policies are not dangerous to the world. He feels that American policies, domestic and foreign, are dangerous to itself and the world. Without intending to, of course, my friend has given us a picture of what life and history looks like from the viewpoint of what Buber calls a prophetic faith. In a prophetic faith, we humans have power and we have the freedom to use and abuse that power. Though our motives may be good we inevitably overestimate their goodness, ignoring the excessive self interest that is in them. Also, we have a tendency to universalize our values, making absolute what may only be relative, and we underestimate the worth of the values of other nations and peoples. What’s true for the individual is even more so for the nation, especially a powerful nation. A powerful nation tends to overestimate the rightness of its own motives and to overestimate the capacity of its power to achieve its goals, seeking to master what may not be capable of being mastered. It’s no wonder that my friend feels uncomfortable when noting the power of this country. While a powerful country can do great good, it can also do great harm, particularly if it assumes its innocence and is unaware of the limits of what power can do or of its own mixed motives or of its ignorance of other cultures and histories. From the viewpoint of a prophetic faith, the whole drama of human history is under the scrutiny of a divine judge who notes our pretensions and vanities and willful and unwillful ignorance; condemns the injustices that flow from actions; all the while upholding that part of our motivation which aspires towards a wider good. To have faith in life under such a divine judge can prompt us into contrition for our vanities and lead us to abate our pretensions, thereby transmuting God’s judgment upon us into God’s mercy. This is a very different view of God’s role in history and of our role in history than the apocalyptic view, but it also provides the clue as to what it is in the apocalyptic mind that opens its vision to the imagination of violence. For while the prophetic view knows that none of us are as good as we think we are —- it takes to heart Jesus’ statement, “do you call me good; no one is good but God alone” so that the world does not so easily settle into a distinction between the good and the evil, the holy and the unholy —- (but) the apocalyptic view with its justified resentments against injustice and its holy/unholy distinctions can easily fall prey to harnessing that resentment into God’s violence against their oppressors, failing to recognize that though their oppressors may well be guilty of great evil, they themselves, the holy, are not as good as they esteem themselves. All of us need God’s mercy. All of us need a faith that prompts contrition. Humility in the judgment of ourselves and of others is the great Christian virtue. It is a weakness in faith not to recognize this.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, this sermon was set off by the dynamics of this morning’s apocalyptic lection encountering my friend writing me that he feels uncomfortable in America. That encounter has not lead this sermon into a clear gospel word —- unless it be this. Perhaps we should not run from being uncomfortable. Perhaps we should embrace it, for that is the human lot. Knowing that we are not as good as we think we are, not as innocent as we think we are, that we have weaknesses that we are not conscious of, that our pretensions are beyond our grasp, that our judgment of the other is often ill informed and lacking in empathy, is it any wonder that we should feel uncomfortable. But the comfort is this, and this is the gospel: that we have our life under a divine judge whose judgment, though real and powerful, is transmuted into mercy —- mercy for all. How it can be for all, I do not know. My faith here is running well beyond my understanding. But praise God for this mercy. Praise Christ for this mercy.

Amen.