9After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.
10They cried out in a loud voice, saying,
“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
11And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God,
12singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honor
and power and might
be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
13Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?”
14I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
15For this reason they are before the throne of God,
and worship him day and night within his temple,
and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.
16They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat;
17for the Lamb at the center 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.”
Ordeals
Holy God,
Remind us today of your honesty
Honesty that comes in vulnerability
In the cross moments of this life
In the times when loving you
And each other
Is dangerous business
Business that you are all about.
Amen
How many of you are poetry lovers?
Any poets out there?
I admit that I, at times, write poetry. Nothing of note, of course. But sometimes words need to be rearranged into a form that is altogether unfamiliar for us to be impacted by them again.
And I think that the world’s dependence on poets and poetry is pretty clear after weeks like this last one.
Weeks filled with tragedy, with suspense, with heartache, and with relief. Weeks filled with explosions in Boston and Waco, Texas. Weeks filled with earth quakes in China and floods in the Midwest.
These weeks need poetry to wrap them up for us because this last week humanity, especially those of us in direct contact with those situations I just named, have been through an ordeal.
And ordeals need a poet’s eye and a poet’s word to help us live with their reality.
One of the great preachers of this era, Walter Brueggemann, once claimed that a pastor must be more poet than anything if she is to wrap up God’s word and world into a 12 minute sermon.
He’s right, I think.
And I practiced a little poetry this last week as I walked into my basement after five inches of rain fell in record time. I composed this little haiku on the fly:
What is that floating
On the floor of my basement
Please don’t be sewage
It was this need for poetry this last week that leads me to preach on the Revelation text for this morning. John the Diviner, the writer of Revelation, is a poet.
We miss that fact, of course, because his writing is so odd and his language and imagery so foreign to us. For some it appears as if John is writing about some end times, or is predicting the future like Nostradamus.
He is not, of course. The book of Revelation fortells specific future events about as accurately as a Magic 8 Ball.
That’s not what this writing does.
This unusual writing style known as “apocalyptic” does have vivid imagery and odd cadence, though, much like poetry. It uses these literary techniques in order to paint vivid images of emotion and feeling for a church that was being persecuted by what seemed to be forces beyond its control. Forces that seemed so powerful, it was as if they were dragons and warriors on horseback. This is why he describes them with such imaginative imagery.
Christians in John the Diviner’s time were being killed for worshiping God and not worshiping the gods of power that Rome demanded they worship.
So, instead of the future, John the Diviner’s writing in Revelation is meant to talk about the present.
His present.
But, as with all Biblical books, it of course has something to say about our present as well.
And this is where John the Diviner, as Biblical poet, can help us. Because sometimes we need to be reminded by poetry, reminded by words arranged differently than we’re used to, about what the reality of the situation at hand is.
And we find ourselves in this book today; did you perceive it?
A great angelic being is speaking to John on this magical mystery road trip of a dream he’s taken over this great land of seven-headed dragons and scary horseman, and this angel asks John, “Who are these robed in white? They are the ones who have gone through the ordeal. They have washed their robes in the blood of the lamb and have been made white as snow.”
All this powerful imagery is there, so I wonder if you’ve caught your small piece in this poem.
You, my friends, are those robed in white. You are the ones who this morning are gathered around the Lamb of God singing that, “Salvation belongs to our God.”
You are the ones who held those palms in your hands a few Sundays ago. You are the ones who have been through the ordeal of this last week and countless weeks like this in the past, and you have come through it all.
And what did this ordeal look like?
It looked like runners finishing the marathon and running to the hospital to give blood. It looked like a bunch of teens on Monday night in this small chapel praying prayers for peace. It looked like you chucking the shop vac into the back of your car to run to a neighbor’s house to pump out flooded basements. It looked like you as you were glued to the news network praying not only for the victims of Boston but also for these sad young men accused of this crime who, while dangerous, are still children of God as well.
John the Diviner calls Jesus both the slain Lamb and the Shepherd in Revelation for a reason. The Lamb knows the pain of this world and has experienced it. But that Lamb is also the Shepherd because that Lamb leads God’s people to go into the fray with their hands and their hearts, knowing that there is pain in these ordeals, pain that must be alleviated.
This is, I think, what John the Diviner means when he says that these saints have been through the ordeal dipped their robes in the blood of the lamb and have been made pure and white. It is not because Jesus is some perfect sacrifice. It is because we have followed and continue to follow Jesus into the places of pain in this world to extend the peace of God.
This, as the mystic priest Richard Rohr says, is primarily what it means to be Christian: to go along with Jesus and agree to feel and suffer the pain of the world and ordeals of the world. Because it is Christ’s pain and Christ’s ordeals, and we enter into it for the sake of the world that God loves.
Our faith is rooted in being with Christ in those around us, andbeing Christ for those around us, especially during ordeals.
As the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins rightly wrote,
-for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his,
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
But this is not easy. And sometimes it does not feel all that rewarding.
Indeed one of the reasons that John the Diviner describes Rome as a seven-headed dragon is because he felt that the powers of this world, often times the cause of the pain and hurt in the world, didn’t like it when the peace of Christ showed up on the scene.
Because the peace of Christ is the antidote of fear, and this world would love for us to live in fear. As one op-ed would have us believe, “There is no going back to ‘normal’ for Boston.”
John the Diviner described the power of this world as if it was a monster of seven heads because it never allowed you to get ahead of it. It tells you that you’ll never feel normal again.
And sometimes the world’s pain can feel like that, as if it never stops, as if we can never get ahead, as if normal is gone, as if we show up on the scene of one tragedy but are constantly being called to a different scene, a different tragedy, a different heartache, without a break.
This can feel true in both our public world and our personal lives.
And in those times it can be tempting to give into the powers of this world that masquerade as friendly, but who are motivated not by the hospitality that God calls us to, but by fear. Fear that says we’re no longer safe in public places. Fear that tells us to stereotype those around us. Fear that tells us we should get revenge; call for more blood to be spilled.
Fear that tells us this world is getting worse and we have to prepare for it.
But do not give into that supposed wisdom of the world that the talking heads and the powers of this world try to give you.
Instead, do as the saints in Revelation do today, and ascribe wisdom and honor and glory to God alone.
God, who welcomes in the stranger. God, who invites us to gather here together as a group unafraid. Those ancient Christians that John was writing to saw worship as risky because it ascribed wisdom and glory and honor publicly to God rather than the powers of this world.
A God who promises not to shield us from one another, but instead to create such a kingdom where no one will thirst for death or hunger for suffering. A kingdom where all will be fed enough peace that fear will be a memory, and every tear will be wiped away by this Lamb who has been there before us and leads us through it from death to life.
And that, my friends, is what this world needs more of. It needs more of people who have been through the ordeals of life and have come out on the other side not jaded, cynical, and afraid, but confident in God’s wisdom, spouting the poetry that helps us to live full lives of service, ready to go to where the pain is next.
Because that is where Christ is leading us.
If we dare to be so bold as to adopt some poetry “We are what the world is missing,” as the poet Fernadno Pessoa says.
And indeed we are what the world is missing when we embody the Christ who lives for the sake of the world, entering into ordeals not for revenge and not out of fear, but to bring peace, and light, and life.
To wipe away the tears that ordeals cause trusting that one day Christ will wipe away every tear. That’s poetry.
Amen.
