First Presbyterian Church
What's a Presbyterian to do with Revelation? Part 7
Sermon for June 27,2004
by Pastor Susan Barnes

Children's Time: Revelation Recap

“Last summer, I preached a series on the book of “Revelation.” It's also called “The revelation of John.” The King James Version calls it “The Revelation of St. John the Divine. It's also called the apocalypse because the Greek word for revelation is apokalupsis. John talks about visions from God, that revealed important things about God. Sometimes people call the book “Revelations”, but it doesn't have an s on it. It's just called “Revelation.” It is the very last book in the Bible.

I need your help today. I want to review the first 6 chapters of Revelation for the congregation. So I have some signs for you to hold up. The signs have lots of symbols on them.”

I distributed signs to the children.

Sign of Chapter 1: a giant arrow. “John pointed out a problem that the Christians hadn't seen. Many of them were focused on surviving, and collaborated with the Romans. That kept them from following Jesus.”

Sign of Chapter 2: PG-13. “Revelation is full of dramatic action and symbols to help us remember that we are supposed to seek God's guidance. It can be scary, so I gave it a PG-13 rating. Then I realized everyone needs guidance, not just kids under 13, and the guidance every needs is from God, so I changed the sign to read GGG (God's guidance for general audiences).

This is the part where John writes letters to seven different churches, calling each church a lampstand. So I brought out this candelabra with seven candleholders, kind of like a lampstand. Each candle holder has an envelope on it. What do you suppose is inside the envelopes? Yes, letters! I used Greek letters, since that's the language John wrote in.” E- Ephesus, S- Smyrna, P- Pergamum, Q- Thyatira.

Chapter 3 chapter finishes up the letters to the churches: S- Sardis, F- Philadelphia, L- Laodicea. The sign says “state (does not equal) God. Some Christians were trying to stay safe by worshiping the state gods, instead of worshiping God. Being a good Roman citizen meant going to a Roman temple; but that kept you from following Jesus.”

Sign of Chapter 4: pictures of eyes and wings. “When John wrote Revelation, Christians were being persecuted by the Romans. There were lots of holy beings, God's messengers, who saw the problems happening on earth. They praised God.”

Sign of Chapter 5: Chrismon crown ornament and a scroll with 7 stickers on it. “Chapter 5 uses the book of Daniel. Daniel talks about a scroll. This scroll has seven seals on it, so I put seven stickers on this one. No one could open the scroll except for the lamb.

In Chapter 6, the lamb opens some of the seals, and terrible things came out. It's pretty scary, and hard to understand. At the end of the chapter, they asked a question. That's why the sign for chapter six is a question mark. Thank you for helping me today. Let's pray.

The first seal brought a white horse to conquer, the second, a red horse to take away peace, the third, a black horse to bring inflation, the fourth, and a green horse to bring death. These are known as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The fifth seal triggers the martyrs' lament, and they are told to put on robes and wait, more martyrs will join them. When the lamb opened the sixth seal, there was an earthquake, the sun went black, the moon turned to blood, the stars fell, the sky rolled up, and the mountains and islands left their places.

Then all the kings, rulers, and generals, and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They shouted, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of the one seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?"

It is this question that chapter 7 answers. Listen for the word of God as it is found in Revelation 7:1-17.

After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth so that no wind could blow on earth or sea or against any tree. I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to damage earth and sea, saying, "Do not damage the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have marked the servants of our God with a seal on their foreheads."

And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred forty-four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of the people of Israel : From the tribe of Judah twelve thousand sealed, from the tribe of Reuben twelve thousand, from the tribe of Gad twelve thousand, from the tribe of Asher twelve thousand, from the tribe of Naphtali twelve thousand, from the tribe of Manasseh twelve thousand, from the tribe of Simeon twelve thousand, from the tribe of Levi twelve thousand, from the tribe of Issachar twelve thousand, from the tribe of Zebulun twelve thousand, from the tribe of Joseph twelve thousand, from the tribe of Benjamin twelve thousand sealed.

After 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. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!"

And 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, singing, "Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen."

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?" I 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. For 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. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for 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."

This ends our reading from God's word.

The lamb will be the shepherd to all the uncounted Like the 144,000 will be marked, and protected. Like the Israelites were protected from the angel of death in Exodus when they painted the lintels of their doors with lambs' blood. It is from verses like these that we get the idea that if we believe the right way, we will be protected.

And so, when something terrible happens to us, we know something has gone wrong in the universe.

Harvard chaplain Peter Gomes writes “we have been seduced by false and phony version of the Christian faith that suggests that we are somehow immune to trouble. Because we have been nice to God, our thinking goes, God should be nice to us. Because you have interrupted your normal routine and come here today, God should take note of it, mark it down in the book and spare you any trouble, tribulation or turmoil. Tribulation happens only to bad people—shouldn't it therefore be happening in spades to all those people who are not here this morning but just getting up out of bed, recovering from a night of pleasure…? Tribulation happens only to the nonobservant and bad people.”

“In times of prosperity, either we make prosperity our religion, or we imagine that we can do without religion altogether. Who needs it? When turmoil happens to others, we can be mildly empathetic, perhaps even sympathetic, and maybe we can even utter that famous aphorism, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.' When turmoil hits us, however, when we are knocked flat, when all of our securities and our cherished illusions are challenged to the breaking point and break, then comes the great question we must both ask and answer; What is left when everything we have is taken from us?” (1)

The early Christians asked “How can we follow Jesus, if he was betrayed, crucified, and buried? Where is the salvation in all this suffering?” The book of Revelation responds to that concern.”

John wrote to Christians who accommodated to the Roman culture. And so, we who accommodate to the American culture, need to hear his message. John used symbols, stories, and scriptures from his Jewish tradition to describe how dire the situation was for early Christians.

A contemporary Christian author said “The problem is not that we've tried faith and found it wanting, but that we've tried mammon and found it addictive, and as a result, find following Christ inconvenient.” (2)

So John's visions warn us what will happen to those who conveniently go after mammon. In chapter 6, the rulers, and generals and the rich and the powerful hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of the one seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb.” I could understand that , but it also says everyone, slave and free, is also hiding from the wrath of the lamb.

But then, chapter seven begins explaining that all the tribes of Israel will be protected. The old testament lists the tribes of Israel 18 different ways; using ten or twelve of fifteen possible names. When tribes are listed, it is usually to conscript men for an army, or take a census for taxation, determine social religious duties, or assign land grants.

By the time of Jesus, all but two of the tribes had disappeared; the records were lost and the people assimilated in the Assyrian exile. So the number 12 means all Israel , as well as all the apostles. 12 tribes times twelve apostles is 144. A very complete number. A thousand could mean one thousand, or it could mean a really big number. So the number 144,000 signified everyone from God's covenant people Israel . Every tribe has the same amount; every tribe is equal.

These 144,000 have been gathered to be protected, to be marked, so that the horsemen, or winds, cannot harm them. They can stand before God's wrath, unlike those hiding in the mountains.

And the 144,000 are joined by an uncountable multitude of people from everywhere, all tribes speaking every language, robed in white. The word multitude is better translated as rabble or crowd; they are generally poor; they have been hungry and thirsty.

They will be sheltered, fed, and comforted. And all they have done is wash their robes in the blood of the lamb. I don't know what that means; it might be baptism; it might mean that they asked for forgiveness; it might mean that they were victims of injustice, like Jesus was. Now, they will be protected. But we still have the situation of the martyrs in chapter 6; faithful people on earth will still suffer, and be killed, added to the number of martyrs at the altar. I want to know why those martyrs to be just couldn't be sealed like the 144,000 or protected like the uncounted rabble. I might as well ask about the slaves hiding in the mountains with the kings and rulers, wondering who can stand before God.

So far, John's answer to the question of suffering seems to be “Get a robe and be patient, and keep on witnessing to Jesus.”

I read an essay by a priest and systematic theologian. She wrote: “A few years ago I had the opportunity to work for a semester as a chaplain at Boston jail. My primary work was helping to lead a group of inmates in the practice of silent prayer. It might not be immediately obvious that prayer, especially the sustained practice of silent prayer, could effect anything positive in the intimidating context of a jail. ….Yet one of the most striking features of jail life is the continuous level of noise. Without carpets on the floor, with screams of command from the guards regularly punctuating the atmosphere, and with small three-men cells ….jail offers little opportunity for stillness and peace. Many men find it difficult even to close their eyes in the presence of others they fear. Privacy of a sort can be achieved only by demotion to solitary confinement.

On any given day I reckoned that about a third of the men were regular meditators, a third were trying to find their way into the practice, and a third were merely using the opportunity to get out of their cells or amass ‘good time.'

Shared silence in peace and solidarity in the context of a jail is possible the most subversive act of resistance to the jail's culture of terrorization and violence that one might devise.

Occasionally, as if by a miracle, the straining and sweating and shifting of a hard shared silence would transmute into a few minutes of acute and focused stillness. After one such ‘miracle' a prison social worker (not a Christian) who was with us that day asked: ‘Why is this so wonderful, and so different, when we do it together?' An older….prisoner, Terry , replied, ‘I've only just become a Christian, but doesn't it say somewhere in the New Testament that when two or three are gathered together Jesus promises to be with us? ‘ I learned that day that such scriptural texts can gain powerful new [meaning] (3)in the prison context.

Often the sessions were hard work for us all. Many of the men new to the practice found it hard to relax or to bear the inner turmoil that the silence engendered. At such times I felt strongly the influence of my inner group of more experienced practitioners, whose gentleness and pose were the best advertisement for the long term efficacy of the undertaking. Gentleness, poise, peace, and solidarity: these were indeed manifest ways of ‘bucking the system,' if only for a short and blessed interval in the prison day. “

I found another answer to that question, “Why is there suffering, anyway?” when I read this about theologian Roberta Bondi, who was concerned when her 82-year-old mother broke both her feet in an accident on an elder-hostel trip. She was worried about her mother's state of mind. She said, “Mother comes from a long line of Kentucky farm women who are dreadfully shamed by their own weakness or dependency ….My mother needs to accept that broken bones happen to nearly everyone, and to believe that there is no particular Christian virtue in remaining unwounded and nondependent. Mother needs to be quite certain that if God is not too good for dependency, suffering, and death, human beings don't have to be either.”

The answer, of course, is Jesus. Let us affirm our faith.

(1) Gomes, Peter, “Storm Center,” Christian Century May 31, 2003 , p. 9.

(2) Arthur Simon, How Much Is Enough? Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture, quoted in Christian Century, May 31, 2003 , p. 7.

(3) Original world ‘valency'