After two years of no blogging, I have decided to get the blog back up and going. After two wonderful weeks on vacation with friends and family post-NIH internship, I set off tomorrow for a few days at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, NY. I plan to blog about some of my experiences there once I return on Sunday.
Until then, I thought I'd dive right in to a topic that several friends have wanted to discuss with me recently. Once we said the requisite hellos and such at a recent reunion with college friends, my dear friend Michael goes "I don't want to overwhelm you since we're having fun, but I want to talk about Revelation at some point. Because that is some crazy [stuff]." (paraphrasing is mine)
Revelation, the last book in the Bible, is indeed some crazy stuff. And what it has inspired in Christian history is even crazier. So why read it? Why is it important? Because I am also trying to pack and get ready to leave, I will answer this with a sermon I gave last year at one of the Cathedral's weekday morning services. More questions? Send them along!
I want this blog to be a place where we can explore the pressing questions of faith that people have- the ones they're too embarrassed to ask, the ones they feel keep them from having faith. So send me questions! Not because I have answers- but because I love questions, and I love exploring faith questions with folks. What's on your mind these days?
First up, the underlying hope of Revelation:
Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, author, and well known
preacher, spoke at the Cathedral a few years ago. In her sermon, she started
out by saying, “Full disclosure: I do not like the book of Revelation… I do not
even like people who like the
book of Revelation, since so many of them use it to justify their crazier ideas
about God and scare other people with what they think they know.”
As a person who actually did read the Left Behind series during my days as a young conservative
evangelical, I get what Barbara Brown Taylor is saying. For example, the blurb
on the back of the first Left Behind
book says, “An airborne Boeing 747 is headed to London when, without any
warning, passengers mysteriously disappear from their seats…. For those who
have been left behind, the apocalypse has just begun.”
This series, with its mass marketing and slick covers, nearly
ruined the book of Revelation for me. When I rejected the Scriptural literalism
that guides its fictional narrative, I also rejected the book of Revelation as
too crazy, too far out there. And its violent rhetoric and treatment of women
have done little to endear me to it, either.
Over the centuries, Christians have long struggled to interpret
and understand this text. One of our church fathers from the 4th
century, Jerome, remarked that the book of Revelation contains as many
mysteries as it contains words.
Which makes it interesting that the passage we heard today is read
so often at our most heart-breaking services—funerals.
We use this passage from Revelation at funerals for precisely the
same reason we reject it at most other times—because Revelation dares to look
past death, past the current world, and into the world to come. Revelation
dares us to imagine a world in which
We who suffer will
hunger no more, and thirst no more;
A world where the sun will not strike us,
nor any scorching heat;
for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be our shepherd,
and he will guide us to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.’
Funerals are one of those rare times
when we sit with our mortality and face it. Someone who we knew and loved in
this life is gone, and whatever euphemisms we may use to mask the event, this
person has died. They no longer exist in a way that we can understand.
The fear, the uncertainty which this
arouses in us is primal—death represents the ultimate disruption. Death is the
great unknown, when theologies built over a lifetime fall apart, when doubt
corrodes our faith like an acid, when loss threatens to isolate us from all we
once knew and loved.
My father passed away when I was ten
years old—one day, we were together. The next day, my father’s brown armchair
was empty and there was a gaping hole where his comforting presence had once
been. My family was thrust into darkness and the unknown, and I remember
looking around frantically for something solid to grab onto, something to help
us ground ourselves.
For those of us who have lost loved
ones, we know the deep feeling of disorientation and pain which death causes. Suddenly,
questions which we could ignore or not worry about become of vital
importance—what happens to our loved ones after they die? What will happen to
me when I die?
Our cry, from deep within our souls,
begs God to help us, to help us understand at the very least!
When we consider the book of Revelation
from this place of deep human suffering, the image of a God who redeems those
who suffer and who wipes the tears from their eyes even in the midst of great
violence and upset becomes more than just a piece of a strange vision—it
becomes the balm for the soul of the afflicted.
But it is not just the balm for us as individuals. In his book, Can I Get a Witness?, Brian Blount looks
at Revelation through the eyes of oppressed communities. He sees the wild and
vivid imagery of Revelation, which can be so off-putting to folks, as the dream
of the oppressed for salvation from the pains of this life in the life to come.
The community which the author of Revelation addresses was one under
persecution from a powerful and seemingly invincible Roman Empire. It is less
surprising then, that their dreams and visions consisted of the overthrow of
this regime and the hope of a new world order.
Blount reads Revelation from the perspective of African Americans,
who have long suffered under the yoke of oppression. He makes many parallels
between the oppressed early Christians and African American spirituality,
particularly the use of code-language and singing, used by both the writer of
Revelation and those in slavery. One of the themes which emerges is that, for
those who do not see justice in their day to day lives, belief in a God who
will one day rectify that injustice is vital for the community’s continued
existence.
As many of us know, dreams are often
fantastic, wild, and illogical expressions of our deepest yearnings—as a dream
of those who suffer, the book of Revelation is thus the hope of a world to come
which is kinder, gentler, and more just than the world in which we now live. In
fact, we need not look far to see the violence it describes in our world today,
from the sectarian violence which is overtaking Syria and Iraq to the shootings
in our own city which take the lives of our young people. Our world is a
violent place, with too few safe places for the vulnerable to rest.
Perhaps the close association of these
verses with funerals makes some poetic sense then, when we consider that both
are avoided and feared until they become absolutely necessary and inescapable.
Revelation is a beacon which reminds us
that there is a world to come which is far better than the one we see now—it is
a signpost on the way to redemption which says, “Yes, it’s hard, and yes life’s
often unfair. But God has the final say, and you will be saved even from death.
Keep going.”
It is a reminder that a delicate
combination of endurance and hope, even in the face of insurmountable odds, is
sometimes the kind of faithfulness to which we are called.
We make a mistake with the text, though, if we
only expect it to provide relief from our suffering. Sister Joan Chittister tells
the story that, “A distressed person came to a wise man for help. The wise man
asked, “Do you really want a cure?” The disciple answered, “If I did not, would
I bother to come to you?” “Oh, yes,” the wise man said. “Most people do.” And
the disciple said, incredulously, “But what for then?” And the wise man
answered, “Well, not for a cure. That’s painful. They come for relief.”
The incredible visions and images in
the book of Revelation promise us not merely relief, but ultimately healing in
the arms of God, the God of our ancestors, the God who led the Israelites from
slavery into new life, the God who sent his only Son to abide among us. This is
the God we follow, and this is the God who will shepherd us, who will guide us
to springs of the water of life, who will wipe away every tear from our eyes,
the God who comes to us in great majesty and even greater love.
In
the words of a later chapter in Revelation:
See, the home of God is
among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God
himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will
be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things
have passed away… And let everyone who is thirsty come. Amen. (Rev 21:3b-4,
22:17b)
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