The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Revelation is a letter many people would like to ignore. It is so strange and foreign to us, it certainly is not rational, and God forbid we appear to be irrational Christians. And vengeful. We thinking, rational, comfortable folk consider a vengeful God as a forgettable aspect of our primitive past. And then, to make matters worse, there are all the right wing interpreters of the letter who write poor novels that become best sellers.

Even as I share all of those thoughts and feelings about the book of Revelation, I am still drawn to it, and I believe it has something to say to us today. From time to time I will preach on it, and hopefully, over time, you will begin to appreciate its power. But today my sermon is not visionary or apocalyptic in a creative sense. Today I want to draw in from all that is happening in the world and take a personal look. What does your future look like?

Both our passages this morning are a response to difficult times. Clearly life in this moment is difficult, but what about the future? Is this the end of the game or is there another quarter? Can we make it into overtime and pull off a win? Are we headed down a dead end street or is there something more down that road? Will we have the courage to keep on going?

All the people I know have difficulty in their lives. M. Scott Peck begins his book "The Road Less Traveled" with the sentence, "life is difficult." There is no question that some people have more difficult lives than others. If you live in Israel or Palestine, Iraq, Haiti or the Sudan, the probability that your life is difficult is higher. Certainly if you are below a certain level of poverty it is very hard to enjoy life much of the time. We need a roof over our head, clothes on our back, and food for our stomach. We need a means to provide and obtain such things. Clean water is a basic human need without which life is very difficult.

There are different advantages and disadvantages that we are born with or inherit and have little to do with a baby’s merit of lack thereof. The playing field is not even, equal opportunity is a goal, not something we have achieved.

To understand the book of Revelation, it is important to understand that is was written for a group of people who were down and out, beaten down by life in a way that most of us have not experienced.

On the other hand most people, regardless of their advantages and privileges, suffer in life. Most of us have been relatively privileged, yet life still has a way of throwing us curve balls. Relationships are always difficult and painful, no less for the rich than the poor. Good friends of mine are both electrical engineers and make a bundle of money. Their first born child, Nicholas, was born with multiple complications and finally died after three years. Another couple of friends would like children but cannot have them. My nephew Wayne was happily married, and had a beautiful baby boy whom he named Max, after me. A Hollywood agent had seen him and asked the parents to put together a portfolio so that Max could do commercials. A couple of months later, at age one year and one month, Max escaped the watch of his father and drowned in a swimming pool.

I have learned that no matter how good someone’s life looks, it is not perfect and has its difficult points. The elderly woman has cancer; her husband fought in the War, and hasn’t been the same since.

The young single woman with a good job and lots of brains can’t seem to use them to help her get free of a bad man. For some reason her son keeps acting out, and so they give him Ritalin.

The super organized, always working woman looks so successful, and she is, except for the fact that the voice of her dead, critical alcoholic father keeps echoing through her head, and tells her she just isn’t good enough to be loved as a little girl should be. She has a hard time getting off antidepressants, even as she is honored at award banquets.

The good looking daredevil will bungee jump and snow board like he has no fear, but is terrified of commitment. He goes from one meaningless relationship to the next, reeking havoc all along the way. He seems to feel better if he smokes a lot of pot.

I often hear people proclaim that they don’t like the doctrine of original sin. They don’t like the idea that because Adam and Eve blew it, we are all somehow born sinful. It doesn’t seem fair, and besides, babies are so beautiful, who could anyone say they are sinful? A part of me thinks the same thing. In my mind, if a child dies before he or she is baptized, the child is not going to hell, as if anything the child could do, or any failure to perform some magical act warranted burning in a pit of sulfur forever. Not only is that not justice, it is ridiculous.

Still, our doctrine of original sin, I believe, was designed to address what is glaringly obvious, that no person is even remotely close to perfect, and groups and societies are even worse. And for this reason Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, "the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine is the doctrine of original sin." It is quite simply a fact of life. We are all messed up. We are all sinners. And so even St. Paul says, "The good that I would do I do not; while the wrong that I would not do, I do."

It may be true that right and wrong are somewhat relative and contextual, and what we label wrong may not be so wrong and what we label right may not be so righteous, but that only confirms our blindness, not our lack of sin.

Most of us go about our day avoiding this big picture view of things. Revelation takes the big view: in the grand scheme of things the earth is the Titanic and the iceberg of sin, and nobody can stop the leak. Or in the language of the Letter of Revelations, we want a new chapter of life to begin. We are tired of this war and pestilence, bickering and fighting between factions and individuals, but we are unable to get there alone. "Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals? And no one in heaven or on Earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it."

Or, through the eyes of the people of Israel in exile: they were unable to maintain their covenant with God, they suffered the loss of the family and land, and there was not much they could do about it. What is next? There will be a new day. God will renew the nation of Israel.

There is a transition made from the time this Isaiah passage was written and the first century. Isaiah 60 is talking about God favoring the nation Israel. Jesus, the person becomes the new representative for Israel and extends God’s blessing to all people. Thus the Magi come with camels and sheep to see Jesus.

God is able to open the next chapter of our life through Jesus the lamb, and now people from every nation, language and people have God’s love and forgiveness available to them. All we have to do is recognize it.

Can you see the light of God? Do you know God’s love? Perhaps you have issues or problems you are dealing with and you are beginning to understand you are not the savior, that you are in need of help. Who is worthy to open the next scroll of your life?

I want to share with you the account of Ann LaMotte’s conversion to Christianity from her book "Traveling Mercies." As a child she went to church every once in awhile with her grandparents, but her father did not believe.

"None of the adults in our circle believed. Believing meant that you were stupid. Ignorant people believed. Uncouth people believed, and we were highly couth. My dad was a writer, and my parents were intellectuals who went to the Newport Jazz Festival…and listened to Monk and Mozart…My dad was a serious bird watcher…He worshipped in the church of Allen Ginsberg…at the Tabernacle of Miles Davis. We were raised to believe in books and music and nature."

In many ways Anne lived a privileged life, but not all was great. She writes, "I loved and often seemed cheerful, but fear pulsed inside me. I was broke and clearly a drunk, and also bulimic…"

Anne mentions she never stopped believing in God, but she stayed clear of Jesus. "Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus."

La Motte frequented the Marin City flea market, "This is where I liked to be when I was hung over or coming down off a cocaine binge, here in the dust with all these dusty people, all this liveliness and clutter and color…

"If I happened to be there between eleven and one on Sundays, I could hear gospel music coming from a church right across the street. It was called St. Andrew’s Presbyterian, and it looked homely and impoverished, a ramshackle building with a cross on top…But the music wafting out was so pretty that I would stop and listen…It had a choir of five black women and one rather Amish-looking white man making all that glorious noise, and a congregation of thirty people or so, radiating kindness and warmth. During the time when people hugged and greeted each other, various people would come back to where I stood to shake my hand or try to hug me; I was as frozen and stiff as Richard Nixon.

"I went back to St. Andrew’s about once a month. No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying. I always left before the sermon. I loved singing, even about Jesus, but I just didn’t want to be preached at about him. To me, Jesus made about as much sense as Scientology or dowsing. But the church smelled wonderful, like the air had nourishment in it, like it was composed…of warmth and faith and peace. There were always chilrdren running around and being embraced…I loved this, but it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.

"Eventually, a few months after I started coming, I took a seat in one of the folding chairs, off by myself. Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone’s heart."

In April of 1984, Anne became pregnant. "I had published three books by then, but none of them had sold particularly well, and I did not have the money or wherewithal to have a baby. The father was someone I had just met who was married and no one I wanted a real live baby with. So Pammy took me in for the abortion one evening, and I was sadder than I’d been since my father died, and when she brought me home that night, I went upstairs to my loft with a pint of Bushmills and some of the Codeine a nurse had given me for pain. I drank until nearly dawn…On the seventh night, very drunk and just about to take another sleeping pill, I discovered that I was bleeding heavily…I thought I should call a doctor but I was so disgusted that I had gotten so drunk one week after an abortion that I just couldn’t wake someone up and ask for help…Several hours later the blood stopped flowing, and I got in bed, shaky and sad and too wild to have another drink or take a sleeping pill…After awhile, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner…The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for moment to make sure no one was there – Of course, there wasn’t. But after awhile, in the dark again, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him just as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.

"And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I though about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, ‘I would rather die.’

"This experienced spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition born of fear and self-loathing and booze and loss of blood. But then, everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen; you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left.

"And one week later, when I went to church, I was so hungover that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so riduculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape…I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I oped up to that feeling – and it washed over me.

"I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said…, ‘I quit.’ I took a long deep breath and said out loud, ‘All right. You can come in.’"

It sounds silly, but this story tells us there is a loving God who can open the winning chapter of our lives. When the going is tough, there is someone to take us on to better times. You may think it irrational, or a crutch, the belief of simple minded folk. I call it the Gospel of Jesus Christ.