Transcribed from the Sermon Preached June 6, 2004

Today I am sharing with you an Apocalypse.  I am mixing the language of scripture with modern imagery.  I am attempting to make a connection with the prophetic tradition that comes to us through history and the Bible.  Virtually every age has had its share of prophets who interpreted apocalyptic literature as a prediction of current events.  Here at the beginning of the new millennium our culture has been particularly susceptible to the belief that the events talked about in Revelation are coming to fruition.

Yet I believe it is a mistake to think that John was writing about actual events in our time.  For if he was, John’s audience would not have been able to understand the letter.  Though I feel John was probably hanging on to sanity by a very thin thread, my sermon two weeks ago helped show that much of his strange, fantastic imagery was in reference to historical events and cultural images that his audience, at the end of the first century, would have been familiar.  Deeply rooted in the Judaism and Hebrew prophecy, John tries to give his audience a larger perspective, a divine perspective.

The Christian cult is under extreme pressure, primarily made up of poor, marginalized and powerless peasants.  Some of their trouble just comes from living in their time and place.  They are susceptible to famine and natural disaster.  At the same time the emperor of Rome and the Roman state have destroyed Israel and the temple, and have put pressure on Christians to conform and worship them.  Just as today, the majority of the populous supports the ideology of the State.  Christian resistance to worship of the emperor and the State of Rome is seen as unpatriotic and seditious.  The local population and local government put pressure on Christians to conform through public ridicule, vigilante justice, and State sanctioned torture and execution.

Eugene Boring points out in the Interpretation Commentary on Revelation, "In the face of this pressure, Christians had several options: 

1. They can quit the Christian faith.  Many did.
2. They can hide their faith and lie about it when asked. 
3. They can pick up arms and fight.  Jerusalem already tried that and was squashed like a bug.
4. They can work within the system and try to change the law and popular opinion.  Yet these are poor uneducated peasants with little power, so this option is not yet viable. 
5. They can adjust and compromise, trying to worship both the emperor, Roman gods, and Jesus and the God of Hebrew scripture.  Many chose this option.
6. They can remain radically faithful, even if it means suffering and death.  John’s Apocalypse is a vote to be radically faithful.

If the Church is going to remain radical, John will have to answer this theological question, "If the faithful are on the Creator’s side, why are they not the successful and powerful?"  In the past, prophets such as Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah pointed out that when the people of Israel didn’t keep the law, when they succumbed to greed and injustice, disaster came.  There was no conceptual problem because the prophets could declare that disaster was God’s judgment.  What is happening then, when it is the faithful people who are suffering?  Is God unfaithful?  Is God incapable and less powerful than the emperor or the state?  John argues that neither is the case.  God is faithful and capable.  If we have the vision, we will see God’s big picture and know that even though we may not win from the perspective of the world, there is a victory for the just and peaceful, and it is coming soon enough.  Like Reinhold Niebuhr, you could classify John as a "pessimistic optimist".  Acknowledge the bleakness in reality now, but powerful faith is still possible, justice will be done, and real peace will prevail.

So as Boring points out, "Revelation does not make predictions for our time: it does have a message for our time."  I do believe we are in an apocalyptic time, a time when one world comes to an end and another has yet to begin.  Our vision of the future is cloudy at best.  There is pressure from one extreme and the other, from forces outside the Church and from within. On the one hand, the culture driven by the postmodern market would have us accept everything in culture as good.  On the other hand, the popular majority within Christianity would have us attach our faith to the state’s power and violence.  What are we to do?

One last thing on John’s Apocalypse:  It is not a linear time line, starting at a certain point in history and following with successive events.  It unfolds like peeling layers off an onion until you get to the core.  God and God’s Kingdom is the core, the beginning and the end, and the middle at all times.

And behold, I saw an angel from heaven and it said, turn on your computer and type, and I saw a serpent of the beast slithering across the European continent, deceiving nations with his silver sharp tongue.  And nations prostituted themselves to him, while others were blinded with fear.

The serpent herded Israel into metal carriages and threw them into a great pit where there was much grinding and gnashing of teeth.  Then the serpent led the people of Israel to the shower of gas and fire, turning them into buttons and soap.  Human bones were stacked like great mountains, and a third of the nations of the world were at war.

Then a second angel showed me an island where two great flashes of fire and light consumed 144,000 people in seven seconds.  The heat was so great that flesh burned before the bodies had time to fall to the ground.  Babies were born sick, mother’s milk was poison, fathers were too weak to work.  And I heard a voice from Heaven say, "The power of the Beast has been unloosed."

And I saw a great wall go up.  And I saw three worlds.  The first world was ruled by an eagle whose colors were red, white and blue.  The second world was ruled by a great red bear.  The third world stood under the paw and the claw of the first and second worlds. The eagle and the bear raced to envelope all the nations of the Earth.

A third angel took me down to the third world.  It was a warm and humid world with great rivers full of creeping things, and trees whose tops held the chain of life.  And I saw great roaring locusts from the first and second world drop sulfur, and naked burning children running through the street.  The soldier of the beast took the land and used it as a prostitute.  The little people of the land disappeared, and orphans wandered through waste fields of the giants from the worlds to the North, looking for food.  The chain of life had been broken.

Then the light of God came down from heaven for a time.  And the prophets of the Lord sang with choirs of angels, "Break down all the walls, prepare the way for the Lord, every valley shall be filled in and every mountain and hill made low."  There was a great earthquake, and a dungeon of the Beast opened up, and countless women marched up into the light.

After a while the beast was loosed again, this time with even more power to deceive the people of God.  And some of the people of God went to the side of the Beast.  They became monsters, half human, half beast, with white pointed heads and black eyes, and worms of hatred ate their insides.  Their mark was KKK.  A great Bull was their pharaoh.  And they pushed the armies of God back with rivers that tore skin.  But the lamb walked with them and raised Moses.  And Moses said to the Bull: "Let my people go."  And the people marched on, and the rivers were parted.

Then I saw black children and white children, yellow children and brown children from all three worlds joining hands and proclaiming with one voice, "We shall overcome!  Glory, Glory, Alleluia!  God’s Truth is marching on."  And they took hammers and began to break the walls down; the serpent was slain, and the red bear fell into an eternal pit of darkness.

A fifth angel took me up to heaven on a great silver bird, and we looked down on a fourth world.  This world is the Great Mother and she appeared as a small blue ball covered with wisps of cotton.  Mother included the first three worlds, but was newer, and at the same time more ancient.  The mother and choirs of saints wanted to sing, but it was not their time yet.  The beast had become even more deceptive and powerful.

The powers and principalities loosed three monsters.  The first was a hungry green monster whose front was the face of a saint and whose back was an eagle and a pyramid with one eye.  The monster pretended to ask people to trust in the Lord, but it really wanted people to care only for their flesh.  It was the root of all evil.  This was a tricky monster.  It gave people things, so at first its taste was sweet, and people worshipped him.  But the more the people had, the more they wanted.  Even as they were filled and filled, the monster always left them hungry for more.

People began to abuse the freedom the Lamb had given them in the time at the end of the three worlds.  I saw beautiful people, adorned with the most perfect body parts, bought with the green monster at the market of the Beast.  But they could not purchase eyes to see.  They could not see that all good comes from the Lord, even the good on this fourth world.  So they chased the green monster blindly, losing track of their communities and families, falling into the pits of adultery and deceit.

After a while the green monster grew two plastic horns, one platinum and one gold.  These horns gave even more energy to the green monster to make slaves of the multitudes.  Soon the people who worshipped the green monster put numbers on their hands.  I saw the principalities keeping track of those faithful to the beast by reading an invisible chain that was each person.

A sixth angel took me to witness as the green monster gave birth to the second monster.  This monster gave even more energy to the powers and principalities.  This monster came up from the Mother as ancient pools of dead dinosaurs, and its name was "Black Gold."  It gave people so much power that they thought they did not need God or the Lamb.  Black Gold gave the powers and principalities power over the Mother, and enabled them to perform many signs and wonders.

But smoke rose from the fire of lust and gluttony, and began to consume the sky.  And where there was rain it rained more, and where it was dry it was dryer.  And I saw huge nasty women dancing spirals over the oceans, and soon men joined them, and the wind from their dance crushed houses and washed people into the sea.  I saw land with no trees, and multitudes of starving people running from war, devastation, and pestilence.  A third of the animals and a third of the fish of the sea were destroyed, and a third of the polar ice caps melted.  I saw people eating strange food produced from the intercourse of insects and corn and pigs.  Cattle were fed as food to cattle, and the salty water of the sea began to eat the fresh water of the land.  The Mother had been enslaved and turned into the whore of the monsters to be used up and thrown away.

Then a seventh angel swept me down into a valley of silicon, where the green monster and the black gold monster mated and gave birth to a third monster.  I saw the multitudes riding as surfers over electric waves that crossed one another like a net.  The Net was its name, and its numbers were 1 and 0.  The Net produced a fifth world, and this world’s name was Virtual Reality.  The human bodies stayed in the fourth world, but their minds went into the fifth.  Teenage girls were made into prostitutes and given the key to the virtual back door of married men.  Men gambled with the Green Monster until their families were homeless.  This third monster became the baby sitter for parents who worshiped the first monster.

While the parents were away, the third monster took the children into the fifth world to worship at the church of the Beast, to perform lewd acts, make bombs and kill.  And when the children wanted to get out, they found themselves trapped.  Soon they did not know which world they were in.  I saw boys who had lost their souls all dressed in black, and blood pouring out the windows of school libraries.

From all sides of the Earth I heard thunderous cries: "We are the Truth, our god has told us," "We know the truth, our god has told us, death to you and your god."  "We know the truth, there is no god.  Death to God."  "Truth is what I want.  I want your death."

The seventh angel showed me a city in the West, great as Babylon, filled with people from every nation, and they all spoke the language of the green monster, and they said, "Let us build two towers that reach the heavens."  Yet the people did not have the eyes to see that the language of the green monster both united and divided, brought to a common goal, and confused.  And Black Gold gave the power to build up, but also to tear down.  Even the gods were confused, and the people could not understand them.  The people were filled with fear and heard the gods calling for sacrifice.  But it was a sacrifice to the Beast.  And I saw two dragons from the East crashing into the towers, and the towers fell, and nations were blinded and divided by hatred and fear.

And the Lamb said, "So full of truth, yet confused, so full of light yet you are still blind. You have power to carry yourself to heaven, yet you fall into Hell. You say I am the Way, yet your journey leads you into the abyss. You wait for the rapture with arrogant confidence, yet I have already left you behind.   You are wolves in sheep’s clothing, and you lead my people off a cliff.  You say ‘Lord, Lord,’ and pray for all to see.  But remember, not all those who say ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  I have shown you, oh people, what is good.  And what does the Lamb require of you…To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

"Fall down on your knees and beg for forgiveness, you wretched and perverse generation.  My Truth is found in humility, my light in grace, my peace in justice, my power in love.  The Lamb is the Lion.  I am the Lion that lies down with the lamb.  The Lion is at peace.  My peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you."

The people of God were there, struggling to care for one another with the gifts the Lord had given them, but in this time they could only see in a mirror dimly.  Some lost their way altogether, and became slaves to the Beast, while others tried hard to keep their ears and eyes open for the Lamb, and to be good and faithful stewards.  Just when they thought they were unable to continue to persevere, the ancestors down through the ages were raised, and people heard them sing to the Lamb, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but know I am found, was blind but know I see."  They thought they could destroy the Lamb, but the Lamb has risen and is now the Lion.  Then I heard the Lamb say.  "Do not give up, my Kingdom is at hand."

A voice from heaven cried out, "Who has the power to open the next world?"  And suddenly the Lamb appeared seated on a throne and said, "I am making everything new.  I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.  To him who is thirsty I will give drink without cost from the spring of the water of life."  The saints from all ages and worlds were raised, and they gave their faith to the followers of the Lamb; their eyes were opened and they could see clearly.

And the powers and principalities, the servants of the Beast, and all the monsters were thrown into a cage where they had to serve the Lamb.  The Beast was thrown down into a fiery pit of burning sulfur.  And all the people and nations of the world were freed from the evil powers.  The Lamb said, "The Mother is my creation, and I am making her new."  And then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, flowing from the mother, and the peoples of the world ate together in peace, with joy and thanksgiving.  The children of the world were happy and healthy; they swam and drank from the pure river.  Each man and woman rested in the shade of their own vine and their own fig tree, and nobody made them afraid.  And a loud voice said, "The dwelling of God is with women and men, and God will live with them."

Finally I was told to turn off my computer, but not before the Lamb said, "Behold, you do not know the time, but I am coming soon!  Your reward is with me.  Remain faithful.  I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.