A sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church of Prairie Village, Kansas. August 19, 2012. The third of a four part sermon series on the Book of Revelation.
John 15:12-17
and Revelation 13:1-18
Watch this sermon at vimeo.com/49862550.
***
When I was around ten or eleven,
I spent a lot of time
in my small Iowa town’s Ben Franklin 5 and 10 store.
I might have spent as much time there as I did with a catalog
called Things You Never Knew Existed…
and other items you can’t POSSIBLY live without!
It was sort of like those ubiquitous Sky Mall catalogs you find
in the storage pocket of airplane seats.
A thousand items that show the ingenuity of the inventive mind
and which are almost all unnecessary and extravagantly silly.
At the time I was fascinated with hiding things.
Toy cars
My older brother’s car keys.
A note I had written and wasn’t brave enough to give to the girl.
You know, things important to an eleven year old boy.
And the Ben Franklin and the Things You Never Knew Existed catalog
offered a number of products
which were tailor made just for someone like me:
There were books sporting titles like Moby Dick
or Crime and Punishment
that looked just like every other book
on our family library shelves
except that when you opened them
the pages were all glued together
and a huge hole was cut out
where you could hide Blake’s car keys
if you wanted to…
Or there were cans of Pepsi cola that weren’t…
with a top that screwed on and off to reveal a secret chamber
for those toy cars or the note to the girl.
You could buy rocks to go in the garden
with a chamber underneath built in
useful to put a house key if you’d locked yourself out
but other things could be kept securely secret there…
And around this time, the movie Clue came out,
with its strange and mesmerizing tale of plotting and intrigue
unfolding like a Choose your Own Ending book.
It was enough to keep an eleven year old busy for weeks!
Thinking about secret passages that had to be built into our house!
Digging and rooting about for hidden gems
left behind by prior inhabitants
or plotting how to secure all my valuables from the searching eyes
of my brothers or, worse, my parents.
It became somewhat all consuming, so deeply interesting to me
that I became entranced by the cloak-and-dagger
possibilities that were all around my quite average
pedestrian four-square Iowa home.
***
I approached this sermon this week with a bit of trepidation.
Not because no one really wants to preach
about the Beasts in Revelation, or because the sign of the beast
the 666 mentioned here at the end
is one of those so-badly-appropriated
pieces of this text in modern-day mis-reading
of Revelation.
We could tackle that topic with a sober and faithful reading.
But there is something about preaching about this book in the first place
that gives me pause.
The word Revelation, from the Greek apocalypto
(from which we get the word apocalypse),
literally means something like
“taking the lid off of something”.
It signifies something which clarifies,
information which takes the mystery out of a situation.
And in religious discourse, it means a vision from God
or a revelation of divine secrets.
The word suggests that upon receiving a revelation,
an apocalyptic message about the divine,
that we should have greater understanding
deeper insight
greater purchase on the truth.
But apocalyptic has never really functioned that way in scripture,
and certainly not in the Revelation of Jesus Christ that we
read from this morning.
Scholars have long noted how this story given to us by John of Patmos
dazzles us through image and metaphor.
(Something that dazzles actually obstructs the vision,
keeps us from seeing rightly)
It evokes fear and awe and tentative standing before
the massive forces at play in the story…
beasts and dragons and angels
armies on the battlefield
smoke belching to the heavens
portents and cries and diadems.
And we look at it with our 21st century desire for clean stories
and rational discourse
and wonder how in the world
it can be of any use to people like US?
This week images were all over facebook, for instance,
showing a view of the sky from Mars,
with Venus, Jupiter, and Earth
brilliant in the martian Sky….
(Ed note: This picture turned out to be a hoax. However, the general point remains and I concur with the author of the debunking article who says “And remember: we have actual, real, amazing, breath-taking images coming from Mars right now. And the fact that they are real, and mean we have a presence on another world, is far more moving and stirring than any fake could ever be.”)
How does a people who can craft machines
that can blast into the heavens
and send us back pictures like THAT
— in High Definition, by the way
How does a people like that
have any use for any word that might be hidden in the Revelation?
This week, I had to tell my daughter five times
that there were no such things as monsters
so that she could get to bed at night.
What, honestly, are WE to do with visions of dragons and beasts?
with a text that feels weird to read,
from a genre of literature with which we are not familiar.
A text which is often used by religious voices we find distasteful
to make predictions of doom or divine wrath,
to support misogyny or oppressive systems or their own
contorted religious perspective.
Or a text that feels, to many of us, like that Sky Mall magazine,
interesting, maybe, but so impractical and frivolous… fluff.
***
Christopher Rowland has argued that Revelation is not a text
that is meant to be decoded.[i]
That it is not written in an attempt to obscure or hide.
It is not the scriptural equivalent of a fake Pepsi-can safe.
Instead, receiving a text like this requires what he calls
“a different set of interpretive skills.”
It is not narrative. It is not moral exhortation.
It is not a letter addressed to a church community to address
specific, historically decipherable problems.
Revelations, apocalyptics, require use of imagination and emotion.
They are meant to move us, to shake us, to convict us.
Not to give us LOGICAL readings of the world.
And so, all attempts to claim that these are literal histories
fortune telling stories with an upcoming reality
every effort to PARSE and DECODE and DISTILL
these stories will get us out of the realm of imagination
and emotion
and ultimately away from what the text itself
is trying to do.
And so as I approach this text and this sermon series,
I want to encourage all of us to take this time
as setting the stage for our own reading of the book.
These sermons are meant to help give context and structure
to your own engagement with the Revelation of Jesus Christ given to us by John.
To help you see why it is not about the destruction of the world
or about claiming a few elect people out of the rest of the world
or about the foundation for fanciful tales of those Left Behind.
These sermons are meant to equip you in your own efforts
to read Revelation yourselves, so that you can use your own
imagination and emotion to feel what God is saying to us
through this text.
And then to apply that to our very technical, rational, logical world
a world that sends rockets to Mars
and teaches our children that there are no such things as monsters.
***
Who is like the Beast, and who can stand against it?
The vision in this part of Revelation is about the Dragon,
the great evil force running rampant
throughout the center of this tale
and two great beasts—one of the sea, one of the land—
who are doing the dragon’s work.
The reader knows, through the very language of Dragon and Beast
that these are not Godly characters.
They are not on the side of God’s love and mercy and peace.
The image is of wild, powerful, forcefulness: “like a leopard
its feet were like a bear’s
and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth.”
The first beast was given power by the dragon, and while it had suffered
some resistance, even a “mortal blow”
it appears to have not been phased by them.
The death-blow had been healed. And the whole earth was amazed by it.
And the whole earth followed it, and worshipped the dragon
which gave it its power.
The haughty and blasphemous words it uttered
were celebrated.
They were CONVINCING, and MOVING. The beast is ADORED.
And the second beast, the one from the earth,
apparently rises to give additional credence to the first.
It performs great signs: “even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of all”
It requires obedience. It claims everything and everybody as its own.
And it marks all with that now famous number of the beast, 6-6-6.
***
Anglican scholar and Bishop N.T. Wright proposes this story
to get our imaginations churning about what might be going on
in this text:[ii]
“He wasn’t acting alone.
That was the conclusion the enquiry reached after a long investigation
into the background of a strange murder in a city street.
The foreign diplomat had been stabbed by a young man who ran away,
but was caught.
At his trial he appeared to be confused, distracted, unsure of himself.
He didn’t give anything away;
but the more the court heard the [lawyer] questioning him,
the more they all reached the same conclusion.
This wasn’t just a crazy man doing something wicked on a whim.
There was more to it than that.
There were dark forces behind it all.
The only question was, ‘Which forces?’
Which country had hired, or bribed, this young man to kill the diplomat?
How might you tell?”
NW Wright continues:
As often in the world of realpolitik, or underworld dealings,
so in the world of spiritual warfare:
the ultimate powers prefer not to show themselves, but to act through others.
They choose secondary or tertiary intermediaries;
they give them some of their power;
they back them up where necessary.
We are today perhaps more aware than some of our forebears
of how what we call ‘dark forces’ go to work.
***
It seems to me that, among many other things, the vision
before us today in the Revelation is a warning to us
of the incredibly persuasive power
of what Wright calls Dark Forces in our lives.
Forces that desire to manipulate, or control, or imprison us.
Forces that want us to hate rather than love our neighbor.
Forces that want us to live by the rule of scarcity
that this is MINE and I have to protect it
rather than by the truth of God’s abundance.
Forces that want us to create boundaries
between who is IN and who is OUT,
and to enforce them…
Forces that would profit from our misguided following of the beast.
Forces that want to mislead us from the truth
to get our vote or our political support.
Forces that teach us the myth of redemptive violence,
that the only way to subdue power is through more power.
You know, Dark Forces.
Who is like the Beast, and who can stand against it?
The Beast has a lot going for it.
The Beast is clearly persuasive.
Its wicked and perverted message
is warped and twisted and seen as the Good by all humanity,
in this vision from John.
And perhaps more frightening, strong and powerful attempts to
counter the beast have gone for naught.
The death blow has healed. There is no defeating the beast
at his own game.
Who is like the Beast, and who can stand against it?
***
This story, like the one Jeff preached about last week, stands as testimony
that the thing that will defeat the beast
that will stand against it,
cannot do so by playing the same game that it plays.
The story of revelation is not that violence will overcome violence.
But that, ultimately, in Christ, love wins.
There may be portents of smoke and fire and pain and agony.
There may be wild, powerful beasts that sway all of humanity
to forms of community that choke and maime the
values of justice, equality, and love…
There may be seemingly unconquerable foes that the saints will have to
endure.
And in the end…still, love will win.
***
Who is like the Beast, and who can stand against it?
We need to allow the vivid imagery of the depth of concern here
penetrate our imaginative hearts.
What is the Beast to you?
Is it something broad, consuming cultures across our planet?
The Holocaust
Environmental Destruction
Mid-East violence
Thermonuclear war?
Coordinated terror attacks
Is it so personal that it hurts to even bring it up in your mind?
Cancer
Physical violation
Betrayal
What is the Beast to you?
Where are you afraid that there is NOTHING that can stand up
against the Beast, whether in your life or in the world?
THAT is where the imagery and the imagination of this book
is trying to get you to meditate about.
And RIGHT THERE: that is where this book is going to say
that the love and the peace and the mercy of God
is overflowing and abundant
and is going to offer healing
for your good, for the good of all the nations of the earth.
***
We have so many beasts in our world.
It is so easy to grow despondent. It is so easy to follow along
and to buy the beast’s message that there is no other way.
The Revelation of Jesus Christ to John tells us that there is another way.
Its not really a secret.
Its not really hidden in a secret room or obscured under a rock.
Our God desires light and love to win.
Our God, the one who deigns to call us Friends,
and who demonstrated such love that in Christ God layed down
God’s very life for us.
That God is working through us to make it happen.
As we continue to read our way through this incredible book,
may we keep our eyes open to the reality of the Beasts of our world
And our God’s ability to triumph over ANY beast
that wants to have our allegiance.
(Image from The Brick Testament rendition of Revelation 13)
[i] Introduction, The Book of Revelation, in The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary Volume XII (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1998), 503-558
[ii] Revelation for Everyone (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011) 114-115
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