Last week we talked about the Book of Acts of the Apostles which we have been reading throughout this Easter season. We started at the beginning of the Book and have been going through it sequentially, taking big leaps each week. The Acts of the Apostles is not the only book we are doing that with. We are also doing it with the Book of Revelation. We started on the 2nd Sunday of Easter with the first chapter, and after taking some big leaps we find ourselves today in the 21st chapter.
When I was a kid back in the last century, we had a thing called cable television which I have not had in years. We cut the cord and stream everything now. But on our cable there were about 100 channels and the last few were religious channels. I don't know if they have them anymore, but they did when I was a kid. The preachers on those channels really liked the Book of Revelation. If there was an image that seemed really confusing, they had charts and graphs to prove that it was going on in the world today. Then they expanded that method to foretell future things that were going to happen. These were not the people who tended to identify exact dates. That is a different group of people. But these people would place events in the next couple of years, often around an election. Something major was going to come, so one had to be on the lookout for the mark of the beast.
To put it bluntly, that way of looking at the Book of Revelation is wrong. But it captured a popular imagination in this country which has led to two responses. One is that you love that stuff, and even though it hasn't happened yet, you are still looking for it. The other response is just to say, who cares about the Book of Revelation. In 2000 years no one has figured this out, so it is just a waste of time.
I think this is a great tragedy for us because the book of Revelation is a rich book that has so much to offer us if we stop looking at it as some kind of road map, this prediction that happened 2000 year ago, and start trying to understand it differently. John of Patmos was not trying to predict what was going to happen, he was telling us what was happening. All of the very imaginative and vivid images he uses are all meant to describe a world he existed in, a world full of chaos, a world full of dragons, a world full of bad stuff that is happening to him and the people he knew and loved.
Things like the mark of the beast, 666, are not mysteries. We know exactly what it means. John was talking about the Emperor. There is a clear 1st century understanding in Greek that you put numbers to letters and it spells out Nero. What John is saying is with all the principalities in the world, what is God doing in the midst of it, and where is your loyalty in that? Is your loyalty to these power and principalities? Is your loyalty to the dragons of this world? Or is your loyalty to God? The real Revelation is not that bad things are happening, or that bad things are going to happen. The real Revelation is God revealing God's vision, his dream for this world. And again, just like with the bad stuff, John uses beautiful, vivid imagery to describe it.
That is where we find ourselves today in the reading from the 21st Chapter of Revelation, with the vision of a New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, the embodiment of a prayer that we pray every week: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name; Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. John is taking the image of the idea that heaven comes down, that we can imagine the Kingdom here among us. He says there will be no sea anymore. The sea is the image of chaos, so the chaos has gone away from the world in John's image, in God's dream for this world. We will not have that kind of chaos. Instead we will have a city with the Lamb as the Light. In this city there is going to be a river. What do rivers do? They bring life. Think about the Middle East. Water is so vital to life and it is so limited there. You build your city by a well or by a stream, but John's image is of a river. There is so much abundant life in God's vision, God's dream for this world.
There is a tree in this city, a tree that has twelve types of fruit. One for each month. Winter will not be a time of starvation, but we will be nourished even in those moments. Twelve should also remind us of the twelve Tribes, the twelve Disciples, all these efforts that God is using to share with us his vision of the Kingdom. The tree should also remind us of Adam and the Garden of Eden, the tree they took the fruit from that led them away from God. But now here is a tree with fruit that is bringing us back. God is offering this vision of reconciliation, of restoration of humanity to God and to each other.
The Revelation in John is not all the bad stuff and predictions of when the end is coming. The Revelation is what God has been trying to share with us for so long, the vision that God had in the liberation of God's people from their slavery. That vision that God had in bringing people into the Promised Land. That vision that Isaiah and Jeremiah and the Prophets had of the people streaming towards justice in God's Kingdom. That vision that we find in Jesus, in his teachings, in his life, in his death, and in his resurrection. Revelation is saying that in the midst of all the difficulty you are having, in the midst of all the chaos and all the dragons that are threatening the world, there is an alternative, a different way that the world can be and the world ultimately will be.
Where is our loyalty in the midst of this? With the dragons, or with the Lamb? Like the words of the Collect, God is asking us to love Him in all things and above all things, above all those powers and principalities of this world.
God is inviting us to be part of that, to start living as if we are already in that Kingdom, eating from the fruit and having that abundant life. We live in a life full of chaos, and it feels, especially in these last few years, like it is getting worse. We desperately need this image, this vision of God shared in Revelation by John, to keep our eyes on the horizon of that hope that it offers us as we navigate all the dragons that are out there that threaten us. So that we, with Jesus in the Gospel today. can offer that peace to a world that so desperately needs it.
I hope and pray that you have not given up on the Book of Revelation because of something you heard as a child, because it is a beautiful image of God's dream for you, for us, for this world. A dream of grace, of mercy, and love.
AMEN.
