A Narrative Lectionary Sermon on Revelation 4:1-11 and John 17:1-5
Revelation 4:1-11 (NRSV)
After this I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.” At once I was in the spirit,[a] and there in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on the throne! And the one seated there looks like jasper and carnelian, and around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald. Around the throne are twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones are twenty-four elders, dressed in white robes, with golden crowns on their heads. Coming from the throne are flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder, and in front of the throne burn seven flaming torches, which are the seven spirits of God; and in front of the throne there is something like a sea of glass, like crystal.
Around the throne, and on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind:the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with a face like a human face, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle.And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing,
“Holy, holy, holy,
the Lord God the Almighty,
who was and is and is to come.”
And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to the one who is seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall before the one who is seated on the throne and worship the one who lives forever and ever; they cast their crowns before the throne, singing,
“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created.”
John 17:1-5 (NRSV)
After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people,[a] to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.
The Message
Do you recognize the refrain “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God almighty?”
How about, “the one who was, and is, and is to come?”
So many Lutheran liturgies—so much of our Lutheran language—draws on imagery from the Book of Revelation. And it’s easy to see why, right? This snippet from Chapter 4, alone, sounds like something my nephews would draw and then try to explain to me very fanatically. (Or maybe something a college buddy would have rambled on about after delving into some choice substances). Stones and a rainbow; oceans of glass and creatures covered in eyes and wings. Unceasing chants. Elders in white robes. Thrones everywhere. It’s a lot. For 22 entire chapters, the author of this apocalyptic work paints some of the strongest, most mystical, most bizarre pictures in all of our canonized texts.
Now, do you remember the first time you actually read from the Book of Revelation?
We are so constantly immersed in the familiarity of Revelation’s language, but we hardly every touch the book, itself, as a church. That’s why I’m excited to dig in today and to listen for the promise coming to us in this text.
I remember the first time that I read from the Book of Revelation. I was probably 14 years old, sitting around a coffee table with the other girls in my Confirmation group, covered in craft supplies. We were making blankets and scarves for a local shelter, but my small group leader, Ms. Lisa, wanted to go the extra mile for us, so she had made up some snacks and rented a movie for us to watch together as we worked.
The movie was based on a series of books—the Left Behind series. For those of you who haven’t had the absolute pleasure of watching these films or reading these stories, let me give you a summary. Rayford Steele, a middle-aged, silver fox of an airline pilot is our main character. He returns home from a work trip to a completely empty house. His wife and his kids have vanished along with a ton of other people world-wide. Rayford Steele and the others who were “left behind” quickly figure out that they’re watching the Rapture unfold before their eyes—the end times talked about in the Bible.
About 30 minutes in, my friends and I started to look at each other, majorly confused. We were thinking that maybe we hadn’t read far enough in the Bible yet. Maybe we had missed something. We would have remembered this stuff that we were seeing on screen. Natural disasters and violent crime and other destructive sweeps of God’s judgment become the norm for Rayford Steele and the other nonbelievers left on earth. A Romanian politician rises to serve as Secretary General of the UN, allegedly trying to restore peace, but he is actually the Antichrist in disguise. Some people are very selectively left behind in very large numbers (I’m talking about Catholics and Muslims) and the focus of the movie becomes the conversion of desperate, suffering people. It’s like constant tests of devotion and attention. Evangelism warped and on steroids. Everyone is preparing for the impending Tribulation of God—the Final Judgment that’s 7 years away. And as much as you want to laugh at the absurdity of all of this, the movie is unsettling. A little scary, too. One of my friends pulled the study Bible from her backpack and started flipping through the Book of Revelation, trying to find the textual basis for all of these things.
Ms. Lisa’s daughter went into the kitchen to ask her if we could switch to something else. “Don’t you like it?” she asked. She followed her daughter back into the living room, and after watching for a couple of minutes, she gasped. I’ve never seen someone find the remote and shut down their entertainment system so fast.
Ms. Lisa apologized to us over and over. She had simply seen this DVD under a sign that said, “Christian Movies for Teens” and she hadn’t had time to prescreen it, herself. Like many other people in mainline Protestant denominations, she had never heard of the Left Behind books, and based on the cover of the movie case, she thought this was a feel-good family story. She could tell we were all a little shaken, so she took a seat with us and started some damage control on the fly.
Looking back, I’m so impressed with her answers to our questions, especially considering that she did not go into that evening planning to talk to a bunch of kids about eschatology. Ms. Lisa spent that night witnessing. She knew Jesus—who he is, what he does and how vastly he loves. She knew about God’s essence; God’s character; God’s relationship with God’s people and God’s devotion to God’s people from the beginning of time all the way through today. And she led our discussion with those things. I’m going to tell you what she told us that night. We’ll add our own twists, of course, but that witness of hers is the whole point of the Book of Revelation.
Now, first thing’s first: we need to establish our definitions. When we hear the word “apocalypse,” I think we tend to make it a synonym for “the end times.” For all of those things in the Left Behind series: natural disasters and violent crime and sweeping judgments and maybe even Romanian Antichrists. But in Greek, the word “apocalypse” translates to “uncovering,” or “peeling back.” “Revealing.” Hence, revelation.
In this text, we see a door from afar. It’s open, and when we walk through that door—when we cross the threshold—an entirely new reality is uncovered. Our old status quo is peeled back. A literal cosmic order is revealed to us. And what is at the center of that order? God, the creator. What is the rest of that order doing? Praising God for being the creator.
The winged creatures covered in eyes surrounding God’s throne in this vision represent the span of creatures from our origin stories—from the creation narratives in Genesis. All beings from sky, land and sea are in harmony with humanity around God’s throne, intermingled and interdependent in God’s love.
In a text so often associated with destruction, the thing that God reveals to us to frame the entire book is creation. Sustenance. New life and continuing life in the past, present and future. Revelation is a book about waking up to God’s vision for wholeness and thriving. And then being a part of it; being made alive in big and constant and new ways. Revelation is a book about transformations—visceral upheavals in your heart that translate to visceral upheavals in your world. Revelation is a book about keeping your eyes where they should be; turning your gaze toward what really matters.
In a text so often associated with destruction, the thing that God reveals to us to frame the entire book is creation. Sustenance. New life and continuing life in the past, present and future.
Why was this written? Well, we know that at this time—a handful of decades after Jesus died and rose again—the church was mostly an underground operation. Questions of religious and political authority were swirling around everywhere. You couldn’t escape wondering who to listen to; who to believe; who to follow. In my church, we prayed something to this effect together this morning: “We live in a world of increasing confusion and mixed messages,” we said. “There are many voices from all around and even inside of us.”
Many early Christians were persecuted people, figuring out how to walk by faith. They needed a centering vision of what was possible—what was real. They needed to know what true, not temporal, authority looked like. They were plenty familiar with oppression, so what fed them was a model of liberation. Resistance.
The Book of Revelation is a work of liberation. Resistance.
Now, I wouldn’t call Revelation a warm and fuzzy book. In its illusions to the prophets from the Hebrew Bible and in its fantastical, allegorical way it tells us that some things will, indeed, be destroyed when the world ends. But they’re destroyed in the sense that new things are actively taking their place. They’re destroyed so that we can be free to re-pent. Re-focus. They die so that we can truly live.
Does this sound familiar? We talk Baptism this way. In fact, in my church, we’re about to practice our Thanksgiving for Baptism rite and profess this very thing: that from deep waters of literal death God raised Jesus to life in triumph. Eternal life. That with him, we have been born completely new by water and by Spirit.
Friends, we might call it by a few other names, but the apocalypse is something that God does in our lives on the regular. Our world ends every single day. But because we know Jesus, we know that it’s starting fresh just as often. Jesus is the one pointing to that open door in the heavens. Jesus is the one who leads us there and invites us to look. To step inside. To be in the spirit.
With all this in mind, I think that it makes sense for us to use Jesus’s words from the Gospel of John to prepare to go into the world and do God’s work this week:
Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over us, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that we may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent us. He glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave him to do. So now, Father, glorify us in your own presence with the glory that Jesus had in your presence before the world existed.
Amen.
This sermon was authored and delivered on August 8, 2021.
P A S T O R ( I S H ) 