The Adventure of the Apocalypse for Today

We begin a journey with John’s Revelation/Apocalypse (Gk apokalypsis), last book of the Bible. It completes the Good New of Jesus in the NT. It’s last scenes take us back to Eden, but now seen in the midst of a vast city. Written by a Christian named John, late in 1st cent.

It’s message is basic: The church is small and suffering, doomed in a vast, powerful empire, but it carries God’s own power of Jesus’ cross and resurrection. It’s part of God’s great story from creation to new creation. He turns all appearances upside down: kingdom, priests.

Revelation is fascinating and intimidating because of its amazing images right from the start. It raises questions. Is it a code for the future? Is it for me? Where am I in all its rush of images? Why do some today apply it to headlines (embassy in Jerusalem), while others avoid it?

An Unveiling - From God through John to Us

Revelation draws on a long, varied tradition. It is an unveiling in visions like Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah saw. It’s a first-person narrative of what John saw and how he reacted. It’s a letter from John to churches that contains letters from Jesus. It is testimony to Jesus that embodies God’s message/word. It is just full of references to OT scripture, but no quotes.

John knows he’s describing strange things that from the very start carried mystery. But even the mystery is illuminating. He sees visions, not events. He emphasizes steps of revelation. 1. God. 2. Jesus, 3. Angel, 4. John’s visions in images that he perceives, 5. John must choose words to write about the visions in a scroll, 6. Scroll to churches, 7. Reading aloud.
8. Listeners hear the words and use them to imagine John’s vision, its impact and meaning. God builds this distance into the process. We are not looking directly at events.

The process of interpretation centers at two points: 1. When John turns vision into words. A scene can be described in many ways - a room, a sunset. John describes his visions in words that richly echo the prophets and OT in general, conscious of prophetic tradition. 2. When we draw on our knowledge and experience to turn his words back into our own conscious images. Each one different. We become part of the revelation process.

More about Who? and How? Less about When?

So much of the history of interpreting Revelation has been about when the world will end. When is "soon"? Are we in the end-times? We’ll explore some of these interpretations.

But Rev 1 emphasizes that it’s more about who! To whom does this world, life, the future belong? How does that one show his character, purpose, power? How do we testify?

God is being, also past and moving toward us. The Spirit spreads like seven spirits everywhere. Jesus is center of Revelation, God through death born in new life, ruler of all, lover, savior, giver. No sword in his hand, only a sword of his word. The stars, suffering believers, are in his hand. Life became dead, now lives, gives life. He owns (keys) death and all beyond.

Celebrating Pentecost

One day of the year that Paul especially honored was Pentecost, the 50th day after Passover, the Feast of Weeks. Something happened that changed the world.

The result and power of all that had happened in Jesus began to be poured out for humans in everyday life: God fulfilled his promises from creation and throughout Israel’s long history and opened that history wide for all the rest of the world to participate.

In the incarnation in Jesus, God united God and human. God’s self-giving love embodied in creation and covenant he gave in new form by taking to himself human suffering, brokenness, sin and death. He defeated death by the creation of new life in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. On Pentecost all of this was poured out for all people, beginning with the Jews. God and human were united in a new way by the gift of God’s own self, God’s life, God’s power in the Holy Spirit given to those who trusted in all that Jesus had done. God filled broken human life with love, joy, and hope by beginning the process that will finally defeat death and unite all reality in resurrection, new creation.

Darkness, Dawn, and Full Morning Light

The darkness when Jesus was crucified (Lk 23:44) pointed to a deep darkness in his disciples. "We had hoped..." they said (Lk 24:21), but hope was crushed by death. At dawn, the women went to the tomb with spices for a corpse. The two men reminded them. They couldn’t make sense of Jesus’ words till it happened. The Eleven still couldn’t believe.

During those 7 weeks till Pentecost the light dawned - the Light of the World. The disciples became people who experienced the dawn. They become Salt and Light as Jesus said.

Even when tested / persecuted they know the light of creation and new creation has shone in their hearts. They never forget that the resurrection and Spirit come through the love embodied in Jesus’ suffering and death. They bear in their bodies Jesus’ death.

At Pentecost they are ready but surprised by what God does. God gives himself as creator of the whole world: All languages are distinct but also united as they speak that day. People have never learned to overcome their brokenness, to overcome hierarchies, injustice, oppression, violence, ethnic prejudice, racism, etc. God does not wait.

Even within the Roman Empire, he models his intentions for humanity. He takes people wherever they are in human power structures, and brings them together as beloved sons and daughters of God their creator. He calls them to a truth of justice and love that can transform their broken societies, but is also a new beloved community within that brokenness. They begin to experience the union of God and human by his Holy Spirit.

Joy in the Holy Spirit

The result is Pentecostal Joy. They can’t believe how good this is, how sweet it tastes. They celebrate in dinners together and in prison! They long for ultimate union in God’s life!

Church Elder Julie Short and Alexandra Swann preach together on Mother's Day.

Light of the World in Our Modern Age

We live in a world that has a powerful vision/myth/story of its development. Humans were long in the darkness of superstition and religion, believing things without reason, constrained by threatening myths of judgment, reaching its depths in the "dark ages" and "middle ages," the age of faith. But then the "Renaissance" brought the rebirth of classical pagan thought and the "Enlightenment" ushered in the "Age of Reason." Humans attained maturity and autonomy. We realized that there is no God to judge or constrain us, that we are tiny in a vast, mindless universe. We are radically free to choose anything or nothing. We create ourselves. We die, and that’s the end!

The development of this "back-story" of the modern world grew from reaction to the misuse and abuse of "Christendom" to which the Reformation also reacted - both Protestant and Catholic. But this "Enlightenment" has become the foundation of our secular world and has itself come under deep challenge in post-modern "criticism."

It began in a period when Christian scholars such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, et al. were using new instruments, new mathematics, and laying the foundations of the development of the modern scientific method. The Enlightenment story claimed science as a quest for deliverance from darkness, and some Christians reacted by rejecting science. Secular orthodoxy and religious fundamentalism battle to this day.

The Latest Technology and the Depths of Existence

It’s important to see what’s at stake in these modern developments. Science and technology have brought so many good things- medicine, phones, exploration, etc. We’re all in.

It’s important to see that the Bible has no commitment to any particular scientific view of the world - Ptolemaic, Copernican, Relativity, Quantum, dark energy, string theory. Scripture calls us to a commitment to truth. God has made the world discoverable.

The fundamental challenge between Jesus as "Light of the World" and the modern age of "Enlightenment" is that Jesus reveals a truth about the nature of reality and of human beings that is not within the realm of scientific discovery of the world’s complexity and operation. It goes to the nature of existence itself, beyond all human discovery.

Jesus, of course, knows that the universe is not mindless and meaningless: That all contingent existence, our whole perceptible universe, depends on a self-existent reality, God. Many have perceived as much. The Light of Jesus reveals the heart of that God in his profound self-giving Love, the Love that is the basis of all existence, sub- atomic, life, galaxies, multiverse, the Love so deep that God dies for his creatures.

Waking Up to My Identity

That Light changes my perception of freedom and autonomy. Freedom is not unrestrained choice in a meaningless universe bounded only by human power-structures. The whole universe is a creation of a God of Love. Freedom that doesn’t take that reality into account is distorted, misdirected. Real freedom and true autonomy come only when I know who I really am. I am the beloved creature of a God of love, within whom I exixt. That Light of Love gives direction and purpose to my existence - "goodness and justice."

Paul says that realization, that light/truth, is like rising from the dead. The true light is Jesus, what God has done in him. He shines. We become light in him, questing for truth ...

Wake up, Sleeper! Everything that’s really true is from that God of Love, illuminated in Jesus.

What is Jesus Saying?

In talking about resurrection through the phrase, "Light of the World," we have talked about Jesus. He says, "I am the light of the world" (Jn 8:12). He illumines ever person. God shines in our hearts to show his glory in the face of Jesus in his amazing self-giving love in Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. We are changed by the encounter.

Jesus brings that change to a sharp point in the Sermon on the Mount: Galilee crowds, sick and suffering, Jesus’ new disciples. He begins with Beatitudes: "Blessed are they...," but at the end turns it to "Blessed are you...," insulted, persecuted, slandered. What?

It’s then that he says "You are the salt...the light of the world!" Who me? I’m just one more burdened disciple, needing healing, scared of insults. But Jesus states it as fact. True?

Think of Jesus’ options for the Kingdom of God: Miraculous intervention; political takeover as messiah king, "mass communication" (J.C.Superstar) many others. Why is he on a hillside with crowds seeking help? Challenging these poor folks with the "Sermon."

This is the same story as incarnation and resurrection. They are God drawing God’s life and human life together. Coming into human life. Drawing our physical, human life beyond death into God’s own life. The event of Gospel. Jesus looks at these ordinary people and says you are the real focus of this event. You are God’s "mass communication."

It comes in images that challenge us to think in new ways, to find ourselves in the story. Salt, light? Be salty! Shine! Engage enough that you might be insulted. The great story of the world is not with Herod or Caesar, it’s with you! Don’t let that be trivial. Salt-less salt. Light under a basket. Let your light shine! My light? I need light. Yes. I give it to you.

What is Jesus Saying to Me?

I like "This little light of mine." Jesus knows my light is little. The Logos, the creator became little. What’s important is not size but what light it is that’s shining and that it shines! Salt flavors food, keeps it from going bad. In darkness, a light stand in contrast to the darkness and opens a space of clarity, recognition, potential beauty, destroying dark. Sonja lived on a Saskatchewan farm before electric power came through. Real darkness.

Fannie Lou Hamer biography, "This Little Light of Mine" (Kay Mills). A sharecropper farmer’s wife in Mississippi 100 years after the civil war didn’t know about any right to vote. 1962 ...

Jesus wants to get into my heart, my vision, who I am. Can I see God’s kingdom here. Paul says God will work in me in desire and doing to bring kingdom salvation to full effect. He doesn’t give me exact rules, but calls us to full participation, embodying resurrection life.

How am I going to Respond?

What is the house we live in where our light shines? Not much, but with God it will do his Kingdom, resurrection work. My family, profession, research, artistry, great job, dull job, difficult relationship, politics, business project, music, philosophy, parenting, etc.

Can I open myself to let Jesus’ vision shape me? Can I let him light my lamp and set it out.

This sermon explores the concept of power set forth in Ehesians. According to Ephesians God's power--true power!--is working in the world and in our lives. It is this power that was 'put to work' at the resurrection of the Messiah. And it is this power that is now at work in the life of the church, which is the Messiah's body. Paul, himself in chains for preaching the gospel, is able to trust that this revelatory power tells the truth about the world, even in difficult circumstances. Can we see the world Paul sees? The world revealed by the 'gospel of our salvation'? Can we trust this power, over against all the little powers that compete for our allegiance? Ephesians exhorts us to embrace this calling.

The Light and Darkness of Resurrection Life

We’re focusing on the light of Resurrection life. John tells of the Logos, creator of life, light shining in darkness, showing God’s glory, full of grace and truth. It all sounds very good, but he leads us through all that Jesus endured into crucifixion and then resurrection.

Resurrection is a challenge to believe as an event - like Thomas. But that’s just the start. Once I know it’s real, then comes the challenge of seeing everything through its lens. Resurrection life is new, in Jesus: the union of human physical life with God’s life. But it is life on the other side of death, incorporating death, conquering death. But God brings it into our world, our history in Jesus so that it shapes our life, values, and purposes, now.

In incarnation, Jesus brings God’s life into ours, takes our limitations - humble, suffering, all the signs of mortality we experience - dies with us. In resurrection, he takes our life into God’s life, shows how great God’s love is, builds hope and meaning into our life. Our lives now are shaped by the love embodied in his cross and the vibrant hope of his Life.

We live in a society fascinated with death, fearful of death. We spend almost without limit to extend youth and life. We dread anyone with no fear of death. But mortality is all around us. Rome made it entertainment in theaters and amphitheaters. So do we. It’s very hard for us to think about suffering, pain, physical and emotional. Pleasure often defines good.

The Revolution of Resurrection

Paul is writing to Christians in the Roman colony in the Greek city of Corinth. Jewish and pagan backgrounds that he has always lived with. Reflecting on his ministry: Vv 6-7: God’s word creating light: we’ve experienced that. Seeing the glory of God in the face of Jesus. This is a great treasure that we carry in jars of clay - ourselves. Power is God’s not ours. It’s a beautiful vision, experience. We like treasure, power in jars of clay. We jars of clay must be pretty great. Great apostle, beloved, elect saints. Health and wealth - we like!

But that’s not Paul’s reality. The light is the face of Jesus. His reality is reality. He emptied himself, took the form of a slave, becoming us all the way to death. That’s God’s glory. His life shows real life centered in love. We are "your slaves because of Jesus." In Roman society, Paul’s statement is almost unimaginable, a reversal of all values. What we’re engaged in is God’s work, God’s gift. No place for deception: Jesus crucified is Lord.

Suffering and the Light of Resurrection

Every human experiences suffering of some sort. It goes with living in our world, but we make it worse. Paul had been through a lot: mental, emotional, physical, legal, etc. It’s really hard. It hurts. There’s no explaining it away. It is human experience that has now been illuminated by God suffering with us in Jesus. We carry his dying in ourselves.

In Jesus’ dying we see the light of his ultimate conquest of death, his gracious love taking it on himself. That love defines our engagement, our hope, our light of life.

How Light broke forth for Humanity

Jesus told his disciples and crowds, "You are the light of the world!" Amazing! How? Shine the light in beautiful/excellent works that show God’s glory: live the Sermon on the Mount.

John sets that process within the great event that God has accomplished in Jesus. Last week we looked at the Foolish Cross/Resurrection as God’s Wisdom/Power that unites physical and spiritual, heaven and earth. Human life and work matters (‘not vain’) toward new creation.

John’s intro overviews the grand event all the way back to the Beginning (Gen 1). The Logos (Word, Reason, Wisdom), the depth of God: "with God" relationship, "was God" identity. From "being" to "becoming." Creation through Logos. "In him," life comes to be as the place where Logos is shared. For humans that life becomes illumination, Light : a physical image for a life of purpose, relationship, meaning. That’s the event: Light is shining... bringing the "being" of God/Logos into the "becoming" created world. Not stopped.

How Light transforms our world

John shows this unfolds with a human, part of the "becoming" creation: God sends John Bap. with testimony (human-directed logos) that point to the Light-Life-Word. John shows the purpose of the Gospel - signs that point to Light-Life for humans. We learn to trust.

But this is not just words of guidance, advice. The Light (Life-Logos-Creator) himself was coming into the created cosmos - the fundamental illumination of all that human life is/means. This "coming" was not movement but manifestation: The profound irony that the Creator was in his own creation but unknown (-the darkness). His "coming" opens knowledge, recognition, believing, trusting. He calls forth our human response.

God’s gift of human freedom works negatively and positively. Many don’t accept. Those who receive him, learn his true reality, see themselves in that Light, receive the gracious gift to become God’s children, begotten by God, sharing God’s unbreakable, ultimate life. This is the goal of the great event. The purpose of the Gospel is to share in that process (Jn 20:31).

Crossing the Line - God’s Presence among Us

But in order for us to share God’s life, God became one of us, sharing our life. Being became. Word became flesh. God broke through all our ideas that (1) the spiritual must escape the physical or that (2) the physical alone is real without spirit, real mind, or purpose. The Logos broke through the impenetrable barrier between creator and created. A new Tabernacle.

His life, work, compassion, service, love, resurrection, revealed what the union of physical and Spirit means. We watch his glory: loving, serving. We trust, practice, grow into his Life.

Seeing the Fool ... Not Being a Fool

April 1. When people walked by Jesus being crucified, they saw the perfect fool. He imagined he was king, savior, Messiah. Now look! Crucified. A clear, humiliating refutation. His disciples felt they were fools too. "We had hoped..." (Lk 24:21). But then, the women, that empty tomb!

Now, Jesus was there among the fearful, locked-in disciples. Shalom. The wounds. New mission. New breath of creation. Sharing Jesus’ work. But Thomas was missing. The others tell him, but he’s been a fool once. Not again! "Unless I see... I’ll never believe." Believe what? He’s followed Jesus. He’s dealt with Jesus’ death. Hard but understandable. I was fooled. But this would be the end of that world. "Lord we don’t know where you’re going..." "I am the way..." (Jn 14:5-6) Jesus graciously gives all he asks. Thomas realizes what it means. Everything is different. New reality, God has died and been raised: "My Lord and my God!"

The Wisdom and Power of God

The foolishness has never gone away. Paul experienced it in himself and every city. We sanitize the cross and spiritualize the resurrection. Refuse to believe: Snuff flick. Pie in the sky. Yet then and now, if you really see the cross and resurrection, you too know that nothing’s the same.

Jesus’ resurrection reveals the union of heaven and earth, physical and spiritual - unsettling! The ancient world often saw physical as transitory, bad; the soul alone as immortal, good. Many Christian also seek release from the physical body into a disembodied, cloudy heaven. Many moderns are physicalists: no soul or spirit, only the material body. Death is our end.

Resurrection unsettles both. It’s not ethereal but very physical, earthy. Jesus cooks breakfast. Transformed physical. It stands in line with God as creator of the very good physical world. God empowering humans in a sharp-edged, changeable world. God choosing incarnation. The cross is the bottom of physical. Pain, humiliation, real death. Jesus goes all the way down. Far weaker, uglier than God should be. More loving, gracious. Stronger, beautiful with wounds.

God gives neither escape from the physical into a bodiless, spiritual life, nor an entirely physical world winding down in cosmic death. God is creator and new creator. In Jesus, he reveals evil, injustice, corruption, death as the real fools. Power, wisdom, grace are in his resurrection life.

Living in the World of God’s Death and Resurrection

We live in that world. A Grand Unified Vision! Can we see, believe, trust it? Everything physical is united with everything spiritual in Jesus -"on earth as in heaven." Everything we do matters. We shape a future that either moves toward God’s new creation or tries to thwart it.

In our work, relationships, recreation, politics, worship, live toward that life. Build for it. Celebrate Resurrection. Create something new. New service, justice, understanding, forgiveness, art, hope, science, music, reconciliation, barrier-breaking. Jesus is risen! Live resurrection life!

A Week of Joy and awful Foolishness

Palm Sunday leads to Easter - two celebrations bracketing startling, awful events: conflict, betrayal, abandonment, injustice, torture, crucifixion. This year Easter is April 1 -April Fool’s. It’s there from the start: It’s a fool’s tale: "The word of the cross is foolishness..." (1Cor 1:18).

And for many of the wise of our day it still is. Actually, for everyone! The foolishness is built in. In this series of events God intends to challenge all our assumptions of how things are: What it means to be strong, to make a real difference, to show glory and power, even God’s. We all, even much of the church, think we know better what’s smart, powerful, glorious, wise.

And then there’s that young man! Astride a little donkey, riding down the hill toward the brilliant marble and gold of Herod’s vast temple, with the fortress of Rome’s soldiers, toward death.

A Waiting Prophecy, Expectation, Surprise

Studying ‘Minor prophets,’ the final part of the prophetic scripture. For 500 yrs, the words of Zechariah and Malachi have been planted in Jewish hopes and expectations, a long wait. The coming king - who? when? Universal rule - how? The messenger of the covenant. The refiner’s fire. The hope, renewal, turning back to God. The kingdom of God! An end to beastly empires.

Jesus knew those words! Palm Sunday is the day he enacted Zechariah’s words with resonance in Malachi, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms. The crowds recognized it and joined in with joy. A king unlike Rome or the Herods - no destroying army, God’s king of peace and transformation.

It’s Passover - redemption from slavery. People had filled in the prophets’ words with many ideas. God’s king! A purified people (Pharisees), destruction of Rome’s power (Zealots), a pure community (Essenes), reality and temple (Sadducees), various messianic figures. Jesus’ own disciples expect a kingdom with themselves as leading governors. Jesus’ words don’t fit.

Jesus starts all those filled-in expectations to vibrate. They are intense but see God in terms of human power, glory, wisdom. They can’t yet imagine the transformation of reality that will break in with Jesus: God/man crucified. A new kind of life, resurrection life, a reality now!

Because the expectations are intense, they’re strong enough to be emptied and refilled. God’s king rides a donkey, speaks peace to Gentiles, destroys instruments of war, refines like fire. God fulfills promises, transforms expectations. Far weaker, dying! Stronger, beyond imagining.

People had to learn to re-understand God in the light of what God was doing in Jesus. Can God really be that way? How could he come to his temple on a donkey? How could he speak peace to pagans? How could the dying God be the God who saves? Hosanna ! How could all the hopes lodged in the Messiah, Son of David, take the form of the suffering Son of man?

The Lord who comes to His Temple

But the story doesn’t stop. That temple ended destroyed, burned: Zealots against Romans. But Jesus had long been showing how "temple" expectations of God’s presence and forgiveness had to be re-envisioned. It was there in prophecy but had to be realized. God present among his people, in his people. The king, savior, refining fire comes to every community and person.

Who can stand? He comes with all that unbreakable foolishness? Weakness is strength. Loving enemies, turning cheeks. Not serving mammon. He takes our "health and wealth" desires and recreates us into a donkey-cross-resurrection people. It’s God’s foolishness. It’s God’s Life!