Revelation

What can we learn from the book of Revelation about our world today.

This month is Bible Month which is looking at the book of Revelation and this week the material suggests we look as chapters 10-13 with the heading “Witness, worship and waiting”. This seems a little odd as the traditional chapter divisions don’t marry up with the different sections in the book. Chapter 10 picks up in the middle of one section and Chapter 13 leaves off in the middle of another. I’ve thus chosen to concentrate on Revelation 12:1-15:4. This is a more sensible unit which, in my Bible commentary is given the title “The story of God’s people in conflict with evil“. The passage is not easy to understand so I’ve prepared a summary that you can read at this link.

I preached this sermonoon 18/06/2023 after the reading of Revelation 12:1-17.

So how are we supposed to make sense of this sort of reading in the modern world?

First, I think we need to acknowledge that this is a vision, or a dream. John, the author, makes this clear in the very first verses of the book. The language is poetic and metaphorical and should not be taken literally. Second, it contrasts the contemporary world of the author, and the power structures within it, to the world intended by God and revealed in the scripture. It is not a vision of the future and there is no value in trying to go through the book and work out how it predicts various events of world history. So if we want to explore its relevance to us today we need to explore which characteristics of the historical world that it portrays are still relevant today.

John uses thinly veiled imagery to comment on the Roman empire (the first beast). He sees this as the agent of the devil. Something opposed to what God wants. One of the key characteristics of the opposition is that it calls people to worship it rather than God. As we know, the Roman Emperor was considered divine and worshipped. At the stage in history that this letter was written, the Romans were extremely tolerant of all sorts of religions, as long as people would worship the Emperor as a god, as well as their own gods.

In the current world we don’t have a single political entity that exerts power in the way that Rome did, but we do have political and economic ideology that is becoming dominant throughout the world. It’s an ideology of materialism and consumerism. At its heart is a worship of money. It started off in Europe and North America and is now spreading out its tentacles to embrace the whole world. It’s like Rome in that it is amazingly tolerant of other world views and religions as long as people acknowledge its power as well. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, are all welcome to express their faith however they want, as long as it fits in with predominant worldview of a consumer economy.

John’s second beast is subservient to the first beast but no less dangerous. It represents all those people and organisations that collaborated with Rome and were effectively agents of its power. Rome exerted its power by unholy allowances with local rulers. Rulers would pledge allegiance to Rome and pay their taxes promptly. In return Rome would use the threat of its military might to keep that ruler in power. Herod, the Biblical king, was a good example of this.

In the current world we can recognise all sorts of organisations who feel that they need to accept the predominant world view in order to secure their own existence. Many political parties and charities are essentially allowed to operate and survive only if they acknowledge the unquestionable power of the markets. It is fine for charities, for example, to provide food to people who are impoverished by the way our world works, as long as they do not criticise the system that has caused that poverty. We now even have laws in the UK that prevent charities from expressing political viewpoints. We also see this in international relations. A broad summary of how the United Nations and World Bank works is that they will offer financial support to poorer nations, as long as those poorer nations promise to abide by the terms of a globalised consumption based market economy.

John calls this out. It’s not right he says. Rome may be the dominant power, it may be a tolerant power, the lives of the wealthy and powerful may have been made much easier if they collaborated with that dominant power, but it is not what God intended. God did not intend a world in which everyone was subservient to the Roman emperor and enslaved to the economic and political system that he represented. God intended a world in which we would love God, love each other and live our lives in all the fulness that this offers.

I believe the same message is true with the dominant world power today. A consumer based market economy may be the dominant power, it may keep the wealthy and the powerful in control, but it is not what God intended. God did not intend a world in which everyone is desperate for material possessions and tied into a system in which they face destitution if they fail to work for a meagre minimum wage. God intended a world in which we would love God, love each other and live our lives in all the fulness that this offers.

Perhaps most importantly though John’s vision is of conflict. John sees the Roman empire as an evil that has to be resisted and fought against. There is a call to action and opposition. This opposition comes primarily from a Christian community that sees itself as different, that is not subservient to the current world view. The mark of the beast is a mark of collaboration with the dark power, with Rome. It is a mark on the forehead of everyone. Averyone apart from 144,000 sof the people of God. Final victory is portrayed as coming about through a community who mark themselves out as different to the rest. People who are in the world but not of the world in which they found themselves.

I believe this is the calling of the church today. Our calling is to be in the world but not of it, to mark ourselves as opposing the dominant world view and willing to hold fast to God. It is through that faithfulness to God that victory will come.

It’s interesting to me that although my Biblical commentary refers to the 144,000 as the “Army of the Lamb”, there is no mention of an army, or any reference to any armour or weapons or military tactics. It’s interesting how this in itself attests to our subservience to a military-industrial worldview. Even the author of a commentary on the Bible assumes that a large group of people opposing evil is best described as an army.

But the 144,000 are not an army (at least not in this section of Revelation). The 144,000 are a worshipping community. They don’t brandish swords, they sing songs. They don’t attack to kill, vanquish and coerce, they hold up a vision of the world as God intends it. Their victory comes not through military prowess but by worship and witness. Our first priority, in a world that worships mammon, is to continue to worship God. Not a God that conforms to the dominant worldview, but one who has a completely different world view offering good news to the poor, sight to the blind and freedom for the oppressed.

The second priority is to bear witness by living out our lives in the light of that vision of how God intends us to live. We need to be seen to be a community who live differently, we need to tell each other, and the wider community of how our lives have been affected by our experience of God’s love.

The final, and less comforting message, is that we need to do this in expectation of opposition. John was writing after a period of persecution of the early Christian community, particularly of the community that had grown up in Rome. John knew that Christians had died for their faith, and he saw this testimony as one of the most powerful tools that community had to express its difference and opposition to Roman authority and to hold up its vision for a different world. Christians, as people of peace and sacrificial love, could not and should not oppose power with violence. Expression of their identity in the peaceful love of God and as separate to the values of the world was the only power they needed to defeat evil.

If we are to defeat the evil in our contemporary world then we must expect opposition. The evil we confront today is much more subtle and pernicious than the brute force of Rome. We are more likely to confront mockery or even indifference than we are to encounter physical violence, but we still need to resist this and hold true to our faith. We can even question the strength of our faith as a Christian community through the observation that we are not, in most parts of the world, persecuted. Where Christians are persecuted in the world today, it is because they are perceived as a threat to the dominant world view. The fact that we, in the UK, are not persecuted as Christians is largely because we do not pose a threat to anyone. Perhaps we should. Perhaps the lack of persecution of Christians in the UK is a sign that we are not responding to John’s vision of Church that stands apart from the world and proclaims an alternative to it. Perhaps we should be more prepared to take a stand, to proclaim that there is an alternative, and to start to live that alternative out.

So let’s not dismiss this passage as the ranting of a first century madman. Let’s look behind the words and images to the critique that he offers of the world in which he lived. Let’s see in it how little the world has changed and learn lessons from it. Above all let us see ourselves as different to the world in which we live. Let us live our lives out as if we are different. Let us hold to that vision and that lifestyle even when we face opposition. For it is through our worship and our witness that God’s final victory will be won. That all people will eventually come to recognise his face and live lives in all the fulness that that offers.

Relating to other faiths

This is a sermon preached on 26th October based on the readings Revelation 21:22-22:5 and Luke 6:27-42.

I want to talk about our relationship to other faiths this morning. What I have to say will be generalisable but will focus on our relationship with Muslims. Clearly there is much fear in our world about Muslim fundamentalism. This is the first opportunity I’ve had to preach since the beheading of Alan Hennings. He was the Salford cabbie who went to Syria  to try and help. Although I’ve never met her his wife, Barbara, works in my department at the University where there has been  a particularly strong and emotional reaction to the news.

We heard yesterday of the death of Muhammad Mehdi Hassa, the fourth of six young men from Portsmouth who went to fight for Islamic state. Somehow, we don’t know how, they and an estimated other 500 British Muslims have been convinced that this is what their faith requires of them. Most of us are horrified and bewildered. An all too easy response, particularly I think amongst Christians,  is to assume that this is  further proof of  the error of Islam. It’s this that I want to explore this morning.

The first and most obvious point I want to make is that there are a wide spectrum of beliefs within Islam just as there are within Christianity. My daughter has just finished her GCSE and is now taking A-level religious studies. At GCSE it was considered appropriate to write about “what Christians believe” or “what Muslims believe”. At the new level she is working at she has been told that this is no longer appropriate. She needs to write about “what some Christians believe” or maybe about “the official view of the Methodist church” or to mention the views of a specific individual who has a particular faith. Just because we are appalled by the actions of some Muslims does not mean we should condemn all Muslims or the faith of Islam.

We lived in Northern Ireland for several years just after the first IRA ceasefire was announced. During that time we lived within a Christian community that was appalled about the deeds that had been done by people who considered themselves Christians and truly believed that they were doing what God wanted. We as Christians wanted nothing to do with the acts of Catholics working within the IRA or of protestants within the Unionist paramilitaries. Most of us within this church this morning would be appalled to hear those acts portrayed as the acts of Christianity. Why then, do we fall into the trap of assuming that the isolated acts of small groups of Muslims involved in terror activities are representative of Islam?

We also need to develop some historical perspective. The trauma that some parts of Islam are experiencing now is extremely similar to trauma that some parts of Christianity passed through several centuries ago. 16th and 17th century Europe was riven by religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants every bit as brutal and uncompromising as the current rivalry between Sunni and Shia Muslims in the Middle East today. On St Bartholomw’s day in 1572 between 5,000 and 30,000 innocent French protestants were murdered by Catholic mobs in Paris and across France. (The only hard evidence for numbers is a bill for workers in Paris to remove 1,100 bodies from the Seine and bury them).

This is just, of course, one particularly horrendous example but history is littered with others of how feuds within Christianity have led to tyranny and death in different communities across the world. (The secular world does not escape either of course. There can be no stronger example of the senseless beheading of innocent victims than the French revolution, perhaps the first time a secular state emerged within the Western world).

In our reading this morning we’ve been reminded of Jesus’ words that we “should take the plank out of our eye” before “taking the speck out of our brothers”. In looking at the state of parts of current Islam we need to recognise that this is where we, as Christians, have already been. Our first response should be one of recognition. Our second response, perhaps, should be more positive, in recognising that  this is a place that we have come from (albeit more recently than many of us would care to acknowledge). Perhaps there is help we can offer their community from the previous experiences of ours.

Of  course this assumes we would want to. Why should we offer support to a different religious community, one who some would see as  in competition with our own – a community that some within Christianity would see simply as wrong and misguided? Shouldn’t we be fighting against that community as part of our responsibilities as Christians?

Whilst there are certainly writings within the New Testament that can be used to support such attitudes I don’t think that those we’ve heard read this morning do. The injunction of Jesus for us to love our enemies is perhaps one of the most preached about and least implemented in the Bible. What credit do we get for loving people who are just like us? What God wants is for us to love people who are different to us. How, in the modern world can we best love Muslims? That is the question we should really be asking. Of course the paradox within this is you cannot love your enemies – if you love your enemies they become your friends.

There is disagreement here within Christianity (its actually a good example of the variety of opinion within Christianity that I outlined above). Some Christians are extremely confident in their particular brand of Christianity. They believe that through the Bible and Jesus that we know the truth and that everyone else is wrong (there are plenty of passages of scripture that can be cited to reinforce this view). For this group of people the most loving thing we can do for Muslims is to show them how wrong they are and convert them to our way  of seeing and doing.

My faith, and the faith of many other Christians, is different. I don’t have the same faith that the Bible represents the Truth in this way. Within the Bible are so many contradictions that you can’t say that it convey a simple truth. One of the Ten Commandments is that “Thou shalt not kill”. The teaching of Jesus would appear to reinforce this message. But then in Joshua we read of how God stopped the sun in the sky so that the Jews could complete their slaughter of their enemies. That’s just an example of a contradiction within the Bible. I’ve already given examples this morning of what happens when on top of this we layer the competing claims of different denominations and different interpretations of our scripture. It is ludicrous, in my eyes, to see Christianity as a single embodiment of the Truth that is either possible or desirable for us to inflict upon other people.

My faith sees all of us, all people throughout the world, as trying to make sense of life. For me it is important to start in humility with an assumption that we know very little. This is, to me, what Paul meant when he talked of our “childish ways” and how now we see “as through a glass darkly”. Christianity offers a framework through which we can explore what meaning life might have rather than a rigid prescription of what that meaning is. Before it was called the church the early Christian movement was known as “the Way”. It was a way of being in community, a way of exploring faith, a way of drawing closer to God. A God that was defined by people’s experience rather than by what had previously been written in the scriptures. For me the New Testament has a unique place in guiding my spiritual development but it is not the only place.

The images of the End within the Bible are incredibly important. I, with many other Christians,  believe they are poetic and metaphorically images of what we should aspire to rather than literal accounts of what will happen but they are no less important for that. (Indeed as science gives us clearer and clearer predictions of what how the physical universe is likely to end  I’d argue that a metaphorical understad=nding becomes more important.) The image we’ve had presented to us from towards the end of Revelation has very little to do with what we see as Christianity today. The reading says very explicitly that there is no Temple. In a sense religion has been brought to an end. When all people see the Truth there is no longer a need for a Way to guide them towards it. There is an undefiled city where all people can dwell, there is a river filled with the crystal clear water of life. There are trees that bear sufficient food to feed us all and whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

This vision is of something bigger than the Christianity we practice today. It has no denominations, it has no church councils or preaching plans of flower distribution rotas. It is something different. It is somewhere I hope I am traveling towards  but it is also somewhere that I know I am a long way from. I look to Christianity as a guide  on that journey.  But this guidance will be needed less and less the closer I get to arriving, the closer I get to seeing face to face.

If I see myself as an individual who knows little and is travelling on a journey then I have no real difficulty in seeing members of other faiths as people who know little and but are traveling on a journey also. The journey is along a different path with a different guide but may still be towards the same destination. I have no doubt that the scriptures I revere and the faith experiences that I have had can support others on that journey. I will not stop preaching the gospel in which I believe. But I will offer that to a fellow traveller acknowledging that they may still want to walk along a different path.

Perhaps most importantly though I want to listen. If what I know and what I have experienced can help others then maybe what others know and have experienced can help me. If we are all one day going to share the same city, the same river and the fruit of the same trees, maybe we should start sharing more of our lives now.

One of the most special evenings of my time in Melbourne was in the home of a Muslim family. One of the responses of the Australian Muslim community’s responses to 9:11 was to issue an invitation through the local churches for people to join an Iftar feast within a local home. The Iftar feast is that which starts at dusk on each night of Ramadan when Muslims who have been fasting throughout the day can eat again. A group of us turned up on at a suburban house in the north of the city and were welcomed by a young woman wearing a head scarf. She and her husband sat us down and told us of their faith and gave us an opportunity for us to tell them of ours. As the sun set we turned on the television to hear the Muezzin’s call to prayer. They left briefly to say their prayers and then returned to serve food over which we continued to talk. Despite many experiences within Australian churches this was probably the most spiritually moving encounter I had in the nine years we were there. Driving home I felt truly blessed.

When people talk to me of Muslims the image that comes to my mind is not of a bearded terrorist. It is of a young Australian woman in a head scarf  whose house I entered into in a state of unknowing and left in a state of grace. For her role in helping me on my journey, I give thanks to God – whatever we may both choose to call him.

I’d selected the hymn, God is love let heaven adore, after I’d selected the theme but before I’d decided what to say. As we sang it in church just before I preached I was struck by just how closely its theme’s mapped on to mine.