Wake Up!

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Revelation 1:9-20

January 7/8, 2012 • Portage First UMC

It was the band REM that sang a bunch of confusing, rambling lyrics—lyrics I can’t quite follow—that led up to a chorus declaring, “It’s the end of the world as we know it—and I feel fine.” Well, that song was released in 1987, and now it’s 2012, and not everyone is fine, especially since many believe this just might be the year when the end of the world arrives. The hubbub started a while back when someone realized that a calendar made by the Mayan Indians somewhere around the 5th century BC runs out on December 21, 2012. Because some believe the Mayans were remarkably accurate in their calculation of time, they believe the world will end when the Mayan calendar runs out. Of course, there are alternate explanations. Here’s a couple of my favorites: the calendar editor comes in with a round stone and says, “I only had enough room to go up to 2012.” To which the other man says, “Ha! That’ll freak somebody out someday!” Another of my favorites has a Mayan writing out the calendar and when he gets to December 21, 2012, he says, “Dang! Out of ink.” Not to be outdone, I found this in a catalog this Christmas: a Doomsday 2012 desk calendar, which stops on December 21. The ad copy says, “This page-a-day Doomsday! Calendar will help you keep track of all the stuff you need to do before, well, before it’s too late.”

Of course, some are taking this prediction seriously, and others are not. But either way, the news media is making something of it. Last Sunday, the Chicago Tribune had several articles about this prediction, including this one in which the reporter asked various celebrities (many of which I’d never heard of) where they would spend their last day on Earth. The answers included the Bahamas, the Flamingo casino in Las Vegas, the beach or Roswell, New Mexico. One said they’d want to be in either Jerusalem or Las Vegas. On Facebook this week, I asked the question, “If you knew the world was going to end tomorrow, what would you do today?” And I didn’t get very many responses, but those who chimed in said they would spend time with loved ones, spend time praying, go sledding, quit counting calories, and maybe cry. I think most of us just don’t think about that. There is an old tale (that may or may not be true) about St. Francis of Assisi who was asked one time what he would do if he knew he would die at sunset, if he knew his world was going to end that day. Francis reportedly said, “I would finish hoeing my garden.”

So what if the end is near? How should we, as Christians, respond to such predictions? How should we view “the end of the world”? Because we do believe that, one day, this world will end. And so, in response to those concerns that are occupying at least some of our culture, we want to spend the next few weeks looking at the book of the Bible that has more to say about the end of the world than any other, the book of Revelation. Now, I want to say a few things about what this sermon series will not be. This series will not be one that delves into absolutely every detail of the book. For one, we don’t have that kind of time, and for two, doing that misses the point of the book. Revelation is about a grand sweep, about a big story, and isn’t so concerned about details as it is about getting a particular message across. As Eugene Peterson says, “This book does not primarily call for decipherment,” but for wonder (Reversed Thunder, pg. xiii). We won’t have time or ability to read the whole book during worship, so each week in your bulletin and on the Facebook page there will be readings for you to do, and we’ll be preaching from a portion of that reading each week. I encourage you to read along, to make the most of this study by immersing yourself in the book itself.

This series will also not be one that presents a “timeline for the end of the world.” While I believe Revelation gives us hope for the end and for the return of Christ, this book is not first and foremost about a timeline, or about matching up clues in the book to so-called “signs of the times.” In that vein, you’ll find little in this sermon series that agrees with the popular notions of this book, a bad theology made most famous by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in their “Left Behind” books. That particular way of understanding the book is relatively new, dating back to the 1830’s in the teaching of a man named John Nelson Darby. None of the early church fathers understood this book in that way; there was no teaching about a rapture before Darby began speaking about it. And, I would argue, John himself, the author of Revelation, didn’t understand his writing that way, either. The great British writer G. K. Chesterton once put it this way: “Though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators” (qtd. in Peterson xiii).

Finally, this sermon series will, hopefully, not be a frightening one but a hopeful one. Honestly, I stayed away from the book of Revelation for a long time because I had the life scared out of me by one of those “rapture movies” in the 1970’s. I also saw a lot of people who responded to Jesus because of that fear, and that sort of salvation and faith never lasted beyond the time when the fear wore off. Besides that, though the book is filled with frightening and confusing images, I don’t think John wrote the book meaning to, literally, scare the hell out of people. He wrote it to get heaven into people. This is a book of hope, because, in John’s mind, the return of Jesus was the greatest hope of the Christian. Other early church writers shared his perspective. Paul, for instance, after describing the return of Jesus, tells the Thessalonians, “We will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words” (1 Thessalonians 4:17-18). He didn’t say, “Go scare people into the kingdom.” No, rather, he said, “Encourage each other—because no matter what happens in life, there is hope beyond all of this.” So my goal, in these next few weeks, is to do exactly that—to encourage us to have hope that the end of the world isn’t the end of our hope. In fact, the end of the world is the beginning of our hope.

And so we begin…with the title. In English, we call it “The Revelation.” It’s not, by the way, “Revelations,” because it’s not a series of visions. It’s one vision—Revelation. And there are indications that what John describes is happening all at once and he’s doing his best to write it all down as he has been commanded to (1:11). The original title, in the Greek, given by John himself is, “The Apocalypse of [or from] Jesus Christ.” When we hear “apocalypse,” we think of a great war or catastrophe, but the original word simply means, “unveiling, disclosing, revealing” (Mulholland, “Revelation,” Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol. 18, pg. 410). In the first century, an “apocalypse” was a particular kind of writing, usually one that described an experience the writer had with a heavenly being or in the heavenly realms (Mulholland 410), and it was a coded sort of message. If you knew the meaning of the symbols, if you knew the secret code, you could understand the writing. You knew what the writer was saying. I remember as a kid we would make up codes and write secret messages to each other. And you did that so that if the teacher found it, they wouldn’t know what you wrote because they didn’t have the decoder, right? Without the decoder, the message was just a jumble. You couldn’t understand it. And that’s part of our struggle with Revelation. We live twenty centuries removed from the original context. Contrary to what some TV and radio preachers like to think, this book was not written for us. John tells us that. It was written for a group of seven churches in Asia Minor, seven churches who would have understood without question the symbolism and the secret code. It was written to their world, not to ours, and that’s part of why we struggle with this book. We’ve lost the context. Much of the symbolism is drawn from the Old Testament (Mulholland 411), and our failure to comprehend that symbolism tells us how illiterate we are today in the language of the Bible. Even still, it’s important to remember John is trying to describe things even he cannot fully comprehend using the only resource he has: language. That’s why, so often, he says something was “like” this or “as if” this were happening. To speak of taking Revelation literally misses the point. John did not intend us to take it “literally,” but to embrace the overall message wholeheartedly.

So John tells us he was on the island of Patmos on the Lord’s Day. He had been exiled there because of his leadership in this illegal religion, Christianity. Patmos is a barren, rocky little island about ten miles long by five miles wide in the shape of a crescent. It sits about thirty-five miles off the southwestern coast of Turkey (though today it is part of Greece) and has a modern population of nearly 3,000 (Wright, Revelation for Everyone, pg. 9). In John’s day, it was a place of banishment, a punishment the Romans favored for political prisoners. Scholars differ on when they think John was there, but many today favor somewhere in the 60’s, during the reign of Emperor Nero, when Christian persecution was beginning to really ramp up. At some point, John, friend of Jesus, had been captured and sentenced to exile on this rock in the middle of the sea. He says he is there “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (1:9). He’s there because he couldn’t quit talking about Jesus. How many of us would have found ourselves in exile for that reason? I remember a Bishop asking us when we were in seminary: if you were accused of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

So there on Patmos, John is worshipping on the Lord’s Day—on Sunday, the day when Christians celebrated the resurrection just as we do now. And he says he was “in the Spirit” (1:10). I love that phrase. In one sense, I do think it indicates he was beginning to see heavenly realities, and we’ll talk about that in a moment, but in another sense, John recognizes that even though he’s in exile, he has not been forsaken or forgotten by the Spirit of God. People in Old Testament times often misunderstood God to be located in a certain place or land or building. The reason the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C. was so devastating was because many believed God had been destroyed as well. When Paul writes, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God,” (1 Corinthians 6:19), he’s saying many things, one of which is that God dwells not in temples or in lands but in you. He goes with you. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. John is reminded that even when it gets difficult, even when you’re banished and removed from everything important and familiar, God is still with you. John was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and in that state, whatever it was like, he heard a voice.

The voice was like a trumpet, and it instructed him to write down everything he was about to see and send it to the churches. So John turns around to see the voice—see the voice. Do you begin to get a sense of the limitations of language here? You can’t see a voice. You can see the owner of the voice, but John turns around at the sound of the voice and enters an entirely new world, a new way of perceiving things. In reality, as Eugene Peterson points out, John doesn’t actually see new things. What he describes in the book of Revelation is nothing new and doesn’t add anything to what we already know if we’ve read the Scriptures. Rather, the voice like a trumpet wakes John up so he can see what has been there all along.

Last fall, I remember a day when I woke up with my mind full of details and struggles and things I was working through. And those things occupied my mind all morning. Maybe you’ve had days like that—where you go about your routine and do what you need to do but your mind is somewhere else completely. And somewhere around 1:00 that afternoon, I noticed the sky. I remember texting Cathy, “I just now noticed the sky today.” Now, does that mean the sky had not been there? That somehow it had disappeared until 1:00? Not at all! It means that, at that moment, I woke up out of my inward focus, my self-centeredness and noticed something outside of me that had been there all along. Or it’s like those times when we hurry here and there and fail to notice someone we know standing right beside us. They were there all the time, but it took their voice or something else for us to “wake up” and notice their presence. That’s sort of what John is describing here. It’s not that all of a sudden Jesus was there. Jesus and the kingdom of God was present all along. In fact, that had been Jesus’ primary message, right? “The kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 4:17). No, what happens in Revelation to John is that this voice wakes him up and enables him to see what—or who—has been there all the time.

And that meant a radical reorientation. John says—several times in this book, in fact—he “turned around” (1:12). We would say he did a 180. He looked a different direction. I don’t know if that means he looked behind him physically or if he’s describing something that happened in his spirit, but Jesus did say that, to be able to enter into and see the kingdom of heaven, we have to “turn around.” In that first sermon he preached, the first word is, “Repent” (Matthew 4:17), a word which, quite literally, means “turn around.” Go a different direction. If you’re headed west, go east—because the way we go and the direction we choose on our own is away from God. So if we’re going to find God, if we’re going to enter the kingdom, after we wake up, we have to turn around. We repent of the things we have done that moved us away from God and begin walking a path that moves us toward God. John needed that reminder on the island of Patmos. He turned around. We need that same reminder, in exile here in Portage.

So what did John see? Or, rather, who did John see? Because the first thing he describes is a person standing among the lampstands. The description is very visual and very Old Testament. He’s wearing a robe reaching down to his feet with a golden sash across his chest (1:13)—these are the garments of a priest, the high priest in particular, the one who stands in our place before God the Father. He’s the one who asks the Father to forgive our sins (Mulholland 428; Peterson 33). His hair is white—white represents purity—and his eyes are blazing fire. The Gospels often describe Jesus’ eyes. In Mark 3:5, he looks at the religious leaders in anger. In Mark 10:21, we’re told he loved the rich young ruler with his eyes. And in Luke 22:61, when Peter denies Jesus for the third time during his trial, we’re told Jesus gazed at him—he saw what was in Peter’s heart. The imagery in Revelation draws on all that because fire purifies, it brings out what is really there. It’s only destructive of attitudes and mindsets that are harmful, temporary. Only the things that are eternal will survive the blazing fire. Jesus doesn’t look at us; he looks into us (Peterson 34). His feet are bronze—a symbol of steadfastness, faithfulness. His voice is like rushing waters, which is the same way Ezekiel described the voice of God (cf. Ezekiel 43:2). He has seven stars in his hand—which speaks of him as a creator, but I love the point William Barclay makes, that this same hand that is strong enough to hold the stars is also gentle enough to wipe away our tears near the end of the Revelation. And out of his mouth comes a “sharp, double-edged sword” (1:16). The prophets and the apostles both described God’s Word as a sword that penetrates to the deepest part of our being. The writer to the Hebrews put it most clearly: “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (4:12) (Barclay, The Revelation of John, Volume 1, pgs. 49-51; Mulholland 429). This not your typical Sunday School picture of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” This is the Son of God, ready to do battle with everything that threatens his disciples. John, as Bishop Tom Wright puts it, “would warn against imagining that Jesus is therefore a [cozy] figure, one who merely makes us feel happy inside. To see Jesus as he is would drive us not to snuggle up to him, but to fall at his feet as though we were dead” (Wright 7). This is like the prophet Isaiah, in the Temple after the king had died, when he gets a glimpse of what God looks like. His response? “Woe is me! I am ruined!” (Isaiah 6:5). This book is a revelation of Jesus Christ—of what he is really like. It’s a wake-up call to follow the real Jesus, and not the one we have made up in his place. To be able to see him as he is means we turn around and we become serious about being faithful to the true and living Christ.

So John falls down, and then that hand that is strong enough to put the stars in place touches him and says, “Do not be afraid.” This one who is above it all, above the suffering, above the persecution, above our momentary troubles (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:17), he is with us through it all. He was dead, he is alive again. He is in control of all things, including death and Hades. And because of that, he commands John to write letters of encouragement to the churches, to call out their best, to call them to faithfulness. This week, if you follow the readings, you’re going to read those letters to the churches, and it might be helpful to do so with a study Bible that gives you some background on each church. But I believe Jesus has a message for us in here, as well, a message to the church at Portage. The message is this: “Do not be afraid.” It’s the same message Jesus has delivered to the church throughout the centuries: “Do not be afraid to do what I’m calling you to do. No matter what the world think, no matter how you are judged, no matter how you might be persecuted—do not be afraid. I am the one who is on your side. I am first and last. I was there at the beginning and I’ll be there at the end—and all the points in between.” We know that, because Jesus has been with this church for 176 years and then some. At a Disciple class a couple of months ago, though, we discussed how so many people here don’t know our story, don’t know this church’s story, and because Revelation is a letter to the churches, it makes sense to tell our story alongside their story. And our story is the story of Jesus’ faithfulness throughout everything that has come our way. So we’ll be telling our story over the next few weeks, and we begin by remembering God’s faithfulness through the years.

VIDEO: Wanda Samuelson

The problem with vision is that, very often, Jesus only gives us one step at a time. A lampstand doesn’t give lots of light, just enough for the next step or two. And that’s the way Jesus works with us as well—one step he leads, and then another, and then another. So how do we respond to this text as we begin our journey into the strange and wonder-filled world of the Revelation? Well, first of all, we have to wake up—begin looking for Jesus in places we might least expect, because he’s there. Turn around, wake up, repent—whatever term you want to use, do what we need to do in order to see him working in our world, in our lives, in our church. You know, sometimes we get so focused on what we’re upset about, or what we disagree with, or what we don’t like that we forget to look for Jesus even in the midst of that. He’s there. He’s working, and he’s leading. And once we see him, our response is to embrace whatever calling he has placed on our lives. It might be scary. It might lead us to be looked on strangely by our world. People might not understand. But, as the Revelation shows us, salvation is worked out in the midst of hate and suffering or not at all (cf. Peterson 31). Where is God calling you to go and what is God calling you to do in 2012? What task will you put your hand to, whether the end comes this year or not?

This Saturday, 9 a.m., is our Vision 2012 event. We’re going to be talking about what it will take to move this church forward in 2012, and I want every one of you to be part of that discussion. Our Ad Council has already approved strategic goals for this coming year, and I’ll be sharing that with you as well as some thoughts on leadership. And there will be time for you to worship, as John did, and to seek out how God is calling you to respond in 2012 to this Jesus, this one “like a son of man,” the one who says to us, “Do not be afraid.” No matter what the future holds, he is with us. He has gone before us. And he will not leave us orphaned (cf. John 14:18). He still hold the keys of death and Hades. He’s still alive forever. Let’s pray.