Sermon 06.15.2025: Revelation as Resistance

This week we will begin a sermon series on the Book of Revelation. It is often used by Christians to predict future events, but it wasn't written for that purpose. 

The Book of Revelation was written to call people to resist the Roman Empire. It carries on the tradition of 'apocalypse' which is Greek for 'revelation'. In apocalyptic literature, God reveals, or makes clear, how to respond to the world in which we find ourselves. But it is written in a way that obscures the message from the people who it critiques.



Scripture

Revelation: 1: 1-20

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants* what must soon take place; he made* it known by sending his angel to his servant* John, who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.

Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near.

John to the seven churches that are in Asia:

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

To him who loves us and freed* us from our sins by his blood, and made* us to be a kingdom, priests serving* his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.

Look! He is coming with the clouds;

  every eye will see him,

even those who pierced him;

  and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.

So it is to be. Amen.

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.* I was in the spirit* on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, ‘Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.’

Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force.

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive for ever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this. As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.

Sermon

We are beginning a sermon series of the Book of Revelation today. And I’m going to confess to you that this book never made sense to me until right now, until this moment our country is living in. 

The current administration has, over the past 5 months, been eroding, and then bulldozing over checks and balances, firing non-partisan government employees—the ones who keep things running for all of us, and seeing how far they can go with their lawlessness before people will stop them. 

It has been demoralizing to see how much of the country thinks it is fine to deport and disappear immigrants without any due process. It is depressing that a portion of our fellow citizens believe it is fine for the president to act like a king, ignoring congress, ignoring the courts, using the military against US citizens, cities, and states. 

It is into just such a world that Revelation was written. The Greek word for revelation is apocalypse. And that word conjures up lots for us in English, but the word Revelation is not about future/end time/final battle/destruction, as we think of when we hear the word apocalypse. At its root, it simply means to unveil or to reveal. 

The Book of Revelation does not reveal a secret plan for future destruction. It reveals how to live in a world with current destruction. 

It hearkens back to Hebrew bible books like Daniel and Ezekiel. 

There are times in History when we need a Revelation from God because things are not clear. Ancient Babylon, or Assyria, or Rome, or other small-minded tyrants with big armies show up and muddy the water so we cannot see truth clearly. 

They tell us that what we know to be true is false and that anyone who disagrees with them is lying. They claim they have a mandate from God, even if everything we know about God is other than what they say. They claim they do what they do out of love for the country, even as they tear at the very fabric that holds the country together. They claim immigrants don’t follow the rules, but then they round them up in courthouses where they are following the rules. They claim immigrants are lazy and a drain on our resources because they don’t want to work, but then they arrest them when they are working in our fields, washing dishes in our restaurants, and cleaning our hotel rooms. 

Our Brief Statement of Faith says it this way: Ignoring God's commandments, we violate the image of God in others and ourselves, accept lies as truth, exploit neighbor and nature, and threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care. 

I’m both depressed and comforted that this is not a new situation in which we find ourselves. We are not the first people who need a revelation from God. Sadly, we won’t be the last ones. 

It is also worth noting that there are populations on the margins of society who have always been living in this space of violence and dislocation. While we seek to hold our elected representatives to higher ideals, it is worth noting and confessing that the very structures of our society benefit people who look like me. While it is right to protest now, we recognize there are groups of our fellow citizens wondering why we haven’t been protesting for the last 200 plus years. 

We need a revelation from God. 

We are people who seek to be faithful in unfaithful times. And we need help. 

So we turn to this book written by John on the island of Patmos. An angel gave him a vision from God. That’s about everything we know about him. It was written around 95 CE. Scholars are divided about the political context he was in. Was he exiled there? Was there persecution from Rome or someone else? 

It does seem likely that there was some sort of persecution, because like the apocalyptic literature from the Hebrew bible, this revelation was not written as clearly as we might like a revelation to be. A function of apocalyptic literature is to keep information hidden from the people in power even as it is clear to those who need it. The symbols and imagery obscure information from Rome, or whoever is the oppressive power of the day. 

For a revelation, the book doesn’t seem to unveil anything with a first reading. Seven lampstands and seven spirits. A throne. Seven stars and the son of man with a sharp mouth sword.

What? 

Buckle up, friends. This is just the beginning of the imagery in Revelation. 

Many of the images will not be explained, but the lamp stands are. They are the seven churches. If you put them on a map, they would make a circle around Asia Minor, or what is today mainly Turkey. Seven is a number of completeness. The seven churches stand for all of us, it is the church in its differences and in its completeness. 

And the seven stars are the angels standing over each of the churches. We don’t talk about angels a lot, outside of the Advent stories of angels appearing to Mary, etc. But the word angel in greek means messenger. These are divine messengers. And so there is a sense that they are both bringing messages from God and delivering news to God, as they watch over the church like stars. 

I find that a comforting image and challenging image right now. I want angels to watch over us. I’d like them to only report back to God the good things though. Not sure how to make that happen. 

Much of the imagery will not be explained because that is how poetry works. Language is always symbolic. It takes sounds and puts them together in ways that we can understand each other but it can’t make meaning be the same. The value of poetry is to give us language that connects to our other senses, and to our imaginations. 

Voices are described poetically in this passage. John could have said he heard a loud voice, but he said he heard a loud voice like a trumpet. That evokes different images in your mind when you add the trumpet. I picture heralds announcing news from a king, or I hear loud symphonic overtures. It is different than saying someone was yelling at you. Then the voice is described like the sound of many waters. That is also a loud voice, but very different than a trumpet. More like the din of Niagara Falls, which takes over your whole mind with the different sounds and tumult of the water crashing, images of the mist rising, and the feeling of the water in the air, covering your skin, your hair, your clothes. 

The benefit of less literal language is it helps us hear truth more clearly. Because tyrants lie using literal language. Poetry doesn’t lie. 

But it also isn’t always clear. 

And we are all a product of the enlightenment, when they mystery and ‘hocus pocus’ of the medieval church was replaced with rationality. And we equate the things we can see, hear, touch for truth. Often that is a mistake. 

I’m reading a book called “Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies” and in it, the author Marilyn McEntyre writes this about truth. 

“Truth is elusive.

Truth avoids institutional control.

Truth tugs at conventional syntax.

Truth hovers at the edge of the visual field.

Truth is relational.

Truth lives in the library and on the subway and on the internet, if you look carefully.

Truth is not two-sided; it’s many sided. 

Truth burrows in the body. 

Truth flickers. 

Truth comes on little cat feet and slips down back alleys. 

Truth doesn’t always test well. 

Truth invites you back for another look.”

In other words, truth requires mystery. Truth requires something more than cliche, jargon, and reassuring absolutes. Truth requires a confirmation from the heart. 

I’m not opposed to the Enlightenment. It did a lot to liberate us from institutions like church and state that were using mystery to excuse themselves from responsibility. “I’m king because God made me king. Trust me on that!” But maybe we threw out the baby with the proverbial bathwater. What we know and sense and can prove is important, but if that’s all there is, it leaves us feeling isolated and alone when we can’t explain and prove and understand the chaos of the world around us. 

One of the challenges in reading Revelation with our Enlightenment mindset is that it requires us to hold on loosely to things we think we are certain about, to not attempt to read it literally, to look for the truth of it slant, as Emily Dickinson instructs.

John receives a message from the Son of Man. This is a term from the book of Daniel. The gospel writers have Jesus using that language as a central part of his message. When Jesus in the gospels refers to the Son of Man, he is referring to a cosmic judge of the earth who would come at the end of history to destroy all the evil forces of the world. After this day of judgement, the Son of Man would usher in a new kingdom on earth. [1]

We’re told this about the Son of Man in Revelation: “from his mouth came a sharp, two edged sword.” If you read that literally, ouch. But what if, instead, it makes us think that the words we say can cut. Our words matter. And they can cut for good or for ill. The words coming from the Son of Man will cut like good news for some and bad news for others. 

John sees the image of the Son of Man, shining like the sun with his sharp mouth sword, and falls to his feet as though dead. You can take that part literally. I am certain that if I saw that vision, I too, would fall to the ground. 

But the Son of Man has a message for John: 

‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive for ever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades.' 

Earlier in the vision, God tells John that God is the Alpha and the Omega. That fits with what the son of Man says about being first and last. Alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet. Omega is the final letter. Your bulletin cover includes the Alpha and the Omega from our chapel windows. 

The revelation that will unfold in the Book of Revelation is that God was there at the beginning. God will be there at the end. God is there with us in the messy middle. There is no place you can go where God is not. There is no experience you can have where God is not. God is our alpha and our omega, the first and the last, the dead who lives for ever and ever. 

As the psalmist says in the 139th psalm, many generations before Revelation was written: 

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.

You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. 

When you are stuck on the island of Patmos, God is with you. 

When you face a scary medical diagnosis, God is with you. 

When you face government agents seeking to deport you, God is with you. 

Whatever we face in life, God is with us. We may be living in the now, and maybe this moment is better for some of us than for others. But God is in all the time frames, past, present, and future. Alpha and omega. Beginning and end. 

Yet God is not a genie in a bottle who magically makes everything better. God does not bulldoze their way into our world, even if there were moments we might wish for a little smiting against our enemies. 

Instead, God reminds us of the bigger picture than the moment we are in, and calls us to resist the lies, to resist the greed, to resist the cruelty. Because Rome only wins if we let her. 

The revelation from God is there is no place, no moment, no situation in our lives where God is not, so we best be on the lookout for where God is in those moments when we feel bereft of God’s presence. 

That was the lie Rome wanted John on Patmos to feel—that he was alone, that God had forsaken him. 

To be people of faith is to live in tension. We are people in the world. We participate in the world around us. It pays our salaries. We pay our bills. We vote and engage in the political process. But we are also people who look to God, people who hold different values than the world around us holds. We live in the world without capitulating to its lies, its cruelty, its inhumanity. 

The Book of Revelation, with all of its weird and fantastical imagery, calls us to resist those things around us that are opposed to God, to seek God’s spirit of truth in a culture of lies. 

The author Arundhati Roy writes [2] this:

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. 

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” 

Another world is on her way, friends. Let us listen for her breathing as we stand together, imagining new worlds, looking for God in the midst of it all. 

Amen.

1 https://ehrmanblog.org/at-last-jesus-and-the-son-of-man/

2 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/292642-our-strategy-should-be-not-only-to-confront-empire-but