April 25, 2010

Shepherding Lamb

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23
John 1:29–34
Revelation 7:9–17

Revelation is a book which requires of its readers not so much that they interpret it, as they allow it to affect them and summon them to the life of prophetic witness that was the vocation of John the seer.

Christopher Rowland

It perhaps has become something of a cliché to reflect on how children often speak truth in situations that cuts through any fluff and gets right down to the reality; I think there was a TV show that was based on this premise of things that children said. I’ve never seen it, but I believe it was very popular.

I had some experience of this at the last church where I worked, St. Columba’s Church of Scotland, in London. We had as part of our morning worship a children’s address, or children’s sermon, and it wasn’t unusual for me, as Assistant Minister, to be charged with the task of bringing a story or a word to the children of the congregation. It often involved asking them questions.

We had a televised service one Sunday; it was a live national broadcast throughout the United Kingdom from St. Columba’s. Now this was a big deal. I was asked to do the children’s address, and my hook for it was the architecture of the church. St. Columba’s Church of Scotland in London has on its walls the coats of arms of the historic and ancient burghs of Scotland. So I used that as a theme with the young people and began by asking them to look around and see what there was surrounding them at church. Little Georgia stuck her hand up, and I said, “What do you see, Georgia?” And she said, “Well, television cameras.” Which was true. Of course it got a laugh from the congregation I hadn’t planned. I was dumbfounded for a few moments, but I think managed to recover.

I was thinking of the truths children speak this week. We had a document sent around the last couple of weeks from the fourth and fifth grade Sunday School kids in which they were invited to ask questions of the ministers in the church. There were great questions about God and about religion and about church and why we do things in certain ways. My favorite was brilliant; it just jumped right out at me: Why are there sixty-six books in the Bible? There you go—that’s a good question, isn’t it? Anyone want to have a go at why there are sixty-six books in the Bible?

It’s interesting that that question has been asked throughout history in the church ever since in the fourth century the canon of scripture that we have today was finalized, was set in place. As early as the second century, Marcion was asking questions about the place of the Old Testament in the Bible. No less a luminary in religious history than Martin Luther, the great reformer, had questions about certain books in the Bible. He was not very happy with the letter of James. He called it once “a letter of straw,” claiming its focus on works had no meaning for him. He came round to it later on. But Luther had the same question about the book of Revelation, which we read from this morning. Revelation, Luther said, dealt in visions, dreams, not the core reality and truth of the gospel. He pointed out what he believed were theological shortcomings in the book, and he would have relegated it to the secondary canon of scripture. Again, he did come around later on in life and acknowledged there were passages that spoke powerfully of the victory of Christ over death and the truth of that in the gospel.

I was thinking that in a very practical way, in the mainline contemporary church, we are very like Martin Luther, because, in actual fact, we hardly ever read from Revelation. I think for many people in their own personal spirituality in reading scripture Revelation is often something that is skipped over. In the lectionary, the set texts to be read in church, Revelation only turns up a few times and tends to be around John’s vision of the new heaven and new earth that is the culmination of that book. I think one of the reasons for this, historically and today, is because people have struggled to understand how to interpret Revelation. It is a question of interpretation, and there are certain ways throughout history and today in which people have approached reading Revelation. (In this, I am indebted to Professor Christopher Rowland for his reflections on the history of interpretation of Revelation.)

One way has been to see it as a relatively straightforward account, prophecy, a foretelling of the end of the world, of the end times. This is current today in more conservative or fundamentalist Protestant theology here in the United States, influenced greatly by the writings of a somewhat obscure Anglican clergyman of the nineteenth century, J. N. Darby, who mishmashed some texts from Daniel and Revelation and Thessalonians and developed what is called today rapture theology. This is the theological conceit behind the series of books that’s become very popular called the Left Behind series. The idea is that at the end times, people will be “raptured,” taken up physically to heaven, and those not saved will be “left behind.”

A second way of approaching Revelation is to see these visions very concretely related to the ancient first-century context in which John was experiencing these visions. The task of interpretation then becomes a task of decoding the symbolism that John uses throughout the book and trying to attach each of those symbols to some present reality that John was writing about.

Other people see Revelation as kind of the Pilgrim’s Progress of the Bible, an account of an individual’s struggle, of the journey of the soul towards God.

Then more recent interpretation has seen Revelation as a lens through which we can view history and understand the nature of politics and religion throughout the ages and the effect that religion has had on history.

One friend of mine, on learning this week that I was reading Revelation and preaching on it this Sunday, threw her hands up in horror and said, “It’s just a psychedelic dream!” She even suggested that the best way to interpret it was the use of hallucinogenic drugs, but she was brought up in the 60s and I didn’t bother following that route.

What we do know is that Revelation is about empire. That John the Divine, the seer, the prophet who has the visions, uses Old Testament language to speak to the context of persecution of Christians in the early church by the Roman Empire. So the context of reading Revelation is persecution and oppression. It might have been the persecution of the Christians by Nero in the 60s in the first century or perhaps by the Emperor Domitian later on in that century. But Revelation is ultimately about the vindication by God through Christ the Lamb, the vindication of those who have suffered because of their faith. Now that may be one of the reasons why it’s difficult for us in our comfortable world to read a book that invites us to reflect on marginalization and oppression and persecution.

The writer Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza says this: “Revelation will elicit a fitting response only in those socio-political situations that cry out for justice.” Isn’t that an interesting lens? When we think about Revelation, I think we have in our mind Durer’s art, like “The Four Horsemen” or William Blake’s apocalyptic vision or movies like The Omen or The Seventh Seal. How interesting to think of Revelation as a book in which the cry for justice is at its heart.

Schüssler Fiorenza says this: “The language of Revelation stands against unjust authority and champions the oppressed and the disenfranchised.” It is interesting that in contemporary theology, Revelation is used as a text by what we know as the liberation theologians, those working with the poorest and most marginalized in the world. Leonardo Boff, a Latin American liberation theologian is one example; Alan Boesak, one of the leaders of the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, another. In his book Comfort and Protest, Boesak lifts up the imagery of the beast and Babylon, the empire, in Revelation and applies it directly to the white regime that instituted apartheid and oppressed the black people of South Africa.

The great contemporary theologian from El Salvador, John Sobrino, reflects on the theme of empire in his book Where is God? This idea of empire is not just being dealt with theologically. There is a lot of writing in history and sociology about what empire means today and indeed what it means for people like us who live in the West, who live in the United States. The question is often asked whether there is a new American empire. Sobrino says this: “Empire imposes the primacy of the individual and of success as superior ways of being human.” So the individual and success become the marker of what it is to be human, not sacrifice or self-giving or love. “God,” says Sobrino, “is not the God of empire. God is the God of the victims. The God of Jesus, who was also a victim of the empire.” Interesting to think of Jesus as a victim of the empire . . .

Mark Jarman, a contemporary American poet, imagines John, and these visions that John has, in a poem called “Patmos,” referring to the island that John lived on when he had the visions.

I saw the script that glares inside rubbed eyes.
I felt the infrastructure of the face
that will endure the empire’s collapse.

It gets to the heart of Revelation, the promise of vindication that the empire does not have the last word, and that’s at the heart of our text today—this vision of a universal gathering of the multitude, almost like Pentecost again. Tribes from every nation with every language gathered, and they’re gathered in victory with palm branches, echoing the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, singing and praising God. Who are these, this great multitude? They are those that have “come [or are coming] out of the great ordeal.” Those who are coming out of the great ordeal, who have known marginalization and oppression, hurt, brokenness. This vindication is anchored in an extraordinary paradox—that they wear these robes made white by being washed in blood, the blood of the Lamb. This can take you to Elmer Gantry or tent revivals and gospel songs about being washed in the blood of the Lamb, or we can hold onto that complex tension of the paradox. The blood of the Lamb, the sacrifice, the self-giving love of Christ, which is that which brings us into wholeness. The shared experience that God has with us through Christ, the Lamb of God as pointed to by the other John, the Baptist, at the beginning of the Gospel of John.

Then we are offered this other huge paradox that John the visionary, John the seer, throws in: that the Lamb of God is the shepherd. What we did today in worship is we took one of the best-known texts in the Bible, the Twenty-Third Psalm, which we sang to the great Scottish tune of Crimond and paired it with probably one of the least known, Revelation, chapter 7. Yet we find that deep in the heart of these texts is the same theme, the Easter theme—that hope is present in God being with us as our living shepherd, with us through the valley of the shadow of death and taking us to green pastures in the psalm. That the lamb is the shepherd whose role is to guide us to the springs of the water of life and with that great hope for us all that in the end every tear will be wiped from every eye. Thanks be to God. Amen.