May 2, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Stuck

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1–6

Breathe into me the restlessness and courage
to make something new,
something saving,
and something true
That I may understand what it is to rejoice.

Ted Loder

For many Christians, the book of Revelation is, to say the least, a mystery. Many Christians who think of themselves as moderate and rational think that Revelation is not a book for them, that its language and its message are strange and removed. Many of us are much more comfortable talking about the parable of the prodigal son or the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, and we are perfectly happy to avoid Revelation altogether. As a result, we leave its interpretation to those “other” Christians, people who scream and turn bright red on the Trinity Broadcasting Network or who are quoted in the news after every hurricane or earthquake ridiculously blaming homosexuals and liberals for the latest natural catastrophe. They then quote Revelation to tell the rest of us how it’s all going to end and when. Distancing ourselves from that kind of talk, the book of Revelation, we say, may be for them, but it is not for us.

The divide between these two kinds of Christians—the ones who love Revelation and the ones who could do without it—has been succinctly captured in a couple of bumper stickers I’ve seen. The first, by the lovers of Revelation, reads, “In case of Rapture, this car may be unmanned.” The second bumper sticker cleverly replies, “In case of Rapture, can I have your car?”

We laugh at that, for the same reason we laugh at most things: because some part of it makes us uneasy or nervous. It’s my hunch that many of us are a little afraid of Revelation. So what I want to say about Revelation this morning, first of all, is that you do not need to be afraid of this book. And furthermore, I want to say that if you choose to engage it, there is a great gift waiting in these pages. On the most basic level, Revelation is a letter, written by a man who is stuck in a horrible situation, who finds a way to keep his spirits up and live with a sense of hope. I want you to hear a message from this morning’s reading and here it is: if you have been feeling stuck in any way that makes it hard to keep your hopes up; if you are stuck in a bad job or without a job, if you feel stuck in your marriage, if you are frustrated by the ways our political parties are stuck in debates about immigration, the economy, or health care; if you look around and wonder why our world remains stuck in cycles of poverty and injustice and cruelty; and if in any of these situations, you find it hard to keep your chin up and find something to hope for, please listen carefully, because the God who inspired the book of Revelation has a message for you.

The book of Revelation is, as I said, a letter. From start to finish, it is clearly a message that is recorded by a particular person and is sent to an intended group of readers. That’s an important piece of information, because when we know what kind of literature we’re reading, it changes the way we think about it. For example, as I said before, one of the types of literature in the Bible we’re more comfortable with is the parable, and I think the reason for that is we understand what parables are: we know they are stories that help us think about something. And we like that, because it frees us of worrying about whether or not the story told in the parable actually took place. We don’t have to be burdened with the historical issues that often bother us about the Bible. The parable of the good Samaritan begins when Jesus says, “a man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and was set upon by thieves.” My college professor Bill Placher used to say that “we do not check the records of the Jerusalem-Jericho highway patrol to see whether this really happened. . . . We recognize that Jesus is here not reporting historical fact but telling a story to make a point, a parable. In understanding the story as a parable, we understand what it really means” (Placher, Struggling with Scripture, p. 34).

Just as the good Samaritan should be read as a parable, the book of Revelation should be read for what it is: a letter. None of us would try to understand the contents of a letter without first asking who wrote it and where and when and to whom was it sent. If a letter is not sent to us, we take its meaning differently. It doesn’t make us feel warm and fuzzy inside to read a love note written to someone else, nor does it make us feel personally threatened to read someone else’s eviction notice. We read those letters first as a message to someone else, and we ask what it meant to them, and only then, if appropriate, do we start to ask what it might mean for us. So let’s move ahead with some of that information.

We don’t know much about the author of Revelation. He tells us that his name is John. He’s a follower of Christ and an itinerant preacher of some kind, and because of his preaching activities, he has been deported from his home in Asia Minor to Patmos, which historians tell us was a penal colony, a prison. We know that John is writing a letter to seven churches back in Asia Minor because he is in prison and cannot preach directly to them.

The knowledge that John has been imprisoned for his preaching, among some other details in the text, helps us to establish a date of composition as well. It must have been written at a time when Christians in that area were being persecuted by the Roman government. Throughout the text, John keeps comparing the Roman occupiers to Babylon, the nation that had devastated Israel by destroying the Jerusalem temple back in 586 BC. Given that Babylon-Rome comparison, this text was almost certainly written shortly after the Romans destroyed the second Jerusalem temple, in the year 70.

By now you may be thinking, this kind of information may be captivating to biblical scholars, but how does it help me when I’m feeling stuck in my world—in my marriage or my job or some larger social situation that seems to be without hope? Well, the parallel is that Christians in this place and time, and certainly this man John, were quite stuck.

We know something of what it would have been like to be a Christian in this place and time from many sources—a particularly good one is a well-preserved letter written by the local Roman governor, Pliny, to the Emperor Trajan, shortly after Pliny took office in Asia Minor and resumed the persecution of Christians. Like many ancient documents, Pliny’s Letter to Trajan informs us that Christians were persecuted, but this document goes further than most in describing the unreasonable suspicion and the arbitrariness that surrounded that persecution. (See Boring and Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary, p. 761.) The persecutions were regional and subject to the whims of local rulers. Some Christians were killed for their beliefs, which were commonly misunderstood, and others were killed simply because they were considered to be obstinate or stubborn in the face of Roman authorities.

Is there a parallel? I’m not sure. But if you’ve ever felt misjudged, if you’ve ever felt as if life is unfair and you cannot do anything about it, if you’ve ever felt like giving up in the struggle against those things, come with me on a short trip back to meet this John who wrote Revelation. Come with me, those of you who feel like the places in life in which you are stuck are not fair; if you ever feel like others misunderstand you or do not give you a full hearing, if you feel surrounded by shortsightedness, if you’re tired of our culture of sound bites and snap judgments, come with me to visit John; come and see what these early Christians have to say to us. We are not persecuted in the same way that they were, but every one of us has felt what it is to live in a world that is broken and unfair, and that is where we find their leader, this man named John.

We find John on the floor of a prison cell. He is alone. He’s afraid. He’s trying to keep his own spirits up, and in the midst of his own struggle, he is trying to help friends he has left behind so many miles away.

It is important to acknowledge that John is in prison, because some of the most important writing in our world comes from that lonely place on the floor of a prison cell. You may not know that you are already a fan of literature written by convicts: Have you read Cervantes or Voltaire? Thomas More, John Donne, Daniel Defoe, Oscar Wilde, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Diderot, Bonhoeffer, Malcolm X, or Jack London? Perhaps without knowing it, you have been moved by the words of someone who was inspired to put pen to paper behind the walls of a prison. There are countless other prison writers whose work is also remarkable, though you would never recognize their names.

Several years ago now, when I was still in divinity school at Vanderbilt, one of the great privileges of my educational career was to be accepted into a class about religious literature written from behind bars. The unusual privilege was that the class took place at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison, and half the members of the class were men who were incarcerated there. During that term, and afterwards in the exchange of letters, I met readers and writers who knew far more about what it meant to be human than I did. They knew anger and sadness, guilt and loneliness, and fear. But more remarkably, they knew something of how not to judge lest one be judged; they knew the importance of forgiveness; and if they had hope, they knew what it meant to really dig deep in order to find it.

One thing I will never forget from talks with those inmates is the descriptions of nighttime in prison. I’m not sure there is anywhere in our world where the darkness is more blinding or the silence more deafening. But some of those men who lived with hope had their own stories of small points of light in the midst of those dark nights. Along with my incarcerated classmates, I remember reading Charles Culhane during that term. Culhane was a twentieth-century prison poet, locked up as a thief; he was released and taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo. One night during his incarceration, Culhane wrote a poem about the Jew who sat in the cell next to his. The poem is called “The First Day of Hanukkah.” Here’s the last stanza:

Amidst the bustle and the boredom
of maximum security life
he lit three candles on the bars
& sat on the end of his bed w/prayerbook.
He prayed in the small light
in his sixty-ninth year
neither murderer nor holy man
just a bit of bone and spirit
remembering the song beyond the ruins.
(from Sing, Sing, 1986 in Prison Writing in Twentieth-Century America, edited by Howard Bruce Franklin)

As little as we know about the author of Revelation, I must imagine John in some similar way: a dark night in the cell, accused and convicted, surrounded by other prisoners he might have feared and prison guards he was almost certainly afraid of. He had little prospect of release and the starkest possible awareness of how stuck he was, and yet he lights a candle and places it up where he can see it, because he is moved to write about a story that he’s heard a hundred times.

The story is of the man Jesus. God came into the world in Jesus Christ to seek out and save the lost—people who were lost or stuck, just like you and I feel sometimes. Jesus found those who were in desperate situations, and he comforted them. Some were the outcasts of their time, “ritually unclean” according to the religious authorities, orphaned or widowed and without family identity due to no fault of their own. Jesus comforted them. Others kept living into bad choices and harmful patterns: the sexually promiscuous who had forgotten about love; the tax collector who bent the business rules just enough to turn a good profit but lost the justice in his work; the wealthy merchant who had fallen in love with his money, forgotten the plight of the poor, and lost his soul. Jesus comforted them as well, and he helped them to get unstuck and start over.

In his prison cell, John remembered those stories of Jesus as he sat in the darkness. He remembered a particular thing Jesus had said: “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Matthew 25:34–36).

There in that cell, feeling mostly lost but remembering that Christ also spent a long night in prison, John put pen to paper and wrote down in a letter God’s revelation to him:

“See, the home of God is among mortals.
[God] will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”
And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

The take-home from the book of Revelation is this: no matter where you are stuck, God is with you. There is nowhere you can go where God does not want to be with you. Revelation is not a book about streets paved with gold someplace off in the future and far away, John writes: “See, the home of God is among mortals.” God loves us here, inside the walls of the prison, and out in the city and in our homes, where you and I find ourselves in prisons of our own making; this is where Christ is coming to make all things new. That’s what the prisoner John writes. He hears God saying, “See, I am making all things new.” The great preacher Fred Craddock reminds us that God doesn’t say to John, “See, I am making all new things.” God says, “See, I am making all things new” (People’s New Testament Commentary, p. 816).

A liturgy from the Iona Community in Scotland reads that it is among the poor as well as the proud, among the persecuted and also among the privileged that Christ is coming to make all things new. In the private house and in the public place, in wedding feast or in the judgment hall, that is where Christ is coming to make all things new. In this place, in every place, for this time, and for all time, Christ is coming to make all things new (Morning Liturgy B, A Wee Worship Book). It is in your life and in mine, here and now, in places where we feel stuck and in places where life is not fair, that Christ is coming to make all things new.

Knowing the brilliance that has come from the writing of people in the darkest places of the world, my hope for us today is that we might come to understand the “prisons” in our own lives in far different terms. Perhaps we can dwell in the stuck places of life, places of darkness and confusion, of injustice and cruelty, and perhaps we can continue to look, as John did, for that reminder that Christ is in those places too, looking to make things new, calling us to be the one to be a sign of light and clarity, sign of justice and kindness. Christ is calling us to make sure that others who are stuck see that sign too. Remembering the promise of Christ, we might become people who see others who have imprisoned themselves and offer a word of comfort and hope to them, to help them to see that they are not so stuck as they think they are. They, you, me, all of us, are not stuck. We are free.

That is the message of John’s Revelation. How can we possibly fear it?

Amen.