September 9, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

“Jazz at Four” Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 46
Revelation 6:1–8

We’ve been preaching a sermon series on well-known passages of the Bible. Some are poetic; some are great stories. Today’s is one that is frequently misunderstood and often frightening or misleading as a result. But it is well known, and in this series, I think it’s important that we bring to light some passages of scripture that are commonly misunderstood and try to bring some new understanding to them.

So today’s scripture lesson is the passage from the Book of Revelation that references what have become popularly known as the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” It is a mystical and mysterious passage of scripture; it’s hard to understand, and what we do understand of it sounds painful and frightening and probably not the kind of thing you hope to hear when you come to church looking for some spiritual strength before you head into another week. But tonight I’m going to try to recover this passage from some of that dread and fear by teaching you about it, and I promise we will end up in a place where I will send you away with some words of hope and not fear.

First I’m going to talk about some ideas that are related to this passage in the Book of Revelation and then make my way into talking about the passage itself.

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There’s a dream I remember having as a child. I dreamt that Abraham Lincoln was preaching a sermon in my family’s church, my brother was tickling me in the pew to make me laugh and get me in trouble, and Abraham Lincoln called me up to the front of the church and gave me a spanking for misbehaving in church.

There are a few things about this otherwise bizarre dream that probably make at least a little sense. I knew, even at a young age, that I was supposed to behave in church and that my parents had high standards for that. I knew that my brother had no trouble getting me to misbehave. I knew that really bad misbehavior would occasionally result in a spanking. And even at a very young age, I probably recognized Abraham Lincoln, top hat and all, as an authority figure, ever since I had seen him in the Hall of Presidents at Disney World. So the pieces of the dream do actually make some kind of sense.

There are other things about this story that make no sense at all. I don’t remember ever getting in trouble in church as a young child and certainly not in a context like my dream. Sure, brothers always get each other in trouble a little bit, but my brother was hardly ever like that. Most obviously though, what was Abraham Lincoln, not even a minister and dead for over a century, doing preaching a sermon in the front of our little church in Zionsville, Indiana?

The point of telling you that story is when we acknowledge on the front end that something is a dream, we accept that parts of it are not going to make any sense. Sometimes none of it makes any sense. Other times we can pull out one or two major ideas that are based in some kind of reality, because we know that our dreams are connected to who we are and have some connection to our deep desires and fears. We dream about things that make us anxious and hopeful and frustrated. And when we retell a dream to a friend or a therapist in hopes of making some sense of it, we include the details—even the ones that may not make much sense—but expect that we’re going to focus on the main idea while accepting that elements of the dream don’t make sense.

Most of the time we bring this same understanding of dreams to the Bible. In the book of Genesis, there is a passage that some of you might have heard before where the pharaoh of Egypt has a dream and Joseph interprets it for him. In the dream, the pharaoh sees seven fat healthy cows come up out of the Nile River, followed immediately by seven thin emaciated cows that swallow up the healthy cows. Then he sees seven healthy, thick stalks of corn grow up out of the ground, followed immediately by seven dry, brittle stalks that grow up around the healthy ones like weeds and destroy them. Joseph interprets the dream to mean that Egypt is about to have seven years of good weather and abundant harvests, followed by seven years of famine and drought. Interpreting the dream according to his anxiety about losing his money and his power, Pharaoh spends the next seven years storing up grain during the good years to get himself through the drought. That’s the interpretation. And because we know that it’s a dream, no one ever asks what the cows were doing in the Nile River, why the small cows ate the big cows, because cows don’t eat each other, or why the corn was growing fast enough for Pharaoh to be able to watch it. It’s a dream, so we accept those things as beside the point.

If you are wondering why I’m going on and on like this, it’s because, for whatever reason, we don’t always do a good job of making these distinctions when it comes to the Book of Revelation, a part of the Bible that many people continue to find quite scary, and I think the reason why is that most of us haven’t paid attention to the first chapter of the Book of Revelation, where we read quite clearly that the book is the recorded version of a vision, like a dream if you will, that is experienced by a man named John.

John tells us in the first chapter, the introduction to the book, that he was “in the spirit” and that he received instructions to write down what he saw. He was in a “spirit-inspired trance” another translation reads (Common English Bible) and everything that comes after chapter 1 in the Book of Revelation is John’s recollection of what he sees in that trance.

One other thing about the first chapter of Revelation: when John introduces himself in the first chapter, he writes, “I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the Island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Revelation 1:9). There are two things we know quite securely from historians that help us unpack this verse. One is that Patmos was a penal colony; it was an island that was used as a prison. The other is that at the time when this book was written, the Roman Empire was persecuting Christians and sending them into exile. We can extrapolate from all of that, that just like I dreamt about Abraham Lincoln because I had some anxiety about misbehaving in church, John had his vision out of a fear and hatred for the Romans, who were punishing him for his beliefs.

John’s vision absolutely reflects this. From start to finish, John’s vision is full of details that make strong references to the Roman world that surrounded him, and many of the strange characters we meet in the book have characteristics that remind historians of particular places in the empire, Roman emperors themselves, and the struggle of Christian people to be free of Roman domination.

Once we have all of that information down, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, for me, are much easier to take. The horsemen are commonly understood as symbolizing, in order: conquest, war, famine, and death. This is what John sees in the world around him. The Romans continue to move throughout the empire in a conquest of other people and lands; war follows, occupying all of the resources and raping the land; so famine ensues because there is no money and nothing to eat; and that, of course, leads to death.

Fast forward to the end of John’s vision, because out of all of this conquest, war, famine, and death, the point of John’s story is that God is in control and has a plan to redeem the world from those evils. So toward the end of the book, in Revelation 21, we read the end of John’s vision, one of those passages of scripture you do come to church to hear, one that is poetic in its beauty and inspiring and hopeful in its message.

John writes:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
     “See, the home of God is among mortals.
     He 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. (Revelation 21:1–4 NRSV)

God’s vision for the world is not one of conquest, war, famine, and death. It is not a vision of despair but a vision of hope. Out of a real-life acknowledgement of how desperately the world needs God’s help, John has a vision. And through scenes of wild beasts and warfare and fire, scenes much more vivid and frightening than being given a spanking by our nation’s sixteenth president, John tells a story about a God who is working for the good in the midst of a world that is so often an awful mess. I believe God continues to do that kind of redemptive work in the midst of life’s troubles. I believe that God’s story is moving even in the midst of violence in Syria and oppression in North Korea. I believe that God’s story is moving in the midst of gun violence and domestic abuse and the people who work to put an end to those heinous acts. I believe that God’s story is moving in hospitals where people fight illness and in the homes of people who have lost a loved one. I believe that God’s story is moving when we survive broken relationships and betrayal by our friends and find strength on the other side that we did not know we had.

The world of pain can be so vivid sometimes that it is difficult to remember what came before or to look forward to what is coming in the future. Just like we read Revelation 6, forgetting John’s explanation in the first chapter and forgetting his hope-filled vision in chapter 21, we get stuck in our own bad times and find it hard to remember the times before when things were good, and we have trouble imagining that those times will return.

Hope in God, for here again is the ending to the story of God’s movement in the world:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
     “See, the home of God is among mortals.
     He 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.

Amen.