The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scripture: Revelation 7:9-17
I’m going to be honest with you: growing up in my evangelical, fundamentalist Christian church, hope was not the first word that popped up in my mind whenever the Book of Revelation came up. Terrifying, maybe. Violent. Confusing. My childhood church preached that the Bible was literally true, so the Apocalypse of John, as Revelation is also known,, was a prophecy that would really come true when it was time for Jesus to return.
“In that time, the sun will become black as sackcloth, the full moon like blood;” a third of the trees and fields of the earth will be set on fire; a star named Wormwood will fall from the sky and poison a third of all the water; locusts “with human faces but with lion’s teeth, and wearing breastplates of iron, the sound of their wings like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle,” will come to torture the people of the earth, though they will be commanded not to harm those 144,000 whom God has marked with a seal upon their foreheads.
Other kids were reading the Goosebumps books or watching Scream. But this good little Christian girl was reading Revelation. Happy Halloween, I guess.
Some fundamentalist traditions, like the tradition I was raised in, believe that the rapture will come—no one knows the day or the hour—and take away those who are saved, some say before, some say after all these dreadful events in Revelation, which they call the tribulation.
All of this was existentially terrifying for me. I lived in fear of not having repented of all my sins before the rapture came, and I’d be left behind. And worst of all, it would be my own fault, I would deserve it. I had nightmares well into my 20s about the clouds rolling and the trumpets sounding and my family taken in a blink of an eye, but I was still here.
I know some of you lived in this kind of fear, too. And I am so, so sorry. This is a traumatizing experience.
But here’s the truth: that isn’t really what the book of Revelation is about. There is no rapture in Revelation. In fact, the word rapture doesn’t appear in the Bible at all. In fact, the whole idea of a rapture and a tribulation—or a tribulation and then a rapture, if that’s what you were taught—comes from a cobbling together of all sorts of random scriptures from many different books—1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, Matthew, Titus, along with some interpretational sprinkles from the Old Testament: Daniel and even Genesis—bringing us back to Revelation which, some of us have been taught, is the story of yes, the tribulation, and then the coming of a conquering Jesus and a New Jerusalem.
Cobbling together scriptures from across the biblical landscape to create your own specific narrative is a really disingenuous way to read the Bible. It requires throwing out all the reasons the author wrote the book in the first place. And doing so to show how billions of people will be harmed if they don’t believe correctly—well, that’s just irresponsible and cruel. I can’t believe that our God who is love would ever demand such cruelty.
But here’s the twist: Revelation actually is a story of hope. John, the author, was writing from the Greek island of Patmos where he was exiled, he says, “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” He writes his tale to “the seven churches that are in Asia,” probably in the late first century. These were real communities that actually existed. And John seems to have very deep and specific knowledge of what was going on in each of these churches and their cities—meaning, he was writing to the people in his own time, people he knew or at least knew of.
And, like John, many of these people were suffering because of their faith—ostracized, persecuted, and even killed for their belief in Jesus. This all happened under the banners of the Roman Empire. When the local Roman authorities weren’t doing it themselves, they were letting it happen. And not just that, but they called for the worship of the emperor as a god himself. In Revelation, John refers to the emperor as “the beast.”
So Revelation is the story, very vividly told, of the ultimate struggle of Jesus against the beast and those who worship him. And John is telling his fellow Jesus-followers that in the end Jesus will defeat the emperor and the empire that is now causing them so much suffering.
It’s like the Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien took his harrowing experience of the First World War and turned it into a vivid fantasy of good versus evil. Or Suzanne Collins writing the Hunger Games to reflect the social inequality and class discrimination and government violence that she saw in her own world.
They’re fantastic and violent stories that tell a hard truth—and point us towards hope. John of Patmos did it first.
Perhaps he’s teaching us that we can find a way towards hope through the violence of our own world. Perhaps he’s teaching us that we can find a way towards comfort through the fear and suffering in our own lives.
In today’s scripture from Revelation, John refers to the great ordeal. Now he’s talking about the martyrs, the people who have died on account of their faith, but he’s also talking about this life itself, in which pain is unavoidable. And death itself, that great mystery that causes so many of us angst and worry and fear—not only for ourselves, but for those we have lost.
I lost my grandpa two years ago. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t really like being around him. He always played just a little too rough, his jokes were always just over the edge of mean. And he used to say about me, “she’s gay, but she’s really smart.”
But after he died, I learned more about his childhood—how he was the youngest of six children, a surprise baby to parents who thought they were done having babies. Who wanted to be done having babies. And they did not hide that fact from him. I started wondering what that was like for him.
A younger kid amongst much older siblings, some already out of the house, and with parents who were ambivalent about his very existence. That’s a kind of violence, really, a great ordeal. So he grew to be a person searching for how to earn love and, when that didn’t work, how to at least command power, however shallow that power was.
It makes me want better things for him.
So it’s a deep comfort to hear in today’s scripture:
The one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.
They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat.
I hear in these words that those who have died no longer have to hunger for the love they craved in this life, no longer have to thirst for the belonging they never had, no longer have to sit under the scorching heat of the fear that they are not enough.
Or maybe what they hungered for in this life was wholeness in their body, an escape from the chronic pain or debilitating illness that trapped them. Perhaps they thirsted for freedom from dementia or Alzheimer’s. And maybe they were scorched by mental illness that haunted their days, told them things about themselves that were not true, or caused them to act out in ways that they later regretted.
Every life is a tribulation, a great ordeal, in some way to some degree. And so is every death, whether sudden and unexpected, or drawn-out and simmering with despairing expectation.
But what Revelation teaches us is that, however painful and vivid the great ordeal is, Jesus conquers our suffering in the end.
I, John, looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.
All, and I mean ALL, of the people we’ve lost are with God, and we’ll be there, too, when our great ordeal is ended.
for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,
and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Amen.
Leave a Reply