A Pretty Interesting Text
A sermon preached with the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, California.
A couple weeks ago, Scott mentioned Roman Emperor Nero and his tyrannical reign. He said tradition tells us that Nero ordered the execution of St. Paul, by beheading.
Well. Fast-forward a couple decades, and another emperor wears the diadem crown of Rome: Emperor Domitian. And if you can believe it, things are even worse. Domitian has been described as follows:
“A ruthless but efficient autocrat … his authoritarian style of ruling put him at sharp odds with the Senate, whose powers he drastically curtailed … Religious, military, and cultural propaganda fostered a cult of personality, and by nominating himself as perpetual censor, he sought to control public and private morals.”[i]
This, of course, was not good for Jews, or those who identified themselves as followers of the risen Christ. And that wasn’t only because these religions did not believe in the emperor’s own claim of divinity, but also because they held values counter to the those of an ever-expanding empire with an endless appetite for land, wealth, and power.
Persecution of Jews and Christians reached its height toward the end of Domitian’s reign,[ii] which is when a Christian leader named John was exiled to the remote island in the Aegean sea, called Patmos. And it was there, on that island, that the man who came to be known as John of Patmos or John the Divine, wrote a pretty interesting text: what we have come to know as the Book of Revelation. Over the centuries some have believed this John to be one and the same as our patron saint, John the Evangelist. But most, including myself, now believe this was an entirely different John.
And I have a feeling this entirely different John might be surprised about the ways this interesting text of his has been used and misused over the centuries. There is a reason, I think, that our lectionary only delves into this book once every three years during the relatively short season of Easter.
But despite its widespread misuse, I believe the Book of Revelation is, at heart, a pastoral text.[iii] [stay with me here].
I believe John, with inspiration of the Holy Spirit, out of his isolation and his grief and his anger at the world around him, created what could be described as abstract art, a dreamscape … or maybe more aptly, a series streaming on Netflix, with several content warnings.
Because so-called “apocalypses” were an element of the contemporary pop culture of John’s day. The were a “popular genre of literature”[iv] that communicated “their message not by logical proofs or arguments but by means of visionary journeys and pictures, creating an alternative “world of vision,” as theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza put it.[v]
While we have culturally come to associate this book with the negative connotation of the word “apocalypse,” that word is simply another translation of the same Greek word we can translate as “revealing.”[vi] “Pulling back a curtain” to understand something of our current condition.
There are indeed creatures and beasts and dragons and scary angels and scorpion-tailed locusts, and blood, and some very weird stuff with numbers, and multiple non-linear plots, if we can even call them plots. It’s definitely not for everyone. So what I think I’m saying is that I would probably be watching the Netflix series, but I wouldn’t pressure any of my friends to watch it.
The key here is that whether it’s to your liking or not, reading John’s Revelation literally, or using it as a tool of precise prediction might be akin to predicting real-world events with precision based on the Star Wars cinematic universe, which also involves monsters and madness, and has some things to say about the very real empires operating in the very real world.
We do not need to read this book and be terrified of a coming, violent end; and certainly not a quote “rapture;” a modern-era non-scriptural doctrine we do not teach in the Episcopal Church.[vii]
We can read this book as art that helps us interpret and think about our own historical moment, especially when the world around us is breaking our hearts. We can read this book as a way to help us remember that our particular moment in this weary old world exists within the wider reality of God’s presence with us, and God’s reign of all things new.
We can read this book as resistance literature grounded in hope.
From all the chaos; all of the monsters of the preceeding chapters of Revelation; John brings us to the spot we reached today. Even through all of that, we come today to the hope we have in God.
"See, the home of God is among mortals.
God will dwell with them as their God;
they will be God’s peoples,
and selfsame God will be with them.
God will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
grief and weeping and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”
(that is the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney’s translation[viii]).
God does not hate this weary old world and its cycles of power and oppression. Nor is God removed from this weary old world. God walked as one of us in this weary old world, in the shadow of its empires. And God’s love continues to flow among God’s people. The oppression and violence before and after John’s days on Patmos —those monsters — they will all fall away. And God will be, as God always is, with the people. And the world will be made new. Not destroyed. But made new. Changed. Perfected.
This is the comfort I believe John set out to bring himself and his people, then and now, with a weird collection of frightening non-linear narratives that you surely would’ve been able to bring up on ancient Netflix, found under the “Apocalypse” category header.
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[i] Yes, friends, Wikipedia is my source. Take with required grain of salt, and forgive me my trespasses. Someday I will get to this.
[ii] To be clear, historians don’t generally believe Domitian directly ordered John’s exile or specific persecution of Christians or Christian groups. However, the political climate resulting from his policies is thought to have led to marginalization harassment, and persecution, as a result of their refusal to participate in Roman worship and economic systems (see Barbara R. Rossing, Fortress Commentary on the Bible p 3463 on Kindle).
[iii] This notion was inspired by an episode of the wonderful And Also With You podcast episode titled, “Wait , the rapture isn’t real? (So what do we believe about the “end times”??). In it, Brian Fox speaks of Matthew 24 and other misused pieces of scripture like much of Revelation, as fundamentally pastoral writings when you consider the context of their writing.
[iv] Barbara R. Rossing, Fortress Commentary on the Bible p 3463 on Kindle.
[v]Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World, 22.
[vi] Go on, geek out: https://biblehub.com/greek/602.htm
[vii] For so much more on this, listen to the And Also With You episode referenced above. Seriously. You won’t regret it. Also, this is one of my favorite recent demonstrations of how very much the Episcopal Church does not teach the doctrine of “rapture”: https://www.suggest.com/jeopardy-priest-explains-why-he-missed-biblical-question-about-rapture/2682849/
[viii] Wilda C. Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year C (Proper 8, Closest to June 29).