preaching on Revelation: hope, weirdness, and being anti-empire

Last Sunday, I preached in my Community of Christ congregation, beginning five weeks of messages from Revelation. This sermon came together with more difficulty than the last few that I’ve done, but I took advantage of being the first person preaching on Revelation by setting the stage for a responsible reading of the book as about the past, not the future. I attend a relatively conservative Community of Christ congregation, so it was unsurprising to get some pushback on that, I guess. I also managed to work one of my favorite novels into that explanation, which was fun. I think I could have gone harder with the message of anti-imperialism, but I’m pleased with what I did fit in there.

I think part of the difficulty I had with this sermon is that less than six months ago, I preached on how often New Testament messages of hope seem to not follow through: Paul’s confidence in Jesus’s return was laughably wrong, and Revelation’s assurance that “Every Eye Will See” seems to fall flat in a time period where Christianity is more often used to oppress than to liberate (not to mention that there’s a promise of violence toward the oppressors in the passage I was assigned that I don’t like and didn’t even engage with). I didn’t want to repeat my Advent message too much, so I wound up spending more time setting the stage for Revelation than trying to tease out a productive but realistic message of hope.

Anyway, here’s what I wound up sharing:

Introduction

When I was growing up, I would hear a lot of sermons referencing great works of literature and famous poems and think “I ought to read that stuff, so that I can include it in sermons.” That never really happened, though. I read a lot, but a lot of what I read is comic books and science fiction, and so that is what makes it into my sermons instead.

One of my favorite science fiction authors is Cory Doctorow. I love Doctorow’s stories, but I sometimes have trouble recommending them to others, because they can be a bit strange. Here’s how a review of his 2017 book Walkaway began:

[quote] Here’s the thing I love about Cory Doctorow: No one is weirder than he is.

And I don’t mean run-of-the-mill weird. I don’t mean personally weird (though he might be, I don’t know him), but as a writer? Super-weird in the best possible way. [end quote]

Walkaway is a weird book. It begins with a young man whose first name and 19 middle names were taken from the most popular boys’ names in the 1890 census. It continues with people who “walk away” from their normal lives to go live in the polluted Canadian wilderness, where they build taverns with automatic kitchens and visit underground universities where people are trying to learn how to upload people’s personalities into computers. Walkaway isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay.

The book ends with a showdown at a private prison, where the wealthy owners of the prison show up with as many soldiers—and giant robots—as money can buy. There are some tense moments of dueling computer hackers and of flying drones attacking other flying drones, but instead of a violent battle, the showdown gets resolved when the hired soldiers also “walk away” from conflict and greed to side with the people tearing down the prison walls, the people who want a better world of peace and plenty for all.

It is such a weird book, but I keep reading it over and over because for all its weirdness, it gets something about the world that we live in. Walkaway is a science fiction book, so it feels like it’s about our future, with giant robots and people whose personalities have been uploaded into computers. If you’re paying attention, though, you notice that Walkaway is actually about our present, about today’s polluted wildernesses, today’s mistreated inmates in today’s private prisons, and today’s wealthy people who can afford to bankroll all the conflicts they want. All of the book’s weirdness is about creatively expressing the author’s concerns about the world we live in and his hope for a better world to come.

Revelation

Today, we begin five weeks of messages from the Book of Revelation, so it’s important to get one thing out of the way right now: Revelation is also a weird book. It begins with a vision of seven golden lampstands and seven stars (Revelation 1:12,16), it continues with a black sun and a blood-red moon (Revelation 6:12), and it ends with a “new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1) where God “will wipe [away] every tear” and “Death will be no more” (21:4).

Like Walkaway, the weirdness of Revelation can make it hard to recommend to others. In fact, Christians have struggled with the book for as long as it’s been around. Between the year 300 and the year 400, as early Christians assembled various books and letters into what we now know as the New Testament, there was a lot of debate as to whether Revelation counted as scripture. Over a thousand years later, during the Protestant Reformation, many of those involved in rethinking religion for their time were also willing to rethink scripture—and a number of them weren’t sure that Revelation qualified. Maybe there’s a lesson there, that Revelation isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay.

So long as Revelation is part of our scriptures, though, it’s worth seeing just what we can get out of it. One important thing to recognize is that, like Walkaway, even if it seems like Revelation is talking about the future, it’s actually saying something about the present of those who wrote it. Revelation is a kind of book called an “apocalypse.” In fact, in languages like French and Spanish, this book of the Bible is called “Apocalypse” rather than “Revelation,” but that’s not as much of a difference as we might think.

A few years ago, the Reverend Philip DeVaul, the rector of Cincinnati’s Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, wrote the following:

We’re trained to think that Apocalypse means the end of the world, or the end of civilization. But apocalyptic literature […] has an explicitly different purpose. The word “apocalypse” means “to reveal”. The apocalyptic genre is about revealing. But it’s not revealing the future – it’s not a crystal ball – it’s revealing something that is already true[.]

So, the Book of Revelation is best understood as a message from its author to its first readers, revealing truths about their time and their context. All of the book’s weirdness was about creatively expressing early Christians’ concerns about the world they lived in and their hope for a better world to come.

That said, just because the book is about our past rather than our future doesn’t mean that it’s not still relevant to our present. We also have concerns about the world and—on good days at least—we also have hope for our future. If we can understand the concerns and the hopes expressed in the Book of Revelation, we might be able to hear God speaking to us, no matter how weird the book is.

Today’s Theme

So, let’s try! Today’s theme is “Every Eye Will See,” and it comes from verses 4-8 of the first chapter of Revelation. Revelation is an extended letter, and these verses help introduce the letter to its recipients. Let’s start with the first part of verse 4:

4 John to the seven churches that are in Asia:

A quick note here before we continue. We associate the word “Asia” with an entire continent, but in John’s time and place, “Asia” referred to the Western part of Türkiye, or Turkey, right across the sea from where Greece is. This is relatively far from the Christian communities living near Jerusalem (about 23 hours in the car today, so even longer before cars existed), but importantly for the Book of Revelation, this region is still part of the Roman Empire, which also rules all the places where Jesus’s ministry took place. Let’s keep that in mind and continue:

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood 6 and made us a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

And here’s the part that today’s theme comes from:

7 Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. So it is to be. Amen.

8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

Every eye will see Jesus. That right there is a statement of hope, and one that gives us a hint about the concerns that these Christian communities had. We don’t have all the details, but it’s pretty clear when you read Revelation that early Christian communities were going through a rough time. It wasn’t all bad: As we’ll remember from the short geography lesson a minute ago, Christianity had spread pretty far from Galilee and Jerusalem.

However, as we’ll also remember, the Christians being addressed in the Book of Revelation were still within the territory of the Roman Empire, and during this period of time, the Roman Empire did not like Christians. Much of the weirdness in the Book of Revelation—even including that famous number of the beast—comes down to a metaphorical description of how these communities are suffering under Roman rule.

The idea that “every eye will see him” imagines a world where that gets turned upside down. The Roman Empire is huge and powerful. At this time, Christianity is relatively small and relatively weak. How fulfilling would it be for these communities to look forward to a day where every eye will see Jesus coming in glory?

Concluding Remarks

If that’s the message of Revelation’s weirdness for its first readers, what can it mean for us today? The Roman Empire isn’t around anymore, but there are still huge and powerful groups around, and there are still small and weak communities that are suffering. I have trouble relating to a lot of what Revelation has to say, but that concern resonates with me, and that hope, that all of that will one day be made right? That resonates with me, too.

Even so, there’s a tricky thing about Revelation’s message that we have to be careful with. At the time Revelation was written, Christians were indeed those who were being persecuted by the Roman Empire. Before long, though, things changed. As the authors of the book Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals describe things:

In the year 280, Roman Emperor Constantine was baptized into the church, beginning Christianity’s transition from a minority movement to an empire religion. It was not long before the persecuted became the persecutors, and the cross of Christ was exchanged for the sword of Rome.

In the centuries since Emperor Constantine’s baptism, Christianity has more often been the huge and powerful force feared in the Book of Revelation than the small and weak community that this book celebrates. The message of Revelation for today’s Christians is not, therefore, how do I protect Christianity against its critics? It is instead, how do I protect the weak against the powerful—even if that means standing up against my fellow Christians.

Every eye will see. I have hope that one day, everyone of every faith or no faith of all will see the need to work toward a world where there are no more weak and there are no more powerful—where, whatever weird book we want to take inspiration from, we are ready “walk away” from conflict and greed to side with the people tearing down the prison walls, the people who want a better world of peace and plenty for all.

Thank you.

• Community of Christ
• Revelation
• Cory Doctorow
• Walkaway
• hope