All Saints Day / November 1, 2020
Rev. Bill Carter
After this I 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. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and 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; 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.”
This is one of my favorite passages from the Book of Revelation. And I realize that’s a curious thing to say.
Christian people tend to extremes with this final book in the Bible. Either they love it, or they ignore it. Either they spend an inordinate amount of time mapping out the end of the World, to the exclusion to the teachings of Jesus or God’s promises to Israel. Or they dismiss the ancient book as a science fiction fantasy about dragons with seven heads and sharp teeth.
I like the Book of Revelation for a very simple reason: it tells the truth.
It tells the truth about Jesus. He is the Risen One, with a sharp tongue that slices away falsehood. His countenance radiates perfect power. He holds all the stars in his hand. Jesus is the One who sits upon the throne, the Real Throne, the Only Throne – and to claim that authority, he looks like a Lamb who was slain but now lives. This Lamb now shepherds his people. With visionary language like this, Revelation reveals what it true about our Lord.
It tells the truth about life as we know it. Life is a struggle. It is not easy. The prophet John, who writes down the visions that become the book of Revelation, sees this as a cosmic battle between good and evil. Wherever Christ the Lamb sits on the throne, there is push-back and rebellion. Whenever the Lamb shepherds his flock and calls them to love, the equal-and-opposite reaction is for other folks to show a lot of hate.
These days, we might know something about that. Yesterday, if it wasn’t enough for a thousand new people to die from the corona plague in our nation, a get-out-the-vote rally in North Carolina was stopped by police officers who fired pepper spray into a crowd. Political signs are popping up all over town; when they are stolen overnight, each side blames the other, shouting past one another, and obliterating common ground.
We are living through a season of division and animosity unlike anything I have ever experienced in my adult life. Old-timers say, “You should have seen the 1960’s,” but it looks like the beginning of the 20’s are no picnic.
In the passage we have today, the prophet John refers to the “Great Ordeal.” The Greek word that he uses is a word about “pressing together,” as in a squeezing, a compressing, an application of pressure. “I’m your brother in this ordeal,” he says in chapter one. He doesn’t give us a lot of details. We know he has fallen afoul of the Roman Emperor, and was sent to a small, barren rock of an island off the coat of western Turkey.
John felt the pressure. Rome demanded absolute allegiance, but John sees Christ the Lamb as the One who rightfully sits on the throne. The Empire pressed in to compel John’s obedience, but John will only answer to Christ who shepherds him with grace. Caesar – in this case, a Caesar named Domitian – enforces his pressure with cruelty and the threat of death, but John knows his future is secure in the God who is stronger than the grave.
And in the stunning vision for today, John sees a multitude of saints in a cloud of glory. They are not Jews like him; they are from every nation. They speak every language. They are gathered in unity, a reversal of the legendary tragedy of the Tower of Babel. Together they break into song, offering a seven-fold praise of God:
Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving
and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!
John is telling us the truth, not only about God, not merely about life, but also the truth about getting through the ordeal. Whatever the ordeal happens to be, it does not define us. We can feel pressed by the voices all around us, but there is one Voice that we lean forward to hear. As the Barmen Confession declared in another time of pressure, “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”
Beyond all sight, beyond all the pressure of whatever ordeal we are currently enduring, there is a song. The saints are singing the hymns of God. It’s an amazing sound, especially for us, who cannot safely sing when there’s a deadly virus that spreads as it is expelled into the air. Beyond the crisis we are in, somebody is singing for us until we sing again.
I think of four of our saints from our flock who have gone to live with God this year. Two of them were brothers, raised among the Baptists of Peckville, both instructed in singing the Welsh hymns no matter what. Friends called them Skip and Beno. One was a gentleman, the other was a character. Both of them grew up singing and kept singing into their adult lives. They have gone before us and now stand in the full presence of God.
And two ladies are also in that choir, Lorraine, and Alma. Lorraine lived 94 years of public service. Employed by the United States Postal Service, she served on the Dalton Borough Council for 29 years. When her small congregation folded, she joined us here. She told me, “I’m a church person. This is where I belong.” Her list of the services she provided for others is a mile long.
The only list longer, I believe, is the list of Alma’s friends. She was another remarkable saint of God. Sometimes outspoken with the women, sometimes a flirt with the men, she touched a countless number of people and transformed them into friends. In Spanish, Alma means “soul,” that irrepressible, irreducible spirit within us that inhales grace and breathes out love. That’s Alma.
Skip, Beno, Lorraine, and Alma – a quartet of those who now sing in the choir that is just beyond our hearing. We can count those four and add their number to others we have recently lost, but we cannot begin to count all those who now enjoy the full presence of God. Are they worried now? No. Are they sick any longer? No, they are completely healed. Are they concerned about the noise and the nonsense of our present ordeal? Not one bit.
They have passed through, as all of us will one day pass through. They are experiencing the fullness of joy and the completeness of love. And nothing shall separate them from that joy and love. Not anymore.
When you are feeling “pressed,” try to see it from the perspective of your future. Every ordeal is temporary. Measured against eternity, it will not last very long. That’s not to ignore how painful it might feel, but it is to acknowledge what lies ahead of us – and the truth of what already surrounds us.
The day is coming when “they will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; 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.”
This is the future for us to claim. It is the very real present for those we have offered back to God. They live eternally with Christ while we keep living here and now.
And once in a while, the gap between “now” and “then” collapses. It can feel like heaven is right here, and earth is completely connected to it. This is the work of the Lamb who is our shepherd. He gathers us in an enormous flock. He guards us from the forces of destruction. Ultimately, he breaks down the walls that separate earth from heaven.
So even if life is hard, the hard parts are not permanent. What is permanent is life. What keeps going is the life of eternity; our trust in God, life begins here and now and goes on then.
Blessed are those who endure in this truth.
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