Sermon Transcript for December 3, 2006
"The Advent of Inner Revelations"
By Ian Lawton

Well, it happened to us on Friday.  We’d heard people describe this situation, but we have now lived here for three winters, and it finally happened to us on Friday.  Meg and I were driving back from Holland, and we were having a very strange conversation in the car.  It was one of those conversations that was necessary and strange at the same time: 

What happens if one of us dies?  What will the other one do?  Would we have a funeral here, and then take the kids back to Australia and gather family there, or would people come over here?  What type of funeral would we have?

We were deep into this conversation when our car hit some ice on the road and we began to do the “Michigan Spin.”  I think we spun about three times around on the highway, completely out of control.  What transpired over the next minutes, or maybe just seconds, is what I want to talk to you about now.  A deathly silence came over the car.  Neither of us said a single word to each other, we didn’t scream, or even look at each other.  We just sat there motionless and timeless. 

I could see in the mirror that there were no cars behind us.  I knew, from that perspective, that we were safe.  We could see ahead of us a very large post and a lot of snow.  On the other side of the snow were a lot of cars coming the other way.  We were spinning around and around and eventually we landed with a “thud”, in the middle of the snow.  I was still clutching the steering wheel (for what good that was!) and we turned to look at each other.  We were still in disbelief because of the conversation we’d just been having.

The whole thing took about five seconds, yet felt like half an hour.  There was a sense of timelessness.  It was as if we left our bodies and were looking down on the car as the whole thing transpired.  A truck came and dug us out of the snow, and we drove off on our way within minutes, as if nothing had happened.  It was only later, when we picked up our kids, looked at them, and began to talk together about the situation, that the emotions started to come. 

While I don’t wish it on anyone, it seemed an appropriate experience heading into the first Sunday of Advent, because it seemed like we were sitting there waiting to die.  There was nothing we could do except wait and see what happened.  It was a profound experience.

Reading Revelation Literally

As we move into the Advent season, and particularly as we look at the book of Revelation, we know that many people take it literally.  Studies suggest that the majority of Americans see the prophecies of the book of Revelation as being a literal account of a pre-ordained set of circumstances that will bring about the end of the world. 

There is a danger to seeing the book of Revelation literally.  I want to point out this danger with a quick parody that I found in a book some time ago-

God is standing with the great crowd of humanity before him.  It is the Day of Judgment, and God is giving instructions as to what will happen now.  He explains that all those who have been good and righteous should gather on the right.  All the wrongdoers should gather on the left.  At a certain point in the speech, God becomes confused, and cannot remember if it is HIS right, or the right from where the people are standing.  Chaos ensues, and the wrongdoers find themselves in Heaven, smirking, while the righteous people are in indignant shock, burning in Hell.

This parody points to the absurdity of a literal interpretation of Bible text and prophecies.  Having said that, what we don’t want to do as liberals, with our healthy skepticism, is to throw the baby out with the bath water.  As liberals, what we want to do is retain the power of the myth, and find the meaning in the excessive imagery of the story, while not taking it literally. 

Reading Revelation as Myth

I want to call us, as liberals, to look at this text again, very seriously, and not take it literally, but rather to find the profound power and truth in the myth.  Apocalyptic literature has typically been about some pre-ordained end time.  But I want to encourage us to see it rather as being about transitions, as not so much about a specific end time, but rather concerning all times, transitions that take place every day in our world and in our lives.

The events of the book of Revelation mirror the creation stories of many of the ancient Near East cultures.  You see the same patterns running through the creation stories and the apocalyptic literature- the battle between chaos and creation.  Different cultures have personified their creation stories in different ways, but they all describe the same reality of death and rebirth, creation and recreation.

I want to encourage us to see the book of Revelation as being about transitions rather than a specific story about a specific time.  So what are the main themes in Revelation?  There are two.  The book of Revelation occurs as a dream in a very specific context, a social context.  The first, very profound message that comes through is the challenge to empire, a challenge to the oppression of empire.  The second theme in Revelation is where I want to focus today, and that is that it addresses the very personal and human issue of existence, finding meaning in suffering and discerning the signs of transition, the signs of death and rebirth that are surrounding us at all times. 

Outrageous Suffering

The first truth that the Revelation myth seems to point to is that suffering happens.  Suffering happens in our lives and in our world, and it is random, meaningless, and doesn’t discriminate.  It is universal- it happens to anyone, and try as we will, we cannot understand why suffering strikes us.  Suffering in our world is random, outrageous, and indiscriminate.  The violence of the dream in Revelation is random, outrageous and indiscriminate, in order to point to this reality.

I wonder if any off you have seen the movie Pulp Fiction, by Quentin Tarantino, who was part of popularizing the movie genre in the 1990’s, a genre of excessive violence- completely outrageous, meaningless, and random violence.  There is a wonderful scene in the movie involving Samuel Jackson.  Before he kills someone, he quotes from Ezekiel 25:17-
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
The point that I take out of this film is that they use outrageous violence to show how outrageous violence is. They use excessive violence to show how excessive violence is. They use random violence to show how random violence is.  It is a powerful film, and I see some links between the apocalyptic struggles of Pulp Fiction and the book of Revelation.  There is a mysterious briefcase in the film, and the code to open the briefcase is “666.”  The links between the two are unmistakable.  That’s not surprising, because apocalyptic themes run through so many different genres.
The second point to take out of Pulp Fiction is that truth is only ever reconstructed.  That is all any of us ever do, is to edit the truth.  And so the point for our lives is that while violence may be random and indiscriminate, we choose how to make meaning out of those situations.  We choose how we will reconstruct truth in our lives.  We choose how we will respond to suffering. 
I believe one of the truths of apocalyptic literature is to show that violence is outrageous, that suffering shows no partiality, to name suffering for what it is, but also to choose how we will respond. We have a tendency, when suffering pushes us into the existential corner, to create enemies.  We have a tendency to create “Us” and “Them.”  Of course, the “Us” is always the good and righteous, and the “Them” is always the evildoer.

Us and Them in Apocalyptic Literature

I wonder how many of you remember the television sit-com Get Smart?  I didn’t get to see it in its original era of the 1960’s, I watched the reruns in the 1980’s, but still, I got the point.  Get Smart pitted good against evil, and the good (the government) was called “Control”, while the evil was called “Chaos.”
Working for the government was Maxwell Smart, and his partner was Agent 99.  There is a very famous, apocalyptic scene in this show, near the end of the series, in which Maxwell Smart and Agent 99 are at the edge of a cliff with the head person from Chaos, who is about to meet a miserly end.  He asks for one dying wish- a cigarette.  Maxwell Smart is not going to fall for that, so he gives him a cigarette that doubles as a bomb, the old “exploding cigarette in the mouth” trick.  As the man smokes his cigarette at the edge of the cliff, Agent 99 asks Maxwell Smart, “Doesn’t it strike you that we’re really no better than them?  We kill and murder and destroy.”  Maxwell responds without missing a beat, by saying, “You know that we have to kill, murder, and destroy in order to preserve everything that’s good in the world.”  At that point, the cigarette explodes and the man falls off the cliff.
Again, that is a parody, but the point is clear.  The point is that once we define others as enemies, we can justify anything that we do on the basis that we are defeating evil.
Elaine Pagels, a professor at Princeton, puts it a little more articulately:
The end-times worldview cannot tolerate those who disagree.  When a society has a simplistic 'good vs. evil' world view, “every conflict between us and them turns into a moral conflict, so we're God's people, they are Satan's people.”   We can do anything to them, without ethical restraint, because all tactics are fair when fighting the devil. The apocalyptic worldview also promotes war as necessary & even desirable.
So you see the point?  When pushed into a corner, we tend to create enemies and apocalyptic literature challenges whether we will perpetuate the suffering.  But take that a step deeper:  When pushed into a corner, we tend to create enemies within.  We tend to divide aspects of ourselves as being good aspects and others as being bad aspects, and we have a war that takes place between them.  We have our own inner apocalyptic that takes place.  You know the chaos that ensues when you create an enemy within.  The book of Revelation illustrates the devastation of the inner and outer battles that rage.

Apocalyptic as Escape

The next point I want to draw out of the book of Revelation is seen in this poem by Czeslaw Milosz:

“Song on the End of the World”

On the day the world ends a bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned, as it should always be.
On the day the world ends women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air and leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.     
Warsaw, 1944  

In 1944, Warsaw was the site of one of the most tragic events of WW II.  For 63 days in the autumn of 1944, the people of Warsaw fought against the Germans who had occupied their land.  By the end, 65,000 residents had been executed, 55,000 civilians were in concentration camps, 150,000 were transported to labor camps in Germany, and every civilian was forced to leave the city.  German soldiers then began a systematic looting campaign stripping every house of furniture and personal belongings. Afterwards, these empty houses were set on fire. Monuments were destroyed and government buildings blown up.

Even in the midst of this unbelievable devastation, Milosz was able to feel joy.  He was able to make a transformative connection with the infinite. Lifted out of his finite misery, he was able to see the miracle of creation. Seeing beauty in the simple act of binding his tomatoes, he said to himself, there will be no other end of the world. There will be no greater purpose in life; there will be no grander end than to tend to these tomatoes, to notice the bee circling the flower and to hear the voice of a violin.

People often think that the book of Revelation is about a time in the future, a time when we escape this world, and get to live in perfection in paradise.  The challenge, like Czeslaw Milosz, is to see the miracle in the ordinary beauty that surrounds us even while the wars rage.

Another approach to the book of Revelation suggests that suffering wont end when we escape this world, but rather that the end of suffering comes when we lose our attachment to time. Consider this parable.

A woman is on a journey to meet with Jesus.  Along the way, she comes across a man beside the road, out from the shade of a tree, wilting under the sun.  He is weeping and mourning by the side of the road.  His skin is being eaten by the heat of the sun.  The woman tells the man that she is going to see Jesus, and the man says, “Would you ask Jesus how long this suffering has to go on for me, and when will I be in paradise?”

The woman continues on her way and comes upon another man, this one sitting beneath the shade of a tree.  The man is singing, laughing, and sipping wine, and just generally having a great time.  The man asks the woman the same question: “When you see Jesus, ask him when I will be in paradise.”

The woman continues on and has her audience with Jesus, then travels back.  When she comes to the first man, who is suffering even more now, and he asks, “What did Jesus say?”  The woman responds, “Do you see that tree?  As many leaves that are on that tree that is how many lifetimes you will live before you are in paradise.”  At that point the man breaks down completely at the thought of endless suffering.

The woman travels along and comes to the second man, who is still singing and drinking wine, and he asks, “What did Jesus say?”  The woman responds,  “Do you see that tree?  As many leaves as there are on that tree that is how many lifetimes you will live before you are in paradise.”  The man looks up with the broadest of smiles and says, “Is that all?”

When you live completely immersed in the present moment, unattached to time, unattached to regrets from the past, or hopes for the future, you are already in paradise.  No matter how devastating the events that surround you, or war within you, name the present for what it is, and in the naming of suffering you begin the transition to rebirth. That is the ultimate truth of the book of Revelation.  Excessive imagery points to the excessive suffering that takes place all around us all the time.  We need not be deluded about that.  But we choose how we respond.  We choose whether we are going to perpetuate the suffering and violence, or whether we will immerse ourselves in the beauty and treasures that surround us, the paradise that we are already in.  We choose how we will respond.

Let me leave you with a proverb that captures the point of Advent and Revelation quite nicely:

Yesterday is nothing but a dream, and tomorrow is only a vision. But today well-lived makes every yesterday a memory of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

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