The end is the beginning (Revelation 1.4-8)
The end is the beginning (Revelation 1.4b-8)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, November 25, 2018 (Christ the King Sunday)
Tom James
When my father was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, he could step back and reflect on what it was like. I remember spending a week with him while we were on vacation and seeing the difference from day to day: there were good days and there were bad days. He knew the difference, too, and he told me that, some days, everything was perfectly clear: his thinking was sharp and he felt like himself; while on other days he felt like he was walking around in a thick fog.
I was struck by the image of walking around in a fog, because, of course, it is a familiar one: we probably all know something of the feeling. Maybe we have literally walked around in an actual fog, feeling disoriented by the sheet of grey that divided us from everything around us. Or maybe depression or anxiety or some other condition has at one time or another caused us to lose perspective and to lose confidence in our abilities to navigate our circumstances, to see the world as it really is. Whatever the cause of our particular fog, the fog is disorienting; the fog is a thick blanket of confusion and uncertainty.
The painfully ironic thing about the fog as a metaphor for dementia is that age is supposed to bring clarity. When I think of walking around in a fog, I usually think about my younger years when I understood much less than I do now. Life is supposed to teach us lessons, to make us more aware, more alert, more in touch with reality rather than less. But that terrible disease of the brain that my dad suffered reverses all that, sealing us off from the world, trapping us in the oldest memories, taking us back to our foggy pasts: to confusion, to unknowing.
Other things, besides disease, can do that, too. The book of Revelation was not written to us. It was written to people who lived in a different kind of fog: the fog created by an empire and its thick blanket of self-justifications, its systematic erasure of any alternative. The so-called “Pax Romana,” or Roman “peace,” was called “peace” because it meant the cessation of war by means of total military domination. It was called “peace” because it meant a relief from political conflict by means of eliminating political choice. It may not sound very attractive, but it worked for centuries because it replaced war and politics with a sophisticated technical administration of life: roads were built, water was transported, trade was expanded. So impressive were its successes and so complete was its domination that people thought there were no alternatives to the reign of Caesar. This was the kingdom of a god on earth.
But then Jesus came preaching.
Jesus came with a message from a different God about a different sort of kingdom. And the book of Revelation is about the hidden reality of that kingdom, a kingdom that Romans couldn’t see because they were trapped in the fog of imperial power. They were unable to see what was going on in the heart of their very empire because they were caught up in the fantasy of its imagined eternity. The Romans suffered from a kind of dementia: they thought they were living in the present, but in fact, a fog had descended upon them, they couldn’t process reality, and all they could do was staggeringly to repeat the past.
I don’t know if you’ve thought of it this morning, but today is the last Sunday of the church year. Since last year at about this time, the church has followed the story of Jesus—his birth, his teachings, his arrest and crucifixion, his resurrection, the beginning and expansion of his church. And here we are at the end. What does this story mean? What is its significance? How do we imagine a fitting end the story, before we begin it all over again next Sunday?
The traditional answer is that Christ reigns in power. We call it “Christ the King” Sunday. It as if the point of the story were a complete and thorough refutation of Roman imperial pretensions. Christ came into the world claimed by Caesar, and we end his story by claiming the world for Christ.
But the book of Revelation is even more surprising than this. It’s not just that one ruler is exchanged for another—although the church has often imagined it that way. Rather, it is that the whole idea of “ruler” is put in question. The end does not provide closure. It doesn’t tie everything up in a tidy way, preserving the original roles but putting new people in them, like a TV drama that revolves around a contest for power where the plucky underling ends up on top and gets the chance to exact revenge on those who held her down before.
Michelle and I have been caught up for several years in a popular HBO series called “Game of Thrones.” In the show, there is an iron throne, made from dozens of swords, that sits in the capital city of the “seven kingdoms,” and the drama that unfolds is about who will sit in that throne. The contestants are many, and there are dozens of changes of fortune over several seasons, as one person seems to have the edge, and then another, and then another. But the throne never changes. The understanding of what it means to rule remains the same. Always, to rule means to dominate, to dispossess, to pacify by controlling. The question is only, who will get the power and the privilege of ruling?
Like ancient Rome. And also, perhaps, like politics in America. Every election cycle, there is always a horse race to see who finishes first, who holds office, but the office that is held seems always to remain the same. And so, we go from cycle to cycle, recycling the same old grievances and the same old lines, as if we have a compulsion to repeat the same old cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment as if we are walking around in a dense fog and can imagine no other way.
But Jesus came preaching. And the book of Revelation’s central image, the lamb upon the throne, does more than recount another episode in the cycle—it announces that the cycle is over, that the fog is lifted. Jesus reveals a life beyond the contest for domination, beyond the world that is managed and manipulated to pacify and control. The lamb upon the throne means that the throne cannot be the same anymore, that power is not a matter of swords and legions but of solidarity and love; that struggle between enemies must be replaced by cooperation and mutual aid between neighbors and friends; that the scramble to the top must give way to a community in which no one succeeds unless and until all succeed.
Preacher Eugenia Gamble tells the following story. Several years ago, she writes, when I was a pastor in the Denver Colorado area, a colleague of mine told me a story of a friend of hers who was traveling home to Denver on a Sunday afternoon from a conference north along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Fort Collins. The conference had been a good one. The man and the woman were driving home full of what they had learned and talking about how they might use their new learning in their work situations. As they rounded a curve in the road they came upon a serious motorcycle accident. The motorcycle seemed to catch on something and flip into the air. The driver, without a helmet, was thrown fifty yards or so, and the bike landed not far away.
The two were the first to arrive. The man was driving and pulled off the road just north of the accident. Before he shut off the ignition the woman was out of the car and running to the side of the accident victim. The man stopped another car and sent the occupants for help while he began to try to direct traffic. At one point in the chaos, he glanced at the woman. She was crouched next to the unconscious young man, stroking his hair and talking to him.
When the ambulance arrived and the young man was whisked away, the man and the woman got back into their car in silence. There was blood on the woman’s hands and around the hem of her skirt.
After a moment, the man said, “I saw you talking to that young man. He was obviously unconscious. He may even have been dead. What could you possibly have been saying to him?”
“I just told him over and over,” she replied, “I just told him, the worst is over. The healing has already begun.”
The apocalypse, the revelation, is that the end of the story is actually a beginning. Amid the wreckage, the healing has already begun. The devastation that we have witnessed, as the church has declined, as our communities have suffered, as we kneel over bodies that may or may not be alive, as the very order of the world has tottered, points toward a new world, a new community, and a new church: a world and a community and a church that we have not been able to see or imagine because of the fog that blankets our vision like a thick, grey veil, hiding our future.
But the preaching of Jesus says the new world is here: it is in the making; it is being born. At the side of the road in the very presence of the wreckage. Within earshot of the falling columns of a failing empire.
Jesus came preaching. That’s the beginning of our story, and it’s also the end. It’s not about having a new king, but a new way of life. The end is our beginning, because the fact that Jesus came preaching means that the worst is over, and the healing has already begun. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
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