Revelation: A Proclamation of Hope

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Revelation 21:1-7, 22:1-5:

In his letter to the Romans, Paul says “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us…. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now… For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Rom. 8:18, 22, 24-25)  We need hope not in the best moment of our lives, not in the brightness of day, not in the celebrations of life, not in the mountain top experiences, we need hope in the darkness, in the worst moments, in the pain and suffering in the valley of the shadow of death, that is not only where we need the hope but consistently in scripture that is when hope is not only offered but where hope is given.  In our Disciple 1 Bible Study, we are currently working through the prophets and their visions of destruction and suffering, and yet even in the midst of all of that God offers a word of consolation through the prophets that the people are not alone, that they are not abandoned, that God is present for them in the midst of all of it, and that God will redeem the situation and will redeem them, so don’t give up, keep going with patient endurance, remain true to the faith

Of course that is also the same phrase we have heard John offering in Revelation, that if the 7 churches that he is writing to are not already suffering because of their faith in Jesus and their refusal to worship the emperor or the state, that they soon will be, but they need to endure to the end, because in the end God will win, and then we get his vision found in chapters 21 and 22 which tells of the coming of a new heaven and the new earth.  And John hears a voice who tells him, “See, the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:3-4)  Although there have been hints of this message throughout Revelation, the closing chapters are John’s message of hope and consolation, not just for those who are suffering or may be suffering persecution because of their faith, but for all of us, because let’s face it, life is not always a bowl of cherries or a rose garden.  There are difficulties and pain and suffering that we all undergo just by being alive, and so John is telling us to persevere because we know how it ends and it’s pretty glorious.

Revelation: Interpretive Lenses

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Revelation 7:9-17:

This past week I was in Houston attending a conference on financial stewardship, and as I was preparing to come back to Albuquerque from my conference on Thursday, we had several hours to kill before our flight, so we stopped at a mall just so that we could spend some time walking around after having been sitting in a room for 10 hours a day for two days, but in the mall, there was a gallery for Thomas Kinkade.  Now I know that some of you probably like Kinkade, maybe even like him a lot, and the reason I often hear is the opposite of that they know exactly what the painting is about.  There are no secrets, nothing strange, noting to try and interpret.  It’s just easy and straightforward.  Now I’m a fan of modern art, which is certainly not appreciated by everyone, and often for the reasons why Kincaid is liked, that it’s hard to understand, people don’t know what to make of it, or I also sometimes hear them say that “my child could do that.”  There are times in which we need or want things to be straightforward and easy,  and we often certainly want to make Revelation like that, because it’s so different, so foreign, so unknown.  But I believe that we have to take revelation as for what it shows us, which is more like modern art then it is like Thomas Kinkade.

This is a picture that t is leaning against the wall, and it’s called Picassoesque.  It’s done by a very talented young artist in Santa Fe, based on a work by Picasso.  Anyone want to make a guess what this is about?  It’s really unknown, and Picasso is a great artist to try and help us to understand Revelation.  Apocalyptic literature tended to be written during times of great social turmoil.  The book of Daniel was written during a Greek occupation of Israel under the leadership of Antiochus Epiphanies, who outlaws Jewish practices, desecrates the Temple, including placing a statue of Zeus in the Holy of Holies, and forcing Jews to worship Zeus upon pain of death, and so in the midst of this Daniel is written to tell everyone to remain faithful to let them know that God will overcome the kingdoms of the world.  Now if you’ve been here the past few weeks, you know should remember that that sounds very familiar to what had taken place at the time that Revelation is written with the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, and the worship of the emperor being so prominent, it makes sense, but the imagery is still confusing.

But to understand Picasso you also have to understand that he also painted in a time of crisis, with the Spanish civil war and the rise of Franco.  He said that in his paintings he was expressing what he was feeling and thinking about when he saw the pain that was tearing Spain apart.  He even has one series of works known as the dreams and lies of Franco, and when he was asked what some of the paintings meant, Picasso said, “I don’t know.  It’s what I was feeling.”  So if you look at a Picasso painting and wonder what it’s all about, because you can’t figure it out, that’s okay because sometimes it’s just imagery to disturb, not to mean anything, and yet other times it does mean something.  It’s figuring out the interpretive lens and how to look at these works that makes a difference, and so today we’re going to look at the 4 different lenses through which Revelation has traditionally been read.

The Problem With Basketball

Tonight college basketball kicks off it's season, and I, for one, will not be watching.  I do watch March Madness, in particular the beginning, because I love seeing the little guys knock off the big guys.  But other than that I don't really watch basketball because to me basketball is boring, and, here is where I get controversial, an inferior sport.

I say that because the first parts of the game simply don't matter.  If you miss the first pitch of a baseball game, you could miss the batter hitting a homerun which could be the only scoring in the entire game.  The same is also true of football and soccer, and perhaps, although I have no idea, even in cricket.  Every moment of every game is important because you don't know what's going to happen, when the scoring will begin or end.  That is not true in basketball.

Really the only part of the game of basketball that really matters is the last 5 minutes, because if you turn the game on with 5 minutes to go either the game is a blowout, and it doesn't matter and you can turn it back off without wasting any time watching it.  Or, it will be a close game and therefore you haven't missed anything because you're going to see the most important part.

In addition, the last 5 minutes could still take an hour to play, so the game could still be long.  If you don't believe me, here is something from a story by Phil Mushnik that proves my point: "Last Friday, we noted the final 42 seconds of the Knicks-Pistons game ran an insufferable 20 minutes, 12 seconds. The last 1:41 of Monday’s Hawks-Knicks game ran 20:17. On Wednesday, the last 18.7 seconds of the Magic-Knicks game went 8:06 — and included two commercial breaks."

42 seconds took 20 minutes to play?!  Here is my solution to make basketball interesting.  Make it last only 5 minutes. It would take just as long and would be just as interesting.  Now I know that is never going to happen, but here is an idea that should happen.  In the last two minutes of the game (or even the last 5 minutes if you would like), when there is a foul committed, the other team should not only get two shots, regardless of the number of fouls, they should also get possession of the ball. That would not only solve the problem of the last 42 seconds taking 20 minutes, but it would also solve the problem of teams fouling in order to try and win, which I can't also stand.

Good luck to the teams this year, although I won't be watching.

Revelation: The Unveiling

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Revelation 1:1-20:

In the lead-up to the election this week, one news stations reported on, in their words “a hellish post-apocalyptic world in which all you saw were political ads.”  That would definitely be hellish, although if you were here last week, then you know that that is an incorrect usage of the term apocalyptic.  It is certainly eschatological, but it is not apocalyptic.  So here is that quiz that I said last week was going to come.  What does apocalyptic mean? (revealing, unveiling) What does eschatology or eschatology mean? (end of time) And what is the parousia? (second coming)  Apocalyptic literature can deal with the end of times, but it need not do so, as it is simply a revealing to “explain, earthly realities through visions of heavenly truths.”  There are really two different types of apocalyptic literature, one gives visions of heaven and hell, and the second talks about the end of times, about eschatological events, and for Christian apocalyptic literature, since there were also Jewish forms of the genre, it was about the parousia, the second coming of Christ.

We have several different examples of apocalyptic literature in scripture, but the only full-blown apocalypse, and that is the technical term, is the book of Revelation, which we are going to spend the next three weeks looking at.  But Revelation is more than just an apocalypse, it also take a form of another genre with which we are more familiar in scripture and is important to understanding it, and which we saw in the passage we just heard.  Verse 4 begins, “John, to the seven churches that are in Asia.  Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come…”  Does that sound familiar to anyone else from other books of the Bible?  It’s a letter, and we need to keep that in mind because first of all it does not say, John, to the churches in America in the 21st century.

Now if someone asks me for some advice, or I decide to then write them a letter about it, there is some context behind what is going on.  If that letter were then to be passed onto someone else, the advice I gave to the first person might be good advice for them or it might not depending upon what their context was.  That means that we first have to understand their context in order to try and see how we can apply that information to our own time and circumstances.  That is how we should approach the other letters we have in scripture, known as the epistles, which means, strikingly enough, letters, and it’s how we also need to approach Revelation is to realize that it is not just an apocalypse but also a letter, and it’s directed to 7 specific churches that John says are in Asia, but this is not Asia that we understand it today, but they are part of modern day Turkey.

The Little Apocalypse

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was selections from Mark 13:

We in America seemed to be obsessed with the end of times.  Dr. David Morrison, who is the person who answers questions that are emailed to NASA, says that he spends at least an hour a day answering questions about the end of the world.  In just the past decade there was the whole Mayan Calendar thing, and Harold Camping’s two different predictions, and then Hal Lindsey and Pat Robertson both said the end was coming in 2007, or maybe it was 1988, or 1985 or 1982 or 1980, which were also predictions made by them, and this week in my mail I found this flyer talking about prophecy and the end of time.   This is a strongly an American phenomenon, although we also export our ideas very well through movies and television shows.   And then there is our literature  about the end of times, like The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, and of course there is the Left Behind series, and the fact that Nicholas Cage is now staring in them may be the most obvious sign that the end is upon us.

Today we begin a new series looking at apocalyptic literature, and in some ways this is a return to our series on questions that people had asked me about, because I was asked in that to talk about this, in particular the book of Revelation, and so for the next few weeks we will be looking at these passages and how we might interpret them.  Now what we normally here is that there is only one way to view these works, but I can tell you that that is not the case and I am going to be giving a different way to view these texts, a sort of minority report as it were.  For some of you this might be refreshing and for others it might challenge what you have heard or been taught, and we’ll talk more specifically about that starting next week.  But here are the two things I ask.  The first is that you don’t come up to me after worship with your Bible in hand to try and refute me point by point, and the second is to listen with open minds to try and hear a different way of approaching these texts, and if in the end you don’t agree with me, that’s okay.