Sermons from St Faith's
Revelation
Fred Nye, May 12th, 2013
Everybody’s goin’ to
have religion and glory!
‘You take the Holy Bible in the back of the
book, the book of Revelation is the place you look,
if you understand it and you can if you try, the
Lord is a-comin from his throne on high! A-readin’
in the Bible all the things he said, he said he’s
coming back again to raise the dead, are you goin’
to be among the chosen few, will you make it
through?’
I’m indebted to the great Pat Boone for that quote
from his 1958 best-selling disc ‘Wonderful Time Up
There’, and I’m sorry I haven’t got the rock band
backing to go with it! But perhaps I can give you a
couple more gems from his lyrics, just to give
you the flavour of the theology – ‘Goin’ down the
valley goin’ one by one, we’re gonna be
rewarded for the thing’s we’ve done, how you
gonna feel about the things you’ll say, on
that Judgement Day?’ It’s a sort of
Country Gospel version of the book of Revelation: as
we rock and jive down that valley one by one, none of
us are going to escape the eternal consequences of our
past actions – ‘Brother there’s a reckonin’ comin’
in the mornin’, better get ready ‘cause I’m givin
you the warnin’!
Revelation, the last book in the bible, was written to
tell us something about God’s hidden nature and
purposes, and the Greek word for revelation is
‘apocalypse’ which means ‘unveiling’. But it is a
difficult book to read, full of terrifying
visions of battles between good and evil; a book of
wild imaginings, of many-headed beasts, of dragons and
angels, of seas of blood, blazing stars, earthquakes
and plagues. And although much of the
symbolism’s interpretation was lost to us centuries
ago, that hasn’t stopped a small army of doomsday
prophets and conspiracy theorists from investing the
book with all sorts of arcane meanings, many of them
highly questionable.
But for me the book of Revelation has one great
message that is easy to understand: as it draws to a
close it points us to the future with a vision of all
things made new, a new earth and even a new heaven,
and of the victorious Christ returning to claim his
own. This picture of Our Lord’s imminent return is
also what gave St. Paul his sense of urgency in his
mission to the Gentiles. Even so, I sometimes wonder
how helpful this vision of the Second Coming of Christ
is for us today. It all seems such a long way off, and
set against this grand and remote canvas our own
immediate picture looks a lot smaller and darker. The
church in the West often feels vulnerable and
uncertain of its future, damaged by scandal,
threatened by secularism, split from within, and,
according your own particular viewpoint, either held
back by tradition or threatened by liberalism. And
sometimes there is the nagging doubt – is it all our
fault? Beyond the church there lie the prospect
of other apocalyptic catastrophes - of financial
meltdown, of climate change, of worldwide food
shortages and social upheaval, and of the resurgence
of nuclear weapons. No wonder people are anxious about
the world to come.
But as Christians we are constantly going ‘back to the
future’, because the death and resurrection of Our
Lord in history gives us meaning and motivation for
life today, and for all the uncertainties that lie
ahead. Christ is the same, and his love for us
is the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow. Yet
sometimes I just don’t see it, sometimes perhaps we
all fail to see it. As we get older, although we may
have some regrets about the past, it can seem a lot
safer and more comfortable than either the present or
the future. Equally, the fear that we cannot change
things, and that the world’s mess will just have to be
cleaned up by Christ at some future second coming, can
become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Either way we end
up with a sort of paralysis, and risk losing the
redemption of the present moment. ’All that is
necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people
do nothing’. We are after all the Easter people, and
we believe in life before death.
Now here I have to declare an interest (if that is
what it is called). I was brought up as a child in the
tradition of the Catholic Apostolic church, a small
Christian sect which held a firm belief in the
imminent Second Coming of Christ. So I’ve always felt
that the essence of the Christian life is a sort of
watchful, yearning expectancy. Times were hard after
the war and there was much anxiety about the future. I
remember my dear father working out the family
accounts in a big red-bound ledger every week and
worrying about how he was to pay his 10% tithe to the
church. Cynically you could say that the money was a
sort of entry fee to heaven, but maybe it was more
like a sacrificial pledge to the future, God’s future.
Of course, sects like that can promote an awful
complacent elitism: the conviction that those in the
club, the ‘chosen few’ will be the only ones who are
going to ‘make it through’ to salvation. Worse still,
this sort of millenial fatalism can produce an
appalling, cruel indifference to the world and its
people. Back in 1993 David Koresh’s Branch Davidian
community in Waco, Texas, used the book of Revelation
to justify beliefs and practices that lead to
suffering, death and destruction, in a catastrophic
fire.
And yet the book of Revelation still speaks of the way
in which Christ makes all things new. It was written
to encourage Christians suffering persecution,
probably under the rule of the emperor Domitian in the
first century AD. In the second half of the 20th
century the text was used by black South Africans in
their struggle against apartheid: the hope and promise
of a transformed world sustained them among the
turmoil and disappointments of those dark days. Father
Simon tells me that the link was made even more
strongly by the liberation theologians in Latin
America. Our situation, thank God, is very
different. But perhaps our need to experience the
Risen Christ going before us is much the same. He
meets us afresh every day, in our need to renew our
relationships with one another, in the new life he is
longing to breathe into our church communities at St.
Faith’s and St. Mary’s, in the concern that he has for
the future of our young people locally, and in his
desire for the coming of the Kingdom, and of peace and
justice for the whole world.
The book of Revelation doesn’t contain any concealed
messages which will ensure our salvation when the
world comes to an end. But Our Lord’s promise to make
all things new liberates us from fear of the future
and sets us free to do his will in the here and
now. It is if you like, the sanctification of
uncertainty. If we will only watch and wait, Christ
the alpha and omega, the same yesterday, today and
tomorrow, the one who makes all things new, will
come to take us by the hand and walk with us into the
future, his future. He says to us ‘Surely I come
quickly’. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
The sermons
index page
Return to St
Faith's home page