May 2

Fourth Sunday of Easter - May2^nd, 2004

Lessons: Rev. 7:9-17, John 10:22-30

When Patty Lokke was interviewing me for the profile in last month’s newsletter, I gave as my favorite Bible passage a couple of the verses in our second lesson today—Revelation 7:9-10. It’s got to be fairly rare that someone asked to fill in as a preacher finds his favorite Bible passage as one of the assigned texts for that day. I figure I must be meant to talk about it this morning.

Why is this such an important passage for me? Let’s read those verses again: “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!"

Of course, it’s just such a wonderful scene – glory, the joy of heaven, praise shouted to God and the Savior. But what moves me especially is this uncountable crowd—men, women and children from every nation, from every tribe, from every people, from every language. They will all be there. Every group into which the human race has divided itself will be represented, all joining together in worship. For everyone who has been privileged to live in another nation, or with others from a different people group or language, for everyone who has come to know and love people from beyond your natural perimeters—these verses are God’s “yes” to that.

There are a lot of people in the world today who fear those who are not like them. Others can seem like competitors, nuisances, burdens, or enemies. They can seem like threats to our comfort, our power, or our identity. God tells us that this diversity of the human creation is not a threat. He wants it on earth, and he wants it in heaven. And there, the barriers that we can only transcend so incompletely here will be done away with. We’ll all be on the same footing; we’ll all be saying and meaning the same thing.

Maybe these verses are especially alive for a missionary or for anyone who has tried to share the Good News across barriers of race or culture or language. The promise here is that the Holy Spirit is doing His work, that seeds that were scattered and maybe even forgotten or despaired of will bear fruit, even if we don’t see it until we get back together in that choir. I rejoice to know that Fulbe people from Senegal will be there. Others of you think of names and faces from Pakistan, from Bolivia, from Japan, from many other places.

But there are other reasons that this passage demands our attention today. (It is tricky to preach on the Book of Revelation. It’s full of captivating images and details that tempt us onto tangents or into what can become a fantasy world of interpretations. The first thing we have to keep in mind is that Revelation is a highly symbolic book. The second is that it is a message for the church in every age.

To grasp the symbols and the message of these verses in chapter 7, we need to look back to chapter 6. There John sees the souls of the martyrs, who cry to God, Rev. 6:10: “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?” They each are given a white robe and told to wait a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed, is completed.

Then he sees a massive earthquake and catastrophes in the heavens and on earth. People are at their wits’ end. They know this is God’s doing. This isn’t routine disaster. This has no explanation but God. (Rev. 6:15-17) “Then the kings of the earth and the magnates and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of the one seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?"

That’s the question: Who can stand? Who can stand up to an angry God, when they’re finally convinced that He’s real? Peasants and presidents alike have just one thought—head for the shelters, head for the caves, hide under a rock somewhere. I have this image from 9/11, of people running down those lower Manhattan streets with that roiling grey cloud of hot dust chasing them, people diving under cars or whatever they could find for cover.

Who can stand? But then what does John see in chapter 7? “A great multitude, standing before the throne and before the Lamb,” dressed in white, waving victory branches and shouting praise. Somebody’s still standing. A whole lot of people are standing--standing before God and the Lamb--, not running to hide.

Who are all these people? John gets the answer: “These are the ones who have come out of the great tribulation,” the great trial, the great ordeal. They are the ones who have passed the test. What is he talking about? Think back to the impatient martyrs back in chapter 6, who got white robes and were told to wait till the others had arrived. And in 3:5, Jesus says that those who conquer will be given white robes, and that he will acknowledge them before his Father and the angels. We have here the martyrs, the witnesses, those who have stuck it out to the end, who have suffered, who have come through the toughest tests, bloodied maybe, but not destroyed.

They’ve died and gone to heaven – literally, in this text! (7:15-17): “They are here before God’s throne, and serve him day and night in his temple; God himself will shelter them. They won’t be hungry any more, or thirsty any more; the sun won’t beat on them; the heat won’t scorch them. The Lamb...will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water; and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

So what is the message? What does John’s vision have to say to us? You could write books in answer to that question, and people have done so.

One thing this text tells us is that God is just. Now, justice is popular today; it’s been a key notion in philosophy, down through history. People can mean a variety of things when they talk about justice.

They might mean equality, such as in “economic justice,” the idea that the world’s resources should be shared more equitably. It’s hard to deny this. Annual purchasing power per capita in the US is over $36000; in Sierra Leone it’s $500.. We hear about CEO’s who make 100’s of times more than the workers in their companies. It’s hard to claim that justice explains these facts. The trouble is, most of us would like it to be somebody else doing the sharing, not us. Unemployment in Senegal is 48%, according to the CIA. So is it just to outsource some US jobs over there? Not easy to answer.

Or, justice might mean fairness. We believe that people should be treated fairly, not to be discriminated against on the basis of factors they cannot control. Here we’re talking about the distribution of power and influence and freedoms, and we know that this is not easy, either.

Or justice might mean retribution, punishment of evildoers. We bring criminals to justice. We want to bring al-Qaeda to justice. We want the murderer of Dru Sjodin brought to justice. We have a justice system for doing this.

But here’s where we butt up against the limits of even our fairest systems and our most exquisite theories of justice. A murder victim can never get justice. The people who jumped out of the twin towers can never get justice. The child who is violated, the widow who is swindled, the motorcyclist run down by a speeding congressman—they can never get justice. Human justice, except in rare cases, never means restoration. Human justice can’t give back the life, the innocence, the health or the dreams that were torn away.

Yet God can do that. Many of us can testify how God’s forgiveness, his power to forgive others, his healing and his comfort can repair wounds that earthly justice can’t even see, or that it simply has to leave gaping as it moves on to the next case in the docket.

But God promises even more. The martyrs in chapter 6 cry out to God to judge and avenge their blood. One meaning for this word avenge is to punish, but the primary meaning is to vindicate, or give justice for. The martyrs are not clamoring for the blood of their persecutors; they are asking God to fulfill his promise, that “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” They’re asking for their life back. Revelation is telling us that God will give it. God’s justice is the only justice that restores life, and that life is forever.

Some people mock the Bible’s promise of this victory, this vindication, this restoration. They say it’s just “pie in the sky when you die.” You can call this “pie in the sky”—but you say then that our paltry systems of distribution and punishment are all there is. If divine judgment and restoration are “pie in the sky,” there is really no judgment, there is no restoration, there is no final preference for good over evil in the world. God is not really just.

But there’s more than God’s justice in this text. The word “justice” in Scripture is often hard to distinguish from “righteousness”—that is, purity, goodness, holiness, rightness. “Righteousness” takes us to another, sharper, deeper level, which is a lot less popular to talk about. You’ll find a lot of people calling for justice who wouldn’t dream of calling for economic and social “righteousness.” We don’t have a “righteousness system.” “Righteousness” implies claims we hesitate to make. With regard to God, “righteousness” implies standards that go farther and deeper than the ones we dare apply to ourselves.

In this passage, God is just, but He is also righteous. It’s not extraordinary courage or heroism, or extraordinary suffering, that earns these people the right to stand before God’s throne. Why are they here? The answer to that question is another of Revelation’s perplexing and powerful symbols: “They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” You know if you pour blood in your washer, your clothes won’t come out white. The paradox of these blood-whitened robes recalls God’s promise in the book of Isaiah (1:18): “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” It wasn’t clear to Isaiah in 700 B.C., but now it is clear, that the sin-stain remover is the blood of Jesus. That is how the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world.

So this crowd is before God’s throne not because they are innocent victims, not because they were brave, not because they were such wonderful examples, not because they deserved better than they got on earth. By the standard of God’s holiness, “there is no one righteous, not one”. In God’s eyes, all our righteousness, all our attempts at justice, are like filthy rags. Unwashed, so to speak, we all, victims, martyrs and perpetrators alike, have to head for the caves and the rocks to hide from the face of a just and a righteous God.

But the God who is just, the God who is righteous and holy, is also the God of saving love. The white-robed crowd stand before God because the Lamb of God has already stood for them. The Lamb has been sacrificed for them. The Lamb gave his blood to pay the death-wages of their sin, as well as the sins of their persecutors. That’s the only reason they can be clean in the presence of God. The Lamb himself has gone through the great trial—the greatest trial—to accomplish this for them. He bore what they could never have borne and came out conqueror on the other side of death. Whatever their individual trials and sufferings, they have all come here through the great tribulation of the Lamb of God.

They’re following him. The word is really in the present tense here: “These are they who are coming out of the great tribulation”—it’s like a grand procession. Like Jesus says in our Gospel lesson: “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). Another paradox today—the Lamb whose blood bleaches white is also the Lamb who is the our shepherd. To follow him is to take his path of faithful witness, his path of suffering, for some even his path of death.

And all those paths lead here, to God’s throne. Follow Jesus and this is where you will end up: standing before God and shouting your thanks to Him, along with people of every variety that the human race has produced. This is where you will be, because this is where Jesus has come. “The Father and I are one”, Jesus said. The Lamb with his whole flock are here, because this is where the Lamb belongs. Here at the center of the throne is where he came from, and here he has returned, bringing us along with him.

But the way is hard, and our weak wills and our flimsy faith are not going to be enough to see us through. Following Jesus is not just a matter of getting our training, our supplies and our instructions, and then being expected to keep up. I think of the stories from Iraq last year, as convoys strung out over miles, trying to keep up with the advance, sometimes out of sight of the rest of their column, sometimes not knowing where they were, missing the turns, bogged down, isolated and vulnerable to attack.

The good news today is that we are not just little units in a convoy, trying not to lose sight of “the cross of Jesus going on before,” out there somewhere up ahead. We are not just trudging along or grinding gears trying to keep up with our leader, slow-moving targets for the snipers and the ambushes and the roadside bombs of the enemy of our souls. No, Jesus says; we are in his hand, we are in his Father’s hand. John 10:28-29: “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no-one can snatch them out of my hand.” We may have to go through fire, but it will be in God’s hand; no one, Jesus says, can snatch us out.

You can stand before God’s throne. You don’t have to run and hide from God. You are part of that crowd that no one can count, if you bring your sin to Jesus to be forgiven. You will be there, if you follow the Shepherd-Lamb’s voice. You will get there, because God’s hand will bring you safely all the way.

As you come to communion today, come to receive the forgiveness that Jesus, the Lamb of God, has won for you with his blood. Come because you hear his call to follow, and you need his strength and his courage for the trials that you face. Come to stand by faith in that crowd of brothers and sisters from every nation and language, thanking God for His justice and for His love. Amen.