Sermon given at the Ecumenical
service of Ashing
King’s College London, 5th
March 2014
Revelation 10:9-10 So I went to
the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me,
"Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey
in your mouth." 10 So I
took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as
honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter.
Revelation 11:3-4, 7-12 [And I was told:] I will grant my two
witnesses authority to prophesy for one thousand two hundred sixty days,
wearing sackcloth." 4
These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord
of the earth. . . 7 When
they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the bottomless
pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them, 8 and their dead bodies will lie
in the street of the great city that is prophetically called Sodom and Egypt,
where also their Lord was crucified. 9
For three and a half days members of the peoples and tribes and languages and
nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a
tomb; 10 and the inhabitants
of the earth will gloat over them and celebrate and exchange presents, because
these two prophets had been a torment to the inhabitants of the earth. 11 But after the three and a half
days, the breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet,
and those who saw them were terrified. 12
Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, "Come up
here!" And they went up to heaven in a cloud while their enemies watched
them.
Additional
Reading:
Matthew 6.1-6, 16-21
Does anybody ever listen to Steve Wright in the
afternoon?
I’m sure
you know the style – Steve and his Posse laugh and applaud their way
through
a show which is a mixture of humour, banter and features
All
interspersed with a typically Radio 2 selection of Music
Well, a year or two back,
Steve
began each show in the season of lent with the phrase:
‘Let’s
give it up for lent’
Followed
by enthusiastic applause and whistling from his posse…
A terrible joke, I admit, but it made me…
And I wonder how many people actually give serious
consideration
to why
it is that some people do actually ‘give something up’ for Lent
What is the point of, ‘giving it up’ for Lent?
Is it to demonstrate our pious lack of dependency on, for
example
Alcohol
Chocolate
Caffeine
Or whatever other minor vice isn’t really troubling us
all that greatly at the moment
Maybe…
For some, ‘giving it up’ for Lent
will
represent a more serious form of self denial,
carried
out as a costly spiritual discipline
in order
to follow the path of fasting
taken
by Jesus in his 40 days of wandering in the wilderness
For others, Lent is a time to give up comfort
a time
to be reminded that Christ walked a costly and painful path
and that
Christian discipleship
is
sometimes similarly marked with pain and suffering
Some Christians have traditionally worn sackcloth for
Lent
as a
symbol before God
of
their commitment to the path of suffering discipleship
and as a
renunciation of the life of ease.
And this practice of donning sackcloth is nothing new
with
both the Old and New Testament speaking of those
who wore
sackcloth as a sign of mourning and repentance
(Ps
30.11; Jonah 3.5-8; Mt 11.21)
often
accompanied by the sprinkling of ashes on one’s head.
It is this idea of wearing sackcloth
as a
sign of mourning and repentance
and as a
sign of suffering discipleship
that lies behind the image of the two witnesses dressed
in sackcloth
who
appear to John just after he eats the little scroll
in chapter
11 of the book of Revelation
It’s as if the contents of the scroll
are to
be understood as the story of the two witnesses
This story isn’t written to be taken literally
or even
allegorically
as if
the sequence of events in this story
were
supposed to correspond to a sequence of events
in the church’s history
Rather, the story is more like one of Jesus’ parables,
and it
dramatises the nature and the result
of the
church’s witness
The two witnesses symbolise the church
in its
role of bearing faithful witness
to a
world that is hostile to the gospel of Christ.
In their death, the two witnesses graphically demonstrate
that the
price for being a faithful witness
may indeed
be that of following Jesus’ path to the cross
This parallel with the path of Jesus continues with the
resurrection of the two witnesses
which
occurs after three days
The message of this, to those who have ears to hear,
is that death
is not the final word on the subject of life
Rather, the heavenly
perspective
is that
death equals victory
Just as it was the slaughtered-yet-alive lamb
who
opened the scroll
So the story the scroll tells
is that
faithful witness may lead to death,
but that death is not defeat:
rather,
the way heaven sees it,
a
martyr’s death is an eternal victory
No wonder John said he found the scroll both bitter and
sweet.
The
sackcloth worn by the two witnesses
stands in sharp contrast with the
white robes
worn by those who have
come through the great ordeal (7.14);
the
two witnesses are depicted still wearing their clothes of mourning and
repentance,
indicative of the sorrow and
tribulation
that remain part of the church’s
present experience
as it bears its witness
to the gospel of Christ.
The bitter reality of Christian martyrdom
has nonetheless
won people to faith
throughout
the history of the church
The death of the witnesses is a bitter-sweet victory,
but from
heaven’s perspective, a victory worth dying for!
So as we, today, here at the start of lent
take
time to consider our own response
as those
who bear witness to Christ
It is appropriate that we remember those
whose
witness in sackcloth
leads
them to the difficult path of suffering and martyrdom
In biblical times, the wearing of sackcloth
was
traditionally accompanied
by
the scattering of ashes on the head
as a
further sign of repentance and mourning
In the Christian tradition of Ash Wednesday
this has
developed into the practice
of making a paste from the ashes of last year’s palm
crosses
and
anointing the foreheads of those who come to worship
as
a sign of repentance
and
of recommitment to the gospel of Christ
which
finds its focus in the cross
The book of Revelation offers us an image of faithful Christians
marked
on the forehead
with the
seal of the living God
And although it’s not immediately clear what the nature
of this ‘seal’ is,
I think the
Pauline epistle to the church in Ephesus,
one of the churches
Revelation itself is addressed to,
is helpful here
Because
Ephesians speaks about believers being ‘sealed’ by God
with the seal of the Holy Spirit
(Eph 1:13-14)
This
sealing with the Holy Spirit is contrasted, in Ephesians, with the seal of
Judaism,
which is equated with the practice
of circumcision (Rom. 4.11).
If
this idea of being sealed with the Spirit ,
as the mark of the
renewed covenant in Christ
lies behind John’s use of the ‘seal
of God’ in Revelation,
then
it’s the presence of the Spirit with believers
that marks them as the people of
God.
and
which empowers them for faithful witness to the world
So
as we come for ashing in a few minutes,
we will be anointed and marked for
renewed service
in the power of the holy spirit
And
as we do so, we anticipate together the day when the great multitude
drawn from every nation
from all tribes and
peoples and languages
will
stand before the throne of God,
and before the Lamb,
robed in white robes of joy,
and
not in the sackcloth of mourning and suffering,
holding palm branches as they
welcome their messiah
not
with the temporary welcome of Palm Sunday
which
so quickly ended in crucifixion
but with the eternal welcome of
those who have found their true home
