Sermon preached at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,
11.00, 5 May 2019
Revelation 2.1-2a, 7; 2.8-9a, 10c-11; 2.12-13b, 17;
2.18-19a, 26, 29; 3.1, 5-6; 3.7-8, 12-13; 3.14-16, 20-22
Revelation 4.1-11
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/apocalypse-now-2-heavens-perspective-on-the-church
Listen to this sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/apocalypse-now-2-heavens-perspective-on-the-church
You may have noticed that we didn’t read the ‘guts’ of each
letter - just the beginning and end - and really, each one could do with a
sermon in its own right. But there are some key things we can take away from even a
brief overview of the letters to the churches in chapters 2 and 3 that might
help us to understand what John, the author of Revelation, is trying to say
about the nature of being a church living under the Roman empire.
Take another look at this map which I showed us briefly last
week:
The order in which John lists the seven churches: ‘Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis,
Philadelphia, Laodicea’
(1.11; cf. 2.1, 8, 12, 18; 3.1, 7, 14), transcribes a clockwise circular route,
beginning with the church that is closest to the island of Patmos
where John is imprisoned (1.9). This provides a clue as to how the book of Revelation would
have been initially distributed.
There is often a tendency when dealing with a book with as
complex an interpretative history as Revelation, to forget that it started with
real people, in real circumstances, and addressed real pastoral needs. But the map on the screen of the locations of Patmos and the
seven churches serves to ground the text in its original context; as a piece of
pastoral writing, originating with John on Patmos, and then being circulated
round each of the seven churches in turn, probably with a copy being made in
each city before the original manuscript from John continued its journey to the
next location.
In a culture where literacy was far from universal, the
initial encounter most people would have had with Revelation would have been
through public readings, either in the context of worship or through smaller
mid-week meetings (1.3; 22.18). - It’s a drama, designed to be performed, not
read. I often think that those of us who just read Revelation are missing
something - in much the same was as reading the script of a Shakespeare play at
school isn’t the same as experiencing it being performed at the Globe.
So chapter 1.3 offers blessings on the one who reads the words
of Revelation aloud, and on those who hear and keep it, reflecting a context
where public reading of longer texts in worship was not uncommon. You might complain that sometimes our Bible readings in
church are too long, but can you imagine sitting through the entire book of
Revelation in one sitting!? I can remember reading the whole thing out loud to
myself once - it takes about an hour and half.
Interestingly, there are a number of places within the
Apocalypse which seem rhetorically to require a response from the listening
congregation (1.5–6; 2.7, 17, 26, 19.7, 9; 22.17, 20), again implying the
reading of it in public worship, with the people hearing responding from time
to time. And here we need to remember that first century churches
bore little resemblance to the forms of church that has dominated Western
Christianity in the two thousand years since. In the first century there were no Christian basilicas, no
cathedrals, no parish churches, no chapels. Instead, most churches were based
in and around a private home.
Those who were Jewish converts to Christianity may well have
continued attending Synagogue worship on Saturday, at least for a time, and
then going on Sunday to meetings in people’s houses for the breaking of bread
in memory of the death and resurrection of Jesus,[1]
and if a congregation grew beyond the point where it could be accommodated in
one room? Well, you just started an additional meeting in someone else’s house. The excavations of the earliest known church at Dura Europos
in Syria show that there is evidence from the third century that some of the
more wealthy church hosts were knocking rooms together to form permanent,
larger, places of worship. In this picture you can see how a traditional Roman
house, arranged around a courtyard, has been modified to function as a
multi-roomed church, with an assembly hall, teaching area, and baptistry. And this is certainly a step towards the basilica-based
worship that emerged in the fourth century.
However, in the first century context of John’s apocalypse,
the churches in each of the seven cities of Asia Minor
would have consisted of just a loose affiliation of house-based congregations. Understanding this context helps us to start making sense of
the problems with false teaching that are identified in the text of the seven
letters - we didn’t read them in full earlier, but if you want some homework, it’s
worth having a longer read of the seven letters to get a sense of the
difficulties they were facing.[2] Rather than one large meeting, with everyone present and one
authorized person presenting a sermon, what existed in that period were a
number of smaller congregations, each with its own leadership. The congregation hosts, the people who owned the houses
where the meetings took place, of course had control over who entered their
home, and would have therefore exercised a considerable degree of control over
the congregation. And as we all know, wealth and wisdom don’t always go hand in
hand. It is entirely feasible therefore to reconstruct a situation
where one or more congregations within the network of congregations in any
given city might have become a breeding ground for alternative teaching, such
as that which John is so concerned about in the letters to the churches - a bit
like a house group going rogue.
So, a picture starts to emerge of small, often beleaguered
congregations, struggling to live out their faith in the midst of an
environment that is forever pulling them away from their call to discipleship. To this end, the seven letters refer to congregations facing
difficulty (2.2), with some who had once attended having fallen away or lost
their faith.[3]
John certainly also envisages the possibility of persecution (2.10; 3.19). He therefore repeatedly calls those who remain in the
congregations of his churches to faithful endurance in the face of adversity
and discouragement.[4]
However, there is another side to John’s engagement of his
congregations in the seven letters, and this is the often-repeated tone of
rebuke and call to repentance. Whilst on the one hand John wants to encourage his audience
to endure through difficulty, on the other hand he also wants to ensure that
they take seriously the effects of any compromise. To this end, on several occasions he issues a call to
repentance,[5]
and the description he gives of the churches is often bleak, especially so with
Laodicea (3.14–22) where there is no praise at all for the congregation, but
merely a description of how far they have fallen followed by an unambiguous
call for repentance.
And yet it is from this earthly context, with all of its
troubles and difficulties, that John invites his audience to pass with him
through the open door into heaven at the beginning of chapter four, to see with
him the throne of God, and to gain heaven’s perspective on their earthly
situation. All the visions that follow are bound into the context of
the seven letters, they provide an alternative worldview that John wants those
in his churches to learn to inhabit. Instead of living as citizens of the satanic empire, they find
themselves invited to live as citizens of the new Jerusalem (2.7; cf. 22.2). And so, on our journey through Revelation, we find ourselves
entering with John through the open door into the heavenly throne room. John tells his readers that he sees an open door in heaven,
and that he hears again the voice like a trumpet inviting him to come into
heaven to see ‘what must take place after this’ (4.1). He is then caught up to heaven in the Spirit, and is
confronted with the throne of God in heaven (4.2), which is occupied not only
by God, but also by Jesus (3.21). This description of an ascent into heaven needs to be read
in the context of the ancient genre of apocalyptic. If we just take it at face
value, and think John is mysteriously entering into heaven, either literally or
in a dream, we’re missing the point.
You may remember from last week that I said John was using a
literary genre that his readers would be familiar with, a bit like science
fiction… Well, if I said that I was going to tell you a story, and began, ‘A
long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away’, you would know that I’m about to
tell you a fictional story, which just happens to be set in another place and
time. You wouldn’t think I had really been to a galaxy far, far away, and a
long time ago. You’d know it was a literary device to signal how you should
hear what was coming. For anyone who is missing the reference here, ‘A long
time ago, in a galaxy far, far away’ is the opening line of the original Star
Wars film. Well, there are plenty of other examples of Jewish
apocalyptic material where an apocalyptic author begins their story with a
description of a trip into the heavenly realms. Here’s a few examples to show
you what I mean:
1 Enoch 14.8, ‘And behold I
saw the clouds: And they were calling me in a vision; and the fogs were calling
me; and the course of the stars and the lightnings were rushing me and causing
me to desire; and in the vision, the winds were causing me to fly and rushing
me high up into heaven.’
Apocalypse of Abraham 18.1–3,
‘And as I was still reciting the song, the mouth of the fire which was on the
firmament was rising up on high … And as the fire rose up, soaring to the highest
point, I saw under the fire a throne of fire’.
2 Corinthians 12.2-4 I know a person in Christ who fourteen years
ago was caught up to the third heaven-- whether in the body or out of the body
I do not know; God knows. 3 And I know that such a person-- whether
in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows-- 4 was
caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no
mortal is permitted to repeat.
And so we find ourselves, at the beginning of Chapter 4,
entering into the heavens with John. And we’re going to stay up here in heaven with him for the
until almost the very end of the book, before he returns us back down to earth
and asks us what we’ve learned. John’s hope is that his readers will have learned to see their
world differently, having spent some time looking down on it from heaven. I’m sure most of us have spent time on Google Maps Satellite
View, looking at places we think we know, and discovering how different they
look from above. And then, the next time we go for a walk round a familiar
place, we find that we see it differently - we know what’s on the other side of
that wall, or behind that fence, or in that person’s garden - because we’ve
seen it from above. Well, this is what John is intending with Revelation. Once
we’ve seen the earth from heaven’s perspective, we’ll never live in it in quite
the same way again - because now we can see behind and beyond things that
previously were invisible to us.
One of the ways in which John sheds light on the world of
his congregations is to fill his description of heaven with a sometimes
bewildering array of characters. There’s absolutely loads of them. For example, just in our reading for this morning, here are
the characters we meet:
- The seven angels of the seven churches
- The congregations of the seven churches
- God on the throne
- Jesus on the throne
- The seven spirits of God which the seven stars and the seven flaming torches before the throne
- The voice that speaks like a trumpet
- The 24 elders dressed in white, with golden crowns and a throne each,
- The four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind, each with six wings, and faces like a lion, an ox, a human, and an eagle,
In fact, I think that there are only four basic actors:
- · The good guys,
- · the bad guys
- · the church
- · and everyone else
The good guys are Jesus, God and the Spirit, and their various
angels, and they
are the underlying source of good and love in the world. The bad guys are Satan and his various minions, and they
are the underlying force for evil in the world. The church are all those who have taken an active decision
to follow Jesus and they
have had their sins forgiven, and have
been freed from their enslavement to the forces of evil. And everyone else are those who are not Christians, and so are
still prey to the deceptions of the bad guys. And that, in a nutshell, is it. All the other characters are
just these basic four actors with different costumes on.
So sometimes Jesus might appear in the drama as a
disembodied voice, or one like
a son of man, or as the author of the letters, or as the Lion of the tribe of Judah,
or as the lamb that has been slain, or as the
child who rules the nations with a rod of iron, or the rider on the white horse. But it’s always Jesus, and he does
roughly the same thing whatever costume he’s wearing.
Sometimes the people of God might appear drama as the
saints, the servants of God, or as seven
golden lampstands, or as the 24 elders, or as the 144,000, or as the great
multitude, or as the
two witnesses, or as the temple in Jerusalem, or as a pregnant woman, or as a list
of names in the book of life, or as the
martyrs under the altar, or as the new Jerusalem, or as the bride of the lamb. But it’s always the church, and they do roughly the same
thing whatever
costume they’re wearing.
Sometimes the bad guys might appear in the drama Satan or
the Devil, or as the
great red dragon, or as riders on horses, or as angels damaging the
environment of the earth, or as
Wormwood or Abaddon, or as a horde of locusts, or as three foul spirits like frogs, or as the
ancient city of Babylon, or as a great prostitute, or as a beast from bottomless pit, or
as a scarlet beast from the sea, or as a beast
from the earth, or as a false prophet. But it’s always the underlying force of evil, and it
always does roughly the same thing, whatever costume it’s wearing.
You get the idea…
What John wants his readers, those in the seven churches in
the seven cities, to recognise is that
they have a simple choice: they either faithfully follow Jesus
and bear testimony to him, or
they find themselves complicit in the evil of the world; they are either citizens of the new Jerusalem or
they are citizens of Babylon; they are either seduced by the great
prostitute or
they are the faithful bride of Christ; they are either enslaved to the
forces of death and guilt or
they are freed from their sins for new life in Christ. And so it goes on.
And this is the perspective on the church that John wants
his readers to grasp. The church is not some earthly social club for mutual
encouragement and doing
good deeds. It is an outpost of the in-breaking kingdom of heaven, which bears
faithful witness unto death if necessary to the
truth of the gospel of Jesus. And here we find ourselves back at the letters to the seven
churches, and I wonder
if you noticed something interesting as we read them earlier: Each letter is not addressed to the church itself, but to the
angel of the church. What is going on here? Well, in John’s vision of the ‘one like a son of man’, he describes
seven stars held in the figure’s right hand (1.16; cf. 2.1). These are identified as being ‘the angels of the seven
churches’ (1.20), and each of
the seven letters to the churches is addressed: ‘To the angel of the church in …’ followed by the name of the relevant
city (2.1, 8, 12, 18; 3.1, 7, 14). The initial image of the seven stars draws on the
description in the book of Daniel of the wise
as shining ‘like the brightness of the sky’, and of those who lead others to
righteousness as being ‘like the stars for ever
and ever’ (Dan. 12.3).[6] This representational role of stars as metaphors for groups
of the righteous is echoed in
John’s description of the angels of the churches as stars, shining
their light in a world of spiritual darkness.[7] They are held within the right hand of Christ, symbolizing
protection and security. The situation facing the seven churches may have been one of
darkness and oppression, but when
seen from heaven’s perspective, their light
shines and they are safe within the hand of Christ.
Slightly more complex is the relationship between ‘the
angels of the seven churches’, and the
seven congregations themselves. The theologian Walter Wink has an interesting suggestion
here, which is
that the angel of each church is a
spiritual representation of the totality of that congregation. This is not simply a dramatic personification but is
rather a coalescing of the spiritual identity of the congregation into a single entity. He says,
‘Angel and people are the inner
and outer aspects of one and the same reality … The one cannot exist without
the other.’[8]
In this way, when the letters are addressed to the ‘angels’ they are
simultaneously addressed to the congregations. Wink provocatively suggests that all Christian communities
exist in this way on both an
earthly and a spiritual plane, and that it is therefore appropriate to speak of (and to) the ‘angel’
of any congregation. He says:
‘The angel gathers up into a
single whole all the aspirations and grudges, hopes and vendettas, fidelity and
unfaithfulness of a given community of believers, and lays it all before God
for judgement, correction, and healing.’[9]
And as we conclude this morning, my
challenge to us is whether we can gain heaven’s perspective on Bloomsbury? Can we come to understand, and relate to, the angel of
our church? What is our distinctive nature and character that makes us
different, from the
church in Ephesus, or Sardis, or Philadelphia, or King’s Cross, or Waterloo… Because if we can get to know our angel, we come to know
and understand ourselves, and all
that shapes us. Or, to put it another way, we gain
heaven’s perspective on what it means to be the church of Christ in this
place, at this time.
[1]
cf. Acts 2.46; 20.7–8; Rom.
16.3–5; 1 Cor. 16.19; Col. 4.15; Philemon 1.2; Heb. 10.24–5.
[2]
cf. Rev. 2.2, 6, 9, 14, 15, 20–3; 3.9.
[3]
cf. Rev. 2.4, 13; 3.1, 15–16.
[4]
cf. Rev. 2.2, 3, 10, 13, 19, 25; 3.4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12.
[5]
cf. Rev. 2.5, 16, 21–2; 3.3, 19.
[6]
A similar thought is expressed in 1 Enoch 104.2, ‘But now you shall shine
like the lights of heaven’ Translated by E. Isaac in Charlesworth (ed.), Pseudepigrapha Vol. 1, p. 85.
[7]
cf. Matt. 5.14; John 8.12; 9.5.
[8]
Walter Wink, 1986, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces
That Determine Human Existence, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, p. 70.
[9]
Wink, Unmasking the Powers, p. 73.
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