Apocalypse Now #2: Heaven's Perspective on the Church

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 

Listen to this sermon here: 

https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/apocalypse-now-2-heavens-perspective-on-the-church

If you were with us last week, for the first of our new series on the book of Revelation, you will remember that we saw how the original context for the book was firmly rooted in the seven churches named and addressed in the first three chapters. Whilst they were mentioned in last week’s reading, this week we get to sample the letters written to each church in a bit more detail.

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,

And so it will carry on, for chapter after chapter, a constant barrage of new characters. It’s no wonder people find Revelation confusing sometimes. So I’m going to offer an analogy which I think may help. Have you ever been to see a play where you realise that there are considerably less actors than there are characters? You get this a lot with the more minor characters in Shakespeare plays: What happens is that each actor plays more than one part. They act for a while, but then wander off stage, do a quick costume change, and come back on to play someone else a few minutes later. Well, I think that an understanding of Revelation as a dramatic text enables us to see it in the same way - it has lots of characters, but a much more limited set of actors. In fact, I’m going to suggest that there are only a handful of actors throughout the whole book, they just keep doing costume changes and acting different parts.

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.