Can I Get a Witness (sermon, April 11, 2010)

Acts 5:27-32

Revelation 1:1-8

Theologically speaking, Easter is not just a day, it’s a season, and a long season at that -- longer than Advent and Christmas combined, longer even than Lent. But most of us celebrate Easter in one day or perhaps for a weekend -- with Easter egg hunts, Easter baskets, meals with family, and hopefully, at least one visit to a church to worship. But after the day or the weekend is over, life goes on. As joyous as we might feel on Easter morning, as much as we cling to our firm belief that day that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ God has defeated death and sin once and for all, when the music fades and the fancy new clothes are back in the closet, we find ourselves face to face once again with the things in our lives that seem much more tangible than the promises of Easter: the job that demands too much, the bills piling up, the loneliness, the illness, the broken relationship, the hole in our lives from the person who is gone. In the face of all this, what does it mean for us to proclaim for six more weeks: Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!? What does it look like for us to be Easter people?

Well, the first followers of Jesus offer us a great answer to those questions. After the resurrected Jesus appeared to them and then eventually returned to God, the apostles got busy with the work of witnessing to the amazing love of God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They couldn’t help but tell the story all over Jerusalem, even though it repeatedly got them in trouble.

Charles Colson was a convicted Watergate conspirator who became convinced of the truth in the New Testament and, specifically, its witness to the resurrection. What convinced him of this truth was his own experience of being directly involved in a major cover-up. On his path to prison, Colson discovered that few people are willing to suffer for long in defense of a lie. Very few people are willing to let their family members suffer in defense of a lie. And very, very few people are willing to die for a lie.

After he learned this lesson firsthand watching his fellow Watergate conspirators crack one by one and tell the truth about their crimes, Colson decided that Jesus’ disciples never would have kept telling the story of Jesus’ resurrection if they had simply made it up to keep their new religion going.

The disciples showed an incredible determination and resolve to witness to what they had seen: Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection -- even when that witness meant they risked imprisonment and even death. For the disciples, it was worth the risk to declare the truth of God’s revelation of Jesus Christ. And when we read their stories, like the one today from the book of Acts, we see what it looks like to be Easter people.

The only problem is, as inspiring as the apostles’ actions are, we find them hard to imitate...because we weren’t there when our Lord was crucified, we weren’t there when they laid him in a tomb, we weren’t there when he rose from the dead. Unlike the apostles, our faith does not come from having witnessed firsthand Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

The good news is that there is a book of the Bible that speaks even more directly to our experience as modern-day Christians and to what it might look like for us to truly live as Easter people. Believe it or not, that book is the Book of Revelation. Today’s reading is from the opening of the book, chapter 1, verses 1-8.

Revelation 1:1-8

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.

Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near.

John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood,and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

Look! He is coming with the clouds;

every eye will see him,

even those who pierced him;

and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.

So it is to be. Amen.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

At the session meeting last week, I asked the elders what first came to mind when they thought of the book of Revelation. Immediately someone said, “Scary stuff.” There’s a good reason “scary stuff” is what comes to mind for most of us when we think of Revelation. Not only is there is a lot of scary stuff in it, that “stuff” becomes even scarier when we discover that much of the violence and judgment in the book comes from God. Plus, over the centuries, a variety of groups have deliberately used the imagery in Revelation to scare people into believing or behaving in a certain way. As a result, many of us tend to avoid this book.

But if we look more carefully at what it says and at the context in which it was written, we might just discover that no other book in the Bible has as much to offer the church today as Revelation.

So let’s cover the basics. Revelation is actually a letter, written by a man named John (not the same John as the writer of the Gospel of John) to seven churches in what he called Asia, which actually refers to modern-day Turkey. The letter is believed to have been written about twenty-five years after the resurrection, at a time when Christianity was still in the early stages of becoming a world-wide religion. In other words, this letter was written right at the time when those who believed that Jesus was the Christ but had not witnessed the resurrection firsthand were trying to figure out how to live as Easter people...not so different from us.

What was significantly different for the first Christians over two thousand years ago was that there was absolutely no attempt to separate religion and politics. At that time, Rome occupied all the cities in what John calls Asia, and citizens were expected, if not required, to show their devotion to the Roman emperor through what were essentially religious ceremonies and rituals. The brilliance of the Roman occupation was that along with military might and economic stability, it gave people a role to play in a grand story. The story was this: the emperor is a god and if you worship him and the you will have peace and prosperity. (1)

In Revelation, John offers his readers a different story: the story of the revelation. Although this book is often mistakenly referred to as “RevelationS”, the proper title is “RevelatioN,” as in THE one revelation, and the revelation about which John writes, the story he offers is this: Jesus is Lord.

Perhaps now it’s becoming clear why the Book of Revelation contains so much violent imagery: because the story of Rome and the story of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ are totally and completely incompatible.

As so often happens when two stories are incompatible but undeniably co-existing, many Christians at that time lived a double life. In public they appeared loyal to their Roman occupiers. They attended all the ceremonies, said the right prayers, ate the meat of animals that had been sacrificed to Roman gods. In their hearts, they didn’t believe any of it -- they knew that the real author of their lives was God, not the emperor and the real story was that Jesus is Lord, not that the emperor was divine. But they kept their true beliefs quiet, knowing this was the only way to live in peace.

In Revelation, John is calling such Christians out. He was infuriated at the evidence he saw of Christians who chose to blend in rather than declare their true loyalty to Jesus Christ. At the time, there was essentially a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy where religion was concerned. As long as you took part in the ceremonies affirming the authority of Rome and the divinity of the emperor, no one cared what you actually believed.

There were certainly good reasons for these early Christians to keep their true beliefs quiet. Taking part in ceremonies and rituals that promoted the emperor as a god was important for their social and economic mobility. It was how people “climbed the ladder” in their careers, which, then, as now, was how people provided a good and stable life for themselves and their families. Accommodation, assimilation, blending in -- these are the things that John is upset about. He wants Christians to abandon the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and come out of the Christian closet, even though doing so is sure to lead to persecution and perhaps even death.

Last weekend, watching the Final Four of the NCAA men’s basketball championship, I was struck by the differences in the coaching. There was Brad Stevens, the coach for Butler, who remained incredibly calm during the games, rarely showing emotion toward the refs or his players. Then there was Mike Krzyzewski, the Duke coach, who watched every game with a scowl on his face, spoke to his players with a quiet intensity, and argued animatedly with the refs when he didn’t like a call. But most emotive was the coach of West Virginia University, Bob Huggins. Throughout the semi-final game against Duke, he screamed and yelled at his players from the sidelines, and furiously lit into the referees when he thought a call was unfair. Personally, I couldn’t see the benefit of this strategy, since I don’t respond well to being yelled at, but clearly, the West Virginia players adored their coach and played their hearts out in the game, even after their best player got injured, even when they fell so far behind it was clear to everyone they were in a losing battle.

If John, the writer of Revelation, was a coach, he’d be a lot more like Bob Huggins than Brad Stevens. In order to inspire the Christians in Asia to declare that Jesus is their authority, that the true story is the revelation that Jesus is Lord, John uses strong language and powerful imagery. But he does so in an attempt to inspire Christians to witness to the truth of the revelation and to share that story so that all might know the wondrous love of God.

I have a friend who is a die-hard Michigan fan. He is such a die-hard fan that he tends to have issues with his temper when he watches a game. Finally, his wife delivered an ultimatum: get your temper under control or you can’t watch games at home. Well, he came up with a good solution: he records the games and then, after he finds out whether Michigan won, he watches the game. When he knows the ending, the game is a whole different experience. It matters, but not quite in the same way. Knowing the ending, he’s able to maintain some perspective.

Maybe that’s why John opens this strange and, at times, frightening letter with a glimpse of the ending in store for all of us. “Look -- he is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him... ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” Right at the beginning, John tells us the ending of this story. And it turns out the ending is essentially the same as the beginning, for this world, and the lives of everyone in it, will end as it began, in the hands of God.

In the end, the answer to the question of how we live as Easter people is the same answer in Revelation as it is in Acts. We are called to witness to the story that God has revealed to us...simply because it is true. Right at the beginning, John reminds his readers that Jesus was the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of earth. We can’t be the firstborn of the dead or the ruler of the kings of earth, but we can be faithful witnesses to the revelation that Jesus is Lord, that God--not any human authority--is the author of our lives from beginning to end.

It’s still Easter, and even though our sorrows and anxieties and frustration with this life are as real as ever, we are called to be faithful witnesses. We witness every time we show in word or deed that this life, this world is not the end of God’s story. We witness when we proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord and that one day Christ will come again and everyone will see him clearly. We witness when we refuse to give in to despair because we know despair is not the end of the story. This story--the story of the revelation--will end as it began: with the glory of God. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Amen.

Endnotes:

1. In this discussion of the historical context of the Book of Revelation, I am indebted to a wonderful commentary by Dr. Brian Blount: Revelation: A Commentary (New Testament Library). WJK, 2009.