Today, we begin a six-week sermon series on the Book of Revelation. Don’t all cheer at once!
It is a hard book that folks often find confusing, damaging, and misunderstood. The imagery and visions and the way in which this book of the Bible has been misinterpreted to tell people the end times are here and we better all shape up or else has caused a lot of damage to folks.
So what is this Book – what are we supposed to 
make of it. Let me offer some overall suggestions about what the Book of Revelation might be offering us today. First, the Book was written by someone named John who had been exiled to the island of Patmos for his witness and testimony about Jesus Christ.
This is not the disciple John or the author of the Gospel of John or the letters of John. It was likely written in the 90’s CE, so 60 or so years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, and people in that time still believed Jesus was going to come back in the near future.
In the Greek, Revelation is noted as Apokalypsis which translates to “unveiling.” What is being unveiled we might ask as we go through this next six weeks. And, as one of our folks asked in last Wednesday’s study, what is our part in the unveiling? Keep those questions in mind.
Revelation is an example of apocalyptic literature of the Bible with one exception – there is an element of prophetic writing too. Apocalyptic literature focuses on revelations, often given by an otherworldly being, about the end of the world and God’s ultimate victory. It often uses symbolic language and imagery to depict cosmic battles between good and evil and the establishment of God’s kingdom. Prophetic literature is concerned with the present circumstances of the community of faith, often in relationship to honoring or not honoring God’s covenant relationship with the people.
Now as Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza points out in her book The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment, Revelation “attempts to give meaning to the present suffering of the community not with reference to a divine plan of history, but with an understanding of the present from the horizon of the future, that is, from the coming kingdom of God.”[1]
In other words, Revelation in its prophetic interpretation is concerned with the present suffering circumstances of the churches in Asia Minor, and in its apocalyptic interpretation is seeing through visions and imagery, God’s ultimate in-breaking of the present to bring about a near-future hopeful kingdom of God. And truthfully it does so with some pretty violent, often misogynistic imagery.
Whew!
John is concerned with the suffering of these communities of faith and the people who testify and witness to Jesus Christ, at the hands of an oppressive, cruel and Godless Roman empire. It is important to keep that in mind – that Revelation is written for a specific set of circumstances in a specific time and place, and if we believe it to be an absolute truth for all time and places throughout the last 2,000+ years, we have missed the point.
More questions we need to ask ourselves in the next six weeks are these: How does culture and the present time of John’s location shape the point of view of John the writer? What happens when you live in an oppressive society? What do you want your enemies to suffer if you are suffering? What is Revelation unveiling to us today?
Let’s look now at our passage for today. What meaning does it hold for us in our time and place and what did it mean to John and his communities. I’m reading from the Common English Bible:
John, to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace and peace to you from the one who is and was and is coming, and from the seven spirits that are before God’s throne, and from Jesus Christ—the faithful witness, the firstborn from among the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
To the one who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, who made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father—to him be glory and power forever and always. Amen.
Look, he is coming with the clouds! Every eye will see him, including those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him. This is so. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “the one who is and was and is coming, the Almighty.”
Do you notice some things?
I notice that it is Jesus Christ who is the faithful witness and the first and foremost of God’s prime witnesses bolstered by the seven spirits. And witnesses to what? Love! Love! Love! It is Jesus’ witness to the love and grace and mercy and forgiveness of God that we are to acknowledge and imitate. How do we do this? Not by violence – notice that the violence in Revelation is never perpetrated by the communities of faith.
Instead they and we are asked to imitate Jesus Christ by practicing loving, active, non-violent resistance to empire. They and we are to be love always in our individual words and deeds as well as our communal words and deeds. They and we have been formed by Jesus Christ to be a community of faith that resists an oppressive empire by following the first and second greatest commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.
Is that what we will teach in word and deed to Bennett who we will baptize later in the service about Jesus? Indeed to all the children of the church? Will we be honest and teach about our own, sometimes feeble, attempts to imitate Jesus Christ and ourselves be a faithful witness to the love God has for us and indeed for all God’s people?
I notice too that the one who is, was and is coming is always present to us. God never leaves us, ever. We may leave God, but God does not leave us. God is the Alpha and the Omega. The beginning and the end. With us from the day we were born until the day we die. Is that what we will teach by word and deed to Bennett and indeed to all the children of the church?
Today, we bear witness to God being the Alpha and the Omega – the beginning and the end. We will baptize Bennett who is at the beginning of his life and celebrate the life of Jan Bonge in a memorial service later today. Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, never doubt that God is always present among us. Always teaching us the ways of Love through the faithful witness of Jesus Christ.
That is power. That is resistance. That is non-violence. That is Love. That is who and what we strive to imitate, knowing we are not perfect in it yet. The number seven may signal completion and perfection, but we aren’t there yet, and still God love us, God guides us, God moves us. The God who is, was and is coming never lets us go! Let us say Amen to that!
[1] Fiorenza, E. S. (1998a). The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment, page 50