Sing Me to Heaven

Sing Me To Heaven

                                    Text: Revelation 7:9-17

(Gary W. Charles, Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, VA, 9-11-2016

         

Toward the end of Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, Vladimir asks Pozzo: “What do you do when you fall far from help?” Vladamir’s question fits aptly into the absurdity of our 21^st century world. Years ago, we could simply “wish upon a star” or “talk, keep talk, keep talking happy talk,” but not now, not in a day when refugees are the fastest growing population worldwide, when the pipeline of young African American males to private prisons grows every day, when North Korea is testing nuclear weapons, when well-dressed looters prey on the poor on Wall Street. What do we do when we fall far from help?

          Fifteen years ago today was the hardest single day of my ministry. I stood outside my office at the Old Presbyterian Meeting House, near the Pentagon, as a plane flew overhead. Nothing new. Planes flew over our church more often than the train runs outside Cove, since our church was in the flight pattern of National Airport.

This was to be no ordinary day, rather an extraordinary day, extraordinarily horrific. In a matter of minutes, first in New York and then in D.C., chaos ensued and engulfed our nation and world. Fifteen years later, violence still runs loose like a wild beast. We struck back with vengeance in Afghanistan and Iraq, but chaos still looms large in those countries and regions. We invented a department of Homeland Security but most of us feel anything but secure. There is an underlying sense of malaise in the air, an ominous fear that haunts many of us as we wonder, “What’s next?”

I still enjoy listening to Rogers and Hammerstein’s old song of the cock-eyed optimist inviting us to “talk, keep talk, keep talking happy talk,” but it is Vladamir’s question that haunts me today:  “What do you do when you fall far from help?”  

Ask Vladamir’s question and you enter the world of Revelation. It is a world where normal assurances no longer work, where evil is not an occasional visitor, but landed gentry; where simple religious formulas no longer produce the desired results; where we pray fervently but heaven is silent; where we are faithful to God and compassionate to our neighbor and yet find ourselves accosted and accused, beaten and jailed. It is a world where madness is the norm and you wonder if God has taken the last train for the coast.

          D.H. Lawrence described the book of Revelation as detestable and our theological ancestor, John Calvin, wrote a commentary on every book in the New Testament, except Revelation. In his superb commentary on this bizarre book, Mitchell Reddish asks: “Would we not be better off distancing ourselves from this book that has been the fertile field for fundamentalist soothsayers, that helped fuel the fires at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, and that to some people seems more of an embarrassment than a work to be taken seriously?” (p. 2). 

          Reddish asks what many Christians practice, simply by not reading this book. And, while the temptation is great to lop off the end of the New Testament, ultimately, we do so at too high a price. For Revelation speaks powerfully and evocatively to Christians like us in the 21^st century, Christians living in a world gone awry, and to a church embattled from outside and within. Its language is strange and its images turn common sense on its head, but its promise is too much to set aside; it is the promise for which Christians and the church thirst when flood waters rise and life’s well is bone dry. 

          Logically, Chapter Seven should be the final chapter of Revelation. The last of the seven seals is broken and the end of the world should occur. Instead, Chapter Seven is a strange interlude, a holy pause with parallel scenes happening on earth and in heaven. On earth, angels are stationed at the four corners of the flat globe to hold back the violent wind of God, while in heaven, a multitude of too many to count saints hold a public concert. A slain Lamb rather than a marauding Lion sits upon the throne of God and saints in dazzling clothes not stained red but made white with blood sing a hallelujah chorus.

Welcome to John’s world, a world dancing with apocalyptic, not-to-be-taken literally, images. Unfortunately, many people read this bizarre book as a literal manual of the end time while others laugh out loud at such religious nonsense and dismiss it as a cookbook for kooks. Both groups miss the mark for what this revelation is all about and therefore distort the power of its message.

          In the second scene in Chapter Seven, the scene set in heaven, a multitude of martyrs cannot stop singing songs of praise and thanksgiving to God. In John’s vision, these choristers are the Christians, the unlikely saints, who kept believing when they had fallen “far from help,” who kept hoping when hope seemed foolish at best amid Roman tyranny, who kept witnessing to the non-violent love of God in Christ when Rome flexed its military muscles, and who kept giving of themselves in the name of the One who gave himself in love for the world. They died while the world laughed at their feeble witness. They died and yet now they sing in glorious praise around the throne of God.

Revelation assaults the senses with fantastic images that try to capture the inexplicable – how God redeems suffering, even the suffering death of Jesus. Revelation dares to ask Christians and a church to put their life’s trust in God, to believe in the good purposes of God, and to love God even in the midst, especially in the midst of terror and suffering, sin and storm. 

Believing in the redemptive, transforming power of God in Christ is always hard. It is much easier, though, when life is calm, when we are comfortable and can somehow equate our prosperity with God’s reward for our sincere faith. Believing is easier when we carry the biggest stick and equate our political and military prowess with God’s divine intention for our country. Believing is much easier when God provides a magic, protective bubble around us to deliver us from the paths of drunk drivers, from the guided missiles of cancer cells, from the horrors of suicide bombers, and from horrific storms that mock our preparedness.

          Revelation puts the church on notice that we are called by God to hone our faith in troubled times, not to escape suffering, not to dodge pain at all costs with one more pill or one more drink, but to suffer with those who would otherwise suffer alone, to pray for and bear witness to the love of God in Christ even to family and neighbors and co-workers for whom the notion of divine love is nothing more than intellectual pablum, to bind the wounds of those victimized by our warring ways, to raise our voices to those in positions to make peace, to get involved in the lives of those who are struggling the most, to gather here Sunday after Sunday to lift our voices in praise while the majority of people around us scratch their collective heads and wonder why we do.

          What do you and I do when we fall far from help? That is Beckett’s question. It is not ours, not in this century, not ever. For, the promise of Revelation is not that storms will hit elsewhere; it is instead the promise that for those who follow the slain Lamb, the one we know as Jesus, they will sing with the chorus of heavenly angels despite chaos and catastrophe, even in the midst of chaos and catastrophe, and will never be far from help, God’s help. It is the promise that God gives us voices to sing our laments and to sing our praises even to the doorstep of heaven, from this moment and in every moment to come.

So, followers of the Lamb, let us sing.

          Hallelujah!

                    Amen!