For the next few weeks in this Easter season – I am planning to preach from the book of Revelation. Revelation is the last book of the New Testament, the last book in our Bible. Texts from Revelation very rarely come up in the cycle of the lectionary, the church calendar offers us a sampling of scriptures – but this spring we get a string of them in a row, so I’m leaning into that.
But I imagine Revelation is not a book that many of you open up very often or page through to study in your own quiet devotional time or read as a bed-time story to your kiddos.
Revelation is a wild book, full of vivid imagery and beasts and dragons and cosmic battles and symbolic numbers. And taken as an end-times prediction, Christian groups have used Revelation’s apocalyptic language to dangerously justify their own supremacy. In a white American evangelical context, the Left Behind series of books and movies is the prime example of using Revelation to stoke fear about the future and draw sharp lines of salvation.
But for us – in these weeks after Easter – these texts from Revelation prompt us not to fear a fictional rapture, but to worship Jesus in the here and now, giving our allegiance to the Human One, the Lamb who was Slain, who has triumphed over death.
The words of the book of Revelation spur us to worship Jesus with our lives – inspiring us to resist the idolatry of nationalism and wealth and personal gain, recommitting ourselves to Christ’s way of nonviolent love.
And for Revelation’ strange invitation to worship to be good news for us today– we will first have to hear it as strange.
So hear these words from Revelation 1:1-8 [read text from Bible].
Please pray with me: God, You are the One who is and was and is to come, the Almighty. Open our ears to your mighty and strange Word, that we might worship and proclaim with our lives that You are the Risen One. Amen.
Our text for today from Revelation is strange to hear, because, like all scripture, it was not written by us or written primarily for us.
Rather, Revelation is a text from the pen of Jewish prophet named John – a different John than John, Jesus’ disciple, and different from the author of the gospel of John.
But this John the Revelator, writes from the inkwell of visions and symbols, his genre is the apocalyptic, that which unveils. And he records these divine visions on the island of Patmos, in the Aegean Sea, where he has been cast into exile because of his “witness about Jesus.” (1:9). John’s words are prison literature. In wild imagery, John unveils visions of the Roman Empire as a beast that gets its power from Satan.
John’s audience – who will read out loud and hear his visions from God – are seven churches in Asia Minor – modern day western Turkey – who are facing persecution from the Roman Empire and the temptation of collaboration with its wealth and violence.
John writes to these small minority Christian communities, encouraging them not to worship the beastly gods of Rome – but to worship along with all of creation, singing out to Jesus, the victorious Lamb of God.1
To these seven beleaguered congregations, John begins with a greeting – “grace and peace to you all.”
Similarly in our gospel text for today, Jesus, risen from the dead, enters the fear-filled, locked-door houses where his disciples huddle and the first thing Jesus says to his friends is – “Peace be with you.” He continues to repeat this greeting multiple times as his disciples see and touch the wound in his side and his nail-scarred hands and feel the warmth of his breath.
Here at Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship when we offer the peace of Christ with one another – we are participants in a long chain of trembling witnesses to Christ’s resurrection. We always need that reminder of the strange peace God offers.
Last Sunday – we gathered in a different place, at a different time than we normally meet. And time took on a different dimension.
Usually on most Sundays – I’m the first person to arrive here, to unlock the building, open up our closet, as we prepare this space for worship. But last Sunday morning – on Easter – I showed up thirty minutes early and wondered if I was late.
I sensed in our Easter eagerness and boisterous singing and overflowing potluck table and lingering conversations and games and music-making – that time took on a new spaciousness and joy. I had turned off my phone in the morning and the next time I glanced at it – it was past 3pm.
The joy that Christ has risen, the mystery and strangeness that Jesus is alive, among us, leads us to a life of worship that upends our calendars and our expectations of what is possible.
“Grace and peace to you from the one who is and was and is coming,” the book of Revelation begins.
When we worship our Risen Lord – we rejoice that God in Christ is loving, liberating, and bringing peace to all places and in all times. These opening words from Revelation are an anthem of praise, celebrating the fullness of who Jesus is.
First, the text names Jesus as a “faithful witness.” In Greek the words for martyr and witness are the same. 2
Jesus is both of these: We can trust that we have glimpsed in the life of Jesus the fullness of God’s love and in Jesus’ death we see him holding a martyr’s mirror up to the brokenness and violence of our world. As a church, we are called to follow the Risen One who stands as a witness in solidarity with all the suffering, forgotten, and forsaken of the world.
Jesus rises from the tomb, conquering death and bringing new life, and Jesus rises as a living, breathing body, still bearing the marks of wounds – a sign that we too should never turn away from the wounds and horrors we face. Jesus the faithful witness empowers us to be agents of healing and hope and witnesses to the resurrection.
Second, the text names Jesus as “firstborn from among the dead,” referring to his resurrection and implying that there will be many others who also will be born from the dead. Jesus, our sibling who shares with us all the quirks and conundrums of what it means to be human, pulls us out of our fear of death to join him to share God’s abundant life.
And finally the text proclaims Jesus as the “ruler of the kings of the earth.” This might be the hardest statement for us to believe and allow to sink in. These words first landed on the ears of Jesus-followers surrounded by the stony architecture of imperial Rome, saturated with temples to its gods and statues to its rulers. What does it mean for Jesus to be “ruler of the kings of the earth” today? How does Jesus rule the likes of the Trumps and Putins and Musks and Bezos and Zuckerbergs and Xi Jinpings in our world of metal and plastic and AI? We’ll wrestle with these questions of power and allegiance in the texts for coming weeks.
The opening of Revelation continues on, rejoicing not just in who Jesus is, but also what he has done and continues to do for us.
Again, the text offers us three things that Jesus has done, is doing, and will do for us as his followers.
First, “Jesus loves us,” the text tells us. A present, here and now, active and continuing love. Jesus loves us with a love that cannot be stopped by death or stymied by distance. If God is the “one who is and was and is coming” – love comes to us not only as a memory or a future promise, but first and always as an active reality right now. Jesus loves us. Jesus loves you. Today and always.
Second, “Jesus has freed us from our sins by his blood” we are told. This action of Christ is described as a one-time, past event. We have already been saved and redeemed, liberated through the nonviolent faithfulness and witness of Jesus.
And finally the text announces to us that “Jesus made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father.” In our worship and lives of justice and mercy – we are participants in the work and reign of God’s kin-dom. We are co-creators of beloved community along with God. We are, following the example of Revelation, prophets and visionaries of “a future not our own,” laborers and worshippers and priests faithful to a heavenly citizenship where Jesus, the Risen Son of God, sits exalted, though still bearing scars.
Amid all of its strangeness – its visions and numbers and creatures and beasts – the book of Revelation invites us to worship. And worship reorients our priorities and our sense of time and place to rejoice in Jesus our Risen Lord, who is loving, liberating, and bringing peace now and forever.
Worship is our response to a God of love. Worshipping this God is always a radical act of faithfulness in a world with so many other gods competing for our allegiance.
So let us rejoice today in the God who made this world and each of us. Let us rejoice in Jesus, Son of God, the firstborn from the dead, who has overcome death and invites us to touch his scars and follow him to new life. Let us rejoice in the Spirit of God who is making all things new.
Let us rejoice and worship the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and end, the one who is and was and is coming, the Almighty.
May it be so. Amen.