Last year – 2024 – was the hottest year ever recorded. And the top ten hottest years ever recorded have all been in the past ten years. We have lived through a decade of record-breaking heat – and all indicators point to a future of human-caused climate breakdown for the rest of our lifetimes.1
“The sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat, “ proclaims our text from Revelation.
We grieve when loved ones die. Our eyes well up with tears at the ache that things are not as they should be and life is harder than we imagined.
“God will wipe away every tear from their eyes,” promises Revelation.
We feel rage and shame bubbling within ourselves at systems that punish and impoverish and concentrate wealth in the hands of the powerful and concentrate waste and hardship in communities of the vulnerable.
“For they will hunger no more and thirst no more,” dreams Revelation.
In these Sundays after Easter, I have been preaching from Revelation, a book that is a hodgepodge of symbols, a collage of images and references and dreams. Revelation was written by an exiled Jewish follower of Jesus to 1st century churches, spurring them to be faithful amidst persecution, to practice fidelity to Jesus amidst the lure of wealth and the idolatry of violence that the beast of the Roman Empire offered in plentiful supply.
Revelation is not a straightforward story or a rulebook to follow. Rather, it is a swirling vision meant to overwhelm us with the power and hope of God’s love that triumphs over death.
But sometimes I wish that the judgments and visions of Revelation could be boiled down into digestible pieces, and laid out in a manageable plan for us to wrap our heads around with clear laid-out tasks for us to set our hands to.
Sometimes I wish that our text for today was written NOT by John of Patmos, but by someone like George Doran – an American management consultant in the early 1980s who first coined the idea of SMART goals.
SMART is an acronym tool used by all sorts of organizations and individuals to help focus goals and deliver effective outcomes. SMART stands for:
Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-bound
I sometimes long for a faith that was SMART – where the power and love and kingdom of God could be implemented piece by piece on a clear timeline that made sense to us.
But instead what we are given here today is a vision of “a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.”
Measurable? Not here.
The anthem of worship our text proclaims is blessing and glory and wisdom and honor and power and might to God resounding forever and ever, Amen!”
Time-bound? Nope.
This innumerable, globally diverse throng, clad in white robes, people who have gone through hardship and ordeal, cry out loudly that salvation belongs alone to God and to the Lamb – Jesus.
Specific? At least within this SMART goal framework – the text gives us specificity about who is worthy of praise. But is any of this Achievable and Relevant for us now? How does this vision of the persecuted, scattered, beleaguered, suffering masses finding refuge, comfort, and sustenance in the presence of God translate into our SMART-goal oriented world?
Maybe it doesn’t. But maybe what this text from Revelation offers us is the chance to imagine something holy. Maybe what it gives us isn’t a structured or measureable plan but a true and holy vision of the world that God is bringing into being.
God invites us to live and worship with holy imagination.
A holy imagination proclaims the impossible. Revelation’s vision is of a mass of people of profound diversity, who have passed through ordeal and hardship and persecution have been brought near and sheltered in the presence of God.
A holy imagination glimpses the redemption of that which is beyond hope. For people who have been subject to hardship or oppression or persecution or even death, this imagination glimpses that this is never the end of the story. A holy imagination sees the multitudes who have been brought out of the great ordeal, united by a God who shelters and sustains with love.
A holy imagination juxtaposes strange opposites and sees God working even there.
The strangest of these juxtapositions to our modern ears might be the description in our text of those who have come out of the ordeal who have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
To these people who have faced the ordeal of the tribulations of poverty and violence and death – people we might wonder who are already wearing clothes bearing blood stains – how does washing themselves in more blood make them white?
But seen through holy imagination – John of Patmos glimpses that these vast victims of history have been given a story of triumph, robes of redemption – because they are folded into the story of Jesus, whose nonviolent resistance overcame the powers who thought they could restrain him by killing him. But instead Jesus rose from the dead, and overcame death.
Blood-red and freshly-washed white are colors that don’t go together and that’s exactly the point that Revelation is making. This impossible redemption requires a holy imagination to glimpse.
Sometimes when I am driving around Durham and Chapel Hill I glimpse a single bicycle spray painted white, chained up to a pole or street sign near an intersection or where a bike path crosses the road. These bicycles painted white aren’t just pieces of public art.
They are memorials to people who were bicycling and were killed in those spots when a car collided into them.
And so the local biking community has memorialized these deaths and called the community to action with these visible white bicycles – calling those who continue to drive and bike past them to bring a safer world into being.
A holy imagination invites us to see the color red in all its manifestations. To look and see the red of blood – spilt on the road unnecessarily and to not look away from this. To look and see the red of flashing ambulance lights and fire trucks that signal emergency. There is so much red in the world that we’re called not to avert our eyes from.
But a holy imagination also invites us to also see brilliant white. To see white bicycles on the side of the road is to be reminded of just how constrained our imaginations are to idols of speed and independence. To truly glimpse the white bicycle chained to the side of the street is to work for a world where all can more freely and safely.
To glimpse the innumerable masses robed in white praising God is to rejoice that God is liberator, a deliverer, the provider of food and shelter and comfort. To glimpse this great multitude is to work for a world where the diversity of the people of God might flourish in peace and creativity.
A holy imagination does not justify or rationalize or sanctify suffering as something God ever demands of us. A holy imagination asks us to truly see suffering in the world – but also to see that these cries and our cries of pain and tears of anguish are not the enduring reality that any of us will be defined by.
John the Revelator asks us to glimpse a vision of eternal praise, not to distract us from the hardship of the present day, but to strengthen us in resoluteness and joy and bravery to live out the love of God in the here and now.
The vision of all creation tenderly cared for, sustained and protected by Jesus – who is both a Lamb and Shepherd – is a vision that we participate in. And it will take holy imagination to translate and enflesh that vision into the context and communities of our lives. We might even have to make some SMART goals in that pursuit – bringing specificity and metrics and attainability and relevance and time-constraints to make concrete glimpses of the eternal promise of God’s love.
But I pray that we never settle for SMART goals alone. I pray that we as a church and each of you as voices in that mighty choir of all creation, continue to cultivate holy imagination.
We need all the holy creativity and vision and imagination that God will provide. What will you see? What new worlds will you glimpse? What dreams of God’s glory and grace and love and shelter will we see together?
What new songs of the love of God might we sing?
May all this, and more, be so.
- World Meteorological Organization – https://wmo.int/media/news/climate-change-impacts-grip-globe-2024 ↩︎