Revelation Reformation Revolution

Text: Revelation 21:1-6
Other texts: John 13:32-35

Jesus was not a Christian. Luther was not a Lutheran.

We know that Luther was dismayed that people were creating a new church in his name. Maybe Jesus feels the same way. I don’t know. The Bible doesn’t say.

Both Jesus and Luther thought of and described themselves as reformers, not revolutionaries. But people were ready for a revolution. It happens a lot with reformers, who see something wrong. But not irredeemably wrong. Something that can be fixed. Something has gone off the tracks in a major way, for sure, but it can be righted and restored.

The book of Revelation is a book of revolution. The old world has passed away, it says, and a new world will replace it. The whole universe will be destroyed, the heavens and the earth, and God will build a new one, re-laying its foundations on the same principles of life, abundance, and justice.

The most scholarly interpretation of Revelation is that it is a response to the Roman oppression of Israel. The land of Israel in the time of Jesus was occupied by the foreign and sometimes cruel power of Rome. In Revelation, the evil Babylon stands for Rome. The destruction of the powers of Babylon in the book are interpreted as the hoped-for destruction of Rome and its entire empire.

This hope for destruction of the world is called apocalyptic, which comes from the word apocalypse, which is just the Greek word for uncovering, or revelation. This book of the Bible has become the archetypical example.

These hopes for the end time, the end of it all, typically arise when people get desperate. It is a kind of “I can’t stand it. I’m out of here” response. Things are such a mess that no one can conceive of a way out. No one can image any solution. No one has any hope in reformation.

People sometimes feel this way about jobs, or relationships, or sometimes life itself. When lots of people feel this way about politics, we call it apocalyptic. These feelings emerge a lot in history among people who are beleaguered to hopelessness in the present. It is not hopelessness altogether, but all hope is directed to a cataclysmic destruction and reconstruction. In our times we have seen such hopes in groups that we mistakenly call cults. The “Left Behind” series is a sweetened version of this thinking. The hope of some Christians for a war in Israel that leads to the end times is a more bitter version.

The book of Revelation is an undoing of creation. The plot of the story, once you get past all the filigree, is pretty much a rewind of the beginning of Genesis. And at the very end of Revelation, in the chapter we just heard, once all has been unwound, a new universe is started. I am making all things new, it says. In one sense, it is the end of the story of a failed experiment. All is thrown in the trash and God starts over.

We must be careful what we wish for. Or at least honest about it.

The wish for the end of all usually means the end of all—except not the end of me. And maybe not the end of my good friends. Not the end of people like me. We imagine that we are observers of the end of the world. Like something out of Dr Who. That the new world that comes of this somehow includes us of the old world. “See, I am making all things new.” There is someone left around doing this new seeing. We don’t want us to disappear, or those we love, we want everyone else to. We want the universe to change, but to be there to watch it.

When we hear about the new Jerusalem, we imagine ourselves to be residents. When we hear that there will be no more death and pain, we imagine us, living in a world to be like that. In spite of our fiery and frantic language, we are not really looking for revolution. We are looking for reformation. This is, I think, good news.

One of the last things Jesus said (on Maundy Thursday) and fundamental to the Gospel, was the new order he gives his disciples—meaning he gives to us and all his followers. “I give you a new commandment,” he tells them—tells us—“that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

This is a hard thing to do. Hard for us individually. Love does not come easily in real life. Some people are hard to like. Some people are hateful. Some people do bad things intentionally. It is hard to love someone whom we hate or fear. In fact, one way we define our own circle of friends, our community, is to separate those whom we love easily or at least willingly, from those we do not.

For that reason, it is hard to love one another institutionally. For nations or tribes, for example. So all this talk in Acts about what Peter and Paul do is pretty radical (though still not revolutionary). In today’s reading, Peter has a dream. In it, he is presented with a lot of food that he is forbidden to eat by dietary laws. “I won’t eat that stuff,” he tells God, “you know I am a good person who obeys your godly rules.” But in Peter’s dream, God gives him permission—gives him a command, really—to go ahead and eat what up until now had been wrong to eat.

Immediately after that, Peter baptizes a household of pagans, gentiles, people who were not circumcised, meaning not Jews. Not of the people. The circumcised followers of Jesus criticize Peter, it says, for doing this. But Peter explains that the Holy Spirit has told him: do not make a distinction between them and us. The Holy Spirit in this story is expanding the definition of “us” and therefore those “one-anothers” whom we are commanded to love.

This is something new. To command to love one another opens up the community of the people of God. That is how the early church interpreted it. This is how people will know that you are my followers, says Jesus. The community of God is defined as the people who love one another. The action of loving one another is what creates the community of Christians. It is not that you love the people in your community—your family and friends and what not. It is instead that your loving others is what makes you a community. Christians are people who love one another. And who do so because Jesus told us to.

That is how other people know that we are Christian. If you love one another, people will know you are my disciples, says Jesus. And if you don’t … well, they might wonder who we are.

Christian theology is full of “re-“ words. Starting with resurrection. And also re-birth, re-newal, restoration. These are reformation words. The prefix means “again.” Christian theology is not big on “de-” words. De-struction, despair, default, death. It is not something Jesus taught. There cannot be “Christian warriors,” as the Hutaree militia in the news call themselves. You cannot kill people in the name of Christ. You cannot do that.

God loves the world, it says famously in John. Jesus expects us to do the same. Since the beginning of creation God has called the world good. It is our impatience, not God’s, that longs for the end of things. We must actively resist the temptation toward that longing.

The reformation of Jesus is making do with what we have and restoring its intended luster, not throwing all things out. Jesus asks us to remove the rust, the scales, the barnacles that have saddened our world and our existence. And then he teaches us how to do that.

Jesus was not a Christian, but we are. We claim Jesus as our lord. He gives us a new commandment. Love one another as he loves us. It is not easy. But it is the power that Jesus has instructed us to use to renew the good world.