Electric Circuit Rider

Christ the King Sunday has now become Reign of Christ Sunday. The latter is an attempt to move Jesus away from a symbol that is almost always associated with coercive power. Kings kill people in order to get their way. They tax people in order to pay for their projects. They draft men into their armies. They live in palaces while their people live in shacks. Somehow, “king” doesn’t feel like it fits with “Christ”.

John Cobb, in his book Grace and Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for Today does an analysis of Charles Wesley’s hymn “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”. He points out that the Wesleys insisted that God is Love. The third verse, in the United Methodist Hymnal, begins:

“Come Almighty to deliver”. 

The capitalization of Almighty was a decision by the hymnbook editors. Charles did not capitalize it. The Wesleys seldom referred to God as “The Almighty” unless they were really clear that this was a God whose power is seen in love and not in domination.

I think what Cobb is saying is that, for the Wesley’s, Love is the controlling adjective for God – and it may not be an adjective, because John (the guy who wrote the epistles, not John W.) says “God IS love.” And I think John W. and Charles would agree with that. “Almighty” implies a kind of coercive power that, in most human experience, is not associated with love. However, the hymn says that Love is “almighty to deliver”.

This Sunday’s passages, especially the Ezekiel passage, are pretty threatening – especially if I am honest enough to see myself as one of the “fat” sheep who will be destroyed by “eating justice”. Justice is threatening to those who have been privileged. Justice means things get equaled out. That means that those who had advantages before will now lose them.

This morning, for example, I asked everybody in our Lectionary Discussion Group, how they got their first paying job. In every case, someone knew us or they knew our parents and we got a job through that person’s influence. My own first job, handling feed bags in a farm supply store, I got because my father worked there. If I had to compete with a young African American who was stronger and more hardworking than me, I suspect that I would not have gotten the job.

However, a world where an impoverished minority person has the same shot at a first job as the privileged son or daughter of a person at the apex of our society, would be a world in which God’s love would be manifest to all of us. Those who have been previously disadvantaged would experience a new kind of self-confidence and those who once had many advantages would probably see themselves more realistically, too.

If we can see that the leveling of the world’s economic playing field (which may be part of the cause or will be the result of this current economic crisis) may ultimately be about God’s love and that our own sense of vulnerability makes us more compassionate for others who are vulnerable, we can learn to love our neighbors in a new way and experience God’s grace in a new way.

In the Book of Revelation a man named John, who is in exile on an island called Patmos in the middle of the
Aegean Sea, receives a vision from Jesus that he dutifully records. This vision provides a “heaven’s – eye view” of the end of human history. For that reason, people read this book like a gypsy reads tea leaves, trying to discern tomorrow’s headlines today. Just last week, for example, someone asked me if I was aware that one of the candidates running for the presidency is really the antichrist. I betrayed my ignorance of scripture by guessing the wrong one.

Actually, I think that person still had a better grasp of the book than a lot of people who simply dismiss it as an artifact of a period of persecution in what is today Western Turkey in the first century A.D. Technically, that is true.  The cities that John writes to are on the mail route from the Mediterranean to the center of Turkey, and the Antichrist is almost certainly the Roman Emperor or a very powerful Roman official who was making life hell for Christians in that area around the year A.D. 90.

So, why is it in the Bible? It’s because the book really does invite us to look at human history from heaven’s point of view and that’s not a bad thing at all.

A simple technique for dealing with almost any problem is to close your eyes and to imagine yourself looking at your problem from a distance – from the top of a mountain, perhaps, or from a hundred years from now. If you’ve tried it, you know that it doesn’t look nearly as big or as frightening.

I’ve found that the Book of Revelation has helped a lot in the past few weeks. The news is full of doomsday talk. We are tipping on the verge of the collapse of the entire world’s financial system. This election is clearly a choice between the renewal and salvation of America or its certain destruction – and again, we might have a lively conversation in this room about which candidate is a tool of the forces of darkness and which one represents the angels of light.

That, by the way, is precisely the point of view that the Book of Revelation undermines. American political rhetoric is based unfortunately, on a great heresy that like all great heresies looks almost like Christianity. Scholars call it Manichaeism. It is dualistic rather than monotheistic. That is, it believes that the power of evil is as strong as the power of good and that the world is always locked in a battle between the two. The only thing that determines whether good or evil wins is which side we choose to be on. In the short run, there is some truth to that. I think that the saying is true, in the short run, that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

But in the long run, evil burns itself out. Evil collapses of its own weight, just like the Soviet Union did almost 20 years ago, or a financial system built entirely on greed. Evil is ultimately impotent, because it is trying to live in the Creator’s world without following the Creator’s rules.

The Book of Revelation portrays an evil empire that  appears to hold all the cards. Every human being is under the control of someone called The Beast, because, like so many institutions, it has lost its humanity. The Beast appears to even be able to work miracles. The Beast makes Hitler or Stalin or Mao look like amateurs. And then God ends the Beast’s reign like a kid blowing out  a candle on a birthday cake.

Sure, evil empires rise and fall. Sure persecutions and even genocides will come.  But the Book of Revelation basically says, “So what?” Even great empires and historical epochs are as nothing in the eyes of God and consequently, they aren’t all that big a blip on the radar screen of God’s people, either. Horrendous things may happen.  Horrendous things WILL happen. But God will save his people.

Oh they may be persecuted. They may be trampled under the hooves of the Four Horsemen: Plague, Famine, War and Death, but they will be saved. Unlike the popular versions of the end of the world propagated by best-selling novels, the Book of Revelation never says anything about the faithful being raptured out of the troubles of this world. Note in our passage this morning that those hundreds of millions of people robed in white are the ones who have “come through the great ordeal”.

This is written for people who are going through the great ordeal.  It gives them perspective and it makes them a promise. God will win in the end. It promises what Julian of Norwich said: “All will be well, and all will be well and all manner of things shall be well.”