Earth
Revelation 1:4-8
Click here to view the full sermon video for April 24, 2022 entitled, "Earth."
There are some words that are so loaded it’s hard to even speak them without unpacking their meaning. For instance, the word ‘salvation.’ There are some folks who immediately have a very definite understanding of what they think that means. It often involves a moment of truth that elicits a particular prayer that in turn saves a person from an eternal fiery fate. But the truth, and salvation itself, can be a little more nuanced than all that. As it turns out, a person can be saved from all kinds of things that represent a more imminent threat to us in the here and now than whatever we imagine the future holds for us.
Likewise, there is the word ‘apocalypse.’ Type that into your Google Search as I did this past week and the first thing the internet returns is a definition from Oxford Languages about “the complete final destruction of the world as described in the biblical book of Revelation.” The irony of such a sentence is that it defines the word based on something of a misreading of the final book of the bible; a book whose title comes from the Greek word ‘apokalypsis,’ which actually means unveiling, or yes, revelation. Do you see what’s happened here? Instead of letting the word itself interpret the events of this book, we’ve allowed what we think we read in the pages John’s vision to re-define the word. It’s a testimony to the power of the images that John unfurls from his vision on the island of Patmos as he writes to the fledgling Christian churches struggling against the onslaught of the Imperial Roman Empire.
Still, imagine how it might change not only the way we begin to understand the vision John shares with the seven churches, but the way we think about the very idea of apocalypse itself. Because what is revealed in this vision that John shares, what is unveiled has very little to do with complete and final destruction of the world, and more to do with what we heard announced from the beginning of what John writes. Jesus Christ, the firstborn of the dead. Jesus Christ, whose rule is above that of any earthly authority. Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins and made us to serve as those who belong to God’s realm of peace, love and justice. He is coming to us. He is coming to set right what is so clearly not right in the world at hand; a world in which the innocent- whether they are itinerant Jewish rabbis who run afoul of Rome, or the Ukrainian men, women and children standing on a train platform trying to escape a besieged city- fall victim to the powers of this world. He is indeed coming to save us from the despair created by a world where too often the weak fall victim to the strong. Instead by the power of God made perfect in his weakness on the cross, Jesus is coming to save us from resigning ourselves to the way things are as the way they simply have to be.
What is being revealed is not God’s future demolition plans, but God’s great reclamation project in Jesus; the transformation of all that would traumatize and afflict us into a place fit for God to dwell among us as our light. Apocalypse clears away every trial and tribulation that threatens to undo us and gives us a peek behind the curtain of all that is passing away to see the eternal presence of the one who is, who was and who is indeed the one to come. The one who is never far from us and will certainly never abandon us to the powers, the principalities, the rulers of whatever present darkness we may find ourselves in.
That cannot be said too loud, or too often. Because what has happened with this Revelation is that by turning apocalypse into a byword for complete and final destruction, we have made it acceptable, or worse been encouraged to treat this world of God’s own making and the people in it fashioned after God’s own image as somehow expendable. Go ahead and burn as many hydrocarbons as you need to fuel the free market. Go ahead and privilege the convenience of single use plastic over the harm caused to sea life and other aquatic species. Pay no mind to the collapse of ecosystems due to the persistent extraction of groundwater. God’s just going to destroy the whole thing anyway, right? It says so right here in the Bible. So it doesn’t really matter how we treat the earth.
Just as it is no accident that the Protestant Reformation flourished with the invention of the printing press, neither should it be a surprise that the theological system known as dispensationalism was birthed at the same time as the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Dispensationalism is the rather fancy name for what might otherwise be termed “rapture” theology. In such a system the world is viewed to be irredeemably corrupted as adherents await a rapture in which the faithful will be caught up from earth, rescuing them from the destruction of God’s final terrible judgement. A young Anglican clergyman known as John Nelson Darby viewed growing industrialization as evidence that the world would only continue to get worse and worse until Jesus returned unleash the great tribulation that would clear the way for God’s entirely new heaven and earth. The goal became to belong to those who would be allowed to leave the world behind through the rapture of the faithful.
The only problem with such a construction is that is relies upon a serious misreading of scripture, and a denial of everything that we know about the character of God in Jesus Christ. Even well before that. The archetypal flood story is a revision of a common trope in ancient near eastern mythology. Many cultures had their version of a story about a flood that annihilated a corrupt world. Only in the Noah story, after concluding that humanity should be blotted from the earth, God decides to preserve a remnant in Noah and his family, along with an ark full of animals. But when all is said and done and the floodwaters subside and Noah and the animals emerge from the ark, God concludes that nothing has changed. Humanity is still prone to evil and wickedness. Nevertheless, God promises never again to engage in the widescale destruction of God’s creation. Jesus himself tells the Pharisee Nicodemus when the man comes to the teacher at night, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Notice that Jesus doesn’t restrict salvation to the people of the world. In actuality, the Greek word here is kosmos, which refers to the order of things, or one might even say the ordering of creation. Too often the destructive impulses of unchecked human appetites conveniently ignore the belief expressed by the psalmist and affirmed in the creation poem of Genesis, that the world is God’s, and all that is in it. It exists and has been brought into being by the ordering hand of God. So, any human activity that disregards this bedrock principle, any human activity undergone without attention to the way in which it may disorder what God has rightly ordered is deeply unfaithful to the will of God. Things like extraction that destroys watersheds, consumption that overheats the planet and unleashes catastrophic weather events.
Perhaps it is for this reason that the tribes of the earth wail at the coming of Christ, because rather than threatening destruction, such a coming promises to reveal and make right all that we have gotten and continue to get wrong for the sake of commerce, or convenience, or our own comfort. But such a revelation is never for the purpose of condemnation or complete and final destruction. It is always for the purpose of setting things right. It is always for the purpose of unmasking the powers of the world for what they are and demonstrating how fleeting and ultimately empty both their promises and their threats are.
What is lasting, what is eternal is the One who was before it all was brought into being, and will be there at the end of it all, and is present at every moment in between to thwart the designs of those who would hurt and destroy that which God has named good from the very beginning: the earth, the air and the seas, and all the creatures from the most microscopic to most egocentric who call them home.
We are an earth care congregation. That is not a virtue signal, or an attempt to jump on some culturally popular bandwagon. It is a designation that we seek as a way of remaining faithful to our calling from the beginning of creation to be stewards of all that God has made in God’s goodness. It is a responsibility born not of obligation, but of gratitude and recognition that just as God has always been- long before our arrival on the scene, so to has the earth been here for far longer than we have. Should we destroy its ability to sustain us, that will not be in accordance with what God wants, it will be quite the opposite. Make no mistake, we need the earth far more than it needs us. To care for it in faithfulness is to align ourselves with God’s reclamation project embodied in the risen Christ. It is to seek the answer to the prayer Jesus taught us, working for all that God would put right on earth, as it is in heaven. That the vision John reveals would find its fulfillment as God’s home is found here on earth, with us.