All Saints’ Day; Nov 1 2020; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson
Normally on All Saints Day, we would have the memory of the night before, Halloween, when we would have seen ghosts in white sheets floating down the driveway, devils with horns and pitchforks stomping through the dry leaves, skeletons dripping blood out of the sides of their mouths, werewolves, witches and wizards. There might have been a couple of supermen who were clinging to their moms’ legs with all that ghoulishness going on around them, a Cinderella looking a little overpowered. It would have been a night that belonged to Zombies and Frankenstein and the grim reaper, who demanded candy or else. As a pastor handing out treats, I might have thought to myself, “Hey, this looks and sounds a lot like the book of Revelation. This stuff is straight out of the Bible.”
Think about it… white robes, some wearing crowns, beasts and a couple of angels. Even if there weren’t any lambs, there might have been lions, bears, eagles. Flashes of lightning and peals of thunder are part of the displays on some streets. Flaming torches. Bloody moons. Dragons with horns and a two-headed monster. Such characters, straight out of the Revelation of John, fill Halloween night.
Normally I would be in Mexico at this time of year where the Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos is a fantastic event. In Mazatlan there would be, in normal years, a parade of costumed skeletons. There the pre Hispanic customs flavor the day with celebration. Death isn’t creepy there. The theme is about remembering their loved ones.
Today is All Saints’ Day in the church. It’s a time meant for celebrating God’s victory over death. We can say to death, “You can howl at the moon if you want to, but we worship the risen Son. And he has already put you in your place among the tombstones and darkness. So you might scare us, but you will not defeat us.”
Halloween, All Saints’ Day and the Day of the Dead remind us in their own way who is in charge of life and death. They help us see God’s revelation.
There is a line between life and death, you know. A thin line. Most of us live as if it isn’t really there until we are confronted by it through our own health concerns or by the death of a loved one, the horror of a tragic accident, violence, brutality, war or this year a worldwide Pandemic. I think the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox believers may have a stronger sense of the thin veil than we rational Protestants. They never quit praying to the departed saints, because in a very real sense, in Christ, these saints are always with us. We can learn something from them, we Protestants. John the Revelator helps us to see it.
In his stunning apocalyptic vision, John blurs the lines between the daily grind and the evermore. He draws the future of God into the present of our lives. He brings heaven to earth and shows us in his fantastic symbolism how things are in God’s world, not the way we have come to think they are.
“Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come.” So begins the last book of the bible. Peace is not, however, a word many people would associate with this fascinating book. Fear, maybe. Confusion, surely. The Revelation of John is a widely interpreted book and given its image-rich language it is subject to all kinds of wild and often conflicting interpretations. There is much in this book that is difficult to understand. Sensational treatments of it can put us off from even trying to grasp its meaning for us but it is well worth making the effort to understand this powerful testimony of a man named John to the risen Christ.
Let me begin today with a brief introduction to the book of Revelation as a whole. The author tells us his name–John. He wrote at about 90-96 AD. So that means he is probably not the apostle John. This man was a Christian who lived through the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero and wrote during the reign of the next Emperor, Domitian. Both were notorious as rulers who harshly persecuted the Christians. In those days the emperors of Rome considered themselves to be gods. All people living in the Roman Empire had to publicly state their belief in the emperor as a god and worship him. Perhaps because he refused to do so, or for some other action related to his faith, John was exiled to the island of Patmos. His main message is that Ceasar is not God and that the true God, revealed in Jesus Christ is stronger than any government.
Because of the tense relationship between the early church and the government John was not able to write openly and in direct language about Jesus Christ without facing further persecution and probable death. So, he disguised his message in figurative language. For example, he referred to the Roman government as a beast with seven heads and ten horns that had come up out of the sea. One of the heads has received a mortal wound. In other words, the first emperor, Nero, died. The wound healed, suggesting another emperor, Domitian, began to rule.
This style of writing flourished from about 200 years before Christ to about 100 years after his death, and is called apocalyptic literature. The biblical book of Daniel is another example of apocalyptic literature written at the beginning of that period. Like John, the writer of Daniel was being persecuted and wrote his message using highly symbolic language. This kind of literature was written almost in code and was meant to be understandable only to insiders in the faith. Books like these were written to give hope and encouragement to people who were having a very hard time. There was usually a concrete political issue at stake. The language, as I said, was full of symbols and numbers. Sharp distinctions were made between this age and the age to come often with a message about the approaching end of all time.
The style of this writing accounts for much of the confusion often experienced when this book is read. No one writes that way anymore. When we try to read this book as if it were direct and literal writing without knowing the reference points for all the symbols we wind up with all kinds of crazy and fearful interpretations.
John was harshly persecuted for his faith. He was sent into exile, away from his home and family, and stripped of his rights as a citizen. This was happening to many Christians throughout the Empire. The government tried to silence all the witnesses to the God known through the crucified and risen Christ. But nothing could stop people like John. Through the apocalyptic language that is sometimes hard for us to understand but would have been clear to his contemporaries, John got his message out. Not exile, not the threat of further persecution, nothing could stop him from telling about his Lord.
Now comes the hard part. What does all this mean for us today, in 2020 on All Saints’ Sunday? Unlike John or Peter or the other apostles, or Christians in other places today we are free to say what we want. Prisons and threats of persecutions are certainly still a part of daily Christian life in this world, even if it is not something we ourselves have personally experienced. For people resisting government oppression and boldly speaking a word of faith and truth in our time these lessons carry words of encouragement, comfort, and empowerment. They still say loud and clear that no government can stop the power of God or the witness of Christians to that God.
I believe these texts speak a word of challenge to us here and now. Prison and threats of persecution or exile are not stopping us from testifying to the astonishing power of God– so what is stopping us? What makes us so silent as Christians? Is it embarrassment? or doubt like Thomas had momentarily? Do we think we are too busy? or Do we have the mistaken idea that everyone knows the grace and peace of God?
These texts also speak a word of comfort to us. After all, we live in a world full of hurting people. The world needs faithful witnesses to the power and love of God as much now as ever. The threats we face today may be more subtle than in the days of the Emperors Nero and Domitian. John called the Roman government a seven headed monster. We face a different sort of many headed monster. We face emptiness and lack of meaning. We face a world full of rampant alienation and loneliness and poverty. We face addictions and violence and fear of our neighbors. We face our fear of our own mortality, the loss of our loved ones, the worry over friends and family with health concerns or financial troubles or broken relationships. We in America face deep divisions and ideological factions that threaten to destroy us. The God who empowered the early disciples of Christ to spread the news of Christ’s resurrection and to write the books of the Bible can fill us with faith and a message and mission that cannot be contained, moving us out to meet today’s seven-headed monster head on.
You see, for those late-first-century and early-second-century Christians, it’s not that John the Revelator was offering pie in the sky by and by. Yes, he was extending the hope of glory. But even more, he was offering hope for the here and now.
Hope for those marginalized, impoverished, weak and starving communities that Rome was gobbling up. And John is saying, in this fantastic vision of a new earth and heaven, with all the tribes on the face of the earth gathered around the throne, John is saying, “Take heart. Be of good courage. That wild thing death — that thing running around your porches, slipping under your bed at night, hanging out in your hospitals, tormenting your cities, wrecking this good earth — that thing death, Jesus has already put a stake through his heart. We call that stake the cross. ”
The saints remind us, you see, that we live on the other side of death. As theologian Dorothee Soelle puts it, Christians are those whose death is already behind them. We are free to live in the victory scene of Revelation 7, because death cannot touch us, not really.
This year especially we see death ravaging. In addition to Cancer, Alzheimer’s, domestic violence, hunger in our cities and rural communities and in all parts of the globe, and the insanity of war, this year we’ve seen 45.8 million cases of Coronavirus and 1.1 million deaths worldwide as of Halloween with the numbers rising dramatically. Death has certainly not given up. But what John the Revelator is saying, what Paul the evangelist is saying, what Jesus the Christ is saying, is that the last enemy to be defeated is death, and the battle is engaged.
So we can live free from the gripping fear of all that ghastliness, because we know the real story. We live how we live and do what we do, as Kimberly Bracken Long says, “because the world envisioned by Scripture is the real world. The real world is not the one of suffering, and pain, and death. That world has been swallowed up in victory — the victory of Jesus Christ.”
So as we worship and live today, we can pray to God for all the saints, those living and dead from this earthly life, that their witness to Christ might embolden our witness to be the true church in these troubled times. A church that draws near to the poor, the hungry, the refugee, the imprisoned, the unemployed and the underemployed, and says, “Take, eat; this is my body, full of good news, my cup, full to overflowing.”