Unfinished Business

Revelation 21:1-7

Presenting Engagement: life and plans cut short.
Imagine yourself travelling along your life’s journey, working to live out your life’s plans, to live out your hopes and dreams, when suddenly some catastrophic interruption occurs that dashes all those plans, curtails all those hopes and dreams!

I thought about that this week when the interstate bridge over the Mississippi River fell during heavy traffic between Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.

Dozens of automobiles and several busses were travelling on to some particular destination when tragedy struck. They were going home from work. They were going home from school trips. They were going home from summer vacations or just setting off on vacations. They were taxi drivers delivering passengers, truck drivers delivering goods. They were social wokrers going out to help improve the lives of others. Some were simply folks going on an errand on the other side of town.

There were all these people who’s lives were interrupted by catastrophe that resulted in disabling injury or even death. Plans delayed indefinitely. Plans disrupted permanently. Business that now goes unfinished. Busy people in busy moments of play or work or chores whose hopes and dreams for the years to come collapsed with the concrete slabs of a highway bridge, smashing into a swirling river bottom sixty feet below.

I don’t know if the most distressing part of it all is the death and injury or the unfulfilled plans of the accident victims.

Of course, this tragedy reminds me of a number of other disasters involving lives lost during travel. I think of the morbid tragedy of the Titanic. Of airplane incidents. I recall a classmate who perished on an airpalne the summer after our seventh grade year. I recall a college classmate who drowned during a whitewater rafting trip. And we can never forget the victims of 9/11, those who were just arriving at work in the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon and those who had boarded early morning flights on business trips or personal travel. All lives cut short in the middle of plans, hopes and dreams.

The most famous story of such a disaster is probably Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The novel was written in 1927 and was made into a popular movie by the director Quentin Tarrentino several years ago.

Wilder’s novel tells about a fictional bridge collapse in Peru in 1714 in which five people perish. This bridge had been regarded as the finest and most “high tech” bridge in the entire country yet it fell carrying these five people, all on their way to specific destinations, filfilling prescious life plans. Five people living out their hopes and dreams. Five people caught in the middle of their life journeys. Five people whose plans were cut short by disaster.

When asked about the purpose intended in this plot, Wilder revealed that it was a question: is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?[i] In other words, is there some supernatural agent of fate that assigns us each a destiny that we can’t know? Or are we in control?

And that’s really a basic question of life, isn’t it?

I mean, here we are making great plans, hoping and dreaming wonderful things off in the future or working hard to complete dreams and plans that we’ve already imagined and when tragedy strikes from some source outside of our own control we inevitably ask: who controls our destiny? Are our lives just some board game that we play out to fill the time but which ultimately has no purpose at all?

Is the course of life just as Shakespeare described it in the play Hamlet? You know that famous soliloquy where Hamlet says:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Do our dreams signify nothing? Why bother dreaming? Why make any plans at all? Is the invisible hands that controls our fate the hand of God?

Biblical Context: new things.
Now, the Revelation of John is a daunting and even frightening book of the Bible. In parts, God sounds exactly like a deity that exercises supreme power, forestalling all our hopes and dreams, snatching us out of the prime of life or taking us away from our loved ones when God considers the timing to be appropriate.

This apocalyptic vision of John is hard for us to understand in 2007, so many centuries after it was written, so many centuries after the conditions that this prophet John saw all around him. But we misunderstand Biblical prophecy if we assume that the writer was speaking specifically to us, a future audience, about specific conditions that exist long after his times and about which he knew nothing.

So the first thing we have to do is put this prophecy into historical context and that context is an era of persecution of Christians.

In the Greco-Roman world of the late first century, religion was more pluralistic than it is today. There were many authorized gods but chief among them was the Roman Emperor. The authorities considered Christianity to be a criminal conspiracy because Christians exclusively worshipped one God and that god was neither the Emperor nor any of the other divinities in the Roman pantheon. After Rome burned in the year 64, Emperor Nero carried out a state sponsored persecution and for decades afterwards Roman governors executed Christians by political order for refusing to worship those validated gods.

Fearful Christians were even encouraged to turn in their Christian neighbors in return for leniency. All Christians had to walk a very fine line between giving lip service to Rome and living as people of faith.

These were the times in which John lived. Not only were there rumors of Nero’s return, but Christians were being seduced by this pagan culture and failing in their loyalty to Christ and Christ’s revelation.

John was likely an itinerant preacher of Jewish origin, a Jewish convert to Christianity who personally knew the seven congregations to whom he wrote. As a prophet, he wanted to warn these congregations about an apocalyptic retribution against both the pagan seducers and the disloyal, seduced Christians. He wanted to warn them about this very real act of God that might begin at any moment.

John’s predecessors in the rich Hebrew prophetic tradition were visionaries like Ezekiel and Daniel who lived during the time of Babylonian exile and forecast a similar destruction of God’s enemies. For them, Babylon was the archtype of all God’s enemies. Gog and Magog were names Ezekiel gave to nations that tried to usurp, seduce, and consume the Hebrew followers of God. [ii]

So what was John speaking about? John borrows from the visions in his prophetic tradition. And even though John’s revelation reads as a continuous, chronological epic, it is very likely that he compiled separate visions of his own and others into this prophetic account.

Like Daniel and Ezekiel, John refers to Babylon and John’s new Babylon is Rome. But Babylon is more than just a symbol of an evil state, it’s the state of evil. Babylon is the Dark Side, the perennial, cosmic evil empire. This prophecy is cosmic in proportions because while Rome may be the enemy in the late first century, John is claiming that there will always be a Babylon in the life of Christ’s church.

In such violent times, John wants to give the congregations of the seven churches more than a warning not to be seduced into accepting a culture that contradicts Christ’s message. John is giving them, and us, a message of comfort to cling to in times of persecution.

Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, if John was speaking to first century Christians, how could his prophecy possibly apply to us?

The thing is that you don’t have to see an apocalyptic vision to appreciate the conflict between Christ’s message of love and the destructive influences of our own times that cause unhappiness, lost identity, and even tragedy.

It isn’t hard to find cultural acceptance of violence as a way of life.

It isn’t hard to recognize the power of elitism that devalues the humanity of those who look or live or speak differently than we do.

It isn’t hard to feel the pull of advertising and marketing that says that a bigger house or a more luxurious car or some other commercial consumption will bring us true happiness.

It isn’t hard to hear the loud, self-righteous voices of narrow moralism or jingoistic patriotism.

In order to make some use of John’s message, you don’t have to see the world in terms of some dualistic struggle between good and evil.

All you have to do is simply consider the world just as it is and compare it to the vision of a new heaven and new earth where God dwells among us and where the river of life refreshes the human spirit.

Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
We go about our lives in this present world, a world filled with tragic possibilities. We go about the business of our hopes and dreams in a world filled with events that cut short our plans. Bridges collapse. Airplanes crash. Automobiles collide. Crime, terrorism, mean spiritedness, racism, cancer, war, infirmity, floods, fires- all these things rob us of robust and precious dreams. These are possibilities in the world as it is.

When confronted with some terrifying, life ending disaster different people will reach different conclusions. Some percentage of the population will claim to see the hand of God in human tragedy. They will say that God is exacting vengace and retribution for personal sins or that God whimsically selects one family to be destroyed by a tornado while sparing another family two doors away. The heavy hand of God is even perceived in the single death of a loved one at any age, death that does not occur from some catastrophic public event.

These people say God takes people out of the midst of life for God’s own mysterious purpose. These people say God has a time and place for the death of every individual and that God will either do the dirty work or will not interfere to save us. There is nothing we can do about it and our plans count for very little.

Theologically, I strongly disagree with that conclusion. And the prophet John disagrees with that conclusion also.

Despite John’s dire warning about divine retribution for false Christians, his revelation is a wonderfully hopeful vision. John agrees with the claim of the great prophet Isaiah. This God, who delivered the Jews out of Egypt, who organized a rabble in the desert of Sinai and gave them a land of promise, this God who raised Christ Jesus from the dead, this God is always doing wonderful new things in our lives. [iii]

John’s vision offers a message of hope and comfort that when we are torn away from this present world a new heaven and a new earth will be revealed. A new thing will be done before our eyes and God will dwell among us, nourishing us with new life.

Conclusion: what’s the point?
Is this just a dream, a far fetched hallucination?

Is it a quaint story that satisfies simple minds?

All who hear John’s revelation must answer these questions for themselves based on faith. It’s up to you. But I know this.

Life matters. Hope abounds in the new things God is doing every day and every step of our journey.

Life counts for something. Hopes and dreams are relevant and worthwhile and life has a purpose even if our plans are cut short by the tragic possibilities of this present world.

Maybe there is a direction and meaning in human life beyond the individual’s own will. Maybe a terrorist’s plot, the failure to inspect and repair a bridge, the failure to prevent a levy from breaking, the failure of a drunk driver to act responsibly, the helter skelter path of a tornado, maybe all these things are the supernatural intervention of inscrutible fate. And yet, life would indeed matter very little if the end of life were not met with a new heaven and a new earth.

Life matters. Hope abounds. Glory be to God. AMEN.

[i] http://www.tcnj.edu/~wilder/works/bridge.html
[ii] Ezekiel 38-39
[iii] Isaiah 43:18-19