I closed out the “Preaching Slam” at the Iowa Preachers Project on Monday night in Corona Del Mar, California, by preaching on John of Patmos’ call story in Revelation 1.9-18.
My friend and former seminary classmate, Chris Hays, teaches Old Testament up the road at Fuller Theological Seminary.
Ten days ago he wrote to his friends and family:
“Our house, with redwood beams and quarter-sawn oak that had stood up against the Altadena elements since 1913, is gone. Our church, our son's preschool, many of our neighbors and friends' homes, and our athletic club— also gone.
This was a little Eden up against the hills. The scale of the loss is incomprehensible. Now we're sitting in LAX waiting to fly to Oklahoma City for my father's funeral. And all of my clothes and personal effects now fit in my carry-on. I was not, am not ready to talk about most of this. I wanted to sit shiva with my losses. But the oddity of receiving condolence emails and not being entirely sure whether people were comforting me for the loss of my home or the loss of my father to cancer compels me.”
He then ended his message by acknowledging the split within themselves, “We are safe, but we are not okay.”
Near the end of the first century, when the Beloved Disciple is an old man on the prison island of Patmos— deported there by the new guy in charge in the capital— the Spirit of Jesus carries John up into a series of cycles of visions.
The visions unveiled to John are prophetic promises about the future.
In scripture, the promise of the future is always the negation of the present.
Thus, in the final vision unveiled to John, the Spirit of Jesus promises, “Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”
“The sea,” the biblical symbol for chaos, “will be no more.”
The church of John’s day, the church under the thumb of Nero and Domitian, had been beset by the mourning and crying and pain and death that political persecution occasioned.
Just so, the final gospel promise to John.
Here’s my question:
If the gospel is a promise about the future, and if, in scripture, the promise of the future is always the negation of the present, then the question is— despite how much we keep up appearances to the contrary, “Are any of us okay?”
About ten years ago, a woman in my congregation asked to meet with me. Diane sat across from me one morning in my office. I knew her from classes I’d taught, pleasantries in the line after service, and a few hospital visits to her spouse, but I didn’t know her.
“Since we’ve decided to make this our church home, I thought you should know my story,” she told me, rubbing her hands along the channels of her corduroy skirt over and over again.
Her voice was taut with anxiety or shame.
I didn’t say anything.
I just waited.
What he told me surprised me.
It wasn’t the sort of story you hear everyday.
With long pauses and double-backs and tears— lots of weeping— she told me how a few years earlier she’d been driving home from the grocery store in the middle of the afternoon on Route One in Alexandria, Virginia.
Out of nowhere a pedestrian stepped into the street. Diane hadn’t been drinking. She hadn’t been distracted. She wasn’t texting or talking.
“There just wasn’t enough damn time!” She said with such force it was clear that she— not me— was the one she was trying to convince.
What she told me next surprised me even more.
Diane told me how her mind developed a split personality to cope with the trauma of having killed another person.
She spent nearly a year, she said, hospitalized for schizophrenia.
She told me how worshipping at a new church, where folks didn’t know her and didn’t stare at the floor whenever they saw her, was one of the goals she’d set for herself upon her discharge.
To convince Diane she shouldn’t be so hard on herself would’ve required converting the complete alternate personality the injury conjured in her.
Here’s another question:
How is the gospel good news for her?
I have a friend whose son somehow— the word miracle goes down like a tough pill— survived a horrific hit-and-run. She celebrated his unexpected recovery as sheer grace; the same recovery process festered his Tourette’s into schizophrenia.
Healthy, he ran away, utterly convinced by delusions that the parents who loved him had once horridly abused him.
How is the gospel good news for them?
Or the boy with autism whose mind will not allow him to escape the trauma his birth family visited upon him— how is the gospel good news for him or those who love him (or simply give a shit about him)?
It is from one of the most remembered of memory passages, Paul’s line in Romans about how all of creation groans (note: present tense) in labor pains.
Too often preachers head straightaways to the summary verse of Paul’s climatic chapter, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Seldom do preachers like me summon the stones to parse that verb groan into its specifics.
As creatures, we all— some more than others— comprise the creation that is groaning, awaiting to be made what the Creator intends.
To varying and often unacknowledged degrees, we all have bodies and minds which betray us.
In the past months, I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD and a recurrence of a rare cancer in my marrow, the latter diagnosis leading to the former. And since Christmas I’ve had to self-administer chemotherapy twice a day, possibly for the rest of my life. The present world has reacquainted me to the ease with which our bodies and minds may betray us.
Which is to say, I’m safe but I’m not okay.
Just like you.
Preachers already know the exegetical details.
The words revelation and apocalypse both, Latin and Greek respectively, carry the same meaning, unveiling.
Like pulling up a curtain.
Like lifting a lid.
The metaphor is altogether visual.
But oddly, or at least surprisingly, what the Seer John sees in the Apocalypse is a voice, “Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me…”
The vision is somehow auditory.
John does not not report, “I turned to see the one who was speaking to me,” as some translations put it.
Rather, John says, “I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me.”
What the Beloved Disciples sees is a voice.
A visible word.
“I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me.”
John of Patmos sees what Mary saw on Easter morning at the tomb.
In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene faces the tomb and addresses the angels, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
Next, verse fourteen, John tells you that Mary turns.
Her back is to the tomb now.
And Mary “sees” Jesus but she doesn’t recognize him as Jesus.
Supposing him to be the gardener, she says to the man in front of her, “Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
And then— pay attention— John reports in verse sixteen that Jesus says to her, “Mary.”
And Mary turns, John says.
She turns in the direction of his voice.
She turns towards the tomb so that her back is again to the man she took for the gardener.
Mary’s facing the tomb when she says, “Rabboni! Teacher!”
She’s talking to the tomb. And it’s from that same direction that the voice of the Risen Christ corrects her, “Do not cling to me.”
But again, notice— John hasn’t said a word about Mary grasping anyone.
Rather, she sees a voice and addresses him as “Teacher.”
And he replies, “Do not cling to me.”
Which is to say, “I am not who you have known me to be. I am more than you have known me to be. I am free of even your memories of me.”
And then Mary turns again and she runs.
And she tells the disciples, no longer calling him “my lord,” (as though she could possess him) but “The Lord.”
And what she tells them about him is so mysterious, so unsettling, so incomprehensible that they hide.
“I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me,” John reports in Revelation.
As my teacher James Charlesworth says, Jews spoke of God’s voice as a distinct person or hypostasis, but understood the voice as capable of being seen, not unlike the divine glory, the shekinah.
Therefore, when John says he saw the voice of God he means, quite simply, that he saw God’s voice.
In other words, by being carried up by the Spirit into the future called heaven, John foreshadows a wholeness— a unity of perception, an identification of hearing and seeing— we scarcely can conceive.
John experiences what prophets before him had been given, a remarkable identification-in-difference of voice and vision.
This duality of voice and vision, hearing and seeing, runs all through scripture.
Israel at Sinai must not climb the mountain because “no one shall see God and live;” nevertheless, they are commanded to approach and hear him speak.
But when that same word of God comes in his own person, it is in order that we may see his glory.
As Robert Jenson writes:
“It is something deep in the reality of God that appears in these phenomena. Both in scripture and doctrine, the second person of the triune God is sometimes Son and sometimes Word. As Son he is the image of the Father, so that one who has seen him has seen the Father. As Word, he is the message from the Father, the gospel of which he is at once the messenger and the content.”
Back to the question begged by Diane’s confession to me:
How is the gospel gospel for those whose bodies or mind betray them?
How is the gospel gospel for those who are not okay?
There is good news, I believe, in the Seer’s seeing what we can only hear.
When I returned to my office with more tissues for Diane and sat down across from her, she said, “I know Jesus forgives me, but Pastor Jason, honestly, forgiveness doesn’t seem to go far enough.”
“It doesn’t go far enough,” I responded, “Sure, you’re forgiven for Christ’s sake. But— read the book at the back of your Bible— that’s not the whole promise. The promise isn’t simply the forgiving of all wrongs, done or suffered. Don’t forget: time is one of the creatures God creates. Therefore, time is one of the creatures God will rectify. The promise is that your past is as unfinished for God as your future; such that, without violating who you are, Diane— your car never struck that man that morning and your mind never split.”
And she looked up from her damp tissue and I could tell she didn’t get it.
“But I did hit that man with my car,” she said and blew her nose, “and my mind did split.”
And I thought of what the apostle says about how it has not yet entered the heart of human beings to imagine what God has prepared for those who love him.
The good news is so good we can’t conceive of it!
So I said to Diane:
“You’re a reader. It’s like Tolkien put it, “One day all sad things will come untrue.”The promise is that God is at work in Jesus Christ to heal your whole timeline, to mend everything that is broken, every wrong you’ve wreaked, every sin you’ve suffered. Without undoing you, all of it will be undone. That’s the hope of the Resurrection.
Resurrection will happen not just to dead bodies but to all things, not just in the future but backwards, to God’s creature called time.
Diane blew her nose and it made a sharp coronet noise.
“I don’t understand any of that,” she said.
“Good!” I replied, “Look at you— you are NOT okay. If you could understand every nook and cranny of the promise, then it probably wouldn’t have the power to save you.”
Resurrection will happen not just to dead bodies but to all things, not just in the future but backwards, to God’s creature called time.
In scripture, the promise of the future is always the negation of the present.
If John of Patmos is indeed a portent of our coming perfection, then we may conclude from him that one day— in the last future— when we have been taken into God, we too will see by hearing and hear by seeing.
That is, we will be made whole.
Preachers in my corner of Christ’s Body like to talk about prophets being those who speak truth to power.
But the prophet of Patmos suggests something more than the first becoming last.
Perhaps prophetic preachers are those whom the LORD calls to point broken people to the Future where we will be made more than okay.
And the mystery doesn’t start with John at the End of the New Testament anymore than it starts with Mary at the tomb. Go back to the Old Testament, “The word of Amos . . . which he saw.” The good news, for all, of so simple a sentence is that one day— in the last future— we will be made whole in the way the Holy God intends.
But the odd surprise of this good news is that this future mode of perception— this promised wholeness— is already available in the present.
But it’s not surrounded by golden lampstands.
And it doesn’t glow bronze like a furnace.
It’s smaller even than Mary’s boy in her belly.
This future is present wherever a little word of promise alights upon the lips of those whom God has called to proclaim it.
So here’s my promise to you:
Preach. Preach.
Preach.
And exactly because you have stood before sinners with the One who lives in the last future on your lips, those who have ears to hear will be able to say, “I have seen the voice of God.”
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