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Preaching Revelation 1:4b-8 Part 2

Preaching Revelation is seldom easy. The language is filled with symbolic references and elaborate metaphors. Preachers will have to decide how they will interpret this book. Lots of our parishioners have only heard it interpreted as predictions of our own time. However, Revelation was a message of hope for its own day before it became one for ours as well. The struggle between God's rule and the forces of evil is as keen today as it was in John of Patmos' day. Here is one direction we might take with this portion of Revelation on this Sunday that celebrates Christ's reign.

Many of us wonder sometimes if there is anything that remains the same. We seem embroiled in constant change. Our lives are so radically different from those of our grandparents that it is difficult even to imagine what their lives were like. Our culture and its values are so different from those of the first half of the twentieth century that continuity is hardly discernible. We are surrounded by change. So, it is natural at times to yearn for something that is stable and unchanging. Many regard the church as a safe harbor from change, but it is changing almost as drastically as our culture.

So, to what can we cling that is anchored so deeply that it will not change? John of Patmos must have sensed the same kind of question among the Christians of the seven churches to which he writes. Change is not strictly a modern phenomenon. Circumstances pitched the churches in Asia Minor into dramatic and drastic change. Whether or not they were actually suffering persecution at the hands of the Romans is debatable today. However, if they were not, John seems to want to prepare them for such persecution.

This fragment of the introduction to the letters to the seven churches claims not once but twice that God and Christ remain the same from the past through the present and into the future. "Peace from him who is and who was and who is to come," John writes in verse 4b. Then in verse 8 he repeats almost the exact words prefaced by the declaration that God is "the Alpha and the Omega"—the beginning and the end of all existence. John assures his readers that there is a "kingdom," a dominion that reaches from the past into the future without change.

So, what difference does this ethereal rule of God make in the midst of a world contorted in change? Is it not the case, as Jesus says to Pilate, his kingdom "is not of this world?" We don't need an otherworldly and celestial realm! What we need is a dependable dominion in this world—one that stabilizes us amid upheaval and chaos. How does God's reign help us deal with change?

Change makes us more sensitive to time. Humans are imprisoned in time. There is no way we can escape the limitations of time, no matter how much we enjoy supposing that we can go "back to the future" in some time machine. Change helps us face the temporal quality of our lives. The Star Wars movies drew us into a future time. While we sat in our seats in the movie theater, our lives were stretched out into another time and another galaxy. Those stories told of events far from us and hence in many ways mysterious. However, in the plot of these movies, there was a constant reference to "the force" which represented something beyond time. That mysterious force spans and glues the four Star Wars stories together.

In a sense, that is what Christ's reign does for us. It glues our lives together with those of the past and the future. It provides continuity among the past, present, and future. There is really only one thing that holds steady amid the change of our world, and that is Christ's reign. His reign connects history and eternity, as Joe Baroody suggests in his Pastoral Implications of this lesson.

However, John does not simply affirm the divine rule that encompasses all time. He speaks of the One who is, was, and is to come—the beginning and the end of it all. Then he surprises us by saying that Christ "makes us to be a kingdom, priests serving Christ's God and Father…." John claims that we participate in a reign that has entered time and enables us to be Christ's reign here and now.

Shadowlands is the story of C. S. Lewis' brief but beautiful relationship with his wife. Lewis was a widely known author and lecturer, living the life of a confirmed bachelor in his circle of university professors. However, he lectured frequently on religious topics and especially on love. Even before he became popular as an apologist for Christianity, Lewis was intrigued with love. Yet he was a timid man with only a few close friends. Then he met an American woman, Joy Davidman. At first he resisted his romantic interest in Joy but finally expressed his affection for her. She was on her deathbed when the two of them were married and soon she died, leaving Lewis a changed man. He had spoken of love, but because of Joy he had come to practice love in a new way.

Much as Lewis found love in his relationship with Joy, many of us find our place in Christ's reign not in lofty thoughts and theoretical considerations but in the nitty-gritty of daily relationships. As Christians we not only believe in Christ's reign, but we experience it and live it. We live our Lord's reign as we practice the grace and love that we found in him. The One who is and was and is to come is in our lives now. And that reign expressed in daily life is the unchangeable reality amid all the changes of the world.

Robert Kysar

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