The Great Ordeal Will Not Stop Them

Scripture Lessons: 1 John 3: 1-3 and Revelation 7: 9-17 Sermon Title: The Great Ordeal Will Not Stop Them Preached on November 5th, 2017 Revelation is really something. There’s a part of me that always wants to avoid it. It’s a book of the Bible that’s hard to understand, but plenty of people think they know what it means, and so many people who don’t know have tried to tell us, and now we all carry baggage to this book of the Bible with all its symbols and prophecy. But we can’t just avoid Revelation because it’s a wonderful book of the Bible, an important book of the Bible, and if we let fear of this book get the best of us than we’d miss out on all the beauty that it contains. The passage that I’ve just read is full of beauty. There’s this great multitude – so big that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages. They’re all there in heaven and they’re singing, “Salvation belongs to our God.” This is a powerful image. And just the composition of this group is enough of a subject to preach a sermon – there is this great big diverse group there in heaven and one of the elders addresses the author of the book who’s also the narrator, the visionary. This one elder asks John, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” The Elder wants to know who this great big diverse group that just arrived in heaven is, and the meaning of his question is like that old joke Presbyterians tell about Baptists. One Presbyterian, arrives in heaven and says to another Presbyterian, “Why all the whispering up here?” And the other Presbyterian says, “Because God put the Baptists just on the other side of that hill and they think they’re the only ones who made it here. We don’t want to spoil it for them.” There are all kinds of people in this world, aren’t there? And some people believe that they’re the only ones with the answers, that they’re the only ones who have a right to the Kingdom, but in our world, there are all kinds of people who believe different things and who come from different places. Every color, shape, and size, they are precious in his eyes, Jesus loves the little children of the world. We’ve been singing some version of that song for a long time, but the words are still radical. An old friend back in Tennessee told me one time, that it’s not just that the members of West 7th Street Church of Christ think that Presbyterians are going to Hell, it’s that the members of West 7th Street Church of Christ think that the folks over at Graymere Church of Christ are going to Hell, and so are the members of Mt. Calvary Church of Christ. They think they’re the only ones going, just like this Elder who asks, “Who are these, robed in white?” So, according to Scripture, who are these, robed in white? They’re the children of God, that’s who they are. And I’m one. So are you. As are the little children who come to Club 3:30. As are our neighbors in this great big diverse county that we find ourselves in. There are all kinds of people in God’s Kingdom, and that’s good. I met a different kind of a person last Wednesday morning. I was standing on the corner at the cross walk waiting for the cars to stop so I could walk, but you know this kind of lady. She wasn’t waiting for anyone, and she just walked right into that crosswalk with authority and the traffic stopped for her. Or it almost did. One car scooted in front of her and she yelled at the driver, “I’m walking here!” And I said, “Lady, I like your style,” and she showed me this whistle she has around her neck that she uses to blow at the cars who don’t respect the cross walk, and I laughed so she told me that her husband said he’s going to buy her a paintball gun so she can mark the cars who don’t stop for pedestrians. I was amazed by this lady. And only later did I put it together that here was this lady, standing up to oncoming traffic, the day after a man in a rented truck from Home Depot killed eight people driving down a bike path in Manhattan. And what’s worse – he did it in the name of religion. Now he claims to be a fundamentalist Muslim, and some people get caught up in that, but I want to say that this crazy idea of one person having all the answers and everyone else being so wrong that they’re less than human is an idea that infects every religion and every person, but any Christian who falls for this idea that religion is about you being right and everyone else being wrong, has never met the Jesus that I know. There’s this whole multitude up there. And one elder is wondering who they are because that’s a weird human defect we suffer from – the idea that I have it right and everyone else must have it wrong. The idea that I matter more. And that my agenda is so important that these other people in my way aren’t people but speed bumps. The extreme version, the sick version, is what we saw last Tuesday in Manhattan, but there’s a problem when any and all of us are so busy rushing through life with an overblown sense of our own importance that we fail to stop and consider the people in the crosswalk. Hurrying as though eternity depended on what happens in the next 15 minutes. We can’t speed through life. And, we can’t get so caught up in our daily routine that we are fooled into thinking that our lives constantly hang in the balance. I’m prone to that kind of anxiety, but not everybody is. Rev. Joe Brice seems immune to it. I was rushing around doing something one day and I realized I had forgotten to give Joe some piece of important information. Worried that he’d be as anxious about it as I was, I apologized to him and Joe responded, “Man, that’s no big deal. Don’t worry about me. Everything that really matters to me already happened.” Everything that really matters to me has already happened, says the sage of Paulding County. And like Joe Brice, these saints in the book of Revelation - they are defined by what has already happened. You see, they are those who have come out of the great ordeal. And we don’t know exactly what that is, but from the book of Revelation we can infer that the great ordeal is a time of suffering and religious persecution. A time in human history when life is challenging, when money is in short supply, when life is lived under the shadow of an oppressive government. When war is the rule and not the exception. When hardship surrounds us and every day seems a grueling struggle to make it from one day to the next. And what makes this multitude dressed in white exceptional, is that these saints, they have come out of the great ordeal, but the great ordeal has not stopped them from singing. They can see what God has done. They know the gift that God has given. And no matter the hardship and pain, it can’t overshadow the redemption and the joy. No matter the oppression, it can’t touch the freedom that they have in Christ. No matter the struggle, they say, “How can I keep from singing?” For my life goes on in endless song Above earth’s lamentation. I hear the real, thought far off hymn That hails the new creation. Above the tumult and the strife, I heard the music ringing; It sounds an echo in my soul How can I keep from singing? That’s what they sing. Because everything that really matters has already happened. For Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again, That’s why tyrants tremble, sick with fear, They hear their death-knell ringing, And friends rejoice both far and near, So how can I keep from singing. Life can seem like a struggle, but the struggle cannot be what defines us, because what defines us, we whose robes have been washed in the blood of the lamb, is the great act of Christ’s salvation. Our lives, then, which have already been saved from the pit, must not be a hurried mess or a stress-filled struggle, but a great song lifted to the one who created us, redeemed us, and sustains us still. Our first Scripture Lesson from 1st John said it all: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” So, live your life, not complacent in the struggle, but singing your part with the great choir of angels and all the saints in light, giving your time, your talent, your treasure, to the glory of God the father, like so many saints of this church who we will remember later in the service, those saints who were such stewards of their lives that they made this church what it is today. . A pledge card was given to you this morning with your bulletin, and it’s important to consider what it is and what it means. I pray that it will cause you to stop, to take a break from the fever of life so that you can reflect on the gifts that you have received, and to take the time to show your thanks to the one who always gives us a reason to sing. For the Great Ordeal of Life – it must not stop us either. Amen.