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July 6, 2017 - January 2, 2018
Anticipation of glory ends up as participation in glory.
Maybe we forget this, but Jesus went to the cross out of no necessity. He could easily have escaped the terrors of the crucifixion, but he was interested in those he led.
If we are going to hang around Jesus for very long, we have to get used to metaphor.
That’s why we need one another, pastor and congregation, not to study maps so much as to keep the conversation of the living reality going.
The familiar concept of resurrection as life after death was totally recast as life “in the land of the living” (Psalm 116:9).
The three Jesus questions on the Galilee beach reverse and redeem Peter’s three denials at the trial the week before in Jerusalem.
Jesus doesn’t say “Lead in my name” or “Lead my flock.” He says as clearly, briefly, and emphatically as possible, repeating it twice, “Follow me….Follow me.”
Peter knows by now that following Jesus means going the way of the cross (John 21:18–19).
Following Jesus demands our full attention. There is no time here to speculate on how others are doing. We are to keep our eyes on Jesus (see John 21:22).
When we attempt to get our models of ministry from the celebrities of our culture, we obscure the uniqueness of this gospel life. When we start trading in a humble life of following Jesus for a celebrity life of leadership, we turn the Christian life on its head.
The Christian life is not about leadership but “followership,” not about becoming more and more but less and less.
And imagine the Letters as a small valley, carved out ten thousand years ago by a glacier, a valley now inhabited by seventy or eighty people who gather on Sundays to worship in a small church.
I think we could say that John in his Letters is describing a community trying to get along with one another in between telling stories of Jesus and experiencing Jesus’s saving work in their lives. They are most aware of Jesus on the mountains, but somehow when they return to the valley, they manage to leave Jesus on the mountains. So the Letters are about Christians getting along with one another, loving one another in the valley during an ordinary workweek with neighbors and spouses and children, jobs and responsibilities.
“It seems to me that many of you have come to think that Jesus is God in the beauty and ecstasies of the mountains but that he isn’t human in the way we are human. At the very center of the Christian gospel is the conviction that Jesus is as much human as he is God. He is as much with us in the valley as in the mountains. And the evidence is that he loves us and that we are able to love him—personal, relational qualities.”
But being loved is not all there is to it. Being loved creates a person who can love, who must love if that person is going to be fully human. Getting loved is a launching pad into giving love.”
As it turns out, in this business of living the Christian life, one of the most neglected aspects in reading the Scriptures is reading them formatively and imaginatively, reading in order to live.
The most formative thing we have learned together in this sanctuary is the worship of God. And we learn more about worship from Revelation than from any other single place in the Bible.
The most common misreading of Revelation comes from reading it as predictive prophecy, what is going to happen in the future. There are, to be sure, references to the past and implications for the future, but the predominant emphasis of the prophetic word is on the present, the presence of God among us in the circumstances of this everyday life. The Bible warns against a neurotic interest in the future (Deuteronomy 18:10–14).
The result of Saint John’s theological work is a poem. If Revelation is not read as a poem, it is simply incomprehensible. The inability (or refusal) to deal with Saint John the poet is cause for most of the misreading, misinterpretation, and misuse of the book.
These statistics post a warning: no one can hope to read this last book accurately who has not read the previous sixty-five. It makes no more sense to read the last book of the Bible apart from the entire Scriptures than it does to read just the last chapter of any novel, skipping everything before it. Much mischief has been done by reading Revelation in isolation from its canonical context.
