Revelation 5:11-14

If you followed the link to access this commentary for the second reading of this week’s lectionary texts, my first assumption is that you have done so for one of three reasons: you either made a mistake, you were simply curious, or you are brave (or crazy) enough to preach from the book of Revelation. All joking aside, I hope that you will lead your congregations in engaging both the second reading for this week as well as the entire book of Revelation. The book of Revelation is a difficult book, but it is an important one for the church today, albeit in a different way than that assumed by many of those in the pews on Sunday morning.

Many assume that in the first century, the Roman empire actively and aggressively pursued and persecuted Christians. Persecution certainly existed and is an important piece of background information for reading the book of Revelation, but most scholars agree that the kind of persecution often imagined by readers of the book of Revelation was most likely not the reality experienced by most Christians in the first three centuries of the common era. Persecution of Christians in the Roman empire was mostly sporadic and localized.

Aside from a brief period under the emperor Nero, It wasn’t until 250 AD that persecution took the form of a state-sanctioned program. Even then, however, Christians were not the specific target of this program. The program was instituted to restore Roman religion by requiring all inhabitants (except Jews) to sacrifice to the Roman gods. Because of their confession that Jesus is Lord and, by implication, that Caesar was not, Christians were more likely to refuse to offer sacrifices and, therefore, often fell victim to the consequences of this edict.

It is crucial to note that wherever and whenever in the Roman empire the persecution of Christians occurred, it did not occur on account of Christians’ partaking in practices of worship that fell outside of the Roman practices. The Roman empire was extremely practical when it came to religion and practiced syncretism. For them, more gods couldn’t hurt anything as long as the practices of worship did not disturb the peace and order Rome fought so hard to maintain. Christians ran afoul of authorities on account of their loyalty to Christ as Lord and, by implication, their denial of the Lordship of Caesar. Their refusal to participate in Roman practices of worship was at the same time a refusal to give credence to the Roman empire and its way of organizing life. It was the refusal of the organizing story of the Roman empire.

In light of all of the difficulties experienced by the church during the Roman empire, the Apostle John does not provide the congregations to whom he writes with strategies or principles that can apply to their lives. John does not provide them with the kind of clear, practical advice we have come to expect in churches. Instead, John invites them to worship! When we read the book of Revelation, our first impression is that the events of reality depicted in the book are periodically interrupted to show us scenes of worship in the heavenly throne room, but I think we should be open to it understanding it the other way around. The scenes in Revelation of the heavenly throne room pull back the veil between heaven and our world and provide us with a depiction of the reality that underpins the world around us.

Some of the difficulties we encounter when we read the book of Revelation stem from the distance between our world today and the world of the Roman Empire. Most of you reading this are preparing to preach in a modern, secular context. We are tempted to believe that our world could not more different than John’s. While religion featured explicitly in daily life in the Roman empire, we are led to believe that religion has been officially removed from the public square. We believe that we, unlike the early Christians, are no longer forced to engage in practices of worship under the threat of ostracism, financial ruin, or death. We believe that, as opposed to life before the rise of the modern, secular state, being religious today is a choice. We must not be so quick to adopt these assumptions. Our world and the world of John the Revelator are not as far apart as we might think. The reality is not that the world is less religious today than it was 200 years ago. Rather, religiousness has taken on a different form.

“Everybody worships something.” I am sure that many of you have heard this phrase or something like it before. When we think of worship, we think of scenes from Sunday morning services or conferences of which we have been a part. We think primarily of singing and raising hands. For many in our pews, the functional definition of worship does not extend beyond the hymns or choruses we sing on Sunday mornings. When this is our default understanding of worship, it is much harder to think of what it might look like to worship other things.

Singing and raising hands is certainly a part of what we do in worship, but we do those things because, in worship, we are hearing and acknowledging and leaning into a different organizing story than the organizing stories that bombard us throughout the week. Those stories may prompt us to identify first and foremost with our country. (How many of you have a national flag in the sanctuary of your churches?) Those stories may cast human beings as consumers and little else. (How many of our holidays are marked by sales?) Those stories may ask for us to reach for violence as a legitimate means of reaching even the highest-minded of our goals. The stories your congregation struggles with will vary depending on your context, but they are subtle and pervasive. Their subtlety is part of what gives them so much power and influence. The practices in which your congregants participate every day, the everyday liturgies that lull them into the rhythms of the world’s stories, are themselves acts of worship. When a business owner settles for paying the minimum wage instead of a living wage for the sake of profit, how is this different than laying a human sacrifice on the altar of Mammon? When we stand in unison and sing a national anthem with religious fervor before any sporting event, how is this different functionally from the liturgies we participate in overtly religious services? Just like the Roman empire, our world expects us to engage in certain acts of worship, to adopt certain organizing stories. When we refuse to participate blindly, when we choose to subscribe to a different organizing story, we should expect pushback and conflict from our world just as Christians in the first several centuries expected it.

When Christians step into worship on the Lord’s Day, we cross heaven’s threshold and are animated as citizens of God’s kingdom. We embrace God’s story of redemption and reconciliation and freedom for the sake of the other. We bow before their Lord who conquered not by violence and the sword but by self-sacrifice and his own death for the sake of his enemies. We sing the worth of the lamb who was slain. Our worship of this kind of God compels us to go and do likewise. Our worship is an embrace of God’s story and, necessarily, a rejection of the organizing stories of our world. Worship is our training for embodying a different story in our world, even when embodying that story and rejecting others leads us into conflict with our world.

I hope, preacher, that this passage opens a door for you to challenge your congregation to be mindful of the stories by which they live. I also hope that it allows you to lead them down new paths of worship that invite them to witness not only with their minds and words, but also with their bodies to the reality of the Kingdom of God where the slain lamb reigns in power and glory. The stories of the martyrs, of Christians who died for the faith, inspire us. But those who died for the faith were martyrs long before they were thrown into the arena or crucified or burned at the stake. The Greek word martyr translates as witness. Their everyday faithfulness as bodily witnesses to the kingdom of God is what led them to their deaths. A martyr is someone who witnesses to the Gospel, to God’s organizing story for the world, with every ounce of their being, even to the point that their being is exhausted. Just as John was calling the seven churches of Asia Minor to be witnesses, John is calling your congregation to the radical witness of the kingdom of God in the world, too.