Tuesday • 10/26/2021
Tuesday of the Twenty-second Week After Pentecost (Proper 25)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 45; Ezra 5:1–17; Revelation 4:1–11; Matthew 13:1–9
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (“A Song of Praise,” BCP, p. 90); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)
“Too much going on,” sighed the man in the checkout line in front of me. He and the cashier had been trading stories about living through the times we are in.
John, the writer of the book of the Revelation, might have said much the same: “Too much going on.” For his testimony to the gospel, he’s been exiled to the Isle of Patmos off the southwest coast of Asia Minor. Many Jewish people resist the message of Jesus as Messiah because conversion to faith in Christ brings expulsion from the synagogue (John 16:2). Rome has become increasingly hostile. Already in the mid-60s, according to traditional accounts, Nero has had Paul beheaded and Peter crucified; and, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, he has used Christians as human torches to light the streets of Rome (Annals 15.44). By the early 2nd century, confessing Christ could bring a death sentence (Pliny, Epistles 10.96). The churches in the western end of Asia Minor who look to John for leadership struggle with persecution from without, and with heresy, lovelessness, indifference, and materialism within.
By telling John to “write these things,” the Lord provides perspective to John, the churches of his day, and also to believers in our day. The Lord wants John (and us) to know what’s really going on above the fray, in the unseen realm. The Lord’s will is that we find strength to persevere and even to overcome when it feels like there’s “too much going on.”
After the transcendent and shimmering image of Jesus as “Alpha and Omega” in Revelation 1, the Lord addresses letters to each of seven struggling churches in Revelation 2–3. The Lord knows and cares about what’s going on in the trenches, about the hard places of people’s lives.
Now, with Chapter 4, the Lord begins to pull back the curtain that, for now at least, separates earth and heaven. He shows John (and us) what’s going on behind the scenes: “…and there in heaven a door stood open!” (Revelation 4:11b). In his vision, John is taken, in the first place, to the throne room, where the Creator of heaven and earth still governs. Here, God the Father sits on a throne in a setting redolent with colors of the rainbow—his symbol that he is both creator and preserver of his good creation (Revelation 4:3). Worship ascends to the Father from all of creation: from wild animal life (the lion), from domesticated creatures (the ox), from the birds of the air (the eagle), and from humanity (the human face—Revelation 4:6b). Twenty-four elders (Israel’s twelve tribes and Jesus’s twelve disciples) represent the full sweep of the biblical story, humanity’s true history and destiny. Each of the twenty-four has his own throne and crown. In humble adoration, each lays his crown at the feet of God.
Week after week, the struggling church here below accepts the liturgy’s invitation to join this heavenly chorus in their unending song, “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Revelation 4:8b). Their song is our song as well. For when we sing, with them, of the worth of our Lord and God, we re-center our lives around the fact that reality is thicker than what we can perceive with our senses. There’s so much more going on than what is readily apparent to us down here where it feels like “there’s too much going on.”
“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created” (Revelation 4:11).
It’s his good creation—all of it—and he’s not about to abandon it, nor leave us alone in it with “too much going on.” Stay tuned.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Image: Ramon FVelasquez, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
