Revelation's Christ the King

Domitian vs. the Dissident

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Psalm 93; Revelation 1:4-8; John 18:33-37

A sermon, a lecture, all in preparation for the book I wrote with Cody Matchett: Revelation for the Rest of Us.

Introduction

Imprisoning dissidents is not always the best solution for those in power. Some imprisoned dissidents were able to become the giants they became because they were imprisoned.

In fact, dissidents have been known to use their time in prison to plot revolutions, to write books that rock the world, and to correspond with the free world in ways establish potent networks. Some dissidents have used their prison time to spend time in God’s presence, to pray and to hear from God and to dream dreams and envision visions.

Think of these dissidents.

         Nelson Mandela on Robben Island

         Alexander Solzyhenitsyn in the gulag

         Martin Luther King Jr in a cell in Birmingham

Thomas Cranmer in and out of Bocardo prison, with recantations as well as commitments that led to the legacy of England’s Reformer.

Dissidents are powerless, marginalized and incapable of doing much.

Dissidents are not all imprisoned but dissidents are prone to imagine a different world …

Like writing a book that gives others an imagination for a new way of life – the way Harriet Beecher Stowe did in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the way Alan Paton did in Cry, the Beloved Country, the way Dee Brown did in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and the way Ralph Ellison did in The Invisible Man … and many of you would want others on this list.

Today we look at a marginalized political dissident, the apostle John, who chose plotting subversion through imagination.

Read 1:9: “I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.”

In prison: “companion in the suffering” but also a companion in the “kingdom.”

On the island of Patmos.

Away from his churches in Eastern Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and his spheres of influence.

Alone.

With God.

Day and night.

For a long time.

The Book of Revelation was written by an imprisoned dissident.

His book is still being read. No one but university historians are reading Domitian, the oppressor.

By a dissident for the culturally buoyant. If one reads Revelation’s two chapters of letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor we find that not all the Christians he had in mind were dissidents. Rather, they were privileged and happy and enjoying some cultural buoyancy. John did not speak kindly to them. He protested their cultural buoyancy.

Like the churches of Western Asia Minor, we’re floating on wave after wave of cultural buoyancy.

We need to hear that Dissident on Patmos protesting, and ask if we need to develop some dissidence:

He speaks of abandoning our first love (2:4), of flat-out false teachings (2:14-15), of sexual immoralities (2:20-23), of “unfinished deeds” (3:2) and lukewarm behaviors begotten in a life of wealth and ease (3:15-17).

         Are you a dissident?

Moral dissident?

Theological dissident?

Church dissident?

Social dissident?

Structural dissident?

Political dissident? Like Jay’s brother Jeff who said “president” instead of queen.

Revelation is not a bizarre set of predictions.

Revelation is not about Rapture and “left behind” and neither is it a “guide for survival” in case we get left behind.

Revelation is not there so we can discern who is the Antichrist.

Some are always calculating someone:

Since Trump’s election in November of zoi6, many have linked him to the beast of Revelation and the number 666, noting, among other portents, that his election year, 2016, is the sum of 666 + 666 + 666 + 6 + 6 + 6; that he frequently makes an “okay” hand sign that forms the number six; and that his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s real estate company owns 666 Fifth Avenue in New York”

(Beal, The Book of Revelation, 202).

Revelation is not for Speculators but for Dissidents. For those who stand with John against too much cultural buoyancy.

The Christian in America who is not a Dissident is a Christian in need of deeper discipleship. (Unless you live in Grand Rapids, or Wheaton, or Nashville.)

Each of us is called to become a dissident somewhere, somehow.

Three characteristics of a Dissident.

1.0          Dissidents Worship God and So Defy Caesar (1:4-5a, 8)

Read 1:4-5a, 8 “from him who is, and who was, and who is to come” (1:4) and “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty” (1:8).

Grant Osborne calls this a “paraphrase of the divine name” (Revelation, 60). He’s referring to Exodus 3:14: God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ”

Dan 7:9-10, 13-14 predicts the coming Son of Man who will rule this earth for the one on the throne, the Ancient of Days, the “one who is, who was, and who is to come.”

Revelation then adds just “the seven spirits before his throne.”

Then it comes to Christ, the King: “and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth” (1:5). He is the one who “freed us from our sins by his blood” (1:5).

Father, Spirit, Son.

Dissidents worship this God, this Trinitarian God.

Church Calendar:

Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week and Easter, Pentecost, “Ordinary” Time

The church calendar ends on Christ the King Sunday, a day to declare our faith that God rules, that in Christ God has assumed rule of this world.

Our church calendar climaxes at the high point of the imagination of Christian faith. Read the prophets and you will come away with what Richard Lischer said in a sermon at Duke Divinity School chapel: “Each in his own way, the prophet and the seer, speaks words that we desperately need to take into our hearts. Each says, ‘I have seen the future, and it belongs to God’” (Sermons from Duke Chapel, Willimon, 289).

2.0          Dissidents Believe they are Agents of Redemption  (1:5b-6)

John’s words about the Son in this Trinity continue: “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father” (1:6).

It takes a fierce imagination to be a minority, marginalized, and powerless to think of yourselves as a “royal priesthood.”

Not just the males.

Not just the males in official religious offices.

But males and females, slave and free, Jew and gentile.

Imagination has the ability to turn a believer into thinking what is altogether impossible can become amazingly possible.

What is a royal priest? One who mediates between humans and God, but also at times between God and humans. This kind of priest does this for the King. A priest is a mediator, one filled with prayer and out of that prayer can become the presence of God to another person and the presence of another before God.

Christian Dissidents are called to be agents of redemption, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make that choice in security.”[1]

Instead, it was a choice to enter into the subversion of German nationalism for the sake of the German church, a choice to enter the Abwehr in order to subvert the Wehrmacht, a choice to take upon himself the condition of the German people’s sinful violence in order to end that violence through the cross.

Where can you become a redeeming agent? Moral dissident? Theological dissident? Church dissident? Social dissident? Structural dissident? Political dissident?

3.0          Dissidents Live Now in Light of the Final Kingdom (1:7-8)

Dissidents know what’s ahead: they know the future is God’s. They know that Jesus will be the Judge and that he will slay sin and defeat death and erase evil. Dissidents know that Jesus will reward the righteous and let life be the last word and will bring final and good justice.

Nothing is more triumphalist than Christ the King Sunday. Nothing is more about conquering than a message about a King. But Christian Dissidents know that in the end God will have to act to defeat death and slay sin and erase evil.  This triumphal King message is the message not of a warrior but a Lamb who was slain.

We may strive for justice but what we need is Jesus the Judge.

We may fight for righteousness but what we need is the Royal Righteous One.

The future may be God’s, but what about now? The dissident fights for the future to become reversed thunder now.

Revelation is for Dissidents who are tired of the nonsense and who long for the kingdom. As Eugene Peterson puts it,

“But for people who are fed up with such bland fare, the Revelation is a gift-a work of intense imagination that pulls its reader into a world of sky battles between angels and beasts, lurid punishments and glorious salvations, kaleidoscopic vision and cosmic song. It is a world in which children are instinctively at home and in which adults, by becoming as little children, recapture an elemental involvement in the basic conflicts and struggles that permeate moral existence, and then go on to discover again the soaring adoration and primal affirmations for which God made us” (Reversed Thunder, x).

John didn’t see these visions and then make a dispensational chart.[1]

John saw these visions, turned north and east, faced Asia Minor and said, “This may be the darkness of Good Friday but Easter’s coming.” Maybe he had a Clint Eastwood glare and said, “C’mon Domitian, make my day.”

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[1] Ibid., 210.

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[1] T. Beal, The Book of Revelation, 202: “Since Trump’s election in November of 20i6, many have linked him to the beast of Revelation and the number 666, noting, among other portents, that his election year, 1016, is the sum of 666 + 666 + 666 + 6 + 6 + 6; that he frequently makes an “okay” hand sign that forms the number six; and that his son-in-law Jared Kushner s real estate company owns 666 Fifth Avenue in New York.”