Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
All Saints B - Sunday, October 31, 2021
I surprised myself by wanting to talk to you about our passage from Revelation today. This book is also known as the Apocalypse. Under that name, it evokes portentous catastrophes and strife between good and evil. The Apocalypse is often seen as predictions of last things; the last things that will ever happen on this Earth as we know it. Whether those predictions are metaphorical or factual depends on who you ask. My sense is that they don’t make sense as literal descriptions of end times.
In fact, the Book of Revelation was written as an unveiling of God’s ultimate purpose for Christian communities contemporary to the writing of the book. Those communities lived throughout the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the first century of the current era. Revelation was written as a way of encouraging these Asia Minor communities to continue the Christian life in the face of oppression under Roman Emperor Domitian. It was written to encourage them all to be everyday saints.
Most likely there was a pressure for Christians to participate in the imperial cult's religious festivals. This probably involved a threat of punishment or death if they did not partake of the emperor’s cult.
Christians didn’t weigh much in the face of the Roman Empire. After all, they were just members of a heretical wing of a minority faith (Judaism) barely tolerated by a human empire. They were utterly expendable.
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Whatever the circumstances in which the Book of Revelation was written, I trust that nowadays it needs to be read as a figurative account of the struggle between good and evil.
The book has a moral purpose that transcends its immediate circumstances and purpose. That’s why we can still read this book and learn from it today.
This symbolic view of the book is still controversial in many Christian spheres. As Roger Ferlo writes: “The book of Revelation can be a happy hunting ground for bigots and fanatics, and the distortion of its purpose and meanings are as rampant today as they were two millenia ago.”
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Today’s passage from the book of Revelation points to the creation of a new community in unmediated communion with God. God will be in the midst of all God’s saints and all saints will be with God.
And the creation of that community is the purpose of history. God is the beginning and the end of history; the Alpha and the Omega.
We come in-between those points amongst generations of our kind to be instruments of God’s love in building such community. The communion of the whole of Creation with God is the purpose of history. History and time will become irrelevant when that full communion happens.
The apostle John paints a vivid picture of what that community - shall we call it the Beloved Community - looks like.
Death, mourning, crying and pain will be no more. God wipes every tear from our eyes. Emmanuel is tangibly with us. The Trinity dwells with us. And we dwell within the Trinity. The world, both heaven and earth, are renewed, not done away with. The cosmos is redeemed and perfected.
The apostle John uses metaphors that rely on time and space because that is what we know and understand. But this renewed reality will be with God in an unmediated way. And God is beyond time and space.
So the writer can only summon up visions that evoke what it will feel like while using time and space to make us apprehend this new reality. This will not be a restoration of our broken world to its imagined original or virginal state.
It will be but a transformation beyond imagining. Still, John invites us to imagine what it would be like to live with the Divine as our neighbor in the new Jerusalem.
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You see, all creation and all redemption are one eternal movement of God’s Spirit, a movement that exists and has existed in every moment.
It existed from the creation of the universe at the beginning of time; to the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord. It exists to the new creation at the apocalypse.
All these steps of salvation history are part of one eternally present movement of God’s Spirit.
Revelation and unveiling can happen anywhere, any time. Revelation and unveiling are the moments when the absolute reality announces itself to us in the midst of our human lives, when we can see, if only for a brief moment, the luminosity of our own selves and of all the created world. These are the moments when the shining garment of God’s body that is present in all people and all things becomes visible to us, if we only have eyes to see.
And those moments can happen and do happen to any of us at any time. It can happen to exceptional and everyday saints alike.
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Today, on the eve of All Hallows, the other name for All Saints, we view existence from the perspective of eternity. All generations are called blessed. They coexist irrespective of time in the same instant of God’s Love.
Today, we honor saints who have come before us, maybe a few years ago, or centuries ago, whose examples we wish to follow. And also the saints who are alive today, those we know, those we live with and those we don’t. And also the saints who will come after us.
Today, we remember that we belong to the communion of saints, past, present and future, because we all are beloved children of God. In this holy community we partake of the divine today and every day.
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Beloved Lord, help us to spot the saints around us; help us to spot the saint in the mirror; help us learn from the saints; that we may see with your light and build your community of Love with You, here and now and forever.
Amen.
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