Sing Me to Heaven

Text: Revelation 17:9-17

Toward the end of Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, Vladimir asks Pozzo: “What do you do when you fall far from help?” In Act III of King Lear, the mad king has fallen “far from help.” He rages about a life that is out of control: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow! You cataracts and huricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks.  You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world, Crack Nature’s molds, all germains spill at once, That makes ingrateful man” (III, ii, 1 – hurricanoes are waterspouts.  Cocksare weathercocks, or weathervanes. Vaunt-couriers are forward scouts. Germains are the seeds of life.).

         “What do you do when you fall far from help?” What do you do when the winds blow and “crack your cheeks?” Though from differing centuries, Beckett and Shakespeare’s questions fit aptly into the absurdity of our 21st century lives. Years ago, we could simply “wish upon a star” or “talk, keep talk, keep talking happy talk,” but not now, not in a day when winds blow with unimaginably deadly results in Palestine and Israel, in the trenches of the Ukraine, in yet another school used as shooting practice in Winder, Georgia, as the nasty demeaning of those different from us has become an accepted national political sport. What do you do when the winds blow hard and crack your creeks, when you fall far from help?

         As I approach retirement, I find myself thinking back. I am grateful for so many rich memories of my years in ministry that warm my heart, many of those memories have happened right here at Cove. I also have a few terrifying memories that are bone chilling. One such memory our nation will commemorate on Wednesday.

         Twenty-three years ago, I was living in Alexandria and serving a church in Old Town. When I walked into our church courtyard that morning, my assistant ran outside and said, “There has been a terrible accident in New York City. A plane has hit the tower of the World Trade Center.”

         In a matter of minutes, a second plane had hit in New York and then the Pentagon, just a few short miles from where I was standing. You could feel the terror in the air. And, many years later that terror still runs loose like a wild beast. It sends us running for shelter and hiding behind debilitating fear.

         Years later, I can still smell an underlying malaise in the air as we wonder, “What’s next?” When will the next plane crash into an iconic building? When will the next disturbed gunshot be heard at a political rally or in a local school? When will the next massive storm strike? What will happen if the recipe of nuclear power, political instability, and economic desperation erupts in North Korea or Iran?

         I still enjoy listening to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s old song of the cock-eyed optimist, but it is the much older song of Lear that speaks to the madness of this new century: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow! You cataracts and huricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks.”

         I would argue that Beckett’s 20th century question, “What do you do when you fall far from help?” should be the official question of this millennium. And, as soon as you ask that question, you have taken the first step into the world of Revelation. It is a world where normal assurances don’t work anymore, a world where evil is not an occasional visitor, but is landed gentry; a world where simple religious formulas don’t produce the desired results any longer; a world where we pray but the heavens remain shut; where we are faithful to God and good to our neighbors and yet we find ourselves accosted and accused, beaten and jailed. It is a world where madness is the norm and you doubt if God listens or cares or is even there. 

         D.H. Lawrence described the book of Revelation as detestable and our theological ancestor, John Calvin, wrote a commentary on every book in the New Testament, except Revelation. In his superb commentary on this bizarre book, Mitchell Reddish asks: “Would we not be better off distancing ourselves from this book that has been the fertile field for fundamentalist soothsayers, that helped fuel the fires at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, and that to some people seems more of an embarrassment than a work to be taken seriously? (p. 2).” 

         While the temptation is great to lop off the end of the New Testament, ultimately, we do so at too high a price. For Revelation speaks to Christians like us who live in a world gone awry, in a church embattled from outside and within. Its language is strange and its images turn common sense on its head, but its promise is too much to set aside; it is the promise for which Christians and the church thirst when flood waters rise and life’s well is bone dry. 

         Logically, chapter seven of Revelation should be the final chapter. The last of the seven seals is broken and the end of the world should occur. Instead, this chapter provides a strange interlude, a holy pause with one scene happening on earth and the other in heaven. On earth, angels are stationed at the four corners of the flat globe to hold back the violent wind of God, while in heaven, a multitude of saints, too many to count, hold a public concert. A slain Lamb rather than a marauding Lion sits upon the throne of God and saints in dazzling clothes not stained red but made white with blood sing a hallelujah chorus.  

        Welcome to John’s bizarre and often confounding world. Some read Revelation as a literal manual of the end time. Others laugh out loud at such religious nonsense and dismiss it as a cookbook for kooks. Both groups miss the mark for what this revelation is all about and therefore they obscure the power of its message.

         In the second scene of chapter seven, the scene set in heaven, a multitude of martyrs cannot stop singing songs of praise and thanksgiving to God. In John’s vision, these choristers are the unlikely saints who kept believing when they had fallen “far from help,” who kept hoping when hope seemed foolish at best, who kept witnessing to the non-violent love of God in Christ when others flexed their military muscles, and who kept giving of themselves in the name of the One who gave himself in love for all the world. They died while the world laughed at their feeble witness. They died and now they sing around the throne of God.

These singing saints are met by a slaughtered Lamb that is also a ruling Lion and a gentle Shepherd. Revelation assaults the senses with fantastic images that try to capture the inexplicable – how God redeems suffering, even the suffering death of Jesus. Revelation dares to ask Christians and a church to put their life’s trust in God, to believe in the good purposes of God, and to love God even in the midst of terror and suffering, sin and storm. 

Believing in God’s redemptive power is never easy, especially when life is terrifying. It is much easier to do so when life is calm and we are comfortable and can easily equate our prosperity with God’s reward for our sincere faith. Believing is much easier when God provides a magic, protective bubble around us to deliver us from planes being used as missiles, from the paths of drunken drivers, from cancer cells run amok, from exploding bombs at music festivals, from teenage gunmen, from horrific hurricanes that mock our preparedness.

         Look again at who sings the doxology in the seventh chapter of Revelation. They are the believers who held onto the promise of the Gospel even when life was at its bleakest. Revelation puts the church on notice that you and I are called by God to hone our faith in troubled times, not to escape suffering, not to dodge pain at all costs, but to suffer with those who would otherwise suffer alone, to pray for and bear witness to the love of God in Christ even to family and neighbors and co-workers for whom the notion of divine love is nothing more than silly superstition, to bind the wounds of those victimized by our warring ways, to raise our voices for peace to those with the power to make it, to get involved in the lives of those who are struggling the most, to gather here Sunday after Sunday to lift our voices in praise while the majority of those around us scratch their collective heads and wonder why we do, to give sacrificially for the work of Christ in the world precisely when most people are cutting back on what they give.

          How Firm a Foundation is an early American folk tune that I have sung since my childhood. The tune has survived several centuries, but the hymnwriter is now known only to God. Written in an age of great anxiety and uncertainty, soon after our Revolutionary War, the final verse declares: “The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose, I will not, I will not desert to its foes; That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake, I’ll never, no, never, no, never forsake.”

         What do you and I do when we fall far from help? That is Beckett’s question, not ours, not in this century, not ever. The promise of Revelation is not that the storms will hit elsewhere; no, it is the promise that all who follow the slain Lamb and sing with the chorus of heavenly angels despite chaos and catastrophe, even in the midst of chaos and catastrophe, are never far from help, never far from a God who will “never, no, never, no, never forsake.” 

         Thanks be to God!

                  AMEN