Foundry United
Rev.
“Cosmic Hope from the Strangest Book in the Bible:
Sermons on Revelation”
Sunday, June 5,
2011
Rev.
Hope and Evil
Revelation 20:7-15
The Book of Revelation – the strangest book of the Bible – the plot is that John is invited to visit heaven (Revelation 4:1-2).
John gets to see the history of the world from the perspective of heaven.
From the perspective of heaven, human history is a great battle. The battle is between, on one side, the devil and Satan, dragons and beasts, and, on the other side, the lamb who was slain, the virgin, angels, and the saints washed in the blood of the lamb.
The battle is very, very fierce. It is cataclysmic.
Then we come to a final battle. In the final battle, Satan organizes the empires of the world for a great and final assault against heaven and the saints of God. Satan's army has more soldiers in it than there are grains of sand in the seas.
As Satan's army is attacking, fire comes down from heaven. Satan is thrown into the sea, his armies scattered. All humanity is resurrected and judged based on their deeds. And at the very end of the battle, death and hell are thrown into a lake of fire and eternally destroyed. Death is destroyed. Hell is destroyed.
After this final battle, in the last two chapters of the Book of Revelation, death and hell no longer exist. At the end of the story there is no death, no hell, and no evil.
Here's the deal in the Bible -- There is no death, no hell, and no evil in the first chapter of the Bible, and there is no death, no hell, and no evil in the final chapters of the Bible.
The Genesis 1 creation story says that everything God created was good. Read through the story and the goodness of creation is like the refrain of a song.
God creates light, and God saw the light was good.
God creates the earth and seas and God saw it was good.
God creates vegetation, and God saw that it was good.
God made the sun and the moon and set them in the sky and God saw it was good.
God created sea monsters, and birds and even everything that with which the waters swarm – which I think includes bugs – and God saw it was good.
God made wild animals and creeping things, and God saw it was good.
And at the end of the sixth day of creation, God saw everything that God had made, and indeed it was very good.
Everything God made was very good. This is the theology of Genesis 1. Evil is not part of what God creates. God does not create evil.
At the end of history, in the Book of Revelation, God destroys hell, death, and evil. At the end of the story God eradicates evil and heals and repairs the damage it has done.
In the Bible, evil does not have its own identity and being. It is real; it is aggressive, it is greedy; it is mean. But it is not ontological. It is real but it does not have being.
Evil is a vacuum, a shadow, a minus. It is real and nasty, but it is not eternal. It is not part of God's intention. It will not survive. Evil is conditional, evil is transitional.
It wasn't in the beginning and it will not be at the end of the story.
Nothing that exists is, in its own being, by its own created nature, evil.
This is why Christians are very, very careful about whom and what we call evil. Evil is not something that anybody or anything is. We do not divide the world between things that are good and things that evil - people who are good, people who are evil. All of us are created good.
Evil is only a condition that we get sucked into when we separate ourselves from the love and compassion and justice of God and God's good creation. And all of us get sucked into it. But it does not define you or me or anyone, not even people we call "enemy."
This is why the churches and religions tend to oppose capital punishment. We don't think that you can get rid of evil by killing it. You can get rid of evil only by winning it back to goodness.
This is why we are very careful, even when our nations fight wars, to understand that no enemy is ever evil by nature. Our goal, even when we resort to war, is not to destroy evil but to win evil back to goodness and to pray that in the process we don't get seduced by the evil vortex we are fighting.
Hell is not a place. It is a negative space. It is the absence of goodness, love, compassion, and justice. It is an anti-place.
From the perspective of heaven, the way John gets to see it in Revelation, all of history is God battling the vacuum of hell which is trying to swallow the goodness, compassion, inclusion, and justice that God created.
Hell is greedy. It wants you. It wants me. It wants every child that is born into the world. It wants every family, it wants every church, it wants every city, and it wants every nation. It wants to suck out of us all of the goodness, compassion, and openness and intelligence and sense of justice that God created.
Hell is strong, but heaven is stronger. This is the drama of Revelation. Satan is determined, but God is more determined and smarter and more powerful. Evil is transitory, but goodness is eternal.
In Revelation, the works of hell are ultimately healed and repaired. Every person is judged solely on her or his own actions and is rewarded by an objective standard of evaluation. All the wrong done to everyone is repaired.
The co-worker who doesn't work as hard as you and who isn't as smart or productive as you, but who got the promotion you wanted? That will be taken care of. The guy who cheated and got into grad school slot you wanted? Taken care of.
But I don't want to trivialize this. It is not really about the petty complaints of our lives. This is really about all the women, children, and men who died in pogroms and holocausts. Women, children, and men raped, dismembered, and killed by invading armies. Women, children, and men who die in genocides.
It is about the children in Haiti whose hair turns red and they starve to death at 5 and 6 years old, people in Haiti being evicted from their homes right now as we sit here in our pretty church.
It is about women burned at the stake as witches, women drowned as witches, women raped, women turned into sex slaves, and baby girls killed because of their gender.
It is about children abused, children left to die because of disabilities, children denied education, children thrown away, children in the school-to-prison pipeline, and children mocked because of physical features, size, accents, or differences.
It is about people and races enslaved, people treated like property, people discriminated against in employment and education and housing, people profiled, people imprisoned, people's heritages, identities, and dignities lost, stolen, and destroyed, and families ripped apart.
It is about gays murdered, gays bashed, gays fired, gays humiliated, and gays told they are going to hell.
It is about immigrants denied work, immigrants whose wages are stolen, immigrants imprisoned, and immigrant families torn apart.
It is about people whose lands are "discovered" and stolen. It is about poor people denied access to health care, and men and women with HIV denied medicines.
It is about poor people denied access to jobs. Poor people forced to work three or four jobs. It is about people with mental illnesses and disabilities and addictions forced to live in the streets and to sleep on church steps.
All of these things come to an end, and they are fixed, they are repaired and they are recompensed and they are reparated.
And for those of us who have been so remarkably privileged and have used our privilege more for our own pleasure than on behalf of goodness and inclusion and justice…that will have to somehow be made right as well. I don't know what it looks like exactly. I don't like to think too much about it. But it will have to happen.
But when it is all done, death and hell and evil are destroyed and they are no more.
I think this battle that John sees from heaven actually takes place in our souls – our individual souls, our collective human soul, creation's soul, and the universe's soul.
We fight it every day.
On the one side is despair; despair and our addictions and our cynicism and our self-condemnation and our disappointment. These are the dragons and beasts on one side of the battle.
On the other side is hope; hope and courage and faith and determination and confidence. These are the lamb who was slain and the virgin mother and the saints washed in the blood of the lamb within us.
John saw a great battle that is taking place within creation's soul and your soul and mine every day.
It is a fierce battle. But goodness wins. Evil is undone and hope wins.
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