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Twinbrook Baptist Church Rockville, MD 4th Sunday of Easter April 29, 2007 Pastor: Kip Ingram Kip@TwinbrookBaptist.com |
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Every team has a mascot. We often see them dressed in costume on the sideline, or leading the charge at pep rallies, or captured in images on a banner or t-shirt or oversized foam finger. Mascots can be any animal or person or thing, and historically they were once thought to have magical power just by their presence. When a school or group or team chooses a mascot, they identify with it. They choose a mascot as a focus for their identity. Sometimes the mascot is based on a region or its history. So, for example, the University of Oklahoma is known as the Sooners, those original settlers who rushed across the state to claim tracts of land offered to whoever arrived on site first. They got there ”sooner.” At their football games today, you can still see a horse-drawn wagon coaxed by a pioneer rushing across the field as fans cheer wildly. There are many examples of mascots based on region or history. San Francisco has its 49ers, named after the 1849 gold rush. New Orleans has its Saints; Dallas has its Cowboys; New England has its Patriots. Other groups choose mascots based on their power or supposed ferociousness. There are the Bears, the Lions, the Rams and Giants. At Maryland, you are warned to ”fear the turtle,” while at Wake Forest you encounter a figure known as a ”Demon Deacon.” Mascots of all kinds provide a way to identify as a group. They provide a point of focus for attention and give leadership to expression of support. For fans and supporters, mascots offer encouragement to sustain group support throughout the ups and downs of a game or a season. The church has a kind of mascot. I say a kind of mascot, because the truth of our mascot goes beyond the mere gamesmanship and commercialism of sports in our country. It speaks to the truth of who we are, and the unique power of our mascot can shape us in life-changing ways. It's not the kind of mascot one usually associates with power. It goes against human expectation and common assumption about what powerful mascots should be. But then, what God reveals to us often causes us to question our assumptions and received wisdom. The church's mascot image is featured prominently in the book of Revelation, but it is found throughout the New Testament and has its roots in the earlier Hebrew Testament writings and practice. In the book of Revelation, the writer John is sharing with early churches certain visions he has seen. He is writing and sharing with these early churches because they are going through hard times, facing persecution in large and small ways, and he is sharing with them what God has revealed to him in order to encourage them. In Revelation 6, we read about a series of seals that are opened, with each one revealing a different scene and each one showing John a vision of increasing devastation for people in general and the faithful in particular. The whole chapter makes for a devastating vision of evil and destruction, and the persecuted early churches in John's day would have recognized and understood the violence inscribed there. In fact, the last sentence of the chapter asks a question that might have been on the lips of early persecuted Christians and was surely in their hearts: ”The great Day of their wrath has come-who can stand it?” Our passage from chapter 7 seeks to answer that question as it offers wisdom and encouragement to Christian believers. Through John's writing we see a vision of a multitude gathered, too many to count, and they are gathered around an image that is deepest and most true for Christians, the image that will comfort and encourage them, as well as challenge their thinking about God. It will be a mascot for them like no other mascot before or since. Now, you would think that a church under threat of Roman imperial power and persecution would need a mascot that will rival that power, something fierce if not monstrous, a bear perhaps or a lion or a gladiator. But when we gather with the multitudes in this vision around the throne of God, what do we see? We see a lamb, of all things! That can't be right, can it? We want something with fireworks. We want a cannon to shoot off at halftime. We want a flyover at the speed of sound. But don't give us "Lambchop and Friends!" How odd of God to offer this image to Christians in a world of the powerful, of movers and shakers, of dominant economic interests and military might, of terror and daily violence. At first glance, the lamb doesn't seem very relevant to our reality. But what is our reality? Part of what we do week by week in worship is to have our thinking challenged about just what constitutes the truth of our reality. Is our reality that which is foisted upon us by constant advertising, entertainment, business interests, political agendas and easy cultural assumptions? Or is our reality as people of faith something deeper and more truthful, something more life-giving and enduring, something revealed by God? Every time we worship we are asking the question, directly or indirectly, just what is reality and where does its truthfulness lie? Every time we worship we are asking the question afresh just who or what is sitting on the throne of our lives. The lamb in Revelation is a very special kind of lamb-it is the Lamb of God. As an image of Jesus Christ, this lamb is revealed in John's vision to lie at the center of God's character and purposes. As one commentator writes: ”At the heart of the power of the universe stands Jesus, God's slain lamb.” There is something powerful about this lamb. At first sight, we might not think so. After all, lambs are perceived mostly as innocent and vulnerable creatures, not necessarily visions of ferocious power. And yet, John's vision here asks us to look again and recognize the power of the lamb. The multitudes are present before John's vision. They are from every country and race and language, robed in white and holding palm branches of victory. As the multitudes are gathered around the throne and around the lamb, they are singing and worshiping, standing on their feet in praise and falling on their faces in reverence. And as John beholds this spectacle, one of the elders asks him if he knows who these robed multitudes are, and John says ”I don't but you surely do.” And the elder tells him that all these people have come out of fiery trials, and that they have washed their robes clean in the blood of the lamb. You may stop here and point out that their robes cannot possibly be made clean by blood. Everybody knows that blood doesn't make clean, it stains. Yet John's vision is offering us a paradox here to get us to stop for a moment and consider what it might mean. What is it about the blood of the lamb that can indeed make clean? What is this power that the lamb's blood reveals? The blood of the lamb reminds us, first of all, about the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ. In the day of Jesus, there was a sacrificial system in place in order to deal with people's sins. At certain times of the year, a sacrificial lamb would be killed and offered in atonement to God for all the sins of the people. Life is given and sacrificed in order that life might go on renewed. In the New Testament, Jesus is seen increasingly as a kind of sacrificial lamb. In the Gospel of John, we are told that when John the Baptist first sees Jesus coming toward him, he says: ”Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Later, out of love for each of us and for the whole world, Jesus willingly gave himself over to a sacrificial death on the cross. He did it to reveal to us the depths of God's love, the lengths that God is willing to go in order to show us how much love is there for us all. The image of the lamb's blood reminds us of just how far God has gone to put love on the line for us. That's real power, power not measured by barbells or bombs or bank accounts, but by the very giving of love. The apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians that the cross of Christ seems like weakness and foolishness to the world, but for those of us who have seen and felt it, the power of God's love revealed there is awesome, life-changing, and worth a lifetime of faithfulness and trust. Let me ask you, which is the greater power? The person who can lift 1000 lbs off the ground, the person who can write a check for a million dollars, the person who can flip a switch and drop a bomb, or a person who can give of self in loving care toward another? You can lift a lot of weight but you can't physically make another person love you. You can buy a lot of things with a million dollars, but you can't buy love. You can drop a lot of bombs, even torture people, but you can't make them freely respond to you. Only love, sacrificial love, has the power to evoke our free response. Only love has the power to invite us to relationship while honoring the dignity of our freedom. While muscles degenerate, money gets spent, bombs are used up, only love endures. The vision of the lamb's blood in Revelation reminds us of this power. It also reminds us of forgiveness and new beginnings. The blood of the lamb that cleanses the robes of the faithful is an image of the blood of Christ which cleanses us of our wrongdoings. We all of us carry regrets over choices we have made that were self-destructive or that diminished others. We all of us have made decisions which hurt ourselves and others. We all of us have sinned. Maybe you are carrying the burden of that sin today in the form of regret or self-accusation. Well, the good news is that you don't have to carry those choices that feel like stains. God forgives, if you will reach out and believe. If you've been wrestling and hurting with sin, why don't you give it to God today and trust God's forgiveness? The blood of the lamb, the loving self-gift of Jesus, can make you feel clean with a fresh start. The blood also reminds us that we live in a violent and vulnerable world. Every time we cut ourselves shaving, every time we scrape a knee or an elbow, every time we get a paper cut or a blister, we are reminded of our bloody world. Some of you may be feeling like all this talk about blood is just a little too much, a little too grisly and repulsive. I understand the sentiment. I recently went to the musical at Wootton High School. It was ”Sweeney Todd”, about a barber whose wife gets raped by a powerful judge. Sweeney Todd enacts his revenge on the judge and the town by inviting people into his barber chair, where he promptly cuts their throat with his razor. At first, when I watched this musical, I didn't care for it. I like inspirational and uplifting and fun musicals, and I thought the music and content of Sweeney Todd was kind of grisly. But the more I thought on it and stayed with it, the more I came to appreciate it as a kind of truthful depiction of the sometimes violent and obsessive side of life. Like life at times, Sweeney Todd reminded me of our bloody world. We believers don't want to live in such a protected and sterile and saccharine world of narrow vision that we cannot see and take on the challenges of life. For in our world, people die of AIDS; in our world, people are refugees of war and famine; in our world, Virginia Tech students and faculty are gunned down like lambs at a slaughter. We need a vision with the power to let us look honestly at our sometimes bloody world. Revelation shows us the lamb of God, not to justify bloodshed, but to give us hope that even here, God is present. The power of our mascot lamb is reflected in the multitudes who gathered around the throne. The throne is a gathering place which draws people from all over, people of different races and dialects and cultures and experiences. Yet they all are drawn to this centering place before the throne. This isn't Caesar's throne; it is the place of the lamb. Something intangible but real draws them there and makes a place for every person present. And what do those present do? They sing. They sing praises before God and the lamb. They sing their thankfulness for life and all its gifts. They sing of the worthy goodness of God. As Eugene Peterson says: ”The people of God sing. They express exuberance in realizing the majesty of God and the mercy of Christ, the wholeness of reality and their new-found ability to participate in it. Songs proliferate. Hymns gather the voices of men, women, and children into century-tiered choirs. Moses sings. Miriam sings. Deborah sings. David sings. Mary sings. Angels sing. Jesus and his disciples sing. Paul and Silas sing. When persons of faith become aware of who God is and what God does, they sing. The songs are irrepressible.” Who God is and what God does is wrapped up in the image of the lamb, our mascot. i.Barbara Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Westview Press, 2004), 110. ii.Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 66. |
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