Love Letter
Scripture Reading: Revelation 1:1-8
These days I’m trying to be more intentional about writing cards and letters. I used to send birthday cards and Christmas cards to family regularly, but when I moved to Korea, I pretty much gave that up, and after I returned I never got back into the habit. It’s so much easier to type one or two sentences in an email that will be delivered immediately. It’s even easier to send a short text that doesn’t require a full sentence or even actual words. “HBD!” (insert birthday cake and party hat emojis). (For the record, I don’t actually do that.)
Compare that with the time it takes to rummage through my desk to find an appropriate card, an envelope, and a stamp. That’s if I even have all three. And because putting pen to paper has a permanence to it, I’d want to spend enough time getting the words just right. More than likely I’d then have to search for the person’s address in my contacts. It’s a whole ordeal, I tell you!
When I was in college, I used to write letters all the time to my two best friends, given that we went to three different schools. This was during the medieval days of the last century before cell phones and even before email. Writing letters was the only way for us to keep in touch between visits home. And there was nothing better than going to the mailroom and seeing a letter inside my mailbox.
A few years later, shortly after Sandy and I began dating, I went on a three-week backpacking trip around Europe with my best friend. Sandy and I had been dating a mere six weeks, but I found myself wanting to write to her from each location that I was in—Paris, Rome, Munich, Amsterdam. Writing those cards clarified the depth of my feelings for her.
I’m talking about the act of writing cards and letters because I want to frame our understanding of Revelation, which we’re reading for the first time, around the notion of a letter, which is what it is. Yes, it’s also a work of apocalyptic literature. It contains bizarre and sometimes disturbing visions, but in form it’s actually a letter written at a specific time to a specific people…or actually groups of people. The author addresses the letter to seven churches throughout Asia Minor or modern-day Türkiye.
Now, let me address a pet peeve of mine, and that is how so many people, even in the church, get the title of this letter wrong. It’s not “Revelations” (plural) but Revelation singular. Although the letter contains many visions, it features just one revelation. And we find it spelled out in the first five words of verse 1: “The revelation of Jesus Christ.”
This isn’t me just being pedantic or nitpicking, it’s a matter of vital interpretive and theological significance. The voice of this letter is the voice of Jesus Christ, the same Jesus whose birth was announced to lowly shepherds, who called the twelve disciples, who preached forgiveness of sins, who healed the sick, who proclaimed good news to the poor and welcome to the stranger, who told parables that angered and confounded the religious establishment, who was betrayed, rejected, and crucified, and who was raised from the dead. That Jesus. That is the voice that we hear in this letter.
Although the letter contains many visions, it features just one revelation. And we find it spelled out in the first five words of verse 1: “The revelation of Jesus Christ.”
To underscore that point, let’s look at verse 1 in its entirety. “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place, and he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ.”
Did you get all that? It’s the revelation of Jesus Christ, which was given to him by God, which Jesus made known to an angel, who then spoke to John. From God the Father to Jesus to an angel and finally to John. That is the provenance of Revelation…from Jesus’ lips to our ears.
The John of Revelation is most likely not the author of the Gospel of John. If you want to know why that’s so, come to Bible study. This John writes in exile from an island called Patmos in the Aegean Sea. Exile was a punishment meted out by the Romans for offenses such as practicing magic, astrology, or prophecy, especially prophecy with political implications.
And guess what? If you write, as John does, that a Jew who was crucified by Rome decades earlier is in fact the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings of the earth, including the emperor of Rome, then your writing is political. John even says in verse 9 that he was exiled “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.”
Amid his lonely exile on an isolated island, John addresses this letter to seven churches in what was then the Roman province of Asia. This would be the late first century, or roughly sometime in the 90s…not the 1990s but the original 90s of the first century A.D. Under the Roman emperor Domitian, Christians faced growing pressure to assimilate, i.e., to adapt to the ways of Rome. You could have your own gods—the more the merrier, in fact—but you needed to pay homage to the Roman gods as well.
But Rome didn’t know what to do with Christians who were claiming that Jesus, a man they had crucified, was somehow Lord. It was a claim they found both preposterous and blasphemous at the same time. A crucified God? Seriously? And because Christians denied the pagan gods of Rome, they were actually accused of being atheists. That’s right. Christians were regarded as atheists!
Now, I know this has been a lot of background, but when reading Revelation it’s important for us to feel the ground beneath us so that we’re not caught up in all of the colorful imagery that follows later in this letter, which we will not be reading. Sorry to disappoint. If you want to read about the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the seven seals, you will have to do so on your own, I’m afraid. My point is, there are very real historical events hidden beneath the wild visions. Revelation is not a fever dream from someone who’s just dropped acid, it’s good news for the church both then and now.
That good news comes as a word of grace and peace, as John writes in verse 4. Grace and peace from Jesus Christ, who is and who was and who is to come. Note the order of that last phrase…who is and who was and who is to come. The order is not chronological as we might expect, i.e., past, present, and future. Instead the order is the nonlinear present, past, future. This is no accident. It’s potent theology. Beginning with the present tense emphasizes that God reigns now, even though present circumstances might suggest otherwise.
The seven churches to whom John addressed Revelation were, at the time John was writing, undergoing intense pressure to assimilate and persecution if they refused. This is made clear when later in the letter John alludes to Christians who were publicly executed for maintaining their faith.
A community experiencing such violent oppression might naturally wonder, “Where is God? Why is God not helping us? Why does God allow us to suffer?” To a church facing suffering and death, the message of Revelation is that God is present even and especially amid such trials and tribulations. God is not oblivious. God is not indifferent. In fact, God is well acquainted with suffering and death because the Son of God subjected himself to death on the cross, the most violent and dehumanizing form of torture and execution known to the ancient world.
But that’s the ancient world. That’s the Roman Empire of the first century. That’s not our world. Christians in the United States are not facing systematic persecution by the State. There are laws against that. And no, the cashier at the supermarket wishing people “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” is not persecuting anyone. One could even argue that the Federal government and many state governments have shown an increasing accommodation of religious faith (and not necessarily to the benefit of the Church).
All that being the case, how exactly is this letter written to churches undergoing persecution nearly 2,000 years ago at all relevant to us today? To answer that, I ask you to remember what I said at the beginning of this sermon—that the source of Revelation is none other than Jesus Christ, “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.” The same Jesus, John writes, “who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father.”
Who loves us, even unto death. Who freed us, taking the enormous weight of sin off of our shoulders and placing it on his own. Who made us a kingdom—a kingdom not like any earthly empire with an emperor who stands above us—but one in which the king is the same one who made himself a servant for us, even at the cost of his life.
And he’s not done with us. Not by a long shot. We whose sins have been forgiven now serve as priests in Christ’s kingdom, priests who minister to a fractured and fractious and wounded world. As our culture turns inward and becomes less welcoming to the stranger, as our public discourse becomes coarser and meaner, our nation and our neighborhoods will need priests to serve on the altar of Christ’s compassion. As we increasingly separate ourselves from those who don’t share our thinking, while at the same time our nation experiences an epidemic of loneliness, we will need priests to offer spiritual sacrifices of forbearance and forgiveness.
We whose sins have been forgiven now serve as priests in Christ’s kingdom, priests who minister to a fractured and fractious and wounded world.
There will be challenging times ahead, no doubt, but our hope is grounded in the God who goes before us, in the crucified king who reigns as Lord of all. Revelation reminds us that as the Alpha and the Omega, God is for us from beginning to end. Revelation is—dare I say—a kind of love letter. For in it we see that God’s love for us is unconditional, unchanging, and unending. God is and was and ever will be for us.