Easter 6C--The Lamb on the Throne of the Heart & the Great Amen

A Sermon at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Easter 6C: Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; John 5:1-9

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

The Book of Revelation is an admittedly strange text that has been put to all sorts malicious uses. Picture the wild-eyed street corner preacher calling sinners to repent because the end is nigh from atop his soap box. Or the end of times predictions that roll around every few months that treat revelation as a calendar of events, a timeline, that can be deciphered with the right key. That’s what happens when you read poetry as if it were a math problem. It’s rather like going to the Symphony and leaving with what you think is a clear map for your financial future. It does a disservice to the music, and I daresay, to your financial future.

So if Revelation is not a calendar of events, or a timeline, what is it? Well, the name of the book gives us a hint—it’s the Book of Revelation, not the Book of Revelations. It’s singular, not plural. The entire book is the unfolding of a single revelation. And what is that single revelation? Jesus Christ. Revelation is the poetic, mutli-media, psychedelic, techno-dance-party evocation of what it looks like as individuals and as a community for Christ to be at the center of everything we do. Revelation is the (rather baroque for my tastes) evocation of what it looks like for us, right here and right now, to live a Jesus-saturated life, a life with the Lamb seated upon the throne of the heart.

Of course, in the poetic universe of the Book of Revelation, there are really two figures who can sit upon the throne: Babylon as the embodiment of imperial, top-down power, which maintains control through violence and exclusion, and the Lamb as the embodiment of peace, human flourishing, a community of love so rooted and grounded in God everyone, without exception, knows themselves welcomed to the wedding feast, the divine banquet of love, the party of life in God that’s been in full swing since the foundation of the world.

One of the more interesting things about the vision of the New Jerusalem is that there isn’t a temple in the city. At first blush, that seems a rather strange detail. After all, the Temple has been the focus for all previous faithful generations, the dwelling place of God, the Holy of Holies. Now, however, there is no temple. How could that be? This is where we begin to taste the radical nature of the author of Revelation’s vision. There is no temple because the city is so united with God that there is no place where God is not. God is all in all. God has so saturated the city—the heart of the individual, the life of the community—that there is no need even for sun or moon to shine as the glory of God, the lamp of the Lamb—is it’s light. Its doors are flung wide open and nothing unclean will enter it, not because of strict customs and excise, but because there aren’t any insiders and outsiders, clean and unclean any longer. That whole structure, the world of Babylon, has been chucked into the sea with no small amount of fanfare and disaster flick imagery.

So Revelation is not a timeline that attempts to hook-up particular worldly events with the divine calendar, but an immersive, poetic evocation of what our lives as individuals and as a community might look like with the Lamb, instead of the Emperor on throne. The author of Revelation was certainly aware of the comic nature of worshipping a lamb. After all the fireworks, the Alpha and Omega is revealed, once and for all, as a… lamb. And not just any old lamb, but a lamb that is “standing as if it hand been slaughtered” (5:5), a “lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (13:8).

Again, this is admittedly rather odd. Worshipping a slaughtered and standing lamb. What on earth? The one at the center of the throne, the one we give ourselves in worship is the very opposite of imperial, top-down patriarchal power that maintains control through violence and exclusion. The one at the enter of the throne is the one who has been killed and raised that we might see that there is no further need for violence and exclusion, that this way of maintaining power and control, of securing a tenuous peace on the backs of sacrificial victims is a dead end that only further ensnares us in the cycle of violence. To worship the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world is to see that peace, forgiveness, gathering like a mother hen is the only true way happiness as individuals and as a community. All the horrors of Revelation, the fire and brimstone that get spouted from the soapboxes and at the squirrely margins of AM/FM dials, speak not of wrathful and angry God, but of a wrathful and violent humanity with power and violence instead of the Prince of Peace seated on the throne.

In our Gospel for today, we have the story of the paralytic who sat by the edge of the pool—right next to the healing waters for 38 years, yet was never able to enter in. Jesus asks him a very powerful, very uncomfortable question—“Do you want to be made well?” Now the man comes up with the main reason why it’s taken him 38 years to get into the waters—line-cutters. We don’t want to be too harsh with the man—we have to face squarely into the ways that in Peter’s words last week, we hinder God. We have to face squarely the ways in which we as the Church have prevented others from experiencing the healing that flows like living water. But there is another dimension to this, and that is our desire to be healed. God, out of God’s love for us, never acts unilaterally, or against our will. The invitation is always on offer (it’s never too late Brother Judas), but it does require as consent to co-operate with grace, to yield to God’s presence and action in our lives.

Who wouldn’t want to consent to that? But we human beings find that difficult at times, don’t we? There is an addictive quality to our present situation that keeps us bound. There’s familiar story firmly in place that we like the sounds of, whose contours we know all to well. I am a thus and such kind of person. She’s a thus and such kind of person. God’s a thus and such kind of God. Those stories, those narratives, keep us bound, keep us on the steps at the edge of the pool—within reach of a new way of seeing and being in the world, but tantalizingly beyond our grasp. Jesus’ “Do you want to be made well?” is one of those questions meant to expose all the ways we rather like our own stuckness—our delicious outrage and indignation, our love of gossip, our addiction to being seen well in the eyes of other, our entrapment in patterns of holding back from the person God is calling us to be. And if we answer with a “Yes” (Mary’s yes that is the heart of all discipleship), we can expect things to change.

This is where we can circle back to Revelation. It’s easy in our consumer culture, to think that once we utter our “yes” everything will be hunky-dory. Mary’s life gives lie to this fact. A sword will pierce your own soul too, says Simeon. And she sees her own son hoisted high upon a cross, mocked and scorned, humiliated, pierced, and bruised. Revelation’s way of talking about this is that the old city, the city with fearful power instead of humble, forgiving love on its throne, is cast like a millstone into the sea. There is a sea-change that takes place in the lives of individuals and communities, when that yes is uttered (not just once but again again, moment by moment) and when that yes is lived from. Again, Revelation is dramatizing in a particularly forceful and memorable fashion the very real transformation that is the very of the heart of Gospel—the transformation that results from unseating all the poor substitutes for Christ from the throne and letting him live his live through with the tiny mustard seed of our yes.

When the consecrated bread and wine are held aloft as the real presence of Christ at the end of the Eucharistic prayer, we, as an entire congregation, utter what is know as the Great Amen—the great So Be it, the great Yes to God. The entire congregation, not just the priest is the celebrant of the Eucharist and we utter it wholeheartedly as an affirmation that we want to be a people for whom love, forgiveness, healing, reconciliation, and peace—most perfectly represented in the unique person of Jesus—are seated on the thrones of our hearts and on the throne of our community. It such an important part of liturgy that I’ve actually stopped and said, “That was supposed to be the great Amen, let’s try it again!”

That Amen is our most powerful prayer—it says that we want to be a people who live Jesus-saturated lives, who know Christ and make him known to others when they leave this place. Suddenly, the imagery of the river of the water of life flowing through the middle of the city from the throne of God and of the Lamb—makes very real sense. The Deacon boots us out the door and we stream forth, each in a different direction, as a bright and shining stream to those who are thirsty. We become the healing, living water of “you are beloved and precious in God’s sight” to all those whom we meet. The bright and shining stream flows from this very altar. That bright and shining stream is the living water of love unstopped with each of our hearts flowing through the middle of the city that, with God’s help, we work to make a more like Heavenly City that is God’s dream for us.