Every so often, our Scripture reading brings us to Revelation.  We call it a book; it’s much closer to a vision, a dream.  Some think nothing of dreams; others believe dreams are very noteworthy.  Today, we’ll dip our toes into these deep waters.  We come with preconceptions about Revelation.  Some of you may associate Revelation with fear and destruction.  This dream or vision given to John is a word of ultimate comfort.  For those in Christ, all of Scripture is, ultimately, a Word of comfort.  The joy that God knows, infinitely and eternally, He means to share with us, infinitely and eternally.

That this is God’s purpose for those in Christ is clear from the greeting we often hear in the New Testament, as here, in Revelation: “Grace and peace be yours from God who is, who was, and who is to come” (1:4).  Grace and peace be yours.  Amen.  In these greetings, grace comes first.  What comes to us first from God is grace.  If grace comes to us, who sin and live very imperfectly as disciples of Jesus Christ, if grace comes to us, it is because of love.  God blesses us with His grace because He loves us.  Grace is a gift of love.  Love is the way to peace with God, peace through grace, peace through Christ, peace by the power of the Holy Spirit.  It’s the Spirit enabling us to receive grace as grace, gift as gift, love as love.

The result is peace.  The result of grace, its outworking, its inworking in our lives, is peace.  If you feel no peace or only very little, pray for grace.  God will give it.  This Spirit-birthed peace is not peace after the ways and images and falsehoods of this world.  This is divine peace, revelation peace, the peace of Christ, who suffered much, for us, willingly, for the glory of God.  When we get our lives oriented toward glorifying God, we will discover this peace in a new and profound way.

This grace and the peace welling up from that divine wellspring comes from “God who is, who was, and who is to come.”  To say God is is not so much a statement of faith as a statement of fact, of truth.  There is no getting away from the truth.  We try.  Lord knows—how well He knows—how people strive to get away from the Truth.  While we live, we can say I am.  When we die, we can no longer say I am.  The truth in saying I am, I live, I exist, is temporary.  The same can be said for trees, mountains, land masses, stars.

The only one who can say I am always, for whom that statement of truth is not temporary but eternal, is God who is.  To hear that this God who is is also God who was and who is to come is to imagine the consequences of that first, basic truth: if God is, always is, He has always been; He will always be.  John says this eternal God will come.  We do not see Him, now.  We do not hear Him now, not the way we hear one another.  We do not touch Him, though He touches us.  We taste His grace, that is, His love and His peace, when we taste the bread from the table, and drink the cup poured out for us, when we taste His Word.

We taste the promise He makes us in Jesus Christ.  Beloved, in Jesus Christ, our Father in heaven makes a promise: I will come again.  The day, the hour is set and sure.  We live in expectation of that day.  We do not know that day. “[A]bout that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mk 13:32).  Our calling is to live as faithful witnesses to the faithful witness.  John speaks of Jesus as “the faithful witness” (1:5).  Speaking with Pontius Pilate, Jesus says he “was born and came into the world for this one purpose, to speak about the truth.  Whoever belongs to the truth listens to me” (Jn 18:37).  Whoever belongs to the truth.  Pilate, we may remember, worldly-wise, worldly-weary, responds “What is truth?”

He should have asked Who is Truth.  Truth is not a what but a who.  Not a thing but a being, living and active.  When Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6), he speaks either with staggering arrogance, stunning lunacy, or he speaks the truth.  Many are willing to allow that Jesus is A way, A truth, and teaches A way of living.  That’s not what Jesus said of himself.  In Revelation, John speaks of Jesus as the faithful witness.  The witness testifies to what he has seen, to what he knows.  The testimony of someone who has heard second-hand, or who knows second-hand, is not so compelling as the testimony of someone who was there, who saw, who heard, first-hand, directly, immediately.  Christ is the faithful witness to God who is, who was, and who is to come.

Christ is “the first to be raised from death” (1:5).  The one who was dead is alive.  This is the work of grace, the power of love, the foundation of peace.  If we adore the way Christ lived, deplore the way he died, and sort of shrug or roll our eyes inwardly when Jesus people talk about resurrection, we do not have Christ.  “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,” St. Paul observes, “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:19).

Our Father in heaven greatly honors this faithful witness, this one first to be raised from the dead: Jesus is also “the ruler of the kings of the world” (1:5).  There aren’t too many kings, anymore.  Can you name any?  Most of them have no real power.  John is not so much speaking of one man or another, as he is about the powers that seem to hold sway on the earth.  Oh, there is beauty, justice, goodness—let us give thanks to God for these blessings.  There are also greed, injustice, jealousy, envy, lust, hatred, vanity, apathy—powerful rulers.  These “kings” may rule, but Christ over-rules.  We do experience the sorrows and pains, the hurt and grief, caused by those dark powers—and we know grace, the gift of God’s love.  Possession of this gift gives peace.  The world, these dark powers, want to take that peace away.  They are desperate to seize it and hurl it far away, but they can’t, and they know it.  This knowledge drives them into a frenzy of fury.  These powers are strong and crafty.  They have been at this a long time.  They hold out many tempting things to us, and our broken hearts and feeble wills do and will turn towards what these dark powers offer, but there is a way back, deep in the heart of God.

Beloved, God knows every sin we ever committed.  God knows every sin that we will commit—consider that!  God knows far better than we ever can the farthest consequences of all that we have done contrary to His express will.  He knows the farthest consequences of what we will yet do contrary to His express will.  And God holds out to us Jesus Christ, who assures us that he is with us, in the power of the Holy Spirit, who assures us he will never forsake us.  This is grace.  Grace is the gift of love.  Peace is not far from us.  Peace is already with us, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Many people think one thing or another rules our lives, rules the universe: fate, chance, chaos, cause and effect, appetite, desire; there are even a few bold, benighted souls who say Nothing rules, Nothing governs.  Emptiness.  Silence.  A universe of Zero.  We look around, and it does not seem as if Justice, Peace, Love, or Truth governs.  There is no guarantee that those noble principles—if that is all we may call them—there is no guarantee that these will ever govern, if God is not sovereign, if Christ is not, after all, the ruler of the kings of the earth.  If Christ is not the King, we truly are fools, just as the world has been telling us all along.

Christ is a very curious king, sisters and brothers: he is a king who dies for his people.  What king dies for his people?  A king sends his people to die for him!  That’s the lesson history has taught us in gory ink, volume upon volume.  No, Christ is not a king after the model of this world, nor is his kingdom of this world, thanks be to God!

John tells us, here in Revelation, this book you may have always thought of in terms of fear and destruction, John tells us of our king.  You tell me, after, if what he says fills you with dread.  “He loves us, and by his sacrificial death he has freed us from our sins and made us a kingdom of priests to serve his God and Father” (1:5-6).  Christ loves us.  Think about that!  Let your heart feel its way into that unchangeable truth!  Me?  Jesus—loves—me?!  Yes!

There are many today in highly enlightened, highly sophisticated circles of Christianity who can see no good purpose in the death of Christ—just another political crime, just what the rich do to the poor, white people to minorities, men to women, the straight to the queer, xenophobes to migrants, just what Republicans do to Democrats.  Not the death but Christ’s life—the example of his life—is the atonement, our redemption.  But if Christ’s life is the atonement, why do we need Christ’s life?  What of Abraham?  What of Noah?  What of Moses, Elijah, or Jeremiah?  Did their faithful, obedient lives not please God?  What Christ lived, what he exemplified, was the Law; let us then keep the Law.  At least two of my fellow seminary students, who came in as Unitarians, have since converted to Judaism.  They mean to keep the Law.  Oy.

Beloved, have we come nowhere in two thousand years?  Have we returned, after all this time, to that dead end?  Paul, that exemplary Jew, speaks himself hoarse about the futility of the Law.  But who reads him, anymore?  What Scripture says, many times in many ways, what John has just reiterated, so very clearly, is that it is Christ’s death, his sacrificial death, that frees us from our sins, that frees us from the penalty of death: death, which is God’s just sentence upon what is contrary to His express will.  How can we flagrantly disobey God and not expect there to be consequences?

But grace comes from the heart of God, and we are freed through the blood of Christ, poured out to atone for our sins.  What you have done, what I have done, cost God the blood of His only-begotten Son: try to plumb the depths of that truth, that mystery; pray that you may live in the depths of that grace.

We do live in the depths of that grace as we become a kingdom of priests of our Savior’s God and Father—for in Christ He is our God and Father, too.  Priests?  Who wants to be a priest?  Nothing against them, of course, but . . . Beloved, priests are those specially authorized by God to carry out ministry.  Priests bring God to people and encourage people to come to God.  All of us, by virtue of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus, we are all specially authorized now by God Himself to carry out ministry: to bring Good News to the perishing, through word and deed, to bring, to offer grace and peace.  When we live in Christ by grace to bless others, we are blessed, we bless God, and we live as His priests.

          He is coming.  When?  Where?  He is coming.  Now is the time to amend our lives.  “Everyone will see him, including those who pierced him” (1:7).  On that day, no one will be able any longer to deny the truth; no more rejection, denying, scoffing; no one with even an ounce of smarts will be able any longer to smirk or groan over what Jesus people jabber about Jesus; no one will disbelieve, on that day.

“All peoples on earth will mourn over him” (1:7).  Because of him, that is.  When he comes, the time of salvation will be at an end, and the time of judgment begins.  The saved will have been saved.  Peoples aren’t saved, beloved.  Societies are not saved.  Cultures are not saved.  Persons are saved.  Does society, does culture serve for the upbuilding of God’s kingdom among us, His way in this world?  Society and culture serve other interests, other gods.  Peoples, nations, societies will mourn not because of what they have done: they will not grieve in sudden enlightenment over their inveterate wickedness.  “Oh!  What have I been doing all these years?!”  They will mourn because they will be judged.

They will be judged according to the only standard, the only measure of value, of justice, love, virtue, truth, reality: “‘I am the first and the last,’ says the Lord God Almighty, who is, who was, and who is to come” (1:8).  There is no other measure, beside God, before God.  God is ultimate.  God is final.  May you find, may you feel, grace in this, peace and comfort.

To the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings, and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, be honor and eternal dominion.