Sunday 11th February 2007Sexagesima
Fr Julian Browning
Genesis 2 : 4b – 9 & 15 – 25 ; Revelation 4 : 1 – 11 ; Luke 8 : 22 – 25
Behold, a door was opened in heaven. Revelation 4.1
When you can hear that divine music in the storm, your storms, when you can hear in the world, from its beginning to the end, the constant hymn of praise being offered to God, then the door has opened in heaven for you.
Revelation leads to liberation, making ourselves and others free,
and seeing our world from a new perspective, the perspective of heaven
where God is sovereign, a new heaven and a new earth. It's one of the
things that should make us stand out as Christians: our freedom. God's
commandments should make us free, not tie us down. Maybe the most
important thing we can teach a child – or ourselves – is to
be free, to use the freedom God has given us, instead of frittering our
lives away, moving from one mental cage to another. This has never been
more important than now, when the pressure to conform to a dreary life
lived in a world without God is so insidious. We live in a culture of
control and surveillance, not a culture of freedom. I'm sure a lot of
it can be justified, but our spiritual lives wither. For freedom Christ
has set us free. Those who are free can understand the Book of
Revelation and hear condemned in its pages the idolatry of human
society. Those who are not free, can't understand it. For most readers
the book is now impenetrable, it's about magic numbers and the Great
Beast, secret books and the Omen and all that. It's a crystal ball.
It's spiritual pornography. The Book of Revelation comes with a mental
health warning. Whatever you do, don't look it up on the Internet. If
you do, you'll end up in the jungle, either literally as a prisoner of
some crazed messianic preacher, or in a mental jungle, someone else's
mad vision. They have one thing in common, these maniacs of the
Apocalypse. They do not wish to liberate us. They have a need to
imprison others by brainwashing them. Here's what to do if you meet one
of these maniacs. First, clap him or her in irons. Secondly, tell them
very quietly that it isn't only what John sees in the Revelation that
is important, it's what he hears. He hears music. There is more music
in the Book of Revelation than in the rest of the New Testament. It is
the music of heaven. The elders and the living creatures and the angels
echo each other in their praise of God. All the complexities of the
book, the prophecies and the visions, are resolved in this constant
round of worship of the Lamb upon the Throne. There is a new heaven and
a new earth. And before the throne there was a sea of glass like
crystal. I love that image, and I have only just realised that it isn't
the sea as we know it, but the waters above the firmament, the sky,
seen from above, from the throne of God. That is the dizzying
perspective we are going to get in heaven. The sky is not the limit.
Time is not the limit either. We can go back to the beginning of the
world, as in today's first lesson, to Genesis, where God divides the
waters, so there's heaven above, and the earth beneath, and the
gathering together of the waters called he Seas. The first book of the
Bible and the last book of the Bible tell us the same story. God and
God alone gives freedom to his people. It's the same song, the same
music, and the same story is told today in the Gospel, where Jesus
calms the storm.
The Gospels are more on our level. That's what Jesus does, meets us
where we are. The Gospels always bring us down to earth, or in this
case into a very cold, wet sea. The Son of God can calm the wind and
and the storm, He brings order out of chaos as his Father did at the
beginning of the world. And that useless lot in the boat had no faith
at all, and neither do we when the going gets rough. The miracle
depends not on our faith, but on the authority of Jesus. The Son of God
will save us from drowning in our despair, our self-pity, our shame,
not because of our faith, but because he wants us to be free. Maybe the
maritime metaphor meant more to our ancestors than to us, because they
had no cruise ships or aeroplanes, so the sea was something to be
reckoned with. Will your anchor hold in the storms of life, When the
clouds unfold their wings of strife? In the Bible the divine presence,
God Himself, is often accompanied by storms, and so today in
Revelation, “out of the throne proceeded lightnings and
thunderings and voices”. Where the storm is in your life, where
the storm is in the conflicts of this world, God is to be found, and it
is there that we shall always find him.
When you can hear that divine music in the storm, your storms, when you
can hear in the world, from its beginning to the end, the constant hymn
of praise being offered to God, then the door has opened in heaven for
you. Gospel freedom beckons, even the freedom to give away our lives.
We can be liberated from whatever hold us captive, even death, and it
is then, and only then, that we can speak of freedom to others with
conviction. We can tell others that the door in heaven does open. God
rolls back the stone from our tombs, and the light streams in, and we
are free.