Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commcommons.church for more information.

Today, we are continuing this extended look that we are taking at the book of Revelation this fall. And like Jeremy said last week, we are in fact getting close to the end, cue the ominous music, which is not an apocalypse joke for an apocalypse series. It's just a reference to how we are getting close to the end of John's vision. We're in the last third now. It's important to remember that this text we're looking at is actually cyclical, and it's so committed to telling us about Christ as Victor that it tells us this story in three expanding arcs.

First, it showed us Jesus bringing healing and restoration to our local communities and our neighborhoods. In the second cycle, it imagined healing of our politics and the empires of our world. And in the third cycle, we see the picture expand to consider the cosmos made new and evil itself brought to an end. And we are gonna jump into this third cycle in a moment, but first, just a quick reflection on last week. See, one of the things that Jeremy talked a little bit about is how malleable this apocalyptic imagery is.

I think this is such an important thing for readers like us to acknowledge sitting here in the beginning of the twenty first century. It's so important for us to remember that the earliest followers of Jesus heard this text, and they interpreted it in the light of the world they were living in. And we see time and time again how readers of scripture have continued to grapple with these scriptures in similar ways. We know, for instance, that Saint Augustine looked out at his world in the early fifth century, and he knew that Rome had recently fallen to invaders from the North, and he used these texts to confront Christians he felt had uncritically believed that Rome was the internal city that's pictured at the end of this story. And last week, Jeremy mentioned also the famed Isaac Newton, who read Revelation and saw all kinds of contemporary parallels in him in his world in the seventeenth century.

And, of course, some of you, you might be aware of the contemporary Christian fiction writers that mine these texts for their wildly speculative books. The point is just that John's words, they have a way of adhering to the time in which they are read, which means that their power is not in accurately predicting the future. If that was true, it's been wrong so many times, and it's always going to be wrong. No. That's not where the power lies in them.

Their power lies in encouraging every human heart faced with darkness and uncertainty. And today, John is gonna ratchet things up. Stakes are gonna get even higher. That's why we're gonna need to talk about zooming out a dragon's den, and we're gonna talk about the evidence. But before we do that, I'm gonna invite you to just take a moment.

Let's pause together. Pray with me now. God of all, we pause now in this moment. And from all the busyness of our lives, from all the things that fill our minds, that hold our attention, we turn. And we choose to try to be open in some way to the ways that maybe you're at work, the ways you're present to us where we are here in this quiet, here in the courage we carry, small as it might be, here in friends who comfort and carry us.

For these gifts and so many more, we are grateful today. We ask, would you be with us now as we turn to ancient words and provoking images in search of your generous way. We ask this in the name of Christ, our hope. Amen. Alright.

So some of you might be aware that I went on a significant road trip this summer with my family. We drove an RV down to the Grand Canyon, then out to San Diego, up the coast. It was epic. And for those of you who are still waiting on me to complete the Instagram photo dump, I have heard your many complaints, and I'm working on it. Okay?

The point is, one of the highlights for me in a trip full of highlights was our visit to several areas designated as dark sky preserves. These are places where there's little to no light pollution, wherein on on a clear evening, can detect a broader spectrum of the stars that are visible to the naked eye. And one of my favorite moments on our trip like this was in Lawson Volcanic National Park in Northern California, where as a family, we actually went and laid out on the road of the campground we were staying in. And we just laid there in a quiet hush. Because we could see the band of the Milky Way.

You could see the tracking arcs of satellites. There were all these sporadic bursts of shooting stars, and all of it was so starkly visible. And all of it was an invitation to consider how vast and how expansive and how startlingly cosmic our conscious reality is. And just like those moments, the second half of John's revelation text, its third cycle, has this same effect, I would suggest to you, because here, John expands the scope of his writing. Chapter 11 ends with the sound of a final trumpet and a heavenly throng singing these words.

The kingdom of the world has become. The kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever. Christ is imagined as king. This is actually how each cycle ends in the book of Revelation. The nations and the empires and the powers of this world have been brought low.

And then John sees another vision. It starts again, and we are off. A great sign appeared in heaven, John writes. A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and a crown of 12 stars on her head. She was pregnant, and she cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.

And then another sign appeared in heaven, an enormous red dragon with seven heads and 10 horns and seven crowns on its head. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky, flung them to the earth, and the dragon stood in front of this woman who was about to give birth so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. And she gave birth to a son, a male child who will rule the nations with an iron scepter, and her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. There's a lot going on here. One But of the things that we need to know is that John is actually borrowing some imagery, most specifically from the Greek mythology of Leto.

And here is your twenty second summary. I won't bore you with more. Here's the deal. The supreme god of the Greek pantheon, his name is Zeus, and in the story, he comes to Earth and he's enamored with the beauty of a human woman named Leto. Because of this encounter they have, Leto becomes pregnant with twins.

And as the mythical story progresses, Leto gets ready to give birth, and as she does, she encounters a great snake like dragon named Pithon, who has been sent by the god Zeus' jealous wife, Hera, obviously, to attack and destroy Leto and these illegitimate children she's carrying. There's lots of drama. Okay? The catch is that in this ancient myth, one of the twins, Leto's son, Apollo, grows to become and ascend as a hero god. Apollo returns to the Earth one day to violently confront and kill the dragon Pithon.

And in doing so, he inaugurates a new era of peace in the cosmos. And because of this great this great lore, Apollo's actually known as the light of the world. And this is why the emperor Nero used Apollo as his divine mascot, of course. This is we're gonna come back to this. Now John is clearly telling a different kind of story here, using some imagery and narrative that his audiences would have recognized because they were familiar with the Greco Roman myth.

Yes. But they also knew the Hebrew scriptures. The woman in John's vision? This is the people of God. John's drawing on this vibrant imagery from ancient Israel's prophets where God's people were sometimes imagined as a woman in labor, longing for and carrying the change the world needs.

This dream of a messiah they had and shared, this dream of a unifying and peaceful ruler. And, of course, in telling this story this way, John's telling the story of Jesus, the long awaited one. Jesus is the one who gets snatched up in the story, the one that's raised to divine heights on account of this peaceable victory that he has won over violence and darkness and death itself. And John is casting this story in images and concepts of a cosmic scale. And this is why it can feel a little daunting to deal with as contemporary readers.

But guess what? In many ways, this grandness should make sense to us because many contemporary scholars find a similar tendency in our science fiction books and movies. This genre that we've created that has landscapes and narratives flung far and wide in search of transcendence and meaning, not unlike the ancient myths of Zeus and Leto and their children. And I wanna suggest to you that this is why John's visions are so compelling even for us so many years later because you need a story big enough for the questions that keep you up at night. We all need stories for the forces that we can't control.

The forces that pull and push on us all our days. These kinds of stories are crucial because they get us to zoom out of life's most oppressive moments. I think sometimes we can't start to see our way out or see our way through until we see our story in context of a broader human experience. And when you start to see yourself with the perspective that you have somehow made it this far and that you're still here. I think this is part of what John's going for at least, but we've gotta talk about this dragon, obviously.

I mean, I suspect that this is the image that as I was reading the text earlier, it grabbed your attention. This might be because you're super familiar with the book of Revelation. You've always wanted to know what's going on here, or it could just be because the world is crazy about dragons right now. From Pokemon's Dragonite to Peter Jackson's Smaug to DreamWorks' Toothless to HBO's House of the Dragon. Dragons are super in right now, guys.

I don't know if you know this. Also, I know I engaged the broadest spectrum of nerds with those references right there. I hope you all feel seen and appreciated today. The truth, though, the truth, though, is that dragons have always been in. The Penguin Book of Dragons illustrates this fact with its nearly 700 pages of examples of dragons showing up in ancient myth and medieval story and contemporary fiction.

And what's interesting for us as biblical readers, people who are reading the biblical text, the biblical text contain multiple dragon references, such as in the book of Job, where the poet describes these ancient beasts called Leviathan, a creature with scaly skin and breath like fire and eyes like the sun as a representation of all that's uncontrolled in nature. One of the other examples is in the additions to the book of Daniel that's found in the Latin version of that text, where the ancient prophet there defeats an extraordinary beast that the Babylonians are worshiping, the symbol of that empire's oppressive idolatry and their power. John's dragon is drawn from these kinds of motifs. Okay? To represent the colossal and destructive powers at work in the cosmos, but it is an overblown and mythical image to start.

I mean, how big is this dragon if it can sweep a third of the stars out of the sky? This is clearly hyperbole to the extreme. Towards the middle of chapter 12, right after this dragon imagery comes onto the scene, we arrive at the literary and narrative heart of John's imagery. There's been a war in the cosmic realm, in heaven, John says. And in that conflict, this great dragon is thrown down to the earth.

And here, John tells us just who the defeated dragon is in his vision. This is the devil, he says. This is the Satan, literally the accuser, this antagonistic character drawn from the Hebrew scriptures. This is the force of evil that deceives the whole world. It's the personification of evil itself, the force that's always opposing creation, always working against goodness wherever it shows up.

And in the middle of Revelation chapter 12, John then hears a voice resound in heaven. And if it's helpful for you, I invite you to just hear this narrator of sorts. Just imagine Morgan Freeman's voice. He played God in a movie one time. Might be helpful to you.

K? And the voice says this, now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters who accuses them before our God day and night has been hurled down. And this sounds like good news. We're gonna come back to it in a second.

First, it's important to pay attention to what the voice goes on to say next. Woe to the earth and to the sea because the devil has gone down to you. He's filled with fury because he knows that his time is short, which does not sound encouraging. John will go on to say how this dragon in the story is pursuing the woman who was pictured earlier. Waging war against the woman and her offspring on all those who keep God's commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus, the text says.

And with all this bleak imagery, monster imagery, it can be hard to catch that John's actually trying to offer the earliest Christian communities some assurance. He's trying to give them an explanation for why it seems so hard to do the right thing, trying to help them see their difficulty with a cosmic lens. What he's not trying to do is get them or get you to believe in dragons because you already do. Right? John knows that, like his ancient audience, you face dragons in the predatory systems of our culture that hoard the treasure they've collected.

He knows that you've seen and felt violence too great to bear that you carry it in your body, and that you don't know what to do to stop what feels like the inevitable. And he knows that you've felt the fire of accusations that have been hurled at you by other people, and that you struggle in a kind of war with accusations that you've leveled at yourself for too long. And he paints a picture of evil and all its rage and its chaos to remind you that you're facing a power and a force that's fighting its last stand. Because evil has been backed into its den, and it is doing everything it can to land a final blow. Now, that might seem like an upside down way to offer someone some hope.

And you know what? I do have to be honest with you and say that we actually don't really come full circle with this particular sermon. John's imagery actually leaves us with a bit of a cliffhanger here. We're gonna have to hold on through more of this cycle before we can breathe easy again. But that is not to say that there isn't something here to grab our attention.

Remember the passage that I read to you earlier, where the narrator is helping the audience get up to speed. This is what the voice says. Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser has been hurled down. But then the voice goes on to tell us how this dragon has been defeated. The voice says, they triumphed over him by the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony.

And they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Now that can seem a little cryptic, but what this is is an obvious callback to chapters five and six. We've been here before where John has this image of a slain lamb. This image of Jesus' self sacrificial life and death that gives him power over all. We've already seen John paint a picture like this, but here in this cosmic grand vision he's painting, he's claiming that the great evil of this world has been overthrown, yes, by the slain and the risen Christ.

And this is why he borrows that image of Apollo and Pethon. He's not just playing to his audience. He's trying to tell a different story of where peace and salvation actually come from. And he's arguing that Jesus leads a nonviolent revolt against the Greek god, Apollo, and all who march under that banner that's carried by violence. That Jesus' victory leaves evil with no cards to play.

But John adds a little something extra here too. He claims that the great darkness of this world has been overturned by, quote, the word of testimony. What's going on there? Well, this phrase is derived from the Greek noun, which is a legal term of sorts. It actually I mean, literally refers to a witness in a legal case, to the evidence that they present to a court.

This is also some of you might have picked up on it. It's the source for our English word martyr, which often refers to someone who dies for or because of their espoused beliefs. And you know what we think is happening here? Scholars think that John's actually using both these layers here. He's commending early Christians for offering their lives as evidence of Jesus' humble way.

And he appears to be saying that being that kind of a witness in the world has a high cost. And listen. We know that early Christians did die at times because of imperial and political oppression. We know that there are still some very isolated incidences of this till today. We also know that throughout history, Christians have offered all kinds of evidence of a different way to live.

They abandoned power and position as an alternative to affluent Christianity, like the early desert mothers and fathers. They gave up inheritance and wealth to live more openly and generously with the poor, like Saint Francis and many medieval mystics. They sought out wild places and even wilder people to tell kinder stories like the Celtic Christians. They abandoned political discourse and involvement as a critique of worldly power like the early Mennonites. And this goes all the way down to our own time where groups like The Simple Way, this group who combats violence and aggression by collecting firearms in The US and turning them into farm tools, or the community at Corie Mila in Ireland that brings together political foes and antagonists in that troubled part of the world to find healing in shared sorrow and truth telling?

These are all great examples, and what these witnesses show us is the evidence of an apocalypse that we all need. They offer evidence for what salvation actually looks like. See, because if revelation teaches us anything, it's that salvation in the way of Jesus can never look like a conquest, can never be defined by vengeance, and it will never use redemptive violence as proof that a better day has come, which changes everything when you think about it. When you realize that you aren't saved by a Jesus who would ever come back and set everything right by giving everybody what they deserve. When you realize that you'll never be saved by a Jesus who would ever do violence to make the world right.

No. Everything changes when you start to look at the cosmos like John did and trust that maybe, just maybe, our hearts and the world around us might be made new every time we lay our weapons down. And when we choose gracious words over harsh ones with those we love. When we hope for the best in someone instead of demanding what's expected of them. When we pray for our antagonists and let our cursing fall silent.

When we show kindness to who we were and let go of harmful cycles. These and a thousand more, the evidence of the peaceful salvation, the self emptying power, and the upside down kingdom of a better God. Let's pray. God of all the cosmos. Sometimes, it feels like life comes at us so quickly.

And in all of our fighting to stay afloat and in all our straining to keep going, it can be so hard to step back and hear this story with a wider scope, to trust this story in all the ways that invites us to see that we are not alone and that we have, in fact, come so far. And we admit today that it's not easy to understand all the difficulty we face. Feels like we're always fighting forces, fighting monsters sometimes. These things that have so much power over us. And so today, we choose in some simple way to hold on to these words of assurance that John offers, this vision of an end to all that harms us and harms your world, even as we hear the reminder of what salvation actually looks like, found in every effort we make to let go of aggression as the way forward.

Trusting instead, Jesus, that your way is good for us. And that in letting go, we find the life and the renewal that we seek. Give us courage, we ask, and go with us as you promised to into all we face. We pray in the name of Christ. Amen.