Wednesday, April 7, 2010

In the Middle
Revelation 1:4-8

Revelation does some interesting things with time. We like to think of past, present and future staying in their places, neat and tidy chronology, where you can tap your life into an iPod calendar. It keeps soccer moms from running late, government tax revenues coming in regularly, and investors happily enriching themselves on compounding interest. Time in the book of Revelation does not play by these rules.

There's the Greek kairos. Not chronos. Kairos. That's what I'm writing about here more or less. But time can run in circles, too, of course. That's where those soccer moms (and dads) often find themselves trapped week after week. There are all kinds of time cycles - many of them viscious. Wheel time in real time. Public religion tends to go that way. The culture assigns it a designated space to spin itself in circles, safe and contained. This is the sort of thing the prophets railed against - like the ideology of Baalism, with its eternal returns and essential changelessness. Balances struck to placate the gods and support the state. Domitian's world. A simple nod to the statue of the emperor. You don't have to be a true believer. Just regular and accounted. Cyclical time is the time of state religion. It is the temptation of churches using this lectionary. The trial of the seven Asian congregations.

But there's a whole lot more to time these days than straight lines and circles. Welcome Einstein, relativity, and all those astro-physicists of the ensuing decades in their own geeky quest for the Alpha and Omega. (No offense meant: I like geeky questers.) The geometry of time-representation has become downright bizarre. My gosh, we now have time bending, and who knows what other quirky moves beyond light speed through all those black holes. I, for one, am not complaining. Anything that gets us off the treadmill of the straight lines and endless circles is a welcome break. Enter Revelation. 

Revelation, like other classic biblical apocalypses, is not chronology, even though the literary form in which its disclosures come is clearly ordered. Apocalypse blesses our spiritual craving for order. Especially for those for whom the world is coming crashing down on their heads. But not as chronology. There's no going "back" to a golden age either. There aren't any "good old days" to go back to. It absolutely shatters time-cycles. Apocalypse is about completions - all those sevens virtually shout at us "See this thing through to the end!" Suffering is a hard teacher. The past is patently unfinished. Not worth a second look. Apocalypse breaks with time altogether, as we have known it, if necessary, breaking up the level places and destroying the old continuities that have served us so poorly - throwing us headlong into a new order. How otherwise could we conceive of the resurrection of the dead? In the gospels, when Elijah and Moses pop in to have a chat with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, chronology is obviously out the window. Apocalyptic Standard Time brings us to a middle where God is manifest. At the time of Christ's transfiguration, the disciples were not in that middle! They were still looking on from the outside (see Transfiguration C). But Easter has changed all that! As Matthew puts it in his gospel, written from the perspective of a community of the resurrection:

"13:17 Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it." (NRSV)

So now we – bold in our baptism in the resurrected Christ – may read ourselves into the book as a part of the full set (seven) of churches of Rome's Asia province. Some historical discretion is warranted, of course. There is a vast difference between my relatively stable life and that of those families who were to die at the emperor Domitian's command. But we know that our twenty-first century world, too, is precariously perched on the horns of various altars, pagan and otherwise. People of faith are no strangers to persecution. You may be among them. There is more than enough rage in my home town, were I to find myself at the wrong place at the wrong time (or the right place at the right time?) to earn me a martyr's white robe. Even if our life is relatively secure, the social contract that makes our civil life possible is more fragile than we would like to imagine. Just this morning a friend of mine overhead a woman in a coffee shop bragging about the Bible her husband gave her for Easter in designer colors to match her gun. Apocalypse has a way of cutting through our illusions of security. That's its job. Part of it. It would not discomfit us so easily were we not already aware that we are always only a few dirty bombs away from chaos. At any rate, John of Patmos brings us along with the rest of the threatened gatherings of Asia in this new found Easter faith. 

Easter. We have been hurled into the middle of God's time by the Spirit that Jesus promised. Sent away from the tomb. Ahead. Gathered. Christ popping into the midst, strange time crafting our recognition of him by degrees. A new time. A “center” time in which vision forges the present. Within that middle, John of Patmos could speak of Jesus' coming in the clouds with the same veracity as one for whom it had already happened. In this middle-time, this time-standing-with-God, we are not limited to speak of God along the old flat line. Or in the same redundant cycles. The Creator announcing himself requires three tenses couched in a whole slew of "amen"s.

the one who is and the one who was and the one who is coming

all at the same time. Two verbal forms of being and one of arrival. Don't even try to figure it out. We are entering a new middle ground where, in the spirit of the resurrected Lord, causes and effects converge in new ways. The old drill is so trite. So blind. In the gospel, Thomas is still clutching his doubts, looking back, like Lot's wife. There's nothing back there, though. He is invited to extend his hand into the middle of a stranger and discovers Jesus, his old rabbi, the resurrected Lord. . . 

. . . this time right in the middle.

© 2010 Andy Gay