Sermons
May 25, 2025
Put On Your Glad Rags
Revelation 7:9-17
If you spent some time thumbing through the Chalice Hymnal, you’ll find one topic missing: there aren’t any of the good old gospel hymns about Jesus’ blood.
Personally this doesn’t bother me most of the time. Those hymns are actually fun to sing; the tunes are rousing and upbeat, and in this part of the world a lot of us grew up immersed in that kind of theology, so we sing with great gusto.
If you spend any time in Revelation, as we are this season, it becomes apparent that sometimes those hymns are called for. So this morning, since Carol Ann is on vacation and she put me in charge of picking hymns, I went back to the old blue hymnal to find us one of those hymns to sing, which we’ll do momentarily.
But hymns about Jesus’ blood, like “There Is Power in the Blood,” or “Are You Washed in the Blood?” or, most amazingly, “There Is a Fountain Filled with
Blood”—which is set to a nice folk tune—are just not popular with white mainline Christians these days. Why is that? Is it a good or a bad thing that those hymns have fallen out of favor, along with the theology behind them?
If we’re not prepared to believe that Jesus’ blood, in some way, cleanses us from our sins, then what do we do with the book of Revelation, along with a lot of other passages from the New Testament? What do we do with Jesus’ own words at the Last Supper, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins”?
(Now as an aside, I’d argue that we need to know quite a bit about the ancient Israelite sacrificial system, which was still in effect to some degree in Jesus’ time but came to an end when the temple was destroyed in 70 ce, to understand what “the new covenant in my blood” means, quite apart from the way Jesus’ blood tends to be used as a metaphor in Revelation and those good old hymns. But that’s not something we can address fully right now, so I’ll leave it at that for now.)
I asked some of my mainline colleagues this question some time ago. One of them wrote a rather strongly-worded response that rejected the whole idea of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice to take away our sins. She does have a point—although I don’t know that I’d take it quite as far as she did—because we have a tendency to make that part of what some have called “the myth of redemptive violence.
We live in an incredibly violent society—maybe even more so than when we had this conversation—and public discourse sometimes indicates that we believe we can solve just about all our problems with more violence. And even when we’re not talking about literal violence, our language is filled with words of violence. Remember how, in the 1960s, when President Johnson wanted to reduce poverty in this country, his policies became known as the “War on Poverty”? The same thing happened under Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush in the 1980s with the “War on Drugs.”
This is obviously not the place to talk about politics, about the rightness or wrongness of efforts to reduce poverty or the damage drug abuse does to people, families, and communities. I’m just observing how we use language—and this kind of language is used in lots more than political discourse.
When a newspaper editor chooses not to run a story, the story is “killed.” If someone refutes an argument, they might say they’ve “shot it full of holes.” There are lots more examples, way more than I can point out right now; suffice it to say that our language reflects the violence we’re immersed in.
So is it really a good idea to hang onto theological concepts that seem to be incredibly violent? Is it a good idea to speak in a way that indicates our belief that we’re saved by the violence that was done to Jesus? (There are other ways to understand the atonement, but especially in evangelical circles, most of them have sort of fallen by the wayside.)
But again, if we just abandon that language altogether, it’s very hard to deal with Revelation—which, I suppose, is the reason why a lot of preachers avoid it like the plague. The book of Revelation is very, very violent and bloody.
To deal with the violence of Revelation, all the blood and gore, and especially this idea in chapter 7 of the saints having washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, we need to recognize what a brutal and violent culture the people who first heard this letter lived in. Certainly our society today is pretty violent—but I think the Roman Empire would make us seem like declawed kittens. They thought it was great sport to go to the coliseum and watch various wild animals tear convicted criminals apart. They liked to execute political prisoners by crucifixion—one of the most horrific, cruel, and painful deaths ever devised. There’s some evidence that Rome borrowed the practice from an earlier kingdom or empire, but they are the ones most closely associated with it, probably because of Jesus.
When Revelation was written, the brutal reign of the mad emperor Nero was a recent memory. Christians, especially, bore the brunt of Nero’s reign of terror, as he made them the scapegoat for the deadly fire in Rome, which many people thought he had set, to burn out poor folks so he could build a grand palace. And it’s said that Nero liked to roll Christians in pitch and set them on fire to provide torchlight for his garden parties.
Do you remember the story from the King Arthur cycles in which he’s expected to return from the dead and resume his throne when Britain faces particular peril? Well, there were some who believed something like that about Nero, although the prospect of his return was nowhere near as attractive as it was with the “once and future king,” Arthur.
That’s actually reflected in Revelation when it talks about a beast who has received a mortal wound but recovered—that beast symbolizes the emperor Nero. The number of the beast” may be Hebrew numerology, in which Hebrew letters stand for numbers, and the number value for the name “Nero Caesar” apparently add up to six hundred sixty-six. Similarly there were some, in the decades after the end of the Second World War, who feared that Hitler had somehow escaped and would return to do more damage.
It’s a sort of understandable aftereffect of extreme trauma.
The original recipients of Revelation—which, as I mentioned a few weeks back, is actually structured as a letter—would have remembered the horrors of Nero’s reign. They might have had more localized persecution as part of their more recent experience, or even be going through persecution at the time they received the letter.
When we saw the heavenly throne room last Sunday, the plagues and woes of Revelation had not yet begun. It was as though John wanted us to have a glimpse of glory before dealing with the horrors that were hidden behind the seven seals.
Today’s reading from Revelation 7 come in the midst of the breaking of those seals. We have to ask why it’s here.
Actually, I can think of one reason why. Have you ever watched a movie or read a book in which the whole storyline is one horror, one terrible event, after another, with little if any respite?
I hate those kinds of movies.
The first of the Lord of the Rings movies is like that—but the first of the three books, The Fellowship of the Ring, is less so. Granted, for that movie to be only three hours long instead of nine, some decisions had to be made and some things left out. But they left out just about every possible bit of relief—dancing in a pub, the antics of
Tom Bombadil, things like that—so it was just relentlessly awful. Two hours into that thing I was in tears, because I simply couldn’t take any more.
That could be the reason why John put this second glimpse of the heavenly throne room here. Yes, things are awful; but God still sits on the throne. Yes, people are suffering, and will continue to suffer; but those who come through the ordeal will never suffer again. And to those who are still on earth facing persecution, this could be a lifeline, something to hold onto, something that can stiffen their spines and help them to stay firm and faithful while God—the one seated on the throne—and the Lamb fight the powers of evil and ultimately defeat them.
It’s in this context that we see people robed in white, waving palms and singing praise to God and the Lamb. One of the elders speaks to John and asks if he knows who those people are. John asks the elder to tell him.
They are the ones who have been through “the great ordeal” (or, in the King James Version, “great tribulation”). Their robes have paradoxically been washed in the blood of the Lamb, which makes them dazzling white.
Now, this is symbolic—nobody honestly thinks taking something and dousing it in blood will make it white. The robes indicate the purity of those people’s hearts and souls. It maybe connects with the Old Testament imagery of the refiner’s fire—which burns not to do harm but to remove impurities from a precious metal like gold.
But it also intends to indicate that, through persecution, this white-robed multitude has shared in Jesus’ death. These are people who remained faithful to Christ, even when it meant they would be persecuted, arrested, tortured, and killed. They knew what it would cost them to follow Jesus, and they did it anyway.
I wonder ifwe’d be willing to do that.
We in this country have been incredibly blessed with freedom to believe and practice our faith as we choose. Being a Christian in the United States ofAmerica isn’t dangerous in the same way that it was in Roman Asia, where the seven churches to which Revelation is addressed were located.
That’s not the case in other parts of this world, you know. My Presbyterian colleague in Iowa had a friend from seminary who was a pastor in, I think, Indonesia, in a place where most of the population was not Christian. And one day, while he was at church, his and his home was burned to the ground. The ones who did it made clear that it was because he was a Christian. They told him he needed to stop worshiping Christ, stop leading others to follow Jesus, or the consequences would be worse next time.
What would we do if we were faced with something like that?
We’ve had it very easy in this country, and I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing.
Revelation is filled with paradox, and one of the biggest paradoxes of the Christian faith is that it’s strongest when being a Christian is difficult, even dangerous.
That could be, at least in part, because when life is easy, the world seems to be enough. And that’s when we turn the idea of being “washed in the blood of the Lamb” into nothing more than individual, personal salvation—what we have to do in order to receive our ticket to heaven. Get baptized, live a moral life, don’t drink or steal or cheat or lie, and all will be well for us.
That’s most assuredly not what it means in Revelation 7. How those people were “washed in the blood of the Lamb” was by staying committed to the way of Christ—a way that, unfortunately, sometimes leads us in directions that are contradictory to basic middle-class American values—even when it meant they would literally die for it.
I don’t know if I would have the strength or the courage to do that. How about you?