21^st May 2013

Rev Warren Clarnette at St John's UCA Mt Waverley, Victoria, Australia Sunday 12 May 2013

When Babylon goes up in flames, all human works are destroyed:
institutions, money, commerce, music and craftsmanship, technology and marriage - all the things that display human greatness, ingenuity and authority. All is destroyed except humanity itself. So are we to accept the view of believers and heathens alike that there is life after death?
That is the wrong question! We should ask, 'What sort of life can it be when time and space are no longer significant?'

The destruction of Babylon reduces us all to being only ourselves, possessing only the clothes we stand up in. What is destroyed is the power that alienates us from our true selves. And a further judgment is to come.

The first vision of war (against the Beast and the false prophet) signifies the fury of the righteous judge against evil. The rider on a white horse is the Word of God, who destroys those who remove the image of God from mankind. The second vision follows. An angel appears 'standing in the sun' who calls the birds of the air to gather for a great supper. This is no farmer's wife scattering handfuls of grain to the chooks, ducks and turkeys; wild birds are summoned to indulge in a feast on human flesh.

Nothing more is said about that, but at the end we are told that the birds are gorged with human flesh. More is revealed in the following chapters of Revelation. But the meaning is plain - all people are bound together in judgment. Nations and individuals are not divided into goodies and baddies. A single fate awaits us all. History runs its course, wrongdoers flourish, good people go unrewarded and justice fails, as it inevitably will when it is left in the hands of men who decide that God is no longer necessary.

Nowhere in Revelation do we read that evil gets its comeuppance and goodness is rewarded. Judgment falls on the evil and the good, as rain falls on the just and the unjust.

This fact opens the door to distorted ideas - presumably from the Bible - which our society takes to heart. Heathens, blasphemers, and confident unbelievers assume that their loved ones will live on in some future time and place, watching over them, even sharing the good times in absentia, before they meet again in a romanticised heaven. Wishful thinking intrudes upon death and bereavement. Even Christians fall under the spell of popular culture, so that all talk of judgment is prohibited and the seriousness of death is diminished. (Few are the sermons on the theme of
judgment.)

The feast of the birds says otherwise. Judgment is a serious reality. When the birds gorge themselves on 'the flesh of kings, of captains, of mighty men, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great' no-one escapes.

But 'flesh' does not mean muscles, sinews, ligaments and whatever else covers our bones. These are not what the birds feast on. Flesh does not mean our bodies; in the Bible it is everything that keeps us apart from God, binding us to the world and its illusions and blinding us to the truth of the human condition. Flesh is what causes that peculiar homesickness of which Augustine speaks when he says 'our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God'.

So judgment consists of being stripped of the depraved attitudes, moral defects, physical and spiritual lust, the craving for domination, the compromises with wrong, the subtle springs of self-glory, the refusal to hear the voice of conscience - all the negative aspects of our lives.
Judgment unmasks our pride, ambition, and imposture, exposing the inwardness of evil and destroying it. Judgment exposes all our fabrications and reduces us to nothingness. Never forget that the real corrupting power of flesh is invisible. It resides in cultivated moralities, good taste and ethical righteousness. Flesh is infinitely inventive and always hides itself from those who indulge in it. Not physical desire but intellectual and spiritual pride are its origins. Paul speaks of 'impurity, licentiousness, fornication, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness and the like'. These are disorders of the spirit that turn natural appetites to evil.

No doubt you will ask, 'If the flesh is stripped away, what is left?' The answer is that none is killed, none is damned, the door of redemption closes on no-one. The grace of God has no limits. Judgment is not condemnation. The only condemnation is what we do to ourselves, like a self-inflicted wound.

Judgment means to be massacred but not killed. None of this is to be taken literally. The Spirit of God kills the flesh in order to bring to life a new humanity.

We may have never known a premonition of such a judgment. Not everyone experiences such a traumatic trial in the midst of life; not everyone has felt that every shred of self-assurance and pride has been taken away; or has stood on the edge of self-despair, unable to take any useful initiative. But it happens. It is the means by which the Spirit of God takes a solitary life and refashions it. Paul sums it up when he speaks of 'dying to the flesh'.

Revelation declares that the feast of birds awaits us all.

Modern thinking can only disagree. Our own arrogance insists instead on the trivial device of thinking that every person has a right to an opinion, and every opinion is the measure of reality. By doing so we have lost the glory of humanity, which is the great theme of the Revelation:
the overcoming of estrangement and spiritual homelessness, and entry to mankind's proper home, where all are restored in the image of God because God at last takes up residence with his people.

But we are not talking about life after death. The Bible speaks of heaven only so that we may see more clearly the world around us. What else does it mean that the nations exist in chaos and misery and broken hopes and dashed idealisms but that our greatest need is to be stripped bare of our collective claim to autonomy and self-sufficiency?

The visions of Revelation exist for no other purpose than to make sense of the incoherence of history and the lunatic activities of the great men and women of our time: politicians, statesmen, captains of industry, experts in economics, writers and commentators and demagogues of every kind.

When judgment is pronounced on all our works, nothing remains. Not nature.
Not human nature. Nothing remains. On the plane of history, the end of all policies and grand visions of the future is judgment. Not indeed that the whole human project is a gigantic mistake. Everything is to be made new.
Judgment is pronounced in mercy.

It is not an act of vengeance but a stay of execution.

It is the final imprimatur of divine love;
the decision of God to be for us and not against us.

So judgment is enfolded in mercy and the last word is not damnation but grace.