ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by the Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at Evensong and Benediction on the Fifth Sunday of Easter, 20th April 2008

Readings: Zechariah 4. 1-10; Revelation 21. 1-14

I once knew someone who couldn't cope with the Book of Revelation. He was an intelligent and devout man but family circumstances had turned him against the writings of John the Divine. His wife and children had left him after his wife became a member of a cult. When he refused to join them his wife and family left him and he never saw them again. He saw in the writings of John the Divine the seeds of his family's destruction.

The idea that 'mourning and crying and pain will be no more' as this evening's second lesson says when mourning and crying and pain was precisely what he had suffered was more than he could bear. It was for him a fiery ordeal.

The Book of Revelation has always been controversial. Unlike the new Jerusalem described this evening the Christian bible did not descend perfect and complete from heaven. It took centuries for the church to decide which of the many early writings should be included and which should be excluded from the bible.

The first person to draw up a list of authorised books was someone called Marcion who lived in Sinope (a town on the Black Sea coast in what we now call Turkey) around the year 140CE. He didn't include the Book of Revelation although that's not to say much. When Marcion came to the gospels he excluded Matthew, Mark and John, an edited version of Luke being his sole guide to the life of Jesus. But he did prompt the church to start sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

The problem with the Book of Revelation was two-fold. Firstly, no one was really sure who wrote it; and secondly, it was the sort of writing about which the church became wary. Revelation is a book of visions. Religion can get overheated and visions can be both the product of and the spur to fanaticism. Religion has to be grounded and the Book of Revelation just doesn't touch basewhen it comes to history.

The gospels are about Jesus of Nazareth and however much they may have their own theological slant no one doubts that Jesus really existed. The Acts of the Apostles also has its own agenda tracing the progress of the early church from Jerusalem to Rome but it, too, is about groups of people organizing themselves in history. The letters in the New Testament were written to the early churches which were seeking to solve their problems. Again they're about history. But the Book of Revelation is about visions. It uses ordinary language ('brides', 'husbands', 'rare jewels' and all the rest) but these aren't anchored in this world.

So why was Revelation finally included in the scriptures? The reason was partly political. At the Council of Hippo (St Augustine's city in North Africa) held in 393 which drew up the list of books to be included in the bible that we use today there were two disputed texts, the Book of Revelation and the Letter to the Hebrews. It was easier to unite the factions by including both than to leave out one or the other. To have left out both would have been too limiting.

But there was also the nagging sense that the Book of Revelation was on to something: that foundational to Christian life is hope. Hope is always in some sense invisible (over the horizon) yet it also needs to be expressed in ways that are sufficiently concrete in order for hope to be attractive. Revelation was the best of its type.

But what of today? Hope has taken something of a battering. To paint with a broad brush hope couched in the terms of Revelation was possible for people when it was written through to people in the West until the eighteenth century. Especially when life was 'nasty, brutish and short' the desire for an idealized, eternal haven in luxury quarters was strong. And for those who had no real concept that the world was round and spinning in space the idea that there was a heaven above the clouds went without saying.

But with the European Enlightenment, industrialization, rising living standards and all the rest heaven above faded and was replaced by heaven on earth. Politics replaced metaphysics. Religious language was kept but used to describe aspirations for this world. In some ways politics and religion coalesced. Karl Marx was Jewish and Marxism is a secular form of the Kingdom of Heaven. It wasn't a politician who coined the term 'the welfare state' but an archbishop - William Temple.

But earthly utopias have not been realized. The headiest of the European empires of the last century, those created by Hitler and Stalin collapsed in showers of sparks that lit bonfire across the world. And in the years since the idea that the state is the answer people's problems has declined.

So hope has shifted. Hope used to be about heaven above but was then displaced by earth. Germany in 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 put paid to all that. So more recently hope has been placed in markets. We're back to intangibles. If economies flourish then people will make their way in the world.

It's all a matter of 'confidence' and 'trust'. Work and disposable incomes gives people hope. Well, up to a point but the acquisition of things, filling up our over-mortgaged houses with stuff, doesn't seem to have created much of enduring value and as dire predictions of the economy become louder every day we may be in for some very hard times indeed.

So what is the future of hope? Perhaps it lies in combining what the Book of Revelation says with what our own age is saying. The death throes of hard-bitten atheism are heard in the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens but a more authentic voice of the spirit of our age is to be found in Julian Barnes. He begins his latest book (which is about death) called Nothing To Be Afraid Of by saying 'I do not believe in God' but then adding 'but I miss him'. People today are 'missing' God.

We live at a time of spiritual hunger. Religious groups that sell easy and concrete hope find a following among the desperate and the gullible. Suicide bombers, we are told, are fuelled partly by claim that righteous martyrs have instant access to paradise. But for me, getting hope right in our own day is about giving it and not having it.

The Book of Revelation, for all its faults and misuse, is spot on when it speaks of the new Jerusalem 'coming down' to us. Godly life is a gift. We don't manufacture it nor should we claim it. It's a gift; a gift from God.

Gifts are received not as a right (about which we can bicker or go to war) nor are they things to which we should cling. Gifts bring with them freedom. And in this freedom the chaos that binds us and imprisons us fades away. In Revelation chaos is epitomised in the restlessness of the waves. So in the presence of the new Jerusalem the sea is no more and the waters that so easily engulf us (our tears) are dried up.

And the moral failures that cause us and others grief (our faithlessness and lack of courage) are finally done to death. With this comes light, light refracted as through a jewel. It pours through the four corners of society (the gates of all the points of the compass); and is established in the one who did not cling to life as a right but who gave it away as a gift (the Lamb); whose gospel the Twelve (that's all of us) are witnesses.

If there is hope for hope it lies not in fantastical visions nor in fanatical empires nor in frenetic markets but in the fire (the passion) that is in us; a fire that warms but doesn't burn. Hope will be real when we engage with the world and make history. Amen.