Delivered at Rainbow Mennonite Church, Kansas City, KS
April 14, 2013.
Scripture:
Revelation 5:11–14
In May of 1757, a promising and precocious 35-year-old poet
and writer by the name of Christopher Smart was committed by his father-in-law
to St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in Bethnal Green, London. Though it was
initially intended that Smart would only stay for a short while, the conditions
of the sanitarium ultimately took their toll on his mental health, and he would
spend the remainder of his life in and out of what were in those days called
“madhouses.” Smart’s condition was marked by frequent periods of prolonged
religious ecstasy, and he was often seen wandering the streets alone or
cradling his cat Jeoffry.
Over the course of many
years of deplorable living conditions, his health steadily declined. This was
back before the days of counseling, psychiatry, and mood-altering medication.
In one of his poems, Smart wrote of his “caretakers”: “For they work on
me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more
unguarded than others.”
He was eventually released from the asylum in 1763, spending
seven short years in freedom before some previous financial debts caught up
with him and he was arrested in 1770. He was imprisoned early in January 1771,
but succumbed to pneumonia alone in his cell just a few months later in May of
that same year. He died miserable and utterly alone, abandoned by his family.
Over the course of four years between 1759 and 1763, during
his confinement, Smart penned seven hefty fragments
of poetry that later came to be collectively known as Jubilate Agno, or Rejoice in the Lamb, which went unpublished until 1939, almost 200 years
after its composition. At first glance, Jubilate Agno appears to be little more than the frenetic
ramblings of a seminary student gone mad. However, a close reading reveals
Smart’s mastery of liturgical style—being himself a high church Anglican—in
addition to some fine wordplay. Still, with all of its liturgical grandeur, the
poem reeks of mental, emotional, and spiritual anguish.
The lengthy poem is written in a
sprawling call-and-response form, and begins on a cosmically tremendous note:
Rejoice in God, O ye tongues!
nations and languages and every
creature
in which is the breath of life!
Let man and beast appear before him
and magnify his name together!
The most striking thing about this poem to me is the sheer joy welling up in Smart’s writing through the depths of
his despair. Though his family had left him, though he was under great
financial stress, though his health was failing and though everyone around him
thought he was a fool, Smart found hope in his cat Jeoffrey. He found hope in
the characters of the Old Testament, found hope in the apocalyptic image of the
lamb, and found himself in a state of mind that allowed him not only to rejoice
in the lamb himself, but to envision all of creation joining in with him, even
as his own caregivers beat him with iron tools.
Like Jubilate Agno,
the Book of Revelation emerged at a time when the Johannine community—the group
of early Christians for whom it was written—was under an extreme amount of
duress, persecution, and hopelessness. Revelation is not a book that was ever
intended to “predict” the future, to be milked into a profitable series of 16
novels, or to be made into a really bad Kirk Cameron movie. Instead, this
“apocalypse,” or “revelation” was written as a polemic against the Roman
Empire, but also as a message of hope to those Christians suffering at the
hands of Caesar. These Christians not only suffered the violence of physical
persecution, but also the indignity of what appeared to be their philosophical
error—this was almost a century after Christ; surely God was not coming back to
establish God’s reign on earth if it hadn’t already happened by now.
And then John has this vision. This revelation.
To get you up to speed with where we are today: John is
whisked away to heaven in a vision, and at one point he sees this scroll, and
all of heaven is mourning because no one can break the seal on this scroll that
holds the great mystery of the universe. But then, just as the Revelator
himself begins to weep, he hears a lion roar with a ferocious bellow. But when
he turns, he sees not a lion, but in fact a little slaughtered lamb. Now, the
lamb is slain, but for some reason is yet alive—still bears the marks of his
wounds from death—and stands in the presence of the throne of God. And it is
seemingly because of these wounds that the Lamb is “worthy.”
But I want to draw your attention to what exactly the Lamb is worthy of:
[Read Revelation 5:11–12]
Power, wealth, wisdom, might, honor, glory, blessing—what’s
wrong with this picture? The slaughtered lamb has none of these things. Even as all creation is singing its praise, the
bloody, mangled, victimized lamb is the very definition of weakness, of
poverty, of foolishness, of dishonor. The real, proper response for such a sight should be laughter, not praise. And yet, the lamb is the only one with
the power to open the scroll, and ultimately the only one with the authority to
establish God’s reign on earth as it is in heaven. A place of justice and
mercy, where the trees grow leaves for the healing of the nations.
See, the Lamb defies our worldly expectations of glory and
redefines these terms. No longer is power defined by politics and intimidation,
but now by humility and self-sacrifice. No longer is wealth associated with
monetary gain—what would the lamb need with money?—but now by poverty,
empathy, and by love. No longer are might and honor defined by getting the
upper hand against someone and forcing others to submit to your will, but
instead by binding up the broken hearted and by setting the captives free. No
longer is wisdom defined by gray hairs, by theologizin’ and philosophizin’, but
now by the very foolishness of the cross. Just as Jesus in the Gospels heralds
the reign of God as the anti-Rome—where we turn the other cheek after being
struck, where we walk the extra mile when forced to carry the gear of our
oppressors, where the poor are exalted and the rich are sent away
empty-handed—so do these anti-values become values under the Reign of God. We
look for Jesus expecting a lion, instead we get a lamb.
And it is in the lamb’s weakness that we see true strength.
One of my favorite movies when I was a kid was the 1984 film, The Neverending Story. In the movie, there’s a character called the Rock Biter, whom
the hero Atreyu encounters early on. The Rock Biter is called the
Rock Biter because he is basically this giant mountain with arms and legs and a
face, who eats rocks (which is kind of weird, if you think about it) and rides around on a big stone bike,
and he has these tiny friends that travel with him—a guy with a “racing snail”
and a guy who rides around on the back of a giant bat. But at the end of the
movie, when an approaching darkness of nonexistence known as the Nothing is
eating up everything in its path and threatens to rip the world apart, Atreyu
runs into Rock Biter once again, and this time, he sits alone, staring at his
hands that are as big as houses, waiting for the world to end. “They look like
good, strong hands, don’t they?” the Rock Biter says. “My little friends. I
couldn’t hold onto them. The Nothing pulled them right out of my hands. I
failed.” The Rock Biter’s admission is one of the most empathetic,
heartbreaking moments of the whole film, because we look at this giant mountain
of a creature, we see his monumental strength, and yet in his inability to save
his friends we see something of ourselves—we see our own weakness and
vulnerability. How many friendships have we let slip through our fingers
because of things we have done or haven’t done? How many loved ones have died
of illness, despite our best efforts to take care of them? How many times have
we failed, picked ourselves up, and failed again?
Canadian theologian
Jean Vanier says that “the greatness of
humanity is that we are programmed to become weaker, that we all
ultimately become conscious of our own fragility.” When
we fully reveal ourselves to one another in all our brokenness, we catch a
glimpse of Christ. We catch a glimpse of the lamb who redefines weakness as
power, poverty as wealth, foolishness as wisdom, frailty as might.
In our weakness, we find strength in one another. In our
despair, we find joy. In our brokenness, we encounter God.
So we see in this passage that the Book of Revelation doesn’t
predict the future. It eternally informs the present.
Like the Rock Biter who finally has to admit his own weakness, like those who praise the upside-down values of the Lamb in John’s vision, and like Christopher Smart, who discovered joy even in his suffering, we must find each other in our vulnerability. It’s just like in our celebration of the Eucharist—we not only
recognize Christ’s brokenness in participating in the Lord’s Supper; we
recognize that breaking the bread together in some way recalls our own
brokenness before one another. And in that mutuality is power. We see that in
Christ’s brokenness, we are to follow suit.
The emblem of the Moravian Church is the image of a
slaughtered lamb surrounded by the motto:
Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur. “Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow him.”
Let us follow the Lamb into weakness.
Let us follow the Lamb into vulnerability in our
relationships with one another.
Let us follow the Lamb into the spiritual poverty that
cultivates true humility.
Let us follow the Lamb into the Lamb into the community of
the broken.
And may we all join those myriads of myriads and thousands
of thousands in the unending cosmic hymn of praise for the foolishness of
Christ.
