Texts: Revelation 5, 13

On Wednesday I walked home for lunch as I often do.  I went to the back of our yard to open the gate on the coop for our four chickens to roam around the larger fenced in area.  As I approached I noticed the loose soil and scattered feathers, a clear sign that a night invader had dug its way in and made a kill.  This was not the first time this has happened, and as I buried the remains of the chicken I asked the same kinds of questions I’ve asked before.  I wondered what kind of animal had done the killing.  I wondered if there’s even more we need to do to protect the chickens, or if this is just an inevitable thing that will happen from time to time.  I wondered if more protection for the chickens equated to a more prison-like existence for them.  I wondered if humans had never domesticated animals if this chicken, in its more wild incarnation, would have been safely roosting overnight up in a tree somewhere in southcentral Asia.  Or if it would have been fierce enough to at least ward off the predator, rather than the defenseless creature we’ve bred it to be.  Mostly, I was again confronted, in a graphic way, with what happens when a predator does its thing at the expense of its prey.

I wasn’t planning on bringing the chickens into this week’s sermon, but this unfortunate backyard farming incident feels like an appropriate lead in to one of the dominant themes of Revelation – the contrast between the Lamb and the Beast.

When John writes his pastoral letter / apocalyptic vision to seven churches in his region, he uses imagery from the animal world to speak about human realities.  For a modern day…

Texts: Revelation 1:1-3,9-16; 4:1-8; 19:6-10

There’s a great irony at the beginning of Revelation.  The first word of this book, the very first word, is the word we translate as “revelation.”  To reveal, to disclose, make known.  It begins, “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John.”  The irony is that what follows, this grand making known, this revelation, is one of the most confusing, confounding, convoluted, pieces of literature ever.

Or so it seems to us.

The very book that bears that name ‘revelation’ appears to us as anything but, and has proved most dangerous in the hands of those who believe they know exactly what it has revealed.

We need look no further than our own Anabaptist tradition to see what kind of religious fervor Revelation has inspired.  In the 1530’s, still the early days of the Protestant Reformation, the city of Munster in Northwest Germany was taken over by radical Anabaptists seeking to establish “The New Jerusalem” referenced in Revelation 21.  This initially included sharing their goods in common, like the early church, but led to tyrannical rule by several leaders and violent armed resistance against anyone who challenged them.  The Munsterite Anabaptists were soon crushed and their tortured bodies publicly displayed in cages.  The human remains are gone, but the cages still hang in the streets of Munster to this day.  Some of you have seen them.

Claas Epp was another Revelation-inspired Anabaptist, producing one of the most bizarre and tragic episodes of Mennonite history.  In 1870 when the Russian government no longer granted Mennonites special privileges, such as military exemption, many emigrated West to the US and Canada.  But Claas Epp cited Revelation chapter 3, which includes…

Text: Psalm 1

The trees have been in the news recently.  Earlier this month the Washington Post carried an article with the lengthy headline “Scientists discover that the world contains dramatically more trees than previously thought.”  Before this study scientists had used satellite imaging to estimate that there are about 400 billion trees in the world.  The revised number is 3.04 trillion.  Climates like Ohio, home of temperate forests, have about 600 billion trees total, itself quite a bit more than the previous estimate for the whole planet.    The new global estimate means there are about 422 trees per person.

For those wondering, a tree gets defined as a plant with woody stems larger than 10 cm in diameter, about four inches, at breast height.  So the waist high service berry and Japanese maple we planted in our front yard two years ago do not yet count as trees.  The new total is based on satellite imaging, plus on the ground measurements at 429,775 different locations around the world, so this was truly a colossal study.  If you want to know more of the technicalities I’ll put a link to the original scholarly article from the journal Nature on the sermon page of the website, although be forewarned that the methodology section contains sentences like this:  “To account for this collinearity, we performed ascendant hierarchical clustering using hclustvar function in R’s ClustOfVar package in each biome-level model.” p. 6

3 trillion is a lot of trees, but it’s the least amount of trees in the last 10,000 years, barely half of what it once was.  We’re losing about 15 billion trees a year.

More locally, the Dispatch carried an article on Wednesday about the city’s “Branch Out Columbus” campaign.  The goal is to raise the tree canopy of the city from…

Text: Mark 8:27-36

Speaker: Mark Rupp

During my early childhood, I was, for lack of a better way of putting it, awesome.  Let me give you some examples: First, not only did I have an illustrated book of dragons, but I also had an aunt who used her scanner and some printable iron-on transfers to make me t-shirts (plural) with pictures of those dragons on them, which I wore for far longer into my childhood than was probably socially acceptable.  Second, I distinctly remember the day my mother chipped the end of one of her wooden spoons and tried to throw it away.  I dug it out of the trash, gave it a splash of color with some markers, glued one of those metal canning lids to the end, and then proceeded to spend countless hours pretending it was a magic wand.  Third, just in case you need another example of how awesome I was, I had a hiding spot in the back part of our property behind some tall weeds and assorted rubble where I would collect different kinds of plants and other ingredients and would pretend (or perhaps hope) that if I got just the right combination I could make something happen. 

I know what you’re thinking: “Mark, why do you keep talking about being awesome in the past tense, like it is something you grew out of?”  To you, I say: thank you and you’re right and you should really stop by my apartment some time and check out my shelf full of pewter wizards and dragons…and wizards riding dragons. 

I think all people at some point in their lives believe, or at least want to believe, that the kind of magic we hear about in stories is real, the kind of magic that is about power and being able to…

Text: Mark 7:24-30

Within the last decade the story of the Syrophoenician woman has gone from being one of my least favorite gospel stories to one of my favorites.  Least favorite, because, well, what do you do with the fact that Jesus uses an ethnic slur to refer to a foreign woman – to her face.  She’s a mother with an ailing daughter doing what any good parent would do in her situation – advocating for her child.  Jesus’ initial response is to refer to her, her daughter, her people, as dogs.  This is Jesus, the compassionate.  Jesus, the all-inclusive.  Jesus, who certainly had a bumper sticker on his robe which said “God bless the whole world, no exceptions.”    Our “Love your neighbor” Jesus.  Our “Love your enemy” Jesus.  Our Jesus calls a foreign woman a dog.

Surely there’s been some kind of mistake.  Surely he didn’t mean it in the way it might come across.   Maybe the English translator was dyslexic and wrote ‘dog’ when Jesus had really said ‘god’.  Unlikely.

There are a couple different ways of interpreting this story which keep Jesus’ record clean.  One is noting that the word used here for dog actually means little dog, a unique form of the word in the New Testament.  Yes, referring to someone as a dog isn’t nice, but Jesus softens the tone by calling her a puppy.  Puppies are fun and friendly, right?

It’s an interesting observation, but it’s a stretch.  Dogs in the first century were not the kind of cute and faithful pets we like to keep around these days.  Dogs roamed the streets.  Dogs were scavengers and fought fiercely for scraps of food around villages.  In another situation Jesus mentions dogs in a parable to illustrate just how poor and lowly is the man Lazarus who sits…