Mother of Dragons Latte: May 12, 2019

John 10:22-30
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17

Bastardizing both Shakespeare and Latin, I recently posted to social media the phrase “Et tu, Derby?” It is, of course, a reference to the Bard’s account of the death of Julius Caesar, when his friend Brutus joined the assassins and Caesar uttered the phrase “You too, Brutus?”, as well as to this year’s Kentucky Derby, when the apparent winner was disqualified. It isn’t that I need to have an opinion on horse racing, a subject in which I have zero expertise, and I certainly don’t need to tweet out my ignorance. I knew weeks before the Derby about the twenty-three horses that have died at the Santa Anita track since Christmas, something that has brought unwanted attention to what many perceive as cruelty and endangerment in horse racing, and since the Derby, I have had the opportunity to listen to people who actually do know a thing or two about the sport explain why the entangled legs of racing thoroughbreds are a bad thing. Really, I just posted “Et tu, Derby?” because I’m tired of everything being politicized and divisive. What is the purpose of getting people riled up, political and angry about the Kentucky Derby?

Also while I was away, the Khaleesi had a latte. It was during an episode of the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” set in a mythical and ancient land of dragons and magic and extreme violence, the violence mostly though not exclusively directed at women, one of the reasons I gave up the show several seasons back. The show runners have been notoriously obsessive about detail. For example, they make the teen actor who plays Bran remain in place between takes so that the fur in his costume won’t move. Yet somehow, they allowed what looked like a Starbucks cup to remain on set and to actually appear on screen during last Sunday’s episode, spotted by the sort of super nerds who analyze every aspect of the show for clues, the Reddit crowd. As you can imagine, the internet had a field day, with memes about what sort of latte the mother of dragons would drink. Personally, I view it as further evidence that Starbucks, along with Amazon, Apple, Tencent, and Alibaba, are taking over the world. Not satisfied with their marketshare in real life, they’ve invaded fictional worlds as well. They’ll be opening branches in Mordor and Hogwarts any day now.

And here, at the juncture of dragons, fiction, horsemen, and assassinated emperors, we find today’s reading.

And you wondered how I was going to get there.

The author of the Revelation of John is not the same person who authored the gospel. We know this, among other reasons, because the author of the gospel wrote rather well, while the author of the revelation was, well let’s just say he didn’t write particularly well, had a limited vocabulary and poor grammar. Though the two texts are definitely not by the same author, they do appear to have been written at about the same time, near the end of the first century.

Domitian was on the throne, the third and final Flavian emperor. He was in conflict with the legislative branch of government, as had been Julius Caesar, and he too would eventually fall to an assassin’s hand, but then again, assassination was almost a given in that age.

Domitian oversaw an economic boom, but he was also self-centered with autocratic tendencies. There was a real cult of personality surrounding him, a bit of grandiosity. He reinvigorated worship of the imperial household, the idea that he and his family were gods, or at least became gods on their deaths. It is this that likely leads Eusebius, a fourth century bishop and Christian historian, to assign the emperor direct blame for the widespread persecution of Christians. This remains the standard story, both around the Revelation of John in particular, and around early Christianity, the idea that there was widespread persecution, though we no longer believe this to be true, despite Sparticus. There were certainly brief periods of persecution during the first centuries of the faith, as well as local flare-ups of ethnic and religious violence, but we have no real corroboration that John of Patmos experienced one of these episodes. We simply don’t know what exactly was going on to produce such a text.

But something was certainly not right. The feverish anxiety of the author leads to this holy imagining of a world made right through dramatic and divine intervention. It is a tale of cosmic conflict filled with symbols that made sense to those who read it, like references to Babylon, Judah’s ancient enemy, as a stand in for Rome.

The text is filled with numbers, though in at least one case maybe not the number you think is there. The oldest fragment of the revelation’s thirteenth chapter gives the number of the beast as 616. This variant appears in several other manuscripts as well. So much for the Omen movies and the 666 on Damian’s scalp.

The number that shows up most often though is seven, the number of perfection: seven churches, seven stars, seven seals, seven angels, seven plagues, seven golden lamp stands, seven golden bowls, etcetera. What has seven heads? The beast or dragon, though it has ten horns, so the numerology sort of goes to hell at that point.

The Revelation of John was the last text accepted in the Christian canon, and even then was not universally accepted. Many churches in the Eastern tradition omitted it until the 16th century. Martin Luther would say that it was neither apocalyptic nor prophetic. Today far too many Christians take it as certain prophecy, and some have even pursued the sort of global conflict and destruction they see in this fiction hoping that they might bring about the end time, certain that they will be among the 144,000.

For all of its problems, and there are certainly problems, the Revelation of John also gives us rich imagery and tropes that continue to have religious and cultural significance, from the sentence “I am the Alpha and the Omega” to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who bring war, famine, and disease.

This is the only text that unambiguously casts Jesus as king of the entire world, though he had been accused of claiming the title King of the Jews during his lifetime, was crucified under that title. The text also continues a process from earlier texts of transforming Jesus into a dual role as both the good shepherd and the sacrificial lamb, the Lamb of God. It ends with a New Jerusalem, with the triumph of righteousness, a world in which Jesus rules as the Lamb.

Like the Book of Job, like the Book of Daniel, the Revelation of John is a holy fiction. Like the work of the prophets, it paints a picture of the “might be.” It is aspirational, a prayer, a fever dream.

We can rightly curse the misuse of the text, and it is badly misused, but there is a lesson here for us even today, when the earth is dying not by the hands of demons, but by our our own hands. Unlike the prophets in the Hebrew Scripture, unlike Paul’s letters to churches he served, John of Patmos does not call on the seven churches, does not call on us to change our behavior. It isn’t that sort of text. But like the prophets, like Paul, he has a clear vision of how a rightly ordered creation should look, a creation centered on God. He has an end in mind.

All too often, we criticize injustice and evil, but fail to offer another vision, an alternate and positive vision. Some of that is human nature. We have more negative words than positive. We can often feel in our gut when something is wrong, even if we can’t yet imagine what would be right. But when we people on the Way of Jesus do that, criticism and complaint without hope and vision, we are betraying the prophets, Christ’s gospel, and the tradition around Paul. The reform Jesus preached was a shift from a way of life that was legalistic and proscriptive to a way of life that was agape, selfless love, that was oriented precisely in the might be, in the opt-in of the Kingdom of God. The gospel is looking at the tiny mustard seed and imagining what it might become, looking at the child, the beggar, the cripple, the sinner, and imagining what they might become. The prophets knew how to bring it when it came to criticism and anger, but they also painted these powerful pictures of the world that might be, a world of justice where God’s law is written on our hearts.

Humankind’s utopian dreams suffered a terrible blow a century ago in the trenches of the Great War, then a possibly fatal wound in the war that followed, as we saw the technology that should liberate us used to kill instead, saw the League of Nations fall to human sin, saw the hygienic slaughter of the Nazi gas chamber. Since then, we’ve grown cynical. We’ve stopped dreaming, especially as we drown in the criticism and complaint of politicians and pundits, so that by and large, we react and criticize, but offer no compelling vision.

The young adult section of any bookstore is filled with dystopian novels in which the young and brave must fight the old and corrupt, and we wonder why they distrust us. Interestingly, the young heroes of those same novels are almost always up against foes with better technology, for younger generations use technology, but also distrust it.

It is the dream, not the critique, that captures us. The Rev. Dr. King preached countless powerful sermons, and left behind memorable quotes like “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” But the speech that set the nation on fire, that inspired and continues to inspire, that moved people to action, was “I have a dream,” a speech that painted a vision of the might be, that called each and every one of us to our better selves. It was a vision of a better future, not a retreat into a romanticized past.

We must dream again of what might be, and bigger dreams than sidewalks on South Street, though they’re plenty cool. We must dream like Joseph, dream of affordable housing and accessible healthcare, of a world in which every child has an opportunity to thrive and become their best self, a world where second graders are not hiding under their desks shaking in fear, dreams of a church that helps people of every generation thrive and become their best selves by providing spiritual meaning and the tools we need to tackle the big questions and the small questions, the day-to-day and the ultimate, that speaks to every generation, for the generations that have abandoned the church still have the same ultimate concerns, the same questions.

We must do the hard work of holy imagination, be clear and articulate about what we want, and we do that best by working on it together, not only testing and teasing out and seeking what might be, but listening to the Spirit, for we are a people who believe divine mystery is in the world pushing and pulling and nudging us. We have to actually invest the time and energy and re-learn how to keep covenant with one another when we disagree.

Of course, there are some groups that are already doing this important work. Maine All Care comes to mind as one organization operating in the public sphere that has articulated a vision of a might be. There are others. But mostly, our civic and public life is comprised of complaint and criticism, because it is easier to destroy than to build. It takes months and then years to create a life, a whole life, and only seconds to kill. But we are in the life business, not the death business. We are in Eastertide, that season when we celebrate the fact that love triumphs over death.

In order to do any of this, this dreaming, this holy imagining, this testing and planning and strategizing, you have to have a hunger, you have to be dissatisfied, either with your own circumstance, or you must have the empathy and compassion to be dissatisfied that others are not thriving. We might want to ignore the pain and suffering of others, to look away, to focus on our own personal salvation, as did the rich man who ignored that other Lazarus in the gospel, the poor man at the gate, but there is no salvation there, no salvation for the rich man who looked away, for Jesus creates community, not individual believers, and tells us always to look outward at precisely those who are not thriving. If you are not dissatisfied with the world as it is, you aren’t paying attention.

God promises through the Prophet Joel that “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”

Cynicism and complaint have no place in a Christianity that believes in the power and goodness of God, that believes that love wins, that believes that the Spirit is real and with us. We can choose to focus on the violence and destruction in John’s apocalyptic vision, or we can choose to focus on his vision of a rightly ordered world. I’ll choose the latter, and continue to believe. We are facing terrible crises, in our nation, in the community of nations, on our living earth. It is time to dream some dreams, to imagine what might be, and then to roll up our sleeves. It might take some late nights. I recommend a double shot in your Mother of Dragons latte. Amen.