Tense in Revelation 1

Rocky: It certainly is. I love Dave Parker, by the way.

I was just listening to a recording from last summer's Allelon Institute conference, and somebody quoted Eugene Peterson in a way that I might copy on Sunday. In his introduction to the book of Matthew in The Message, he writes,

Every day we wake up in the middle of something that is already going on and that has been going on for a long time. Genealogy and geology, history and culture, the cosmos, God.

It gets to the same thing that you're getting at with the "past, present, and future reality of God," but puts it (and us) in a narrative framework. That we are a part of God's story, which is not the story of us but the story of God, and that it's a story that was well underway before we got here and will continue to be here long after we're gone, is crucial. So the future is in God's hands because God is sovereign, yes, but also because God is creating a story of which we and the entire cosmos are a part.

Also, that the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is a "witness" to the future and our very present expectation for it. Because "whenever [we] eat this break and drink this cup we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." So this act of gathering together around the table, of proclaiming the death of Jesus by partaking in a common loaf and a common cup, doesn't mean anything--not hospitality, not community, not salvation--without a lived belief in and hope for the future.

Ultimately, Revelation 1 makes me want to ground us and our hope, our expectation for the future, in the ongoing story of God and to draw out the things we do right now to participate in it.

Landon: Yes, I most certainly think that'll preach. Most certainly.

And I hope that it does, because that's where I've decided to go as well. The points I mentioned in the "First Thoughts" post that struck me are the points that continue to strike me: God "is, was, and is still to come" and we must testify to that.

Dave makes a great point in his comment (not the part about the SUV - I'm not laying off! tee hee) that answered one of your initial questions from our first work session ("What do we hope will be the outcome of preaching eschatology?"):

I think if our congregation members can see it (and consequently live it) that way, then we would be free to be the types of Christians God is really calling us to be!

His discussion of "remembrance" is, I think, particularly helpful. It brought something else to mind.

I was reading The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong last night, and in her chapter regarding the shift from a ritualistic to kenotic quality in Axial Age spirituality she writes this:

The people followed other gods only because they did not truly know Yahweh. Their understanding of religion was superficial...Religious practices must no longer be taken for granted and performed by rote; people must become more conscious of what they were doing. Hosea was not talking about purely notional knowledge; the verb yada ("to know") implies emotional attachment to Yahweh, and an interior appropriation of the divine. IT was not enought to merely attend a sacrifice or a festival. "I desire loyalty [hesed]," Yahweh complained, "and not sacrifice; the knowledge of God, not holocausts." Hosea constantly tried to make Israelites aware of the inner life of God.

I have several pieces I've got to weave this Sunday:

1. the present, past, and future reality of God - sort of an "Ebenezer"-ish theme
2. that we are to be witnesses to that reality be virtue of an "interior appropriation of the divine"
3. that the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is one of the chief ways we witness to the eternal nature of the Triune God

I'm really glad that this is the first week's text - it's allowing us to set the stage nicely.

Rocky: Landon, friend, we touched on this a bit already, but my staff meeting this morning brought it out further: the phenomenon of tense in our passage for this week. Particularly in the assertion that Jesus is the one who "loves" us and who "has freed us" from our sins and "has made us" a kingdom gets my attention. Add to that the coming-in-the-clouds allusion to Daniel 7 and the repetition of the "is, was, and is to come" refrain, and you have a thoroughly past-centered expectation for the future lived out in the present.

I don't know about you, but this will probably be huge in my preaching of this text. That our expectation and our hope for the future is grounded in God's past (not, mind you, our past or a past of historical events that follow a pattern) is most certainly good news. And we experience it right now. Because the God who "will be," beyond and after all the incidents and accidents of lived history, is the God who "was" before all of it and the God who "is" in the midst of it.

So what's the case right now? Revelation 1 gives two answers: 1) God loves us and 2) God is.

Think that'll preach?