St. John’s Lutheran Church
1 June 2025 + Easter 7c
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
The Rev. Josh Evans
There’s a danger in hearing only what we want to hear,
seeing only what we want to see,
believing only what we want to believe.
We live in a world that makes it increasingly more possible,
even appealing,
to live in our own silos,
to exist in our own echo chambers,
guarded from being challenged,
protected from confronting opinions and ideas that differ from our own.
Whether it’s the ways we carefully curate our digital presence,
or the persons we surround ourselves with in analog spaces,
or the ways we cobble together the various media and news sources
we choose to pay attention to,
only taking in the ones we already agree with,
only to reinforce our own perspectives –
this sort of siloing, editing, and curating is dangerous,
and it also betrays the wider reality beyond our narrow scope.
You might have noticed the careful, nervous editing of the lectionary
that hands us this final Eastertide text from Revelation –
a patchwork of assorted verses from its final chapter –
12-14, 16-17, 20-21 –
jumping over what we can only imagine are inconvenient or challenging verses –
and keeping only the “safer,” more polished, more wholesome content
we feel comfortable reading from our pulpits.
This sort of editing,
jumping over and excluding a not-insignificant number of verses
should call our attention and pique our curiosity:
What is being left out,
and more importantly: why?
Ironically enough,
one of those excluded verses in this instance actually warns its readers
against the very notion of “taking away from the words” of this book,
like some kind of cut-and-paste Jefferson Bible,
only taking the parts we want to hear
and leaving the rest out.
Admittedly, some of those excluded verses
are enough to make me want to bail
on this sermon series entirely.
After all, there are three other texts on any given Sunday
on which I could choose to preach.
Surely one of them is better suited to crafting
a sermon I want to preach
and one you want to hear.
But, we’ve come this far,
and I’m nothing if not stubborn,
so let’s finish the job, shall we?
Let’s finish our journey through Revelation –
and let’s take a look at those excluded verses.
***
By last week, we’ve come at last to the new Jerusalem,
the holy city come down to earth.
In his vision, John has taken us on a sightseeing tour of this city:
We have beheld its golden streets,
and its gates which are never shut.
We have walked along the banks of its river, bright as crystal,
under the shade of the healing leaves of the tree of life at its center.
We have noted the remarkable absence of what is not in the city –
notably no temple,
for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb;
nor sun nor moon nor lamp,
for the Lord God will be its light –
God will dwell, or camp, with God’s peoples.
“These words are trustworthy and true,”
the angelic tour guide says to John.
And thus we come, finally, to John’s closing words:
I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things.
And when I heard and saw them,
I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me,
but he said to me,
“You must not do that!
I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers and sisters the prophets
and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship God!”
And he said to me,
“Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book,
for the time is near.
Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy,
and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy.”
“See, I am coming soon;
my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work.
I am the Alpha and the Omega,
the First and the Last,
the Beginning and the End.”
Blessed are those who wash their robes,
so that they will have the right to the tree of life
and may enter the city by the gates.
Outside are the dogs and sorcerers
and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters
and everyone who loves and practices falsehood…
***
At first glance,
Revelation seems to present us yet again
with another opportunity to consider
who’s in and who’s out,
as though this book were really that simple,
as though that were even the point.
But upon closer examination,
that’s not exactly what’s going on here.
As New Testament scholar Anna Bowden helpfully points out,
“In his letters to the seven churches,
John [of Patmos] does not shy away from naming his opponents.
He is quick to draw attention to those who disagree with him,
and he is not afraid to call them names…” [1]
On the one hand, it’s understandable:
John lived in exile,
under the occupation and oppression of the Roman reign of terror –
his words are raw and emotional,
an honest, if not imperfect, human response to his reality.
Of course he wants to draw lines around the city,
to draw stark boundaries around who’s in and who’s out:
Rome doesn’t belong here.
And yet, as we have already seen,
such a notion betrays John’s own vision
of the city whose gates will never be shut.
And Revelation keeps going
with an expansive invitation
that challenges our assumptions of who’s in and who’s out:
Let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.
Despite John’s initial protests,
there are, in actuality, no limits on the open invitation
to dwell in the eternal presence of God.
***
There’s a danger in hearing only what we want to hear,
seeing only what we want to see,
believing only what we want to believe;
to live in our own silos;
to edit and curate and sanitize what we absorb and what we repeat
in order to reinforce our own perspectives,
and to advance our own agendas.
But in so doing,
we risk cutting ourselves from one another,
and perhaps more dangerous still,
we risk prioritizing our own narrow agendas
over God’s expansive and limitless grace.
Ultimately, John’s vision culminates in one simple phrase
in its final words,
indeed in the final words of scripture
as it has been handed down to us:
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.
Words which, in some translations
and according to some ancient manuscripts,
are even simpler still:
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen. Period.
Dr. Bowden’s commentary goes on to ask:
“In a world that increasingly attempts to narrow definitions
of gender, citizenship, et cetera, in efforts to demean and exclude,
our translations matter more than ever.
What might it look like for the church
to err on the side of inclusion?” [2]
For starters, it looks like what several of us
will be doing this time next week,
as we take to the streets of downtown Albany
to proclaim God’s extravagant love for all –
for all God’s beloved LGBTQIA+ children,
and for all whom both church and society have harmed.
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all.
Revelation, far from its big, bad, scary reputation,
offers us a message of incredible hope
and a vision of radical inclusivity:
Our Lamb has conquered,
and our Lamb gives us the victory
over every force that the empire can level at us,
over every force that seeks to divide and exclude.
Our Lamb has conquered.
Our God is with us.
Our God beckons us:
Let all who are thirsty come to the water of life.
All who are thirsty for mercy and love,
all who are thirsty for justice and peace,
come to the water of life.
The grace of the Lord Jesus
for all. Amen.
[1] Anna M.V. Bowden, “Commentary on Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21,” Working Preacher
[2] Bowden, “Commentary,” Working Preacher (emphasis mine)
