The Pleasure and Prison of the Status Quo

Psalm 32; Revelation 3:14-22

A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie

June 13, 2004

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

“I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot.” Revelation 3:15a

It’s a great comfort at this time in our history, to know that the Book of Revelation is about the ultimate healing of all of creation, the salvation of creation. Salvation means healing, to make whole. The condition of our world is dangerous and frightening. And for us particularly, the death of our Sarita Mullins-Williams has gathered us in a place of grief seemingly with no bottom. The brokenness and woundedness of the world is most apparent in these circumstances. And so the hope for healing is our collective prayer.

Emily Dickinson’s favorite book of the Bible was the Book of Revelation. Perhaps that is how she was able to write, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” The nearness and steadfastness of the providence of God in the face of catastrophe and danger means everything, and this is one of the principal reasons why we are here this morning.

The reading today from the third chapter addresses the question of wealth. The sense of this piece is that the people of Laodicea had become somehow compromised by their wealth. Since most of us are wealthy, that is we have enough money to go beyond food, clothing and shelter, this passage should be of interest to us especially since one message of the church has been that wealth is evil. Wealth is not evil, but it is complicated. Wealth like anything that becomes the major focus of life can block or obscure substance. In the greater scheme of things, wealth is relatively superficial and can keep us from connecting to the substance of life. And when we stay in that superficial place, we are neither (as our text tells us) hot nor cold.

A couple of months ago, at a meeting of our Stewardship task force we had a discussion about tithing, the biblical concept of giving 10 per cent of income to the causes of God. It occurred to me as we were speaking that tithing may contain an element of healing in the same way that Sabbath is about healing. The setting aside of a day per week to restore our souls and bodies makes perfect sense, but we have rebelled against a legalistic sense of Sabbath and now we have lost it. Perhaps we have lost the healing dimension of tithing n the same way. The healing dimension of tithing is this: giving opens a door into a place where we can connect with life’s substance: love and its consequences of cooperation, compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation and justice. Wealth by itself is not the issue. But in Revelation and elsewhere in the Bible, it is clear that tithing can constitute a release valve on the “neither hot nor cold” dimension of the superficiality of having materialism be the principal focus of life.

I am more and more aware that this is one of the major themes of scriptures and of Jesus. It begins with the prophets Amos and Micah decrying the practice of sacrifice as another type of blocking of substance. They were concerned that the practice of sacrifice focuses on the superficial appearance of religion and obscured the substance. The tension and drama between appearance and substance becomes clearer and clearer. As people we are vulnerable to living in a place of comfort and superficiality until we are wrenched out of it. But until we are, if we are, we miss the experience of love, the ability to grieve and the hope that comes with the reassurance that the world and all that is in it will one day be healed. Amos, speaking on behalf of God, says, “Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon….but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” It is as if he is saying “stop living in that place where you are neither hot nor cold!” Micah says, “Shall I come before God with burnt offerings? God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Again, “stop living in that place where you are neither hot nor cold!

The ministry of Jesus brings this forward most dramatically in the moment when he overturns the tables of the moneychangers at the temple in Jerusalem. It wasn’t the money that was the problem nor was it the money-changers. The real problem was that the business of the temple was still sacrifice and was still in the way of the true substance of life: love and its consequences of cooperation, compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation and justice. As God’s people, we are called to move away from the appearance of religion to the true substance where love becomes the source of healing, growth and vitality.

In chapter 21 of Revelation, which was conveyed to us by the choir in the anthem, the writer makes it clear that he does not view wealth as evil in itself; rather he saw it as one of the blessings of salvation. But we must add that salvation or healing is not possible without giving. In other words wealth only becomes a blessing when we give some of it away.

Nowhere in my life did material wealth seem more of a blessing that a couple of weeks ago when Judy and I were in Paris celebrating our 60^th birthdays. As we stood gazing as the Eiffel Tower rising as it were above the superficiality of life and constituting a challenge for us to do the same, or listening to an organ concert at Notre Dame challenging us again to dig into the complication and depths of life, we both experienced, we confessed later, tears and lumps in our throats. There was in that experience, a subtle reassurance that there will be healing—the message of Revelation is true.

The writer Kathleen Norris, writing in an introduction to the Book of Revelation says, “The hope engendered by the Revelation is as bitter and bracing as the hope one finds in an emergency room or ICU or hospice. All that seemed to matter, all competence, all status, all that was formerly of value is revealed as nothing compared to the beat of a pulse, that next breath. The book embraces a great psychological truth, that the crises and apocalypses of our lives are meant not to beat us into submission, so much as to give us room to change and grow.

Brothers and sisters, let us resolve in the face of all that has happened as well as in the face of all that is possible, to remind each other consistently of the healing that God intends for all of creation, of the role that giving and not giving can play and most importantly of the access to substance, love and its consequences that we need so desperately. These are the reassurances that we need. Amen.