Author Archives: Greg Johnston

The Ascension

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I sometimes like to imagine the following word problem taught in a Christian-school physics class:

Jesus ascends into heaven 40 days after Easter, traveling at a velocity of 0.99999999999c (i.e., 99.999999999% the speed of light). Please answer the following, showing your work:
a) What % of the Milky Way Galaxy has he traversed to date?
b) What day of the week does he think it is?”

Answers:
a) Roughly 1-2%.
b) Sunday.

The universe is very, very big. (And special relativity is very cool.)

I offer you this word problem because today is, of course, “Ascension Day.” In his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke tells the story: after his resurrection, Jesus spends forty days with the disciples, before ascending again into heaven.

In a three-tiered ancient cosmology, this makes perfect sense. The world as we know it, the place where we spend our whole lives, was in the center. The underworld was a shadowy realm of spirits beneath the ground, where we buried the dead and where they remained. The heavens were the whole celestial sphere above us, a luminous place of divine beings we could not reach, although some mortals like Orion could be brought there by the gods. So when Jesus rises up into the sky, he is returning from earth to heaven.

But anyone with a basic grasp of modern physics or astronomy will have some questions about this story. We know now that the Earth is not, in fact, at the center of the universe, nor is it qualitatively distinct from “the heavens.” It is but one planet in but one solar system in but one galaxy in a truly massive universe.

Luckily for Jesus, “heaven” is not a place located within beyond the bounds of the known universe, or even just our galaxy. It is a separate and overlapping realm, one that is hidden within and behind and beneath and inside all of creation as we know it. Jesus is born, “descending” from heaven to earth. He dies, “descending” from the world to the underworld. He “rises,” ascending from death into life, and breaking the chains that keep the souls of the dead trapped there. And he “rises” again, bringing the souls of our ancestors with him to heaven, bearing human nature itself back into the dwelling place of God.

As physics, it makes no sense. As theology, it does. Jesus descends into the depths. He is with us in the hardest, and the scariest, and the most painful parts of life. He doesn’t always fix them. You can’t always sense him there. But he is in them, bearing witness to and redeeming them, and bringing them with him back to heaven.

And in the ordinary, holy parts of life, he’s inviting us to come and meet him. We can’t travel the trillions of light-years it would take to escape our universe to somehow get to heaven; it simply can’t be done, and in fact that’s not where heaven is found. But by the mysterious working of the Holy Spirit, we can sometimes catch a glimpse of the heavenly reality that is hidden everywhere.

Since I began with a joke about special relativity, I guess I’ll close with a poem. This one’s a sonnet for Ascension Day, by the British poet Malcolm Guite:

We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heavencentred now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed.

“Come Over and Help Us”

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“Come Over and Help Us”

 
 
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Sermon — May 22, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Massachusetts has one of the world’s most boring flags: the Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on a white field. The seal itself is kind of interesting. It consists of three elements—and by the way, I’ve printed the seal out on a bulletin insert so you can see what I’m talking about. In the center, a Native American holds a bow and an arrow pointed down, symbolizing peace. Above him, an unfortunately-placed arm holds a sword, looking like it’s about to swing down and cut off his head, just like the famous scene in one of the great movies about indigenous people and their relationships with the colonial state: Frozen II. And below him, there’s a scroll with the Latin state motto, Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem: “We seek by the sword a quiet peace under liberty.” It’s an unfortunate combination, implying as it does that violence against the indigenous people of Massachusetts is what ensured our quiet peace under liberty.

Now, the seal is pretty problematic—the model for the supposed Massachusett Indian, for example, is in fact an 1890s Chippewa chief from Montana—but the Frozen thing with the sword over his head is mostly accidental. The seal actually combines elements of two earlier and unrelated seals. (See the other side of the paper!) The revolutionary seal of 1775 features a colonial Minute Man with a sword in his right hand and the Magna Carta in his left, with the motto, “We seek by the sword a quiet peace under liberty.” Hence the disembodied sword-in-hand, and the motto; the violence is against the king. The original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, first used to seal the colony’s charter in 1629, is different. It features a rather stereotyped drawing of an American Indian with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, which have been adopted into the modern seal. But the banner coming out of his mouth holds a very different motto from the Minute Man’s statement of revolutionary zeal, one much more relevant to our reading from Acts today: the simple English phrase, “Come over and help us.”

This is, of course, an ever-so-slightly adapted version of the message Paul receives in a dream from a Macedonian man: “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” (Acts 16:9) It’s a divinely-delivered request: cross the sea from Asia into Europe and bring us the gospel. And indeed, the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw themselves as repeating that apostolic process: they came across the sea, and landed, and settled here, right here, in Mishawum, where they established their first settlement, soon renaming it after the man who’d granted their charter by stamping it with that original seal: King Charles I. Hence, the first settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: “Charlestown.”

Now, placed into the mouth of an indigenous resident of Massachusetts by his soon-to-be colonizers, “Come over and help us” is somewhere between a naïve disaster and grotesque bad faith. Diseases spread by Europeans had already devastated the Massachusett and Naumkeag people of this area, and war with the newcomers would soon nearly annihilate them. Some of the more godly colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony surely thought they were walking in the footsteps of Saint Paul and spreading the gospel here. Others were, without a doubt, cynically exploiting the seeming parallel between the Bible and their lives, using royal authority and Western technology to grab the land for themselves, with no real concern for the actual well-being of the locals. But even the best-meaning colonial Puritan missionaries were doing the very opposite of what Paul had done in the Book of Acts. They were swimming with the stream of a growing empire. Paul was fighting against one.

For three centuries before Paul’s journey to Macedonia, the history of the Jewish people and the whole region had been marked by armies moving from the west to the east, subjugating the local people to Greek and then Roman rule. Macedonia was where it all began, with the rise of a young man named Alexander, known to us as Alexander the Great. His father, King Philip II of Macedon, had founded a powerful kingdom and united many of the independent cities of ancient Greece. Alexander had bigger dreams, and in a brilliant but short career he went on to overthrow the great Persian Empire. After his death, his generals began to squabble over the remains, and rival kings set themselves up in Syria and Egypt, battling over and over again for the areas in between, including Judea. These kings surrounded themselves with a Greek aristocracy and sometimes sought to impose Greek customs on the locals, leading to occasional resistance, including the Maccabean revolt still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. By Jesus’ day, Roman rule had replaced Greek rule, but it was more of the same imperial domination.

In the first century BC, Rome was wracked by civil war as well, and while the history is too confusing to be helpful, there’s one event worth noting. In the year 44 BC, after three Roman generals defeated Julius Caesar’s assassins outside the city of Philippi, they discharged some of their veterans soldiers as a reward for their service and gave them land in and around the city. When one of them, Octavian, finally triumphed in the Roman Republic’s final civil war, claiming the title Augustus and becoming the first emperor, he sent more of his veterans there to strengthen and reorganize the colony, transforming Philippi into a “miniature Rome,” giving his soldiers all the rights of citizens of Rome itself.

All of which is to say: when Paul receives a vision inviting him to cross the sea, to “come over and help us,” he is not coming as the colonizer, the powerful one, here to spread the gospel with a sword hanging over your head. He is the one whose land has been conquered. He is the one whose people have been oppressed. And in next week’s reading, Paul and Silas will be arrested by a mob, who say, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” (Acts 16:20-21)

Now Paul was himself a Roman citizen. He would use that, at times, to his advantage, to escape from a local mob or a small-town jail by telling them he was a citizen of Rome, and therefore under Roman protection. But it was a dangerous game to play, because it turned Paul’s proclamation of Jesus Christ—his claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, God’s anointed King, and that he was inviting Gentiles as well as Jews into his kingdom—from mere rabble-rousing by some foreign traveler to an act of treason by a Roman citizen.

Paul walks, nevertheless, into the mouth of the imperial lion. He crosses over into Macedonia, the homeland of the great conqueror Alexander. He walks into Philippi, a city named after Alexander’s father Philip, a colony of Roman army veterans. He shows up eager to “proclaim the good news” of another, very different, kind of King. (16:10)

You’d almost have to be insane to try it. But after cooling his heels for “some days,” (16:12) Paul does what Paul generally does: he goes to the synagogue to be with his fellow Jews.

Or rather, he goes to the “place of prayer,” down by the river. (16:13) It’s a little unclear, but it seems the Jewish community in Philippi is perhaps too small for a synagogue within the city walls; perhaps too small even to muster a minyan of ten men, as Luke tells us simply of the “women who had gathered there.” (16:13) But these are powerful women, the great saint Lydia among them. Lydia listens eagerly to Paul’s message, accepts his words, decides that she and her whole household will be baptized—and then invites him to stay at her home, which becomes Paul’s base in Philippi. (16:14-15) Lydia’s the first person Paul meets in the city, and she’ll be the last one he says goodbye to before he leaves after his miraculous escape from jail in next week’s reading. (16:40) Within a few years, the Christian church at Philippi will have become a strong and thriving one. In fact, Paul’s letter to the Philippians is one of his most upbeat: there’s much to rejoice about and little to criticize. And I think we have Lydia’s leadership to thank for that.

Paul’s ministry in Philippi gives us a better model to think about the Church’s mission in the world than that Puritan “come over and help us.” It’s one founded on resistance to imperial power and might, not backed up by it. And it’s built on the assumption that you come and work in order to hand leadership over to someone else.

I think sometimes about the relationship that churches like St. John’s and many others have had over the years with organizations like the B-SAFE summer camp program. Over time, there have been changes to those partner relationships, and some of them have been hard for partner churches to swallow. Over time, B-SAFE has made many changes that come from listening to the kids and young adults who are part of the program. This year, B-SAFE has decided to hire parents from their community to cook meals for the kids, instead of churches bringing in food for lunch. And for many people who’d enjoyed cooking those meals for years, this felt like a loss. And it is. But it also reflects a kind of growth and maturity in that program, in a very good way.

God does not want us to “go over there and help them” in the Puritan sense. No, God is working through us more like God works through Paul. God is inviting us to recognize that we are citizens of an empire founded by the sword, and to spread instead the subversive message of the Prince of Peace. God is inviting us to go to the people on the margins of society, to the people gathered at the riverside outside the city gates, not to “help them,” per se, but to accept their hospitality and to support their leadership, to build a self-sustaining community of love, and to trust them to run it. And for what it’s worth, this is as true when it comes parenting or management or friendship as it is about community service or the mission of the Church. The end goal is not a permanent program for “us” to help “them,” year after year after year, but a community built on equality and love. So I pray that when God calls us to go and help people near or far, we answer that call, and that we bear witness to the good news of Jesus’ reign of peace and justice, in word and in deed, in our homes, and in our community. I pray that we have the wisdom of Paul to recognize the strength of leadership that’s already there among the people we come to know. And I pray that by the power of the Holy Spirit, God might build us up into a community that is founded not on the sword, but on the promise of the peace left to us by Jesus Christ, in whom all our prayers are known to God. Amen

Training Time

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In the last few weeks several of you have told me you’ve seen me out running. While I’ve been a casual runner since college, this month I’ve started training for my first road race in almost twelve years. (I’m going for the title “Fastest Priest in Charlestown,” which I don’t think will be very hard to achieve.) Adding some more serious track workouts into my running schedule has reminded me that athletic training has long been one of the core metaphors for Christian spiritual life. “An ascetic” has come to mean someone with a particularly strict regimen of spiritual self-denial—a monk living on lentils and water in the middle of the desert, wearing a hair-shirt or something—but in fact the Greek word askesis means exercise, practice, or training. Ascesis is what athletes do. And ascesis is what people of faith do. We train our minds. We exercise our souls. We show up for our “spiritual practice”!

But my new workout schedule has also reminded me of something crucial to both kinds of exercise: finding the right setting to make it possible.

You see, for scheduling reasons I tend to go to the track for an interval workout twice a week: once right before I pick Murray up from school on Wednesdays, and once early on Saturday mornings, before we get going on our plans for the day. On Wednesdays, the track is empty. School is still in session; adults are at work or on errands or whatever they do on Wednesday afternoons. It’s just me, the sun, and an occasional baseball practice. I have the whole place to myself.

Saturdays are a different story. On Saturday mornings, the soccer field inside the track plays host to several dozen of Charlestown’s kindergarteners and first and second graders, who are just learning the sport, and to several dozen more of their parents and siblings, who spill out onto the track to chat, drink coffee, throw lacrosse balls, ride tricycles, and so on.

This is a terrifying thing. The average six-year-old does not exactly have much control over their soccer ball; the typical three-year-old tricyclist is not paying much attention to the traffic on the track. And while I’d never begrudge them use of the playing area—they, after all, have reserved the field for the morning and I’m intruding on their space to use the track—it’s rather alarming to see someone sitting cross-legged, reading a book, in lane one at the finish line when you’re trying to run 400s.

Suffice it to say that my Saturday workouts train a rather different set of skills from my Wednesday afternoons: careful attention in case I need to swerve to avoid a toddler, gracious patience as I remind myself I don’t own the track, intercessory prayer that the ten-year-olds throwing a lacrosse ball across the track (why not in the ample free space around them? I don’t know) don’t bean me.

For many of you, the life of prayer is something like this. Perhaps you are the audience for the book I once joked about writing when Murray was a baby and a toddler, which I’d call Praying One-Handed: Spiritual Life for the Overwhelmed Parent. Perhaps you’re like my friend and mentor Cathy, who used to say that she’d perfected the art of praying in parking lots while waiting to pick her kids up from something or other. Perhaps your distractions come from within: the internalized cacophony of fear and anxiety, grief and despair that has leapt from our TVs and our smartphones directly into our brains. Or perhaps, setting your intention to be just a bit more “spiritual” in 2022, you arrived at the track of prayer to find that things were quite busy and went away, finding that your spiritual training plan wasn’t going quite so well.

You might say that I should just change my schedule and find another time to run. Or you might say, to be perfectly honest, that dodging kids and balls and off-leash dogs is itself pretty good training for a road race in Charlestown. I don’t know which one of those is right; but I do know that training under less-than-ideal conditions has value, in spiritual exercise as much as in physical.

If we only ever pray while on retreat—if we only ever turn to God when our minds are calm, and our homes are quiet, and our to-do lists are done—we’ll only ever learn to see God in those tiny, rare, tranquil moments of our lives. To run alone on a track is a wonderful thing. But to run through the chaos of life, rejoicing in it nevertheless… that is truly divine.

“Spiritual Journeys”

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“Spiritual Journeys”

 
 
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Sermon — May 15, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

It’s become commonplace to observe that life is like a journey, and religion is no exception to this trend. A quick Google Books search for “spiritual journey” shows that the phrase was virtually unused until 1950 or so, then began a gradual rise before exploding exponentially through the ’80s and ’90s. It soon became the defining way for 21st-century people to talk about the attempt to find the meaning in one’s life. The idea has ancient roots, even in Christianity: the Acts of the Apostles reports that the Christian movement was, at first, called “the Way,” with a capital W. (Acts 9:2) And so our own Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, in his effort to recover and revive the spirit of “the Jesus Movement,” speaks often of “the Way of Jesus” and “the Way of Love.” It’s an important insight. Our lives as Christians are not about a static body of doctrine that we hold, or a one-time commitment to Christ. They’re about the journey we take together, led by Jesus, who almost always invited people into the search for God not by saying “Learn from me” or “Obey me” but with the words, “Follow me.” To call something a “spiritual journey” is to recognize that it is a process of slow and sometimes-meandering change over time, as we wander day by day toward our final destination.

We sometimes forget, though, how chaotic these journeys can be. I was reminded of this on Monday evening, as I sat outside my apartment, waiting for AAA. You see, on Sunday, Alice, Murray, and I had spent several hours playing and building up Murray’s seashell collection at the “Airplane Beach” in East Boston. And Murray was so eager to return that we planned a trip for Monday evening, after Alice had returned from work. Murray and I waited in excitement all afternoon, and halfway through dinner Murray couldn’t wait any longer and ran out to the car. When I went to unlock the door so Murray could climb into the car seat, I found the remote unlock button wasn’t working. And when I walked around and unlocked the driver’s side door with the key, I soon discovered that the car wouldn’t start. Apparently in the excitement of the night before, I’d forgotten to turn out one of the lights, and the battery was completely dead—so dead, in fact, that it could not even be jumped, and I had to wait for the AAA truck to come with a new battery, by which point Murray’s excitement had been on its own journey through denial, anger, and bargaining, to its final destination: sleep.

It never feels good to disappoint someone you love. But it’s really not so different from what Jesus does to the disciples.

“Follow me,” he says to Peter and to Andrew while they’re fishing on the shore, “and I will make you fishers of men.” (Mark 1:1719) “Follow me” he says to Philip, as he leads him from John the Baptist’s camp by the Jordan back to Galilee. (John 1:43) “Follow me,” he says to Matthew sitting at his tax booth. (Matt. 9:9) And the disciples say yes. They leave behind everything they have and follow Jesus on this remarkable journey, pledging to go with him wherever he leads.

And then he pulls the rug out from under them: “You will look for me,” he tells the disciples at the Last Supper, “but as I said to the Jews I say now to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’” (John 13:33) What a disappointment. They’ve answered his call. They’ve followed him where he has led. They’ve gone with him even to Jerusalem, the city of his destiny. But now, the same Jesus who said to them, “Follow me. Follow me. Follow me,” follows up with, “Where I am going, you cannot come.”

It’s a frustrating end to their journey. And it’s typical of this late part of the Easter season. On Easter Sunday, we celebrated the Resurrection, and in the weeks that follow we heard stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. But he soon stops appearing, at least in bodily form—and on this Sunday and the next, we look forward to Jesus’ Ascension, his departure from earth to return to heaven, the place he is going where we cannot come. He’s going away, and he’s leaving us behind. He has made it to the Airplane Beach, and we are stuck here, in desperate need of a jump start, completely unable to reach our destination. We seek him, but we cannot go where he has gone.

And so he comes to us instead. And for me, this is the most startling part of Revelation’s stunning vision of “a new heaven and a new earth.” (Rev. 21:1) This passage is the culminating moment in John’s vision. It’s the second-to-last chapter of the whole Bible, and it’s a message so comforting and powerful it’s (ironically) hard not to cry:

See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away. (Rev. 21:3-4)

The destination of our life’s journey is a place where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, where death and mourning and crying are no more, where the pain and the toil of this world are no more, “for the first things have passed away.” We have so many blessings and so many things to be thankful for in life, and we have so many burdens to lay down, so many tears to be wiped away. And It can be a great relief to hear these comforting words.

But the emotional power of these verses makes it easy to miss something. This is not a message about our final destination, when our lives’ journeys come to an end and we arrive in heaven to dwell with God. It’s a message about God’s final destination, when God returns to and renews the earth to dwell with us. It’s not a vision of each one of us individually journeying toward heaven, our eternal home. It’s a vision of God coming down out of heaven to dwell with us, and all who have gone before us, for “see, the home of God is among mortals.” (21:3) God will come here once again, as God came here once before, and walk among us again, and care for us with tenderness and love. It’s as though the AAA truck never came, and my battery was never replaced, but we woke up in the morning to find that the beach had come to us.

Our spiritual journeys can be long and winding. Sometimes they’re interrupted or cut short. Even the most blessed and saintly souls often struggle with periods of doubt, or despair, or dead spiritual batteries. And while we pray to drink deeply from the sweet, fresh “spring[s] of the water of life,” our lives are filled as well with brinier waters too, with tears, and sweat, and blood. Our journeys take us far afield, and sometimes we don’t know where they’re leading us. But God knows, and God is coming home to dwell with us as our God; to be with us, and to wipe away every tear from our eyes. God is making all things new. And this promise of renewal is already being fulfilled.

This is important. This passage from Revelation is traditionally read as if it’s about the end state of things, about what’s sometimes called the “Parousia,” Jesus’ final return at the end of time or in some eternal sense, and that’s true. It is. right now, we get a taste of that eternal life. The season of Easter, after all, doesn’t end with the Ascension, with God’s disappearance from earth to go away into heaven, never to return until Judgment Day. Jesus ascends into heaven, yes, but Easter goes on until the day of Pentecost, when he sends the Holy Spirit to be our comforter and guide. And in this long ordinary time, between the first Pentecost and the final Parousia—between one day two thousand years ago, and the Last Day in some eternal and unknowable time—the Holy Spirit is already here, dwelling with us.

Our comfort is not yet complete. God’s new creation is not yet complete. We still live in the world of death and mourning and crying and pain. But there’s a reason it’s called a spiritual journey. We are not alone on our voyage toward God. God the Holy Spirit is already here with us, comforting us, dwelling with us, recreating us into new people every day, as God will one day create a new heavens and a new earth. For “behold,” says the one who is seated on the throne, “I am making all things new.” (Rev. 21:5) Not “I made it once and it was good enough,” not “I will one day fix it all,” but “I am making all things new.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“And the Sea was No More”

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Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. (Rev. 21:1)

I’m a coastal person by nature. While I’m not a sailor, and I get rather seasick under any but the calmest conditions, I’ve never lived more than ten miles from the shore. Salt water and decaying seaweed smell like home to me. There is no more comforting sound than a seagull’s cry over the pounding of the waves. And, yes, I’ve been known to swim in the icy Atlantic off the coast of Maine on more than a few Memorial Day weekends. (Although “swimming” is perhaps a generous term.)

So I’m always somewhat dismayed when I read, in the chapter of the Revelation to John that we’ll be reading this Sunday, that John “saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away,” but “the sea was no more.” (Rev. 21:1)

It’s the kind of baffling throw-away phrase on which scholarly careers in Biblical studies are made, and I’m happy to say I once wrote a twenty-page term paper on exactly that question.  So if you’re a sea creature like me, perhaps you’ll enjoy a few short reflections on what John means when he says that in the new creation, “the sea was no more.”

Like most things in Revelation, it’s operating on four or five different levels all at once:

  1. On the ordinary level, the sea is a place of danger. While small-scale fishing voyages, coastal travel, and island-hopping were possible and relatively safe, the open Mediterranean was a stormy and dangerous place, and shipwrecks and mishaps were common and deadly, especially given most sailors’ inability to swim. This danger led directly to the…
  2. The mythological level: the sea symbolizes the chaotic, destructive powers of the cosmos. Many ancient Near Eastern creation myths include a battle between a god or God and the sea, or often a sea monster, in which the god must subdue the chaotic powers of destruction to make a safe and stable creation possible. And in fact, there are traces of such an idea throughout the Bible, with references to God struggling with sea monsters or holding back the waters of the deep to prevent them from overcoming life. In the “new creation” of Revelation, God has finally won an ultimate triumph over the powers of chaos, and this victory is symbolized by the absence of the sea.
  3. On the historical/political level, the sea is a highway for the spread of Roman authority. The author and audience of Revelation are not Roman citizens, but subjects whose homelands have been conquered by Roman armies sailing over the sea. John the Divine himself receives the vision while in exile on the island of Patmos: he has literally been separated from his own community by the combination of Roman power and the sea surrounding the island. So the abolition of the sea symbolizes not only the end of chaos on a mythological level, but the overthrow of the Roman imperial power of Caesar in favor of the peaceful and loving kingdom of God.
  4. This overturning of exploitation extends to the economic level, as well. Elsewhere the Book of Revelation envisions the destruction of the city of “Babylon” (a coded stand-in for Rome), and the grief of “all shipmasters and seafarers, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea” as they watch it burn. (Rev. 18:17) And they “weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, [… the list goes on …] horses and chariots, slaves—and human lives.” (18:11-13) This is not a generic anti-business screed. The sea is a highway for human trafficking: soldiers go east to conquer, merchants return west with cargoes of enslaved prisoners and plundered wealth. John envisions these enslavers and looters weeping at the loss of the sea that has enabled their exploitative practices to thrive.
  5. On the ritual level, the sea is a symbol of purification. Water, salt, and fire are often associated with rites of cleansing and renewal, and indeed the container used for priestly ablutions in the Temple in Jerusalem was a giant bronze vessel known as the “Molten Sea,” (1 Kings 7:23) combining salt water and fire in one vessel! In earlier visions in Revelation, the human seer is separated from God by “something like a sea of glass mixed with fire,” (Rev. 15:2; cf. Rev. 4:6) That “the sea is no more” suggests that there is no longer a need for purification, no longer something to be washed away that separates the human being from God.
  6. Finally, on the community level: for all its chaos, danger, and opportunities for exploitation, the sea brings people together. John writes from the island of Patmos to churches in seven cities in Asia Minor, the western coastal region of what’s now Turkey. In a region defined by mountains and archipelagos, travel by sea is often much easier than travel by land, and the sea connects John to these small communities scattered in different cities around the area. In the new creation, though, God brings a new and holy city out of heaven, in which they all will dwell. The Church that has been scattered throughout the world is reunited in one place. The Church that has communicated through letters sent across the sea can now live together, face to face.

To be reunited in that heavenly city, living in a community of love with one another and with God, with chaos and empire conquered, with ritual impurity gone forever, is the greatest joy the angels can show to John.

Although, for my part, I think I’d still probably miss the seagulls.