Revelation Chapter 9

Pentecost 9 year C Sermon 

The fifth angel… sounds his trumpet…
and John of Patmos sees a star…fallen from the sky
with the key to the shaft of the Abyss.

And when he unlocks the Abyss…smoke rises
as from a giant furnace… darkening the sun and the sky.

Did you notice this very week in 2013… how the fifth angel …
the one with a key to the abyss…opened it again…

exposing yet another veiled and evil power…
when a terrible monster…
was spewed out of the abyss…
writhing and screaming into the purifying light
where everyone on earth could see…

The 2013 angel… paid for it with his life… [pause]

Street march slide

The first turn of the key to the shaft of the abyss was this …
a man named George…whose ability to make good decisions was crippled by fear…

well…George…shot and killed a beautiful boy…
named Trayvon

riot slide

The second turn of the key…
the one that actually opened the Abyss…
was when a jury acquitted the shooter …
because the boy’s hoodie… and colour …
would have scared them too…

Trayvon slide

The boy who died… was part of the youth group
of the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Florida…not far from where my mother lives…

He was a volunteer of over six hundred hours of
service to his community. At college he was an honours student with an A average…
about to go to uni on a scholarship…
he was friend and a beloved son… [opening the Abyss]

Opening the Abyss… this angel paid for it with his life…
and his killer…though acquitted…and free
will pay for it… for the rest of his life…

Both of them…victims of the monster...which emerged from the Abyss…one of the many powers and principalities normally hidden deep in the abyss of the human heart…
and now unleashed across a continent

What is the monster…this evil… do you suppose…
how would you name it?

[ask]

Blank title slide

In the Revelation of John of Patmos…
a vision is given
to bring comfort to those suffering oppression and persecution and death… at the hands of the Roman and Parthian Empires

and today in Chapter nine we’re reminded once again…
that for evil to be defeated…it must be named for what it is …cast out of the Abyss… and exposed to the light…

and in John’s vision…when the monster emerges through the smoke of the Abyss…it’s our worst nightmare…

Horrible creatures…
with the power to torment human beings so terribly …
they longed for death… as a release.

John knows we’re created in the image of God…
to reflect our wise and loving creator…
and that somehow… in our desire to play God …
our hearts are full of rebellion
and now he sees…it’s is true at a cosmic level…as well.

Though created good… and loved by God…
the world now harbours such anti-creation destructiveness...
that in order to be dealt with…sooner or later…
it must be allowed to come out in the open…
to show its true colours.

Black hole

The Abyss…
like a black hole in modern astrophysics …
is a place of anti-creation, anti-matter…
destruction and chaos.  And our collective and personal abyss… contains everything opposed to God…
to love and compassion and mercy and justice and peace…

And most of the time we don’t even know it’s there.

Didn’t Jesus teach us… that all kinds of wickedness…
come smoking from the depths of the human heart…
… to the surprise and horror… of those who would be ritually and religiously pure?


didn’t he tell us in the book of Mark…
it’s what comes out of us that defiles us.
when he said For it’s out of a person’s heart…
that evil thoughts and actions come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.

And so in John’s vision…out of the abyss
these torturing creatures are released…

Locust slide

It’s the stuff of horror films.

We can only assume John’s revelation was given to produce in his readers and in us…our worst nightmares.
And John lavishes more detail…on the super-locusts in Chapter nine…than any other creature in his vision.

And many modern readers…struck by the almost
mechanical appearance of these locust-like creatures…
see in them… a modern military machine.

Helicopter slide

Like a helicopter…

And this is so typical…of trying to tie down John’s symbolism
and domesticate it.

Remember what we learned last week…
three things to help keep…our heads and our faith strong…
as we read this part of revelation
one… the seriousness of sin…
two… never mistake symbolism for reality…
and three… remember the purpose of the plagues of Egypt …when God calls for repentance…
from those who oppress and exploit
God’s people in slavery

Locust slide

But now in John’s vision…the locusts are torturing and eating human beings … heavily armoured…striking under strict limitations…
not to harm the earth’s vegetation… as they normally would …nor those with God’s seal…just every one else.

In Hebrew…the name of the locust king means
place of destruction… and in Greek…the destroyer…

But there is no death for those who are attacked…
that would be too easy… it seems only suffering…
will bring about the rock bottom of repentance
that God requires.

And here in chapter 9 of Revelation…just as in Egypt…
instead of repenting… the people harden their hearts.

And more monsters… are disgorged from the abyss.

Horses slide

Horses with lion’s heads… spewing smoke and fire and sulphur with tails like snakes…

with riders in heavy armour… [pause]

drought slide

a third of humanity dies at their hand… [pause]

And still the rest….will not repent
of the work of their hands;

They continue to worship demons… and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood—idols that can’t see or hear or walk. Nor do they repent of their killing…
their magic arts, their sexual objectification of others…
nor taking what doesn’t belong to them… [pause]

And once more the inscrutability of evil
and how God exposes and deals with it…
leaves us breathless… and perhaps dismayed… [pause]

But in chapter eight…we already learned
not to down-play… the seriousness of sin.

Nor make the same mistake as those in John’s vision…
who refuse to repent… [pause]

Seven seals

Like the first Christian’s…we too have seen terrible
things in our day…monsters designed to kill...
and destroy and strike terror in the human heart.

My favourite Biblical Scholar Tom Wright suggests
‘perhaps such machines do come from the bottomless pit under the direction of Apolyon the destroyer’

In the first century and today…
one way the powers and principalities opposed to God operate… is to play on people’s fears…
their king is the father of lies…
Christian’s are not deaf to their whispers…

They work to stimulate jealously and envy…hatred and suspicion… to arouse in us a constant sense of threat…
…they encourage us… to see others
who are made in the image of God… as our enemy….

some of you experienced this…in the first world war
with the holocaust…and the demonization of the Jews…others of us who grew up during the cold war…heard our leaders demonise the Russians and the communists…we saw in the war in Iraq…in such a way that a burka causes us to  pass to the other side of the road.

We see it right down through the idolatries of history…
Whenever people worship power over compassion,
war over peace,
and greed over economic and environmental justice. [pause]

You know my friends…it seems we only repent of the things we don’t worship. And in John’s vision…
what the unrepentant worship…only brings them torment
…in the end.

Revelation slide

If the book of Revelation teaches us anything…
for evil to be conquered…whether it’s our own petty jealousy or the ravaging of creation by greed…
sin must be exposed for what it is…
so God’s will to be done on earth.

And terrible though these monsters are…
throughout John’s vision…we see the power of the abyss
is limited…The lion and the lamb remain sovereign…

Two questions for us this week…

Are we willing through prayer and surrender…
to allow God into our own abyss…
to expose our idolatries and our self-deceptions and repent of them.

And are we willing as Jesus followers…
to name and expose…those unjust and bloodthirsty
anti-creation…powers and principalities

that hold our world in bondage?