Be Reasonable

This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, October 1, 2023, drawing from Revelation 7:9-17 and Matthew 5:1-12

Revelation 7:9-17 (NRSVUE)

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb!”

And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing,

“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

For this reason they are before the throne of God and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

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Matthew 5:1-12

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

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Sermon: "Be Reasonable"

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to most folks by now, but I think it’s fair to admit that I can be a profoundly weird person, from time to time.

It’s true!

But when I say “weird,” I’m not just referring to my many geeky interests, or my propensity for including deep-cut Star Trek references into my sermons, or anything like that; no, my weirdness, like a lot of us, is as much an issue of perspective as anything else.

Like a good number of people, I am by nature a very solution-focused thinker, someone who loves the intricacies of critical thinking, problem solving, and finding innovative, interesting, and above all weird solutions to otherwise unsolvable problems.

As an adult of course, a propensity for out-of-the-box thinking is often thought of as a positive, but what most business-minded people rarely realize is that the metaphorical “box” contains the full measure of everything we might consider sensible, logical, or even rational.

So it shouldn't come as anything even approaching a surprise for you to hear that the two words most commonly directed at me in exasperation tend to be, "Be reasonable!"

When I was a kid, I had an insane idea or a ridiculous suggestion for absolutely everything. For example, I once suggested to my parents that we could solve the problem of my sisters and I being regularly late for school by replacing all our breakfast food with chocolate. I mean, not only would it motivate us all to get right out of bed, but the sugar rush would carry us at least through the end of first period! It just made sense!

But, to no one's surprise but my own… they didn't go for it.

"Be reasonable," my father said, sitting down to explain things to me, "Sure it might help in one way, but if you look at the bigger picture, it would do more harm than good. It would be unreasonable."

This is how I first came to understand just what the terms "reasonable" and "unreasonable" actually meant; by making wild suggestions again, and again, and again, and finding that boundary line, that place where my own, childish perceptions of reality came at right-angles to the ordered, sensible, reasonable lines of the rational, adult world.

In the beginning- not long after the "candy for breakfast incident, really - I had come to understand the word "reasonable" as having a fairly simple, clear meaning. Experience had thus far taught me that something being "reasonable" was not unlike something being "logical," meaning that a reasonable decision would be one that was clear and obvious, which flowed naturally and understandably from the current state of affairs. Reasonable, I thought, meant moderate, restrained, even sober-minded; the sort of thing which would produce a clear positive in a cost-benefit analysis, something with many easily definable "pros" and only a few obvious "cons."

But in time I started to notice that the definition of "reasonable" seemed to change, depending on who I was talking to. My parents, for example, might have found it wildly unreasonable for me to be 5 minutes late for school in the morning, only for my teacher to suggest that a little tardiness wasn’t, as I had been taught, the end of the world. My elementary school math teacher might suggest that a late homework assignment was unforgivably unreasonable, while the art teacher not only encouraged the occasional late work, but actively allowed us to miss a few assignments without any ill effect on our grades.

And that's not even mentioning my most dear and beloved college professor, who once allowed me to turn in an assignment three years late - but that’s a story for another day!

And then, one Sunday, the fresh-faced new pastor of the church our family had attended for years, gave a sermon on the Christian calling to have “compassion” for “the least of these.” Like many sermons given in the 90’s by young pastors flirting with the temptations of power offered by a charismatic homiletic paired with the power-hungry political mindset of evangelical theology, it was delivered with a great vagueness of language, suggesting not necessarily a solution per se, but merely the vague and unfocused, passive-voice conviction that the poor should be welcomed.

After the service, brimming with that hilarious cocktail of youthful exuberance and that bubbling temptation to constantly solve problems, I came up to one of the elders of our church, someone I had sung with in the church choir for a few years, someone with whom I had a very good relationship; an elder who had very much taken me under his wing, as elders should in church, and I asked him, point blank;

“If we’re supposed to welcome the poor, the outcast, the oppressed, the homeless, the suffering, and all the least of these, why don’t we just…do that? We’re a reasonably wealthy church, why don’t we rent a van every Sunday morning, drive it down to the homeless encampments in the poorer sections of town, and invite people in for a warm meal and some fellowship? Why don’t we actually do something?”

And I'll never forget how that church elder turned to me with a little, condescending chuckle, and presented me with those same two words I had heard so often before, shining now in confusing newness;

"Be reasonable"

I was so confused! I had thought I was being reasonable, taking our wealth and applying it directly to the problem, using what we had to live into exactly who the bible, who Jesus himself was calling us to be made manifest in gloriously helpful action! What could be more reasonable than that?

But as he walked away, smugly confident in the rightness of his polite dismissal, I came to realize something that I probably should have realized sooner; there is no fixed constant as to what is truly "reasonable." "Reasonableness," I learned in that moment, is an institutional quality, a sort of social construct.

"Reasonableness" is often just the boundary condition of privilege, a wall built by those in power to protect themselves from the terrible realization that the great power and unending work of the Holy Spirit is not perfected in the halls of strength and power, but on the tarnished floors and cardboard-box shelters of weakness and suffering.

And as shocking of a realization as this was to me, in time I began to see that this understanding of what is reasonable was echoing all around me, resounding even from the pages of history itself!

After all, only a couple of centuries ago, slavery was considered entirely reasonable, by both the church and society at large.

And after that changed, it was only reasonable for the government to enforce segregation based on race.

And even as that ended, our society though it was only reasonable for marriage to be restricted to people of the same race, and to deny marriage to couples of different races.

And even then, while I was a church-loving youth, it was still considered reasonable for people to be ostracized and condemned for their sexuality or gender identity.

And that’s not even counting our treatment of prisoners, demonization of the poor, hateful treatment of immigrants and refugees; oppression on top of oppression on top of oppression, all couched in the comforting robes of the reasonable.

And as I looked closer, I even found this sense of reasonableness staring accusingly back from the pages of the Bible itself.

Take today’s passage from Revelation, for example. I know we like to get down on prosperity gospel preachers and the like for taking single verses wildly out of their larger context, but the truth is that a lot of how we tend to use the Bible ourselves comes from a very similar place. You see, the Bible we have in our homes, or that we pick up from the pews when we come to church on Sunday, is a very neatly divided text. It’s divided evenly into chapters, and each chapter has a number of different clearly separated sections, each with nice headers to indicate when the previous passage has ended and a new passage begins. Our English bibles are clearly broken up into nice, reasonable, bite-size bits for easy reading and, to be honest, easy sermon writing.

But the truth is that the original text wasn’t written like that at all! Not only are none of these neat little section headers in the original text, but the original text didn’t even have chapters or verses! Each book was written as an independent piece that was meant to be understood as a single, intricately interconnected narrative, with each new sentence resting in comfortable connection with everything that existed on the page before it.

And nowhere is it more intricate than in Revelation, St. John of Patmos’ absurd fever-dream which, whether you take it as the literal recounting of an actual metaphysical experience, or just a bit of fiction written to make a powerfully prophetic point, is all about a series deeply, even intimately-connected prophetic events.

So when we get to this bit here in today’s passage, with the white-robed multitude coming out of nowhere in praise and worship of God, it’s kinda weird how we tend to treat it as a fun little aside; a nice, quick, little shout-out to the suffering and the oppressed in between the far greater, more powerful works of the angels and elders standing around the throne and overseeing the end of all things like a crowd of middle-managers at a construction site.

But remember what I just said; none of these passages were meant to exist in isolation.

In the passage just before this one, we had this angel rise directly out of the sun, setting the Divine seal upon a very specific number of people from each of the tribes of Israel. This angel is just one of the many servants of God we see in Revelation, much like the elders themselves. And while we like to assume that this angel is operating on direct instructions from the Almighty, there’s no mention of that in the text at all No instructions given, no command offered, just an angel operating independently based on their own, personal understanding of who God is, and what God wants.

And when we see this angel’s understanding turn to action, we get the presentation of a very sensible, very reasonable decision about just who God might want to see robed in glory before the throne. We get a crisp, clean twelve thousand picked from each of the twelve tribes, and it's all very neat, clean, and tidy. 144,000; a number so perfect and precise that it's formed the basis for everything from cults to television shows.

But then, like an open-invite backyard BBQ gone sideways, who actually turns up before the throne to answer the Divine invitation is, "… a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.”

Take note of what exactly happened here; the angel makes their rationalized, reasonable, selection, but when God moves into action something totally different happens instead; the gates of heaven are thrown open wide, and we get to see that the true selection of the Almighty bears no resemblance to the sign’d, sealed, rational and reasonable selections made by angles and elders alike.

The elders, the angels, and all these various…creatures…gathered around the throne are standing like they own the place, firm and complacent in their own righteousness. You can almost feel the self-righteous confidence, that sense of security that comes from being in the “inner circle,” just radiating off the page like a Great Value brand knockoff of God's true and perfect, self-sacrificial love.

For seven and a half chapters, we’ve been taking the divinity and wisdom of the entire divine council for granted, utterly convinced that these select few gathered in righteousness must therefore know God best, must be the best measure of what is right, and true, and reasonable before the throne.

And most of us never question it, we don't even see it; at least, not until the multitude rock up with their white robes hanging on bent and emaciated bodies, clothed in resplendent glory to cover up a lifetime of scars. Here is where we find the truly poor in spirit, those who know mourning as a lifelong friend, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, and all those who have lived with a gasping hunger and thirst for righteousness.

And in verse 10, the only words that come out of the mouths of the many-beattitude’d masses, is to declare with bold and unrepentant praise the utter failure of the angel’s declaration of a numbered. measured, reasonable salvation, saying:

"Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb!"

Not to the angel haphazardly choosing twelve thousand from the tribes of one single people, not to the great indistinct gathering of elders ruling with their own muted understanding of divine authority, not to the kings and princes of men who have spent the lifetime of the universe drawing lines to demarcate the saved from the damned;

But to God, and to the Lamb.

And in this one moment of unyielding glory, in pure action made manifest without so much of a whisper, that salvation is not given to any reasonably selected group formed by sensible, rational criteria or the wise reasonings of angels and elders, but to the untold masses of those who have suffered, those who have lived lives of hunger, thirst, scorching heat and the sting of persecution.

In this moment, we see the fulfilment of the Gospel made purely and perfectly real. We see the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and all those who hunger, thirst, and face persecution for righteousness being blessed by God, chosen by the Almighty creator over and above every more reasonable suggestion ever made by the elders and angels in the divine council.

We see the promise of the beatitudes fulfilled as all the metrics of the reasonable are ignored in favor of a wild, unrestrained, and unreasonable love.

One of the things that kinda sucks about being a progressive pastor, particularly one with a penchant for the prophetic, is that far more times than I would like my sermons have a lot more “afflict the comfortable” than they do “comfort the afflicted.” You get into this line of work because you want to show God’s love in glorious, practical action, but the nature of the world we’ve been presented with is such that the most loving thing a preacher can typically do is to speak that uncomfortable truth to power, to boldly declare God’s justice in an unjust world – or at least to screech haphazardly against the rising tides of hatred and indifference that wash over us all.

But today the message is as simple as it is glorious; be unreasonable. Be wild with your compassion, be uncompromising with your mercy, be absolutely feral with grace, and be unyielding with your love. And yes, the world will dismiss you as unreasonable, ignore you, persecute you, and cast you aside. They will tell stories of your absurdity, justify your expulsion and exclusion by saying that you could not be convinced to simply be reasonable, and they will be correct.

It is unreasonable to expect the poor in spirit to inherit the entire kingdom of God.

It is unreasonable to expect all those who mourn to be comforted.

It is unreasonable to expect the meek to inherit the earth.

It is unreasonable to expect that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled.

It is unreasonable to expect that that the merciful will be shown mercy, or the pure in heart given the privilege of seeing God firsthand.

It is unreasonable to expect that peacemakers, not warmongers, will be lifted up as children of the Most High God.

And it is unreasonable to expect that those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness will inherit the kingdom of heaven.

But we follow in the footsteps of an unreasonable Creator.

So be unreasonable. Live unreasonably. Love unreasonably, and accept happily the world’s consequences because in the end, none of that matters.

Because it wasn’t the handful of elders who were chosen by God to be robed in resplendent white and, nor was it the limited orders of angels, or the perfect 144,000 meticulously selected from an already limited few. It was the great multitude, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, who had endured suffering for their unreasonable righteousness.

The fulfillment of the beatitudes, the blessing given to all who struggle and suffer, all who mourn, all those whose spirits suffer, all those who are meek, weak, and hurting, and everyone who takes the risk and bears the consequences of mercy, justice, peace, and God’s true righteousness, is this:

“They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."”

So my friends, never allow yourselves to be constrained by the reasonableness of the world, but live your lives in pursuit of our merciful, loving, and above all unreasonable God.

Amen.