Rev. 7: 9-17
9 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. 10 They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Svation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”11 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, 12 singing,“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
13 Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” 14 I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that 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. 15 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. 16 They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat; 17 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.”
I invite you to help me start this message by reading with me the vision statement of Zion Mennonite Church, printed in your bulletin: Zion Mennonite Church covenants to grow together as a Christ-centered community, extending our Anabaptist branch into our world, bearing the lasting fruit of discipleship, and planting the seeds of God’s reign through hospitality, service, and reconciliation with God and others.
As I’ve shared earlier, I hope to focus and teach some this year on that phrase, “reconciliation with God and others.” But first a warning: What about Uncle Gilbert? You know, the family member whom you don’t want to invite to Thanksgiving dinner, but you feel you should, even though he might show up drunk, again, or he might bring up the most awkward topics and go on about the most outrageous politics and conspiracy theories, again. And if he shows up, Aunt Ethel insists that she won’t. You’ve tried your best to, as the Bible puts it, “Be at peace with all people,” and to apply the best of your nonviolent conflict resolution tactics to Uncle Gilbert’s provocations, but Gilbert doesn’t reciprocate. Does that mean that you’re a failure at reconciliation? If we think of reconciliation as just a state of grace to arrive at, rather than a lifelong journey, we’re setting ourselves up for shame and unnecessary guilt.
For we’re all in the same boat with the tensions, estrangements, absences and gaps in our families and communities. Even in the best of our relationships, there are times in which we are awkward strangers to each other, for so often are we strangers to ourselves. Those distances and differences within us and between us, great and small, seem to mock the longing that God gave us for union and communion, to know and to be known, to love and to be loved, which come from the very nature of God himself, and from God’s love and longing for us. They make it harder than we think it should be, to follow Jesus’ command to love one another even as he loved us, and to be reconciled one to another.
But take hope. The image in John’s Revelation, of that throng around the throne that cannot be numbered, of worshipers from among every tribe, tongue and nation, tells us that reconciliation is God’s great game plan for a fallen and divided world, split and spoiled by sin. But that leaves begging the first question in the sermon outline: “What do we mean by ‘reconciliation?’ Biblically speaking, I mean? The Merriam/Webster dictionary defines reconciliation as, “the act of causing two people or groups to become friendly again after an argument or disagreement.” That alone is wonderful, whenever it happens.
But biblical reconciliation is more bold and gutsy than that. The prophet’s picture of a great cosmic, intertribal reconciliation that we just heard from John’s Revelation is an Easter season passage, because biblical reconciliation has everything to do with resurrection. Reconciliation, in the Bible, is God resurrecting good and godly things that have died in our relationships. It is not the resurrection of relationships themselves, because even hatred, fear, ignorance and indifference are still relationships. They’re just bad relationships. But good things within relationships can suffer, struggle and even die. Like love. Or trust. Or affection, safety, understanding or respect. When God brings those things back to life in a relationship, then you have biblical reconciliation. So again, Biblical reconciliation is when God, by his grace, resurrects good and godly things in our relationships, by raising up good and godly things in us.
As for the next question in the outline: What 2 kinds of reconciliation does Rev. 7: 9-17 display? In John’s wonderful picture of the throng around the throne from every tribe, tongue and nation, we see, first of all, our reconciliation with God, expressed through worship. Yes, worship is an experience and an expression of reconciliation with God. By worshiping God we proclaim that we are reconciled to our role and our place in the cosmos, that we are reconciled with the fact that God alone is God, and not we. Therefore we are not to be worshiped, but to be worshipers. That’s a hard one for us sons and daughters of Adam, ever since we were first tempted with the false promise that we “can be like God.” When we worship God in Spirit and in truth, we are responding in good and godly ways to God’s initiative to reconcile with us, and we are expressing our reconciliation with God as God, on God’s terms.
The second kind of reconciliation we see in this throng around the throne is reconciliation between and among people. And between people groups, as a result of Christian witness, Christian mission. Christian mission is about new personal conversions, yes, because God cares about people. But Christian mission is also just as much about creating new communities and new relationships out of formerly estranged peoples, because God cares just as much about people groups, as about persons. God cares as much about relationships as about the people who relate. That’s why, two decades ago, the motto of one Mennonite mission agency was, “Out of many peoples one new people.”
But why am I talking about Christian mission today, when John’s Revelation is a book of prophecy? That brings me to the third question in the outline: Is John’s vision of reconciliation to be fulfilled in the future, or now?
Yes. This vision is for the future, but also for the present. Thirty years ago, a Mennonite missionary couple were living in one of the hottest and poorest parts of Burkina Faso, in West Africa, not far from the Sahara Desert. They were learning the complicated, tonal language of the Tagba people. When the task looked the most hopeless, the heat was the most oppressive, and the living conditions were the most taxing, Kathy, the wife’s name was, said, “John’s image of that throng around the throne from every tribe worshiping in every language is what keeps me going in times like this. It tells me that there will be Tagba worshipers there.
And now there are Tagba worshipers in a Tagba Mennonite church. And their pastor is from another neighboring tribe, in fact, a related tribe from which they split many centuries ago, probably for reasons of conflict. Think of reconciliation as the future invading the present.
This helps me think about last Sunday’s Christian Education class on The Doctrine of Discovery, by Jennifer Delanty, and Iris de Leon’s sermon about it. They are part of an inter-Mennonite working group trying to dismantle that doctrine, and to educate the church about it, and detach us from it. If you weren’t here, the Doctrine of Discovery is a 500 year-old religious and legal framework that encourages and allows Western, historically Christian, nations to colonize the lands of historically non-Christian peoples in Asia, Africa and the Americas. It led to some terrible things, like genocide, sometimes, in the name of Christ. It still lives on today and makes it legal to displace Native peoples all around the world in order to get at their forests, their farmlands, their fishing grounds, and the minerals underneath their homes.
Since then, a few people have said to me, “That history of colonization and the genocide of Native peoples was terrible, alright. But what do we do about it now, except feel guilty for something we didn’t personally do? We can’t undo the past; so what’s my responsibility in all this? Do I give back the farm, or the house? If so, to whom?” If you wondered that too, then you were not alone.
Good questions. I wrestle with that, too. From my years teaching 2nd through 4th grades at a Native American- run school in Minnesota, called, “The Red School House,” I got the impression that my Native friends and colleagues weren’t so mad at the fact that Europeans came to North America. The contact between the cultures and the continents was going to happen sometime. And hospitality is a crucial virtue for them. It was in the way so many of the Europeans came that injured them. So often they came as conquerors of the land and the people. They felt entitled to mastery and ownership of this continent, believing they were more advanced, virtuous and civilized than the people they found here. That’s what I was taught in grade school. And so we missed the chance at something truly wonderful and beautiful: to combine the best of our cultures and our worlds into something better than what either society had known before.
There were a few times that both groups came close to making something beautiful happen together. My friends at Red School House spoke of how much better the French related to their ancestors than did the British, the Spanish or the Americans. Some of them even had French names from a family history of intermarriage.
And there was the community of Gnadenhutten, Ohio, where there lived, worked and worshiped in the late 18th Century people of German and British background, and Natives of the Delaware and Mahican tribes, together, peacefully, cooperatively, as members of the Moravian Church. Of all the Christian missionaries at the time, the Moravians were the most humble and respectful toward Natives and their cultures. They learned their languages so well that their dictionaries and grammars of Native languages are still in use today. They lived with them and often as them. The Moravians did not think that an Indian had to become white in order to become Christian. In many ways, the Moravian missionaries became Native.
But the peaceful Moravian Indians got caught in the middle of the American Revolution. The British and their Indian allies distrusted them, and pressured them to join the fight against the Americans. Which they refused to do. Then, one terrible day in March, 1782, they were attacked and massacred by an American militia from Pennsylvania seeking revenge for the raids they had suffered. The peaceful, Moravian Christian Indians were not guilty of this, but they were the first the militia could find, and 90 of them died that day at their hands. That brought a sudden halt to the interest of Native peoples in the gospel for quite some time. When talking with government agents or Christian missionaries, they would often refer to what happened at Gnadenhutten and ask, “Why should we trust you?”
There’s still a chapel on that site, and in it is the Moravian symbol of a lamb surrounded by the words, “Our Lamb Has Conquered; Let us Follow.” That refers to Christ, the Lamb on the throne in today’s Bible reading, surrounded by the innumerable throng of the redeemed from every tribe, tongue and nation. That throng would include the Delaware and Mahican nations.
“Gnadenhutten” is German for “shelters of grace.” I recommend that Moravian church chapel as a place of pilgrimage to go, remember and think about the America that could have been, had Europeans and Native Americans been able to combine, unhindered, the best of their worlds under the shelter of God’s grace, and the guidance of the gospel.
But since reconciliation is the resurrection of good and godly things that have died in our relationships, there is yet life in the seed of that Moravian Indian and Euro-American church and community, ready to sprout, grow and bear fruit again. What died in the massacre at Gnadenhutten, Ohio, can live again, by the resurrecting grace of God.
Which brings me to the first of the three ways we might live into our glorious reconciliation future here and now (that’s question #4): One: let’s trust God to give us do-overs wherever and whenever we and our ancestors have failed; let’s pray, watch and wait on God for chances to get it more right than we have done before. After all, isn’t that what we mean by grace?
We don’t have to go far nor wait long for such opportunities. One of the biggest groups of Native people among us and around us is the Hispanic community. Yes, many of them come from Mexico or Central America. But they and their cultures are also partly or mostly Native to this hemisphere. Many of them even speak Native Central American languages like Nahuatl or Tepic in their homes. Through our relationship with Maranatha Ministries in Mexico, we have contributed to the training of Indigenous Christian leaders of the Kora tribe in their mother tongue.
Anything we can do to help them be at home on this part of their Native continent is wonderful, such as teaching English or taking people who can’t get drivers’ licenses to doctors’ appointments. But for such relationships to be reconciliation, rather than just charity, there must be the second thing I have in mind: interdependence, by our listening as well as speaking, by our learning, as well as teaching, by our receiving as well as giving, so that the blessings, the benefits, the honor, love and dignity flow both ways. That takes humility. And repentance from the attitudes of racial mastery, superiority and entitlement we may have been taught from our earliest years.
While I was an Elementary Ed teacher at that Native-run school, my life was blessed and enriched by so many of the things they taught me. Like tapping maple trees for syrup at their annual early spring campouts at a grove outside town. Learning the names in the Ojibwe language for animals and plants made the map of the Great Lakes region come alive with meaning for me. Again, a second way we live this great cosmic reconciliation out now with other people and other cultures is by doing so humbly and interdependently, as learners and receivers, as well as teachers and givers.
Which brings me to the third way we can live into God’s glorious reconciliation future here and now, especially with our Native friends and neighbors: that whatever our ethnic family background, that we become more Native wherever it is that God plants us. That’s what missionaries to other cultures learn to do. No, not in the sense that we become wannabes play-acting at being Indians, like I’ve seen at Indian Pow Wows, when perfect strangers leave the stands and sit down around the drum uninvited, because they think that all there is to it is just keeping time. That’s disrespectful.
But even if our heritage goes back to Switzerland or Japan, now that we’re here, are there things we can yet learn from the people and cultures who preceded us, so we might live more respectfully and lovingly on the land, and with each other? In the creation care class I did last winter, we compared and contrasted the Bible’s values about land, creation, nature and human nature, and compared them with the mainstream modern, western, secular outlook, and again with the Native values and beliefs.
The Bible had critiques and corrections to make of both cultures. But in some cases, we saw that certain Native values were actually closer to the Bible than the western, modern secular worldview. For example, my culture glamorizes youth. Native culture honors age, and the wisdom of the years. So does the Bible. I grew up thinking that self-fulfillment and personal achievement were the goal of my existence and the proof of my worth; but one poster at the school said, “We honor people for what they do for the community, and for the generations to come.” So do the Scriptures. I grew up thinking that land belongs to people; Native Americans tend to say, “The land belongs to the Creator, and we belong to the land.” That could have come out of the Old Testament.
There was a recent article in the Oregonian about “forest farming,” in which fruit or nut trees, berries, mushrooms and edible tubers are grown together in a kind of plant community that can almost run itself forever. They called it “a new experiment in farming,” But that was how Natives managed much of North and South America, for themselves and for the animals they hunted. To walk from the Atlantic Coast to the Kansas was like walking through a supermarket full of free food. Our European ancestors only thought they were settling an untouched wilderness because they came in 5-10 years after smallpox and cholera decimated the Natives and undid all those centuries of wisdom and work with the land. In this day of climate chaos and environmental degradation, we could stand to go back and look for some of that Native wisdom about the land was overlooked and discarded.
Such wisdom is still around, to find and to learn, so that we can at least move in the direction of being more the Natives who love and live humbly and harmoniously with the land on which we now live. That was one thing we can do. But first, let/s trust the God who resurrected Jesus to resurrect the beautiful and beloved community of different tribes, tongues and nations that died in places like Gnadenhutten. Because such reconciliation is God’s great game plan for Creation, beginning with us, the church. And secondly, let’s live into that future interdependently with others, with humility, by listening, as well as talking, by learning as well as teaching, by receiving as well as giving.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “We are not all guilty, but we are all responsible.” And that fills in the blanks of Question #5: “We are not all guilty, but all of us are responsible.” All of us, everywhere on the planet, are born into morally and spiritually compromised histories and heritages of conflict and trauma, by no choice of our own. That’s another reason why we so desperately need the Savior and Mediator, Jesus Christ. No one here is guilty of the massacres at Gnadenhutten, Sand Creek or Wounded Knee; Feeling guilt for something we didn’t do does not help us do anything worthwhile with the wreckage of the past. Shame only paralyzes us and makes us repeat the things we feel shame about. But we are responsible in that we are “accountable for our response” because God has made us “able to respond,” and God is giving opportunities to respond to his extravagant, undeserved grace to reconcile with himself and others. God’s grace gives us chances and makes us able to do better than what was done before.
Like the chance that came to a Mennonite pastor of the Northern Cheyenne Nation of Montana, Joe Walks Along. Joe was a veteran of the Korean War. Because the Chinese Army entered that war and killed many of his friends, Joe lived with fear, loathing and resentment against everyone and everything Chinese. But one day, as a Pastor, Joe was serving communion at the close of a Mennonite conference. Next to him, also serving communion, was a Mennonite pastor of Chinese ethnicity. Joe felt such great turmoil in his soul that he wanted to leave. Instead, he turned and embraced the very surprised man with one, long hug. A dam holding back all the trauma and grief in Joe’s soul broke, and tears gushed forth for some time before Joe could tell the Chinese pastor why he had hugged him, and what it meant for him to do so. Instead of just serving communion, they were demonstrating it. Such reconciliation, we confessed, is the concluding phrase of Zion’s vision statement, which invites us to, “reconciliation with God and others.”