After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” 11 All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying: “Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!” 13 Then one of the elders asked me, “These in white robes—who are they, and where did they come from?” 14 I answered, “Sir, you know.” And he said, “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. 15 Therefore, “they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. 16 ‘Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them,’ nor any scorching heat. 17 For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; ‘he will lead them to springs of living water.’ ‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’ (Rev. 7: 9-17)
Why, the nerve of John the Revelator! What was he smoking, we might ask, that he would claim to foresee a throng of worshipers around the throne of Jesus, The Lamb, a throng so big that it can’t be counted, from every tribe, tongue and nation on earth, when the church in John’s day was so young, so tiny, so fragile, so vulnerable to massive, overwhelming threats on all sides? He had this vision while he was in exile, for his faith, on a remote prison island in the Mediterranean Sea.
On top of that, divisions, false teachings, immorality and power abuses were already seducing and troubling the new church. You can read about them in the first few chapters of John’s Revelation, in the words of Jesus to the seven churches of the province of Asia. If anyone had then posed the question, “Will the church survive or die?” the safe betting money would say, “It’s as good as dead, before it has hardly even gotten off the ground.”
That very question gets posed a lot today. Just Google the words, “Will the Church die?” and articles pop up saying, Yes, first in Europe, especially England, where the latest statistics predict that in the year 2059 the Church of England will baptize the last baby born into one of its families.
Our own young denomination is also shedding numbers, churches and members. As are many of our conferences and congregations. This is happening to most mainstream churches and denominations of mostly middle-and-upper-class white European American background.
But just when they were printing up the signs that say, “The last one leaving the cathedral please turn out the lights,” in German, French, Dutch and Swedish, some new worshipers and seekers have started to show up: immigrants and refugees. Even, some immigrants and refugees of Muslim background. They didn’t miss the fact that the people who drove them out of their home countries were fellow Muslims, while the people who most warmly welcomed them into the new countries are Christians: the very people they had been taught to fear and to hate. The same is happening here in North America: immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers are most likely to provide the new faces in old churches, or to start and grow new churches.
Look at the wider world, and you see something more like what we just heard from John the Revelator’s vision: amazing church growth today in Africa and Asia, especially in China. There are also rumblings of underground church growth in the Muslim Middle East, where Christian guest workers from Africa, the Philippines and South Korea are worshiping together, and may be having an effect on their Muslim employers. In terms of the sheer spread of the church worldwide, and its stunning, growing diversity in language, culture and color, this is the time for which our grandparents prayed, and toward which they gave and sent family members and friends as mission workers. So in the bigger, global picture, I’m not worried about the church dying anytime soon. John’s Revelation, chapter 7, looks not just like prophecy, but like current events.
Except in this respect: We read about these Christians in John’s vision, that, 16 ‘Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them,’ nor any scorching heat…. ‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’ That does not sound like any church, nor any Christians that I know of, here and now. If anything, today’s amazingly growing global church is also experiencing an alarming growth in persecution, such that even non-religious organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations, and columnists like Nick Kristof in the New York Times, are taking notice and calling it barbaric and catastrophic. On top of that, most of the world’s church growth is happening in poorer countries where hunger, climate change, corruption and civil conflict are causing great suffering, homelessness and migration for all, Christians included. The beautiful comforting words of Revelation chapter 7 do not describe any Christian, nor any church, in any country today, no matter how prosperous their country might be.
John’s vision is about the church which has “come through the Great Tribulation.” The “Great Tribulation” there is not to be understood as a final hyper-stage of global cataclysms in some schedule or scheme of end times events like in the Left Behind series, or one of the last chapters of a Hal Lindsey book and movie about the End Times. If anyone were to tell the churches of China, the former Soviet Union, in countries run by Islamic law, by corrupt dictatorships, or experiencing civil war, like in the Democratic Republic of Congo, “Don’t worry about the Great Tribulation because we’ll get raptured out of this world before it happens,” they would ask us, “What have you been smoking? When have we not been in ‘The Great Tribulation?’” John’s phrase, “The Great Tribulation,” is a description of life for the church in this world, here and now. If that sounds strange, just go on the next tour of the US/Mexico border with Mennonite Central Committee. Or go next year to Burkina Faso for the 40th anniversary of the Mennonite Church there, and you’ll see that for most of the world church, poverty, persecution, violence, corruption, political and social chaos and oppression, in short, “The Great Tribulation,” have long been the rule, not the exception.
And even for us in the prosperous, powerful West with 1500 years of mainstream Christian culture and Christendom, we cannot escape the common human trials and tribulations of illness, chronic disease, aging, family tensions and struggles, death, dying and bewildering social change. So John’s vision applies to the church on the other side of death and dying: as John puts it, “Those who have come through the Great Tribulation,” all those who have been faithful through life and death to Christ and the Gospel.
So there’s another reason why I do not worry about the death of the church: most of the church is dead already, and quite happy about it. When you count all the churches and believers who have ever lived anytime, anywhere, past, present and future, you realize that the church that is ever and always worshiping in the New Jerusalem, safely beyond the reach of temptation, suffering, persecution, and death, far outnumbers the earthly church that has gathered today to worship all around the world. The church that is yet worshiping this side of the New Jerusalem is only a tiny minority compared to the church that we just heard about in John’s Revelation. Our church of the living is like the tiny vestibule at the entry to the giant cathedral full to the rafters of John’s throng around the throne. Join the visible church of those now living, in membership and worship, and you’re joining the much bigger and invisible church of those living eternally.
The deaths of these saints do not constitute defeat, disaster nor disgrace; if anything, each one represents a victory; in the words of John the Revelator, they have overcome “by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.”
That’s the big picture of the church, in light of which I’m not worried about the church’s survival. Forms of church, their names, their structures, their practices and their customs, come and go, live and die, all the time. Zion Mennonite Church is as it is today because some previous forms of this church have died and been resurrected in different ways and shapes over time. In fact, every time we Christians pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” we are praying for this congregation and denomination, along with all others, to die, disappear and give up their lives to the church that will fill the whole cosmos, when “the glory of the Lord fills the whole earth as the waters cover the sea.” It’s similar to the death that a caterpillar undergoes in a cocoon, on the way to becoming a butterfly. Until then, as long as the Gospel endures, and the Holy Spirit is present to convict, convince, comfort and convert, the church’s existence is assured.
In fact, the surest way to kill any community or organization, like a church, is to make it panic about its mortality, and thus forget its mission. John’s vision of the infinite throng around the eternal throne should put the present, the future and all our anxieties in perspective. It defangs the tyranny of the urgent and the immediate of its urgency, immediacy and tyranny. It redefines victory not as its impact nor even its survival here and now but as faithfulness all the way to the end. No, make that, faithfulness all the way to the beginning, the next beginning, the resurrection. That faithfulness to resurrection, and not mere survival, is what constitutes victory in John’s Revelation.
But that throng around the throne is not celebrating their own victory. They are celebrating that of the Lamb, who conquered not by killing others, but by dying for them. We participate in the Lamb’s victory and share his honors and triumph, not because we somehow saved the world, nor because we somehow saved the church, but because God saves us. And so our discipleship need not be driven by anxiety and the need to survive and to succeed (whatever that looks like). All those resurrected saints around the throne of the Lamb did not get there by anxious striving to survive; they were drawn there by longing, delight and desire for that victorious resurrection reunion with God and the saints.
And when I ponder and picture in my mind’s eye that throng around the throne, the gaze of my imagination does not rest long on them; it follows their gaze toward the Lamb upon his throne, to join them in wonder and worship. This struck me a few weeks ago when I went to Salem to visit the family of the late Pastor Jose Campoz, the day before his funeral. I did not personally know Pr. Campoz. But I know and love his sons, Jimmy, and Pastor Angel Campoz, and his wife, Luz. While greeting Pr. Jose’s family and expressing condolences, I got all teary-eyed and choked up, even though, again, I had never even met Pr. Jose. I got all teary-eyed and choked up because it struck me that Pr. Campoz was now enjoying all the beauty, joy, love and peace of the Lamb’s direct presence that we so long for. He was experiencing, directly, the secure, timeless and complete union of adoration and contemplation of the very One whom we now know only in part, as through a glass dimly. He now knows fully what we only trust in and desire so imperfectly. My tears then were a mixture of joy, longing, pain and hope. Maybe together, all of those things provoke the tears that God shall wipe from our eyes.
If any should say that such joy, longing, pain and hope for that eternal worship of God and the communion with the saints will make us “too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good,” that innumerable throng around the throne would tell us quite the opposite: if our goals, our hopes, our joys and loves are only earthly and temporary, like survival, then neither eternity nor this life will be ours, in the end. But if we set our hopes and hearts on things above, and eternal, then earth and heaven, time and eternity, God and the church, will be ours, and will be one, forever.