Revelation, Part 2: The Beast

 Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

 A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.

 

 

 

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org

Order of Worship

September 17, 2023

10:00 a.m.

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit.

 

Prelude

Greeting and Announcements

Mission Statement:

We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

Call to Worship:

Sing and rejoice! The Lord reaches out to you with healing love!

The Lord is our strength and our power!

Dance before the Lord, a dance of joy and hope!

The Lord brings us joy and lifts us up in hope.

Come, let us worship God who is always with us.

Let us celebrate the good news God brings to us each day. AMEN.

*Hymn              We Gather Together       #131

Prayer of Confession:

Lord, we confess that we don’t always turn to you in our troubles. Sometimes we are paralyzed by fear and anxiety. We cannot see “the light at the end of the tunnel”. For us, there is only the ongoing darkness and hopelessness. Clear our sight, O Lord. Bind up our wounded spirits!

Fill us with your mercy and love. Forgive us when we stray; when we fear; when we falter. Pick us up and place us on pathways of peace and hope, for we ask this in Jesus’ Name. AMEN.

Assurance:

No matter what befalls us, the Lord walks with us on the path, bringing us courage and hope. No matter what, we belong to the Lord, now and forever. AMEN.

Scripture Reading Revelation 13: 11-18

The Second Beast

11 Then I saw another beast that rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb, and it spoke like a dragon. 12 It exercises all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and it makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound[a] had been healed. 13 It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of all, 14 and by the signs that it is allowed to perform on behalf of the beast it deceives the inhabitants of earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that had been wounded by the sword[b] and yet lived, 15 and it was allowed to give breath[c] to the image of the beast so that the image of the beast could even speak and cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. 16 Also, it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be given a brand on the right hand or the forehead, 17 so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the brand, that is, the name of the beast or the number for its name. 18 This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number for a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.[d]

Sermon                                 Revelation, Part 2: The Beast

Friends, we’re now in week 9 of Stump the Preacher 2023, sermons requested by you and then researched by me. The request for today’s topic came when I put out the call for Stump the Preacher ideas on TikTok, and a clergy friend was curious to hear a more progressive take on the Book of Revelation than a lot of us heard growing up. This is a very large book that covers soooo much theological ground, so I broke it up into two parts. Last week we talked about this idea of the Rapture, or Jesus’ return and the end of the world. Today we’re talking about the Beast, and the number 666.

Earlier in the summer, y’all may remember that I preached a Stump the Preacher sermon about numerology in the Bible, and told you we’d circle back to that when we talked about Revelation. I’m keeping that promise today, because boy howdy did this author have a field day with numerology. There will be not one but 2 beasts! The second beast will have 2 horns! A letter is being written to 7 churches, sealed with 7 seals! 4 angels will stand on 4 corners of the earth! The walls of the New Jerusalem will be 144 cubits thick, and 144,000 people will die as martyrs for Christ and go to the New Jerusalem! Then there will be 7 trumpets, and 2 witnesses, and 7 angels destroying Babylon! Numbers, numbers, lots and lots of numbers! And the kind of terrifying imagery that most of us couldn’t even imagine unless we got into some real freaky, hard drugs. If last week’s talk about the end of the world didn’t scare you away from Revelation, then this talk of vengeful angels and evil beasts just might. And on top of having Game of Thrones level fantasy play out in the pages, you also gotta do math. Jeez, how did anyone read this?

The truth is there’s a few different ways to dissect this text, and I can’t tell you which road to take, you have to look at the information presented to you and do what feels right. The first way to read this text is in the more literal way. This is also the fun way. This way yields some pretty colorful results. Over the 11 years I’ve served in parish ministry I’ve received several hand-written letters from people who, bless their hearts, claim that they read every stroke of ink in Revelation with a magnifying glass, mapped out all the numbers referenced, charted them all out and drew lines connecting them to our world until their work started to resemble that of Russel Crowe’s character in A Beautiful Mind, and then they came to the conclusion that the world is coming to an end at 2:46 pm on October 3rd, and also Bernie Sanders is a zombie.

If that’s your bag, have at it. Others will take the numerology and imagery of this text literally, though less seriously, and develop specific anxieties and phobias, especially where the number of the Beast, 666, is concerned. For many years, the street address of the church I grew up in was 666 Graceland Ave. Clearly someone at the post office had a sense of humor. My dad balked at attending regularly for lots of reasons–after all, if he went to church on Sunday he might miss football–but on his list of complaints was always this notion that our church must be demonic with an address like that. Eventually, the church addressed this head on and changed its address to 668 Graceland, partly to stop being the punchline for every bad joke in town, and partly to stop getting mail from a factory a few blocks away at 666 Garland Ave. This is far from the first time the number 666 was taken off property because it was causing problems. In fact, when President Ronald Reagan left Washington DC and bought a retirement home in Bel Air, California, the original street number for his home was 666, and the town changed it just for him.

I read a new and interesting crop of doomsday theories in college, right when we were approaching the date of June 6, 2006, or 06/06/06. Would the calendar alone bring on disaster? Maybe none of us should leave the house that day! Of course, some capitalized on the spookiness of that date, and a horror movie called The Omen picked June 6, 2006 for its theatrical release. The same folks who are prone to to do connect-the-dots work in the Bible and come up with predictions also like to dissect banking, real estate, medical, and government records for evidence of the number 666 popping up and exposing corruption. Tempting as it is for many of us to simply roll our eyes at these kinds of claims, real action, and inaction, does come from them. Back in 2016, Pope Francis refused a donation from the President of Argentina because the amount was 16,666,000 pesos, and the Pope didn’t want to touch money with the number 666 anywhere in it.

Upon doing a quick Google search, I discovered that the number 666 has been associated with Monster energy drinks, the Illuminati, the anime series Sailor Moon, Walt Disney, Bitcoin, Beyonce, and in recent years some anti-vaxxers have sworn there was a connection between the number of the Beast and the Covid-19 vaccine. And it’s a little too obvious to tell you about the parallels people have drawn between these verses from Revelation, and US Presidents with vocal dissenters. But we’ll get back to that in a minute.

The road I walk on when reading from the book of Revelation is the historical-critical approach. I look at who wrote this book, when, and why? What was going on around him, who was likely to read his work, and what were his most immediate concerns?

Like we touched on last week, this book most likely found its origins during the tyrannical reign of Emperor Domitian near the end of the First Century, CE, in Rome. You’ll notice if you read Revelation in depth that the author names two evil beasts, and the second one follows the first. The first beast, according to these verses, “makes fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of all”. You’re free to draw all kinds of conclusions about what that really means, and certainly those living words point our hearts in all kinds of directions today. But I bet the folx who read these words in the First Century immediately thought of Domitian’s predecessor, Nero, who started a fire in Rome and blamed it on Christians.

If you read Revelation like I do, then you can make a connection between the frequent uses of the number 7 and its importance as a number for God’s perfection and justice. You could also draw a line between the many twelves that show up, and the importance of 12 to Christians, who remember the 12 tribes of Israel as well as Jesus’ 12 disciples, and know that hard work to build love in a broken world happens in 12s. As for 666: 6s tend to denote imperfection and evil. But also, every letter in the Hebrew language has a number attached to it. When you spell out the name “Nero” in Hebrew letters, and then assign numbers to those letters, the sum you end up with, conveniently, is 666. Nero and Domitian, the beasts named 666, require you to worship them or die, won’t let you buy or sell in Rome unless you have their approval, and are obliterating their opponents. And the beasts will terrorize and prevail for a season, but in the end angels will swoop in and clean up that mess, and Jesus’ love will win.

Then, you may ask, why didn’t the author just say that? Why load up these verses with all the imagery and numerology rather than just directly get to the point?

For one, because the author didn’t think he’d live very long. He didn’t want someone working for Rome to catch him, or a loved one, with this writing, look at the page, and see “down with Domitian” in big, bold letters. Instead, he wrote in code.

And, besides that, he didn’t directly say what he meant because, often, when you’re making a sociopolitical point, you don’t have to. Think about the cartoons you see in the newspaper about donkeys and elephants and their Uncle Sam. You don’t need Captain Obvious to explain what those images mean, you’ve seen and heard them many times before, you know what they represent.

The number 666 still looks bizarre and haunting to our modern eyes because the author did a great job of putting his fear into his writing. As unique and striking as 666 looks to us, we do this, too. We use numbers to refer to people, both people we admire, and people we don’t. Growing up in Chicago, if you said 23 with no other context, I knew you meant Michael Jordan. And I don't even like basketball. Brett Favre, of the Green Bay Packers, was number 4, and y’all can play this game with all your favorite athletes. To a person of a certain age, 50 is a rapper, and to a different generation, the fab 4 come from Liverpool, England. To name the elephant (or donkey) in the room, yes, we also refer to US Presidents by their numbers. 45 for Trump, 46 for Biden, 44 for Obama, 41 and 43 for Bushes senior and junior, yet get the idea. 

Though I maintain that 666 was meant to be code for Nero, and not a creepy omen that we should hunt for every time we see numbers, it’s always worthwhile to make connections between what we read in the Bible and what we see in our world. Where do we see unchecked power? Where do we see fascism, and greed? Where do we see destruction and scapegoating? Where do we see the vulnerable cowering in fear? Where do we see money and business being used to control people? And where do we see people of temporary, relative importance being put up on a pedestal? Where we see these phenomena, we should hear the warnings of Revelation echoing in our ears. Resist evil, injustice, and oppression in every form they present themselves. And when we think of those qualities, and see them reflected back to us and our society when we look in the mirror, then it’s our job to make changes, reparations, and pursue social holiness.

No matter what happens, the Good News is that we can’t mess up our world so bad that Jesus can’t still toss us a broom to clean it up. At the end, love wins, and the universe will be at peace.

Amen.

*Hymn                                     Precious Name                   #536, v 1 and 2

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication           

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

Create a throne room for yourself here, O Christ,

but let it be the empty seat beside the anxious

the lonely chair next to the confused

the vacant pew next to the hungry

and reign, O Jesus,

as sovereign over the forgotten

May your reign be a mockery to the world

but good news to those who seek out truth

and may we join them in the search

finding you walking the streets

or breaking bread

or sitting by bedsides

May we find you in border areas

on the edge of things

crossing over with the foreigner

May we find you among children

learning to finger paint

as teachers to those who long to enjoy life again

May we find you with the worried

silenced with nothing to say

and space enough to keep it

May we find you on the wrong side of the tracks

going where you should not

and finding a place to lay your head among the lost

May we find you singing our songs

of justice and peace

and removing your crown to do so

May we find you with a word that lives

in the hopes of the afraid

and a comforting peace for those who are broken

May we find you laughing at the powerful

unnerving what folk think so secure

while welcoming those who have nothing into your throne room

O Jesus, reigning in the world

with your upside down kingdom

may we find the faith to stand with you

sovereign of life

and servant of all

~ written by Roddy Hamilton, and posted on Mucky Paws. http://www.nkchurch.org.uk/index.php/mucky-paws

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us, not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

*Hymn                      Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah                    #127

Benediction

Postlude

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Staff

Natalie Bowerman Pastor

Betsy Lehmann Music Director

Joe White Custodian

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant