Wash Day

"Wash Day"
Revelation 7:9-17


It doesn’t take me long to get caught up in the pathos and poignancy of a congregation.  In the congregations I’ve served, some have lost a spouse to cancer.  Some have had to deal with the double loss of Alzheimer's.  Some have felt the slow, creeping destruction of ALS.  Some have felt the abject fear brought on by emphysema.  Some have experienced the end of a marriage.  Some have lost children in infancy, or as teenagers, or as adults.  Some have lost land or businesses.  Some have suffered physical, or emotional, or sexual abuse at the hands of parents, spouses, relatives or friends.  Some have faced addictions.  Some have faced cancer and are alive to tell about it--but still they are changed by it, physically and emotionally and spiritually.  None of us escapes life’s ordeals.  As Job lamented, “It’s human!  Mortals are born and bred for trouble, as certainly as sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7).

I mention all this not to sadden you.  I simply make the point that when you add all this up, the sum of it is one big sigh.  We are a people who have been through a lot in life.  And you can probably say, very justifiably so, “You don’t know the half of it!”  No one entirely knows what we have had to face.  There are similar experiences, but how we respond to those experiences, emotionally, differs widely.  No one entirely knows what it’s like to face what we’ve had to experience.  As someone once said, “There’s a lot more juice in a grapefruit than meets the eye.”

II

So it wouldn’t be difficult to make a case for the claim that life is an ordeal.  Life is, as the book of Revelation calls it, a tribulation.  I discovered that the word tribulation comes from a Latin word, “tribulum”.  A tribulum was a threshing board constructed with sharp points for rubbing and threshing grain.  So, going through a tribulation is literally feeling like your life is being rubbed between a bunch of sharp points.  That describes it pretty well, doesn’t it?

No one passes through life “unrubbed,” unscathed, unscarred, unblemished, and unhurt.  A couple of farmers were out in a field when a sudden summer storm came over.  A lightening strike hit very close to one of the old guys.  “How close did it come to you?” called the one to the other.
“I can’t rightly say,” drawled the other guy, brushing himself off.  “But my pipe wasn’t lit before.”

Life is like that -- suffering a lot of close calls.  And sometimes our pipes get lit.  No special persecution is necessary (as some think this part of Revelation is talking about), since we all face life as a great tribulation.  The painful, dragged out, and even horrific experiences we face in life get elevated to a higher level -- according to these verses -- if we call ourselves Christian.   Life becomes more of an ordeal for Christians because we have an inkling of what life was meant to be like vs. what it actually is, or has become, or promises to be in reality.

While going through the great ordeals in life, no one keeps their “robes” clean.  All, in the end need washing.  It is vitally important to see that, standing before the throne of the Lamb, is “...a huge crowd, too huge to count.”  “Everyone was there,” writes John.  More are “in” because of their life experiences than many “scare tactic Christians” would lead us to believe.  They say only 144,000 get in.  But this vision of John lets us know there are many brothers and sisters of all kinds and from all kinds of places who have faced life as an ordeal.  All, in the end, need their robes washed.

What that means is that the robes we wear -- the lives we have lived -- have gotten a little muddied.  Some are covered head-to-toe.  They are constantly down in the dirt trying to do something in life, but instead got done by life.  They were wrestling in the mud with circumstance. Their garments, good to begin with, had become sullied.   Purity and integrity got compromised, and a smudge appeared here, then there, then all over.  That’s how compromise goes.

And as I mentioned, there wasn’t one person who showed up in the multitude before the thrown who had a pure white garment when they arrived.  I’m wondering if anyone did, if they’d be allowed in.  It seems that one of the requirements for being allowed “in” at the throne, is that you’ve gotten smudged in the ordeal of life.  That your life is a mess, and it’s as clear as the dirt on your white garment.

To say that once caught in the rubbing of the “tribulum,” once experiencing some tribulation in life, once you’ve passed through all that into the protection mentioned at verse 15 -- what that means is that on this side of the tribulations in life, there is not a thorough protection against life.

To say that there will be no hunger or thirst on the other side of life’s ordeals means there are all kinds of unsatisfied needs we experience in the midst of living on this side of life.

To say that once past the “tribulums” there will be no scorching heat means that in the midst of life, now, there is the sun of many oppressions that will radiate down upon us.  And we’ll get burned by them.

To say that once through the trauma of living we will be led to “spring waters of Life” means that part of the ordeal on this side is the stagnancy of deterioration.

To promise that God will wipe away tears means that in the midst of being pushed and shoved by life, tears flow.  And that no one may genuinely care nor honor your tears while you cry out now.  Not so on the other side.

When my daughter, Kristin, was looking at colleges, one of the places she applied to and really wanted to attend was USC.  She was interested in their musical theatre program, which is one of the best in the country.

We made a campus visit after she had applied.  It’s a beautiful campus, south of downtown Los Angeles.  But it’s just about totally walled all the way around.  The reason for the wall is that it’s on the boarder of Watts.  You may remember back to 1965, you who are old enough, when the riots were going on in Watts.  Scenes were on every television at that time.  I was in junior high, and I remember the scenes of looting, rioting, fires and absolute chaos that were happening in that part of LA.

When Kristin and I did our campus visit, we drove around the area of Watts.  Kristin, unbeknownst to her at that time, would be doing some mission work in the projects of Watts from Azusa Pacific University, where she ended up attending.  (She didn’t get accepted at USC.)  I still remember that little driving tour.  Totally vacated lots, overgrown, and full of trash, as well as boxes where people lived.  Kristin was later to find out that those vacant lots were where buildings had once stood during the riots of 1965.  They were blown up, burned down, gutted, trashed, and just plain left to rot after that terrible time.  They were never rebuilt, or reclaimed.  They were just left as scars of an awful, tribulation kind of time in the history of that city and a people.

In the same way, the riots of our lives have torn down parts of our self that once stood for something, and housed something proud in our heritage.  But now they are empty spots, left by some tribulation, never rebuilt; we abandoned them only to collect the other garbage we throw in there.  We don’t try to cover it up or decorate it.  It is a huge stain on our white robes, and with those stains, with that whole empty, garbaged lot, we ALL enter God’s presence.

III

I would like to have the outlook that life is not all ordeal and tribulation.  That, only occasionally do we experience the rub of life.  It’s just that the abrasive times wizen and sober us.  But on the other hand, there is much about life that is worth shouting about.  There are victories to be celebrated.

John, the visionary of this book of Revelation, is a pastor.  He knows what people are going through.  He is feeling for them, and feeling with them.  His heart aches.  He knows they are asking questions like, “Where’s the hope for us in the midst of the ordeals we face?”

He has a couple of answers to those kinds of questions.  One of those answers is that hope lies in our worship.  Worship, for John, is the action by which we all, who have come with dirt on our robes and on our hands, can enjoy being in the presence of the Lamb, who has washed our robes and won the victory over our tribulations.  Worship is the practice of grace.  Grace is the expression of our joy, celebration and gratitude in the faith.  Celebrating that grace doesn’t just happen in John’s vision of the future, but in our vision of what’s going on right now with us.

That’s a part of the answer that John is encouraging the white robe wearing, uncountable multitude before the throne.  In reality, the description of this scene serves for John as a mini outline of the whole rest of the book of Revelation.  It is a vision of the victorious Christ, the triumphant worship (which is really the worship of the triumphant); and, then a symbolic retelling of the ordeal that leads to the triumph.

Worship, both now and in the future, keeps forcing us back to face the central reality that God is full of grace, that God is in charge, and that God (including all those who stand before the throne in their new white robes) will be the triumphant victors.

Worship is immersing ourselves in prayer and praise.  That is what the washing is all about -- prayer and praise and grace is the water that we pass through, so that God can clean our robes once and for all. Worship is listening to God, believing and having faith in this God of grace, shouting voice-to-voice with other tribulation-mates.  All of this helps us to discern meaning in the midst of a life of ordeal.  We don’t go through it alone.  Both now and in the end, we will not stand alone before the throne of grace.

A rookie parachuter jumped from the plane, only to find that his parachute won’t open!  As he helplessly is plunging toward earth, he sees a woman coming up.  “Do you know anything about parachutes?” he shouts frantically to her as they pass.
“No,” she shouts.  “Do you know anything about gas furnaces?”

We aren’t alone in the scary hard times we go through.  We aren’t alone in the smearing of our white robes.  And neither, because of our worship, and even in the midst of our worship, are we alone to celebrate God and God’s grace.

We don’t need God to tell us that the world is full of trouble.  But we do need God to give us the vision of the experience of victory and grace before the throne.  We do need to know from Christ the Lamb, that because of our experience of the worshipful grace, our troubles are not and will not be meaningless.




IV

But worship is just one part of John’s answer.  The other part -- because as I have mentioned that John is a pastor -- has to do with compassion.  Compassion and worship are what John sees in his vision that surrounds, or brackets our ordeals.  Evil, and the tribulation it creates, is not minimized by John.  It’s not made light of.  It’s not denied.  Those times of adversity and sorrow are taken very seriously by John.

But, as I have just said, John looks at life’s ordeals and brackets them between victorious worship of the Lamb, and the compassion of the Lamb.  Surrounding us on one side is the amazing worship, singing shoulder-to-shoulder with our fellow, worshipful survivors.  And then surrounding us on the other side is this amazing compassion that guides us to cool waters and dries tear-filled eyes.  Here is a picture of our Lord who takes our pains and our need for healing seriously, who honors our tears.

So, what this scene in Revelation does is to define the context of life’s ordeals.  That is, the anxieties, even the evils we face, even though they aren’t explained, they are nonetheless surrounded.  The tribulation we face is always pictured as episodes, not as final scenes.  The final scene, as John has remarkably shown us, always belongs to God, who washes our robes in worship and compassion.