 It is such a privilege to be with you all today. Over the past year, I've heard the phrase, you can't make this stuff up more than any other year of my life. I confess that I've used it frequently as I try to articulate my own exasperation at the death-dealing forces of COVID, strongman politics, conspiracy theory culture, and made for TV antics by leaders in power who are hell-bent on destroying the lives of the marginalized. Indeed, you can't make this stuff up. Why so much darkness all at once? Who lost control of the script for this chapter of our life together? How do we not only survive this moment, but thrive as the people of God? These questions do not merit any easy or superficial answers. Viral diseases, after all, don't care about your self-help books. Your good deeds and piety. To thrive amid pandemic as leaders of Christ's church, we need wisdom that has endured the test of time, community, and the stressors of death and death's manifestation in systems of domination. This afternoon, I would like to suggest that we find such wisdom in ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic imagination. But before we can animate what apocalyptic imagination is, we have to untangle John's apocalypse from the ways its message has been commodified and misused by its interpreters. To be sure, Martin Luther, the famous reformer, wrote that John's apocalypse is neither apostolic nor prophetic, I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it. Again, they are supposed to be blessed to keep what is written in this book, and yet no one even knows what that is to say nothing of keeping it. Christ is neither taught nor known in it. Nietzsche argued that John's apocalypse is the most rabid outburst of vindictiveness in all recorded history. George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, wrote that it's the curious record of the visions of a drug addict. Christopher Stendall, a New Testament scholar, argued that it's a script for a horror movie. John Dominic Crossan argued that it's a book that transforms the nonviolent resistance of the slaughtered Jesus into the violent warfare of the slaughtering Jesus. What then do we do with this contested book at the end of our Bibles? To read Revelation responsibly, it is crucial that we understand the conditions in which Jewish apocalyptic literature arose and how this body of literature influenced the early Jesus movement. After all, John was not the first Jew to write an apocalypse. To be sure, in the year 167 BC, the Hellenistic King Antiochus IV marched upon Jerusalem with his gigantic military apparatus, including his elephant engines of war. For the next three years, all hell broke loose. Antiochus levied the full weight of Hellenistic Empire upon Jews' minds and bodies in an attempt to erase Jewish identity. What ensued was a time of trauma for colonized Jewish subjects. Copies of Torah were burned. Circumcision was banned. The temple was defiled by the forced worship of the Greek god Dionysus. The Seleucid military policed Jewish minds and bodies through forced home invasions, stop and frisk police tactics, and the killing of faithful Jewish mothers who circumcised their sons anyways, even though they knew martyrdom would be imminent. For some Jewish subordinates, the stressors of Seleucid Empire led to resistance. Some resisted through guerrilla warfare. Others resisted through banditry. Some resisted through foot dragging. Others resisted through songs of resistance. Some resisted through prayer. Others resisted through penitence. But still others resisted by writing back to the Seleucid Empire through an ingenious literary invention. And that invention is what we now call Jewish apocalyptic literature, a literature designed to address crisis among the people of God, or what some call a literature of resistance. It is this rich tradition of Jewish apocalyptic resistance that so deeply influenced the apocalypse of John. Writing under the stressors of cultural marginalization, John wrote his apocalypse in exile from the island of Patmos to seven churches to empower them to resist the political idolatry, economic injustice, and military domination of Imperial Rome, along with the forces of death that fund these systems of oppression. At the heart of this literature was not an escapist theology that focuses exclusively on the end of times or how to get into heaven in the afterlife. Rather, the primary focus of Jewish apocalyptic literature was an unmasking of current cosmic and oppressive systems of power to show the people of God that God has not lost control of history. You see, for John, it is not Caesar with his vast military and economic bureaucracy that rules the created order. Rather, the rightful ruler of this world is a humble slain lamb whose death on a Roman cross has disrupted human existence with another way, an alternative understanding of divinity, power, race, and human mortality. Interestingly, the word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apocalypsis, which means to take out of hiding, to unveil, to reveal, or to uncover. And herein, I think, lies the key to understanding Jewish apocalyptic literature. At the heart of this literature is God's desire to unmask the oppressive systems of this world and show oppressed and suffering peoples that God has not lost control of salvation history. God has not failed to hear the cries of those who are suffering. God has not turned a blind eye toward those who exploit and lower their power over others. As professors Catherine Keller and John Tatamniel wrote in a viral op-ed last spring, when the term apocalypse is understood as unveiling, we can then ask the right questions. What does this pandemic unveil for us today? What have we refused to see about ourselves in the precarious world we've built? A world that now stands exposed and tottering in the harsh light of this unasked for apocalypse. If we permit this crisis to expose the fissures of our failing world, this pandemic will have served as properly apocalyptic. If instead, despite its devastating toll, we return to an obsolete and unsustainable world, nothing meaningful will have been revealed. To thrive as the people of God, we have to see, name, unveil, and expose those structural powers that wreak havoc on our communities and selves. You can't resist or even pray against something unless you can name your object of resistance. To thrive together, we have to unveil the things in our world that obstruct thriving and flourishing. And so I wonder, what has this pandemic unveiled for you about the world? What has this past year unveiled for you about the city you live in? What has this past year unveiled about you? You can't resist something unless you can expose and name your object of resistance. To unveil toxic and drunken manifestations of power, the apocalyptic visionary chose to evoke a constellation of bizarre imagery, angelic figures, many-headed beasts and creaturely entanglements across all walks of mortal and immortal life. This imagery was never intended to be decoded by new generations in order to unlock secrets about the end of times. Rather, the primary purpose of this imagery was to animate the monstrosity of human systems of injustice and political authority gone bad. The primary purpose of this apocalyptic imagery was to spark our imaginations and redirect our gaze and worship away from beastly power toward lamb power. You see, the beasts we see in Revelation are literary art. They are not meant to be prophetic time capsules that will one day burst onto the stage of world history in the guise of your political opponent. Rather, they are designed to spark the church's theological imagination, call us into patient endurance and empower us toward faithful resistance by reorienting our allegiances. So don't be fooled. The confusing, frenetic nature of Jewish apocalyptic literature does not reflect an author who has lost control of their meaning. Rather, the disruptive, bizarre nature of apocalyptic is a strategy of safe speech for a people whose speech is policed. It is a form of artful innuendo where the dissident voice can articulate subversion of the empire without evoking its wrath. In other words, apocalyptic literature is intentionally hard for the ruling power to understand. This brief foray into the thought world of Jewish apocalyptic literature illustrates how important imagination was among early Jewish and Christian communities suffering under the stressors of crisis. Over the past year, I've caught a small glimpse of the significance of imagination for negotiating stress. Last March, when we pulled my extroverted three-year-old son from school, he was devastated. Like so many children for an entire year now, he's been at home isolated from community. A few months into quarantine, however, I noticed that he was having long conversations with an imaginary being while he played by himself. When I finally asked him who he's speaking with, he said, rather nonchalantly, oh, that's my friend Kane. He's a baby horse. Kane has become a regular part of our family during pandemic. On more than one occasion, I've buckled Kane into our car. I've reminded Kane not to go potty in the house. I've tucked Kane in under my son's bed, and I've been told by my son that Kane is actually the one who didn't put the toys away. You can't make this stuff up. As a strategy to resist the stressors of isolation, my three-year-old son conjured an invisible ally, a baby horse. One thing life under pandemic has unveiled for me personally speaking, is that my imagination has been in a state of atrophy for too long as an adult. Just as my muscles atrophy when I don't exercise, my spiritual self desperately needs spaces that spark my God-given imagination. I need an ally to conjure in a time of need. When our imagination atrophies, our spiritual self can become complacent, hopeless, or in John's words, lukewarm. To be clear here, by imagination, I mean the mental capacity to think of possibilities beyond the evidence of immediate sense perceptions. As the psychologist Ethel Specter observes, without imagination, there could be no picturing of mental alternatives to current discomfort or deprivation, no planning of a future course of action, no creative rethinking of the past to make it pertinent to the present and future. The philosopher John Salas, on the other hand, observes that there is nothing more forceful than the imagination, because it makes the impossible possible, a potentially important tactical asset in an environment where very little is possible. Apocalyptic imagination then is that space where we find a mental alternative to current discomfort and deprivation. Apocalyptic imagination then is that space where we are given permission to think creatively and differently about the past, the present, and the future. Apocalyptic imagination then is that space of tension we live in between the real and the imaginary. Apocalyptic imagination is that space where despair melts into hope. Apocalyptic imagination disorients our gaze away from idols and re-orients it around Christ crucified and Christ raised. Apocalyptic imagination keeps us awake before a loving, compassionate, and justice-making God. Apocalyptic imagination is that holy space where we conjure Christ as our invisible ally and our struggle against the powers that be in this world. Apocalyptic imagination simply put, re-centers our lives on Christ. To re-center our lives on Christ amid the stressors of empire and duress, John gives us seven visions of Christ throughout his apocalypse. It wasn't until this past year when I taught Revelation for the first time at AMBS that the profundity of John's first vision of Christ in Revelation 1, 12 through 20 took hold of my atrophying imagination. A student who some of you may know named Jacob Elias Curtis asked if he could do his final paper on John's vision of Christ in chapter one. But instead of writing a paper, Jacob wanted to do an art project with commentary on it. I reluctantly said, sure, not really quite knowing what to expect with this experiment. And so I about lost my breath when a brilliant 36 inch tall representation of John's vision of Christ hit my inbox right before Christmas break, created out of hundreds of curated images that were painstakingly overlaid over the top of one another. With Jacob's permission, I'm going to share his art piece on my screen with you right now and read Revelation 1, 12 through 16 again. Jacob, by the way, is now a co-pastor with his wife, Michelle at Ambler Mennonite Church in Pennsylvania. I'm going to share his art piece right now. John writes, then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me. And on turning, I saw seven golden lampstands. And in the midst of the lampstands, I saw one like the son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace. And his voice was like the sound of many waters. In his right hand, he held seven stars. And from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword and his face was like the sun shining with full force. Strikingly, in Pastor Jacob's representation, Christ's face is made of over 50 images of different cultural representations of Jesus. In half the images are Palestinian men injured by the Israeli army in war. To represent Christ's hair as white like wool, images of Nelson Mandela's hair was used to reflect the New Testament scholar, Brian Blount's suggestion that John's Jesus is black. The seven menorahs are composed of dozens of images of Jewish menorahs over the centuries, including the one on the shoulders of enslaved Jews on the relief of the Arch of Titus in Rome, who was responsible for the sacking of Jerusalem in 8070. But perhaps most provocatively, the sword coming out of Christ's mouth is reversed hilt first to evoke Christ's self-sacrificial death and non-violence. A canvas print of Jacob's art now hangs in my office at AMBS, I'm staring it as I am preaching to you today. And sometimes I find myself staring at it in moments of need to conjure Christ as my invisible ally made visible as Lord, peacemaker, savior, healer, protector, and friend. John's apocalypse gives us permission and invites us pastors and leaders to be imaginative creatures. John's apocalypse gives us pastors and leaders permission to build imaginative communities across lines of encrusted human difference. Even the very idea of being a global ecumenical church demands imagination. As the activist Jonathan Smucker writes in his book, Hegemony How To, to feel solidarity with people one has never met face to face requires a profound exercise of imagination. Let's say that one more time. To feel solidarity with people one has never met face to face requires a profound exercise of imagination. And this imagined solidarity can operate as the thread that weaves together otherwise dispersed elements into a potent political force capable of consequential intervention in the real world. When the church exercises its collective imagination, its apocalyptic imagination, we become a potent political force and collective participant in Christ's ministry of reconciling humans to God and humans to one another. And when we fail, when our imaginations atrophy is though dead is John experiences in verse 17, Christ places his right hand on us saying, do not be afraid. I am the first and the last and the living one. I was dead and see, I am alive forever and ever and I have the keys of death and of Hades. Truly in a world under pandemic and exhaustion, this is good news for life in the present tense. Amen. Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring. Ring with the harmonies. Of liberty. Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies. Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. That the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun of our new day. God, let us march on till victory is won. Don't need the road we tried. Bitter the chastening rock felt in the days when hope unborn had died. Yet with a steady beat feed come to a place for which our fathers sigh. At which tears have been watered. We treading our path through the blood of a slaughter. Blue bee is caught. Now God of our tears, thou who has brought this far our way. Thou who has by thy might lead us unto the light. Keep us forever in the path we pray. Sing of the hope that the dark past has taught us. Sing the rising sun of our new day. Let us march on till victory is won. Has taught us true to our native land. We need to thrive together to fulfill the way of the disciples and meeting of head and heart and hands. But now we go. Go, you purveyors of hope and dare to dream. Go, you. You cities set on a hill, light in the darkness, salt where there is none, mender of breached walls, carer for God's vineyard, oak of righteousness. Go, you, the planting of God, looser of the bonds of wickedness, breaker of the yoke, carer of bread, feeder of the hungry, host and hostess of the homeless poor. Go, go and cover the naked, healer of the afflicted and excluded, satisfied in squatched spaces. Go, you, the strong-boned one, well-watered garden, you the rebuilt of God. Go, you, the razor of foundations, restorer of streets and homes, chaplain of the Sabbath, Jubilee and God's kingdom reign. Go, you, the prophet of righteousness. Go, heir with Christ. May God keep you. May Holy Spirit enable you. May God restore you. May Holy Spirit comfort you. May God enfold you. May Holy Spirit inflame and set you up. So go in shalom, you anointed, pastors and leaders of God. O naming, resisting and writing back, O praying, O claiming salvation, sleeping and thriving and multiplying in peace. Let the disciples of God go pandemic. We have read the end of the book, the Lamb of God trumps all. God will never lose control for Jesus Christ is the Lord of all. Go in peace.