Nov 1st - The Census of the Saints

The Census of the Saints Have you ever noticed how numbers tend to dehumanize and desembody? Like, if you can attach a number to it, the person behind the number doesn’t matter and just seems to fade away? Our world doesn’t care much about flesh and blood people. What do we care about? Numbers! Wisconsin has well over 200,000 positive COVID cases around 2000 deaths. No names, just numbers. The United States is on track to see 65% voter turnout this election, more than in over a century. You could be one more for Biden, or one more for Trump. You’ve been gerrymandered into a voting district. And you are harassed on an hourly basis to answer another political survey. No names, just numbers. You’ve been assigned a social security number, a phone number, an address, library card number, credit card number, health insurance member number, bank account number, and more pin numbers than you can count. No names, just numbers. Salaries, wages, taxes, income, expenses, credits, withdrawals, and bills, bills, bills, No names, just numbers. Statistics everywhere: cancer diagnoses, cancer deaths, car accidents and deaths, heart disease, pregnancies, abortions, school enrollment, unemployment, family size, community demographics. The almighty census. No names, just numbers. Numbers numb the pain and save us from the inconvenience of knowing real people and real struggles. Numbers dehumanize people into statistics and disembody people into categories. Which is curious, because that happens to be Satan's job, too. Satan’s work is dehumanization and disembodiment, because he hates God’s real, physical, meticulous, detailed, living, embodied, and good creation. God made a world thriving with individuals of different races and names and homes and life stories, and Satan hates it! The Devil has been defeated, but he’s throwing a temper-tantrum, and he wreaks havoc on God’s creation however he can. Where there is life, he brings death. Where there is health, he brings disease. Where there is joy, he brings despair. Where there is generosity, he generates greed. He wants to tear God’s creatures limb from limb and pollute this planet into oblivion. If Satan can’t beat God, then he’ll try to beat what God loves, so he takes aim at God’s creation. Satan dehumanizes and disembodies God’s creatures. And that means pain for God’s people. It means bad news from the doctor. It means friends who turn their backs. It means doubts of faith. It means divorce and estrangement. It means temptation and sin. It aches and sprains, disease and pestilence. It means suffering and tragedy. It means death. And yet, John sees a vision depicting the opposite. The book of Revelation is a vision that God gives to the apostle John to share with Christians. And for all the scary stuff Revelation depicts, Revelation is first and foremost a book of comfort for God’s people. And smack-dab in the middle of all the scary stuff John sees going on in our world today, he also sees a heavenly spectacle of the church: an ​embodied ​army of individuals sealed by God against dehumanization and disembodiment. John heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel. No, you don’t have to ask the JW at your door for answers. And this isn’t just talking about Old Testament Israel. The number 12 symbolizes God’s people—12 tribes, 12 apostles, God’s Old Testament people and God’s New Testament people. The number 1000 symbolizes completeness, every last person being accounted for. You do the math: 12 times 12 times 1,000 means that every one of God’s people from the beginning of time to its end is accounted for. They have been sealed, sealed under His authority, care, and protection, sealed so that they know that they belong to God, are known by God, and are kept safe in the faith by God. And that 144,00 stands as a holy army of God’s people, sealed against the assault of all the dangers that Satan and this world can muster. Whether it’s sin or disease or despair or heresy or even death, the church of God on earth stands victorious to every last saint. The Holy Spirit conducts His divine census by making sinners into saints through the waters of baptism. It’s at the baptismal font where you are not a number, but a name. It’s at the baptismal font where the God of the universe calls you by your name, your body is joined to Jesus’s cross and resurrection, and the Holy Spirit seals you for the life in the world to come. Where the world uses numbers to dehumanize and disembody, Revelation’s numbers show that every person sealed by God matters, and every person sealed by God has been redeemed for the resurrection of the body. Jesus came in body and rose in a body to thwart Satan’s work. Where Satan dehumanizes and disembodies, Jesus justifies and regenerates. Jesus is in the business of renaming sinners as saints and recreating and resurrecting the bodies of His people. Jesus will bring all things in heaven and on earth together. And in that future new creation, Jesus will make a new world that doesn’t turn people into numbers, but where ​“they shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” Friends, many people think that Revelation depicts future events of this world falling apart. What Revelation really depicts, is what the world is like between Jesus’s ascension and His return, the world that you live in right now. And Revelation was not written to give you fear, but comfort. And that comfort is this: You look forward to an embodied, robed eternal life. You will live in your body that has been made new, immortal, invincible, and immune to every pain, discomfort, and disease. And you will be robed in Christ’s righteousness, made white in the blood of the Lamb, blood that purifies all sins and a righteousness that makes you incapable of sinning. And the comfort that the Spirit gives you is this: you have been sealed into this lavish promise in your baptism. You stand as a member of the church militant of sealed saints on earth, and you will stand reunited with every single one of the multitude of resurrected, robed saints in the new creation before the throne of God. Take comfort, you have already been counted in the census of the saints!