Meet Me at the Edge of the World

The New Revised Standard Version The Multitude from Every Nation

The Multitude from Every Nation

9 After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. 10 They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

11 And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 singing,

“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom

and thanksgiving and honor

and power and might

be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

13 Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” 14 I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

15 For this reason they are before the throne of God,

and worship him day and night within his temple,

and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

16 They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;

the sun will not strike them,

nor any scorching heat;

17 for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,

and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,

and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Meet Me at the Edge of the World

As I was mapping out this sermon series, this particular text sparked a memory of a song I love. There is a duo from Ohio called Over the Rhine. Country, Americana, sweet melodies. The husband and wife duo wrote a song about 10 years back called Meet Me at the Edge of the World. It talks about everything breaking down and falling away and them running out to the edge of things to gather and be together and hunker down and live out life together.

It’s a beautiful invitation, a beautiful refuge song.

And it struck me, as we hear these apocalyptic texts, that this invitation stands for us and for all creation, as well.

Remember, last week, the many voices singing out together, praises to the lamb. That sounded like a grand party, right? Where do we even go from such a culminating, hopeful event?

Well, as I reflect on this morning’s reading and the arc of the whole book of the Revelation, I’m struck by the notion that it is all about an invitation to meet at the edge of the world.

There is a famous Rumi quote that says,

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.”

I’m beginning to believe that this is what the Revelation is about. It’s about that final invitation to go out beyond all of the war, the destruction, the conflict, and meet with our siblings in Christ at the edge of it all. To gather with the multitude of multitudes and praise God.

And don’t get this wrong — it’s not necessarily a teaching that we should go seclude ourselves from the trials and tribulations of the world. There is too much in the whole of Scripture that implores us to participate in the restoration and active participation with the struggles of our times to ignore. So we don’t get off the hook and go out and live in the mountains and ignore the troubles of the world.

But, as we will see in a bit, it is still an invitation to gather, to heal, to restore, to wait, and to praise.

I know that the Revelation can feel abstract and weird, like you’re in the middle of the Doctor Strange movie, trapped in a Multiverse of Madness. But there is a through-line in this: it’s the invitation to gather and praise Christ. It’s an invitation to worship.

And, for us practically minded folks, this is the simple application of these texts: invitation. You want to know what you’re supposed to do with this reading, with this fever dream of apocalyptic and prophetic literature? We’re meant to invite others into the goodness at its core.

Think about it this way: Power and might want to draw us into the center, under their authority. They want to centralize and control, these powers of the empire. But in the end, when the powerful and the rich have consolidated their resources, they still face the destruction and brokenness of that not being enough, that power not holding.

So then, the invitation, is to go outside of the center and gather elsewhere. To find the throne, to gather with the nations, outside the seats of power, away from the order of the empire.

And here’s where it gets really practical: churches, gatherings of worship, people of faith supporting each other in daily lives — that’s weird stuff. It’s peculiar. It’s outside the lines of order and empire. What, come and sing praises to the resurrected Lord? Give of your time, your talents, your money, to a common cause with the poor and the disenfranchised? Share what you have and who you are, mutually, vulnerably, with one another? That’s silly, right?

But that’s what we’re inviting people to — to the edge of the world, out away from centers of power, into the good life, a life free of all that would otherwise encumber us. And practically, we want to invite others into this good life. We want to share it, and so we invite, we say, meet me out there, and we’ll journey together.

Inviting people to join in with this can feel daunting. But I’m not talking about inviting your buddy to go to camp with you this summer so that he has a one-time hyped up experience of Christians. No, I’m talking about sharing life, like, the long road of life, with all its ups and downs and hardships. I’m talking about inviting each other into experience life in its fullness, grace, and beauty. I’m talking about stability, commitment, solidarity. And not just with people like ourselves, but with all sorts of odd and quirky and beautiful and messy and glorious people.

Friends, we are all going through life. Some of us are going through it with a lot of ease and grace. Others of us have great burdens we carry. The invitation to meet out at the edge of things, is an invitation to share our journey and find the good, restoring life of Christ, together.

Because we need each other. And we are invited.

I want to turn to vs. 13-14 here.

The Great Ordeal

The New Revised Standard Version The Multitude from Every Nation

13 Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” 14 I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

These are the ones who have gone through the great ordeal. What is this great ordeal? What have people from all the nations gone through?

It’s important to note how these people from all the corners of the earth share a common cause with one another, a common experience of going through the trials of the apocalypse.

Remember, this is prophetic literature and therefore, we have to read this in context and with imagination as to what is really going on here. Leading up to this portion of the Revelation, we hear in chapter 6 that the four horsemen of the apocalypse have ridden out of the sky. They embody death, judgement, power, and war. The people gathered at the throne have witnessed this — they have seen judgement, power, war, and death spread across the world. They have born witness to the suffering of their people.

Now, I think we immediately want to imagine an incredibly grand spectacle of death and suffering, war and destruction, when we hear of these fantastic images. But wait, think about it: haven’t we all born witness to great suffering, upheaval, storms, and change, too? I know we want this text to be this culmination and grand battle, but consider this: aren’t we also witnesses to judgement, power, war, and death? And let’s not consider ourselves special: this piece of the Revelation acknowledges that it is people of all nations who have seen such things.

Growing up in a powerful, privileged society, I know that it is easy to see the “problems of the world” as someone else’s issue, someone else’s struggle. We have missions and aid organizations that built their whole structure upon this idea: good white Americans helping the struggling poor and impoverished elsewhere in the world.

But the haunting beauty of our world today is that it is almost impossible not to see the struggles of others around the world…and, in a very powerful and important way, we have to reckon with our connection to those struggles, both in complicity and in common belonging that ties us up in the struggle together.

We must realize how connected we all are. That is why we are all invited to gather with all the nations at the edge of the world. We are connected to and share life with those who are afflicted. That is the way of the people of Jesus, for sure.

When we begin to see our shared belonging, the invitation for us all to join in at the throne of God and praise in unity, then we start to see the struggles of others as our struggles. We start to see our part, for instance, in cries for justice and access to health care services. We start to see our part in mitigating the risks of climate change, even if we are comfortable and unlikely to experience its impact. Someone will be harmed, someone who bears the image of God is wrestling with fear, trauma, uncertainty, and despair. When one of us bears the weight of injustice or war or destructive forces in our world, we all are meant to know it with them, to fight alongside for freedom, for all people.

The great ordeal of others is my great ordeal.

And when I share common cause with you, with the other, it doesn’t mean that I get to decide what they need. No, sharing common cause means I humbly look for ways I can care for and support those who are struggling. It doesn’t look like me telling you how your body is supposed to work or me solving your problems with money sent from my seat of power. No, it means we get in to it with people, we hear their cries, we help ease their pain. When we gather together at the edge of the world, we meet people in their needs, we listen, and we offer care. We transcend our position and power to instead yield and experience mutuality.

Only then does the healing begin.

And this is the beautiful picture of what we have been witnessing in this text. It is the promise of a future, a hope, a place and time in which there is no more hunger, no more thirst, no more scorching heat, no more tears.

When do tears subside? When does pain let up? When we have made space, with others, to heal and be received. When the tears have been shed, not stifled. When the pain has been treated, not ignored. When the hunger has been fed, the thirsty sated.

So friends — will you meet me at the edge of the world to be about this way of life? Will you bring your great ordeals and will you, with me, lay those burdens down at the feet of the lamb, who wipes away all the pain and tears?

Will you invite, will you share this good news of a place that is beyond the powers of death and destruction? Will you share this good news that the good life has already begun, that even here, in a simple neighborhood church in Bellingham, WA, that a community is seeking to love one another, to heal with each other, and to share this goodness with each other?

And the Lamb at the center of the throne, the Lamb we go to worship, will guide us to deep wells of life, the fullest, healed, restored, whole life there is.

And God, with the intimacy of a loving mother, will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

Hallelujah. Amen.