The Once and Future King

Daniel 7:9-14  - Revelation 1:1-8  -  Mark 11:1-11

"So it is to be." - Revelation 1:8

I was not supposed to preach today. I was scheduled for December 10, but I will be out of town that day. A few weeks ago when I discovered the conflict I emailed several of our lay preachers and begged to switch Sundays. Jokingly I said I'd take the Sunday with the most difficult readings not really thinking that I could really be stumped. After all I did go to the best seminary in the country, and I was raised Baptist, so no text can really trick me that much?

When I looked over the readings for today I was reminded of a Proverb: "Pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall." (Proverbs 16:18, KJV).

These readings require humility because they're strange and enigmatic, and because they are apocalyptic.  And apocalyptic defies any easy, clean reading or moral.  To get apocalyptic you have to be baptized into a different realm, taken up into the imagination of God, who dreams into being a world markedly different and better than what we know.  Daniel and Revelation are apocalyptic writings that jolt us and woo us into a truer world, the kind of world that ours hopes to become, is becoming, and will one day be.  A world created, redeemed, and perfected by the Ancient of Days, the One who is, and was, and is to come.

But first things' first.  What is apocalyptic literature?  Apocalypse is a Greek word which means revelation.  That's why Revelation is called Revelation.  "The revelation [or apocalypse] of Jesus Christ..." (Revelation 1:1, NRSV).  Generally, an apocalypse is the revealing of inaccessible secrets to a human person (or seer) usually through a vision, interpreted by a heavenly being.  Right off the bat we should be humble because even the se-er of the vision needs help interpreting it (although this may just be a literary device to draw the reader into the vision).

The Bible contains two apocalypses - Daniel and Revelation.  Some apocalyptic elements are in other books of the Bible, along with books that did not make it into the Bible.  And other cultures and religions also had apocalyptic writings.  Apocalyptic was not unique to Judaism or early Christianity.