One of my seminary professors taught us—it might have been Anna Carter Florence—that preaching two lectionary passages in the same sermon is risky. First of all, the lectionary creators—bless their hearts—often create false correspondences. That is, they group passages together for certain reasons, and those reasons are often not germane to the text. The various books and passages of scripture were written by a diverse bunch, for various reasons, and—we were told—we should respect that as we preach. Which sounds reasonable to me … there are a lot of things we impose on scripture—like capital letters, verse numbers, and in the Hebrew text, vowels. So I took my professor’s words about preaching only one lectionary text at once to heart—I have a hard enough time figuring out what onepassage means every week, much less two . . . and all I can say is “thank God for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”
But as they say, rules are made to be broken, and I find myself talking about our two New Testament passages this morning: the one Phil read, from Revelation, and John’s story of Jesus’ first appearance to the disciples, there in the upper room. And by doing so I’m breaking another of my own rules: never preach from Revelation, the reasons for which are too long to go into, but suffice it to say that it takes too much energy to explain why it’s nota prophecy of the end times, and that it almost certainlywasn’t the same John wrote it who wrote the Gospel. But maybe I ought to preach from it at least oncein a while, seeing as how it is, you know, part of the Bible.
So I grumblingly started looking at the Revelation passage, with plenty of time to spare—I think it was yesterday afternoon—and one part stood out, and it’s not what you think: it’s not alpha or omega, not the beginning orthe end, as famous as that line is. Nor is it the vivid, strange imagery of we—his followers—as the kingdom of God ourselves. No, it’s one word: witness. Witness—that Janus-headed, double-meaninged word that is so important to Christians, both of that time and this time, although sometimes I wonder if it’s lost a bit of its luster lately.
Of course, it’s mightily misunderstood these days, at least popularly . . . I know everyone here understands perfectly what it means, but just in case, let me remind y’all that the Greek for witness is marturos which in English, of course, ismartyr. And to us, this word—martyr—has almost entirely the connotation of death: specifically, death for a cause. It’s entered large into our language: we say somebody has a martyr complex if they’re always emphasizing how long-suffering they are. We say “don’t play the martyr with me” to our annoying acquaintances who persist in playing that game. I am proud to report that we Olsons are extremely good at it—I think my great-grandfather won a prize for it at the county fair. “That’s ok,” he’d say “use me for a doormat. That’s just my lot in life.”
But the thing is, in the New Testament, the noun marturoswithout fail is translated as “witness”—I know because I used my handy-dandy Bible software to do a word search. Except for one instance where it is converted into its verbal meaning of “testify.” And that brings up an important connotation of the word: it is legaljargon, as in a courtroom. Of course, “witness” has that meaning today too, a witness in court testifies about something they have seen. And the thing is, when someone is a witness to an event, when she testifies in court, it becomes a kind of truth, at least as far as the court is concerned. I swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me who? So help me God.
So the noun witness—marturos—and it’s corresponding verb to witness or testify to has a very important role in the New Testament. It implies truth,veracity, and the thing that caught my eye is that in this passage from Revelation reverses the natural order of things. We usually think of ourselvesas witnesses to the Gospel, but here it’s Jesus who is the witness. And this must have been a striking thing to the folks at the time this was written, close to the beginning of the second century C.E. Because the persecution of Christian witnesses, Christian martyrswas just hitting its bloody stride at about that time, and in fact that’s when the association of the word with sacrificial death began.
So the the hearers of this verse—the New Testament was written to be heard—would likely know very well the double meaning, and it would comfort them thinking that Jesus—like folks they knew, like perhaps even they themselves—had suffered for his faith. But one thing that’s hard to figure out is just what it is that Christ is a witness to. To what truth does he testify? He is a faithfulwitness, we’re told, and Christ faithfully told the truth, faithfully testifiedby his actions . . . Christ himself is a witness, in himself a testimonyto that truth. And to what truth does he testify? He is firstborn of the dead, and ruler over all the kings of the earth . . . and so it is this that he witnesses to: the twin foundations of the kingdom of God.
And as Paul points out over in first Corinthians, the gospel to which he witnesses is captured in paradoxes. He captures it perfectly when he says the wisdom of God is foolishness to the world; the world’s weakness is the strength of the Lord. Here, John of Patmos captures it equally succinctly: he is firstborn of the dead . . . how can the dead be born? Well, the firstJohn—the gospel-writing John—said we must be born from above.
The gospel is that Christ has conquered death, he is the first-born of the dead, the first of the dead to be born from above, to be resurrected by God, and whether the powers and principalities know it or not—and they generally don’t—this first-born is the ruler of all other rulers. It is no longer they that rule the world, no longer the minions of death, but Jesus Christ, the first-born, or as Paul put it, the first fruitsof the resurrection, is ruler over all. See? The grave has lost its victory, and death has lost its sting!
The testimony of Jesus Christ, embedded in his life, death and resurrection—is that there is a new creation, and the rule of death is fading away, whether it looks like it or not, whether it feels like it or not. And that kingdom of God, that just rule over all, is created in love, bought by Jesus’ martyrdom, and embodied in us. We have been made a kingdom, a protectorate, a state, because we are ruled over by God through God’s son Jesus Christ. Further, we are priests to the God of Christ, or as John puts it “to his God and Father.”
This kingdom consists in part of our being priests to God . . . sounds Roman Catholic, doesn’t it? Or at leastEpiscopalian . . . but Paul again puts it in a more familiar way: we are the body of Christ, Christ embodied upon the earth. And just as we are priests to god, stand-ins forGod, we are the embodiment of God’s son.
And in our secondpassage, the one from the gospel-writingJohn, we get a glimpse of how that is to work. The disciples are fearful, huddled together in the upper room, in the candle-lit dark . . . they should have been jubilant,joyfulfor they have been told that Christ lives . . . that first witness, Mary Magdalene has seen the risen Christ and testified to them. But they have not believed her testimony—there’s that word martyr again—and Jesus greets them as he has promised: peace I give to you, my peace I bring to you . . . not as the world gives, not as the powers and principalities, which give death, and war and destruction, but peace . . . his witness, his message, his testimony is a testimony of peace.
Peace be with you, he says. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Christ is the faithful witness, the firstwitness, first-born of the dead, who was in the beginning with God. Christ is the eternal witness, and he bestows upon us through that witness the role of witness ourselves. As God has sent me, he says, so I send you. The faithful witness, through his life and death and resurrection, through his faithfulness, has made us witnesses, made us martyrsto the truth as well.
But note well: it isn’t solely upon we as individuals that this is bestowed . . . Christ sends the group, the whole of them trembling in the upper room. Although there is only a second-person pronoun in English—you—for both a plural and singular, in Greek that is not the case. And here, in the original Greek, he bestows witness-hood not upon individual disciples but upon the lot of them . . . in that upper room cowered the first church, and that’s whom he sends.
That’s one example—there are others!—of the superiority of the Southern version of English. In the South we have a second-person plural, and that’s what Christ passes on his witness-hood to. As the father sent me, he says, so I send y’all, as a group. If y’all—if you the church—forgives the sins of any, they are forgiven them. If y’all retain the sins of any, they are retained. We, the body of Christ, the church are his faithful witness on earth. Just as Jesus was the faithful witness to God, the church—this body in this room, this body of all Christians in Cincinnati, in Ohio, in the world,is that witness as well. Because the human named Jesus is no longer on earth—though he has left us the holy spirit, the advocate, the Spirit of truth, breathed into the mouths of the church there in the upper room—but because the physicalJesus is no longer on this earth, the Church is now the witness, we are now the kingdom of God on earth.
Sermons for me are often difficult to end, without a resorting to a pious platitude or two . . . sometimes I do that anyway, when I can’t come up with anything better. And in this case, the standard thing would be to end by saying something like Brothers and Sisters, how good a witness is Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian? How faithful isit to the call of that firstfaithful witness, Jesus of Nazareth, who in this Easter season has been crucified, died and resurrected as the Christ? If somebody from the outside were to look in on us, what kind of witness would they see? Would they see a typical U.S. congregation, accommodated to our acquisitive lifestyle and nature, a reflection of the world’s values with a thin overlay of Jesus? Or would see committed witnesses, in both senses of the original Greek? Would they see a congregation committed to Jesus’ ministry of sacrifice and service, and, in a word, peace?
What kind of witness is this congregation? If this were a typical sermon on witness, I’d end by asking that, but in our case, in the case of Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian, I don’t have to. Because I think all of us know the answer. Amen.
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