THE WHORE OF BABYLON (Revelation 17 & 18)

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1 THE WHORE OF BABYLON (Revelation 17 & 18) Scripture Lessons: Revelation 17:1-18; 18:1-24 Luke 17:20-21 (08/19/12) Come, I will show you the judgment of the great whore who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and with the wine of whose fornication the inhabitants of the earth have become drunk. (Rev. 17:1-2) As much as I like having Jon with us this morning, I confess I am sorry that Julie is not here because I like to tease her. She set herself up for this by suggesting the Book of Revelation for our summer worship because she said she likes a challenge. I guess that s the way this younger generation of preachers thinks they like a challenge. Old timers like me tend to prefer passages that are simple and easy to understand. Second, Julie made the mistake a few weeks ago of referring to the Book of Revelation as a hopeful book. I may be missing the point, but this is not a text to which I would turn if I were lost, lonely, discouraged or depressed. Nor, by the way, would I read the daily newspaper, especially during an election year. Nor, by the way, would I peruse the sports pages if I were a Boston Red Sox fan. On second thought, this biblical text could actually pick up your spirits. If you are having a bad day; if your children or your husband or your wife or even your minister are getting on your nerves; if you find it painful to watch the Red Sox implode in their own inimitable way; and if the pollen count or humidity is particularly high, take heart. If you think you have it bad, consider what s going to happen to everyone who will not be among the 144,000 righteous who will be spared the torment that the seven angels carrying the seven bowls filled with the wrath of God will visit upon the earth. Perhaps because I suffer from low self-esteem, I often find myself lying in bed at night wondering if I will be numbered among the 144,000, whether, in the words of our beloved hymn, when the roll is called up yonder, I ll be there. After all, there are a lot of really good people spread all around the earth. Am I really in the top 144,000? As much as I believe that the one true way to God is liberal Protestantism enriched with elements of Tibetan Buddhism and viewed through the lens of Jungian psychology, there are moments, often in the dark hours, when I find myself assailed by doubt. What if my 1

2 path is not the one and only true path? Then I assure myself that my path is the one and only true path and I drift off contentedly to sleep. I know that as sophisticated biblical scholars you re probably thinking that we don t have to take the number 144,000 literally. You know that 144 is equal to 12 x 12, or 12 squared. You know that there were 12 tribes of Israel and 12 disciples, so perhaps 12 is one of the special or archetypal numbers that appear and reappear in the Bible as a symbol of wholeness. After all, there are 12 signs of the zodiac and 12 months of the year. It was also Gil McDougald s number, but that s beside the point. So 144,000 may represent all those who are faithful to God, even those who follow other religious paths. There are several different ways that one can read the Book of Revelation. First, we can regard the various beasts and signs as literal descriptions of what will occur at the end of days. Maybe at Armagedon there really will be dragons, angels with bowls of wrath, and a woman riding on a scarlet beast. This is one possibility. We can also read the Book of Revelation as an analogy. In an analogy, the various parts of the narrative serve as coded references to something known. This is the way that biblical scholars tend to interpret the text. If we try to understand the chapters we read this morning as allegory, Babylon could be a code name for Rome. Babylon is described as a city with 7 hills. Babylon did not have 7 hills, but Rome did. The Fall of Babylon would then predict the fall of Rome, the city that John and the early church hated for its persecution of the saints. If we continue along this line, the scarlet beast would be the Roman emperor. The blasphemous names for the beast would be the divine titles that Roman citizens gave to the Roman emperor. The mark on the beast s forehead ties the emperor to Roman prostitutes, who were branded in this manner. The statement that the beast was, is not, and will be could describe the Emperor Nero, who, though dead, was expected by his loyal followers to return to life and power. The 10 kings mentioned in the 17 th chapter probably refer to local governors. We can read the entire Book of Revelation this way, as a coded description of how the Roman Empire will be destroyed. For example, the number of the beast, 666, refers to the sacrilege of emperor worship. Since Hebrew and Greek letters have numerical equivalents, the number of the beast is the sum of the separate letters of the 2

3 emperor s name. The most probable reference would be to Neron Caesar (in Hebrew) which, if spelled without the final n (as Nero Caesar) would also account for the variant reading of the number of the beast as 616. So don t worry if the numbers 666 or 616 occur in your telephone number or street address; they most likely do not refer to Satan. They refer to the Emperor Nero, a real jerk who is long gone and not to be feared. I understand this way of looking at the Book of Revelation, but I don t understand why this would be included in our Bible. A coded prophecy of the anticipated end of the Roman Empire is of no interest to me. Despite my several visits to Rome I have yet to grasp its connection to Satan. I also don t know why Babylon gets trashed since that was one of the cornerstones of civilization, of writing and art in the ancient world. I am not inclined to view Italy as an enemy to be feared, especially based on its track record in the last two world wars. They didn t even do that well in the recent Olympic medal tally. I confess I find myself drawn to the third way of understanding this book, viewing John s mystical experience as a vision or a dream, something to be viewed symbolically. Symbols are different from signs or allegories. Symbols seek to put us in touch with an unconscious dimension of reality that cannot be adequately described in either conceptual or allegorical language. My preference, then, is to regard the Book of Revelation as a symbolic book, as one would do if someone were to experience this material in a dream. This approach to scripture is the approach Julie took with us last week. In her amplification of the passage concerning the great earthquake that will herald the end of the world, Julie suggested that rather than simply seeing it as a sign of the end, we could think of it as something that happens to all of us. The ground beneath our feet begins to shift. That which we believed was solid is not solid. The crucial question is whether the destruction is just destruction or whether it is in the service of growth, of individuation. Sometimes the old just crumbles, but sometimes the old falls away in order for the new to emerge. I think Julie s sermon last week was psychological and descriptive rather than eschatological and predictive. When I look at this morning s chapters from this perspective, the great whore could symbolize the primitive unconscious, that realm of the psyche that gave birth to consciousness but which can also swallow it up. As I mentioned two weeks ago, the unconscious contains the will to pleasure and the will to power. These drives are present 3

4 in all of us. They become problematic when they become an end in themselves. When this happens, our moral code as well as our sense of community, our experience of empathy, compassion, and love get swept away. The dragon or the beast within us is then unleashed upon the world. We need to remember that for hundreds of thousands of years before the Israelites encountered Yahweh, people worshipped the Great Mother. The Great Mother Goddess was believed to give rise to the life that sprang from the earth. She was the goddess of planting and harvest. Her realm was nature, the earth, matter, and the body. Approximately 5,000 years ago, several especially sensitive people in Palestine received a different glimpse into the divine nature of reality. They experienced God as masculine and as one who imposed a strict moral code. Perhaps they experienced a complementary side of God. Perhaps God had actually evolved. In any event, their worship of this new God gave rise to a new kind of consciousness, a masculine as opposed to a feminine consciousness. This new experience of God split the world and life into opposites: masculine as opposed to feminine; sky as opposed to earth; spirit as opposed to matter or body. The Israelites solidified their new religious and cultural identity by pushing off from the practices of the indigenous peoples in that part of the world. In fact, I do not believe that the dietary restrictions in the Old Testament have anything to do with food safety. The foods that are condemned were related to animals that were associated with the Great Goddess. To eat these foods, i.e., to have communion with her, was regarded as sin. As we now know, a one-sided masculine approach to life is no healthier than a one-sided feminine approach. The only healthy approach to life involves wholeness. The woman s movement, especially as it has found expression within the church, has attempted to heal the patriarchal culture and psychology of both the church and western civilization. At the time the Book of Revelation was written, however, the Israelites and the newly emerging Christian church were still pushing off from everything that had to do with nature, with the body, with sensual pleasure, with the earth, and with matter. In Revelation 14 we read that only those who are virgins are numbered among the 144,000. If we view the whore as a degraded depiction of the Great Goddess, we can see why her followers are kings and merchants. Kings and merchants accumulate wealth. 4

5 Individual wealth was condemned by the early church, which promoted a communal or communistic society. It emphasized the virtue of poverty, while the secular world valued riches. The church focused on the next life while the secular world emphasized this life. Some religious traditions still require their priests to not only be men but also celibate, while, as we know, the secular world seems obsessed with sex. Christianity served as an excellent corrective to paganism, but it will never be psychologically or spiritually healthy without reintegrating the feminine, the earth, the body, pleasure, and material wealth in a healthy way. But let s be honest. It is easy for us to become lost in the material side of life, to become followers of the woman clothed in purple and scarlet who is adorned with gold and jewels and pearls. These are things that the secular world seeks in abundance. As we heard this morning, we can actually get drunk on them, get addicted to them. When we worship the Great Whore of Babylon, when we fail to build our house, our life, on a spiritual foundation, we are setting ourselves up for the kind of total destruction that John witnessed in his vision. I believe this interpretation of the woman is congruent with what Jesus said about the dangers of wealth. Jesus told the rich young man to sell all that he had, give it to the poor, and then follow him. He warned about storing up riches on earth rather than riches in heaven. The lost coin is not an actual coin. The treasure hidden in the field and the pearl of great price are not external gold and pearls; they are the riches of the kingdom of God that is within us. I would never tell you this around stewardship time, but I believe we need to embrace the opposites with regard to these important dimensions of life. We need to experience pleasure, but not get lost in a search for pleasure. We need to strive to be successful while maintaining a strong sense of community, of empathy and compassion for our brothers and sisters who have less. We need to grow the world economy, but we need to do this without desecrating, despoiling, and poisoning the earth. We need to give generously to our church, but we also need to take care of our own needs. The apostle Paul tells us that the love of money is the root of all evil. Note that Paul does not say that money is the root of all evil, but the love of money. 5

6 Finally, and I hesitate to say this, I disagree with the angel. I don t think the Great Whore of Babylon can be conquered or destroyed. Because I believe that demonic powers are an exaggeration of normal, natural, healthy drives, I don t believe they can or should be driven out or banished. They should just not be allowed to swallow us up. We should not become drunk on them. They should not be in the center of our life, the place reserved for Christ. If we become addicted to them, then the disaster predicted by John will surely follow. The Book of Revelation tells us that if we place Christ in the center of our life, we will not only escape the disaster that will destroy the lives of so many, we will be able to transform these dragons and beasts through love. When we do this, we stand a much better chance of being numbered among the 144,000 that are saved or enlightened, those who have both experienced and find their grounding in the kingdom of God that is within. A sermon preached by the Reverend Paul D. Sanderson The First Community Church of Southborough August 19,