I found this passage from Brian McLaren and used it to open Friday Morning Meditation. Folks liked it and, so, I want to pass it along, but with a warning: it will make you think, maybe criticize.
What was true for Revelation’s original audience is true for us today. Whatever madman is in power, whatever chaos is breaking out, whatever danger threatens, the river of life is flowing now. The Tree of Life is bearing fruit now. True aliveness is available now. That’s why Revelation ends with the sound of a single word echoing through the universe. That word is not Wait! Nor is it Not Yet!or Someday! It is a word of invitation, welcome, reception, hospitality, and possibility. It is a word not of ending, but of new beginning. That one word is Come! The Spirit says it to us. We echo it back. Together with the Spirit, we say it to everyone who is willing. Come! [Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (Jericho Books: 2015), 257.]
Rather than Jesus someday, Christ at the endtime, McLaren invites us to a Christ that is already here among us. He invites us to gather friends and share the journey.
Revelation has always been a difficult book in the library of the Bible. Commentators warn us not to take it literally, to understand the audience for which it was written and the political oppression under which they lived. Still, it is a confusing story. I am no expert on Revelations, or any other book in the Bible and, yet, as protestants we are commanded to make sense out it and to make it fit into our spiritual life, our prayers.
Sensemaking is what scholars and historians do. They cobble together facts into strings of logic. But that's not the kind of knowledge that is needed to grasp the final verses of the Bible. McLaren wants the mystery and majesty of Christ's story to surround us and to carry us along. He wants us to turn this mystery into our own lived experience. He reissues the invitation to come!
• • • •
Join us on Friday morning at 8 Pacific time for silent Centering Prayer. If you need the internet URL, email me at charlestaylorkerchner@gmail.com
Banner Photo: Patrick Fore via Unsplash