Mtr Kelli Joyce

Dear friends in Christ,

Today’s reading from the Revelation to John is, to put it mildly, a little bit... trippy. A throne. Surrounded by a rainbow, which looks like an emerald. Surrounded by twenty-four other thrones, all of which are in front of an ocean that seems to be made of crystal-clear glass. Whoever is on the central throne can only be described as being “like jasper and carnelian.” Also, there’s thunder, and creatures that are “full of eyes, around and inside.”

It is an exceedingly strange passage. And I think it’s a good one for us to reflect on. There’s a real temptation, when we imagine Heaven, or the Kingdom of God, or New Creation, to imagine it as mostly like the world we’re familiar with, but with the rough edges sanded off and the sad parts cropped out. But John’s account of the heavenly court of God is utterly unrecognizable. John himself struggles to find things to which he can compare the heavenly scene. He is constrained to analogy - not an emerald, but like an emerald. A sea like glass, like crystal. Beasts that are somehow akin to lion, ox, human, and eagle, but... different.

Our religion is a strange religion. It makes supernatural claims that are beyond our ability to explain or account for. The future we are promised is not the world that we have built for ourselves, but a little nicer. It is tremendous and unimaginable, and God invites us to hope for it, in all its strangeness and despite its unfamiliarity. We do not yet know what we shall be, or what Heaven shall be - but we can know who has promised us eternal life. And we can have faith in the goodness of that One.

In peace,
Mtr. Kelli