Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

As Fr Peter wrote earlier this week, our lectionary, pretty much without warning, has dropped us into the midst of the Apocalypse. And here we are this morning, faced with armored locust-scorpion-human things, an abyss and an Angel of Destruction who happens to be king of the armored locust-scorpion-human things. The best part of our reading this morning, though, comes right at the end: “The first woe has passed. There are still two woes to come.” I think we can be forgiven if we mutter under our breath a bewildered or beleaguered, “Good God, what’s next?”

Of course, it doesn’t necessarily take locusts and angelic destroyers and Apocalypses to get us to sigh, “What next? What now?” All you need do is glance at a newsfeed or turn on the radio or look in the newspaper to be exposed to an ever-growing and increasingly breathtaking litany of disturbing or angering or horrifying or heartbreaking events happening around the world or in our own backyards. And it’s easy to feel fatigued and dispirited by the parlous condition of our world or our country, state, city, church, or home; easy to feel like the only thing you can do is crawl into bed, pull the covers over your head, and hope it all goes away.

Our faith, though, offers another alternative…

…We can sing.

In seminary, I took a class on John’s Revelation, and one of the great treats of taking the course was getting to read Allan Boesak’s commentary Comfort and Protest: The Apocalypse from a South African Perspective. Writing under and against apartheid, Boesak’s insight into the Revelation is that it’s principally and primarily protest literature: the literature of an oppressed, beleaguered and embattled community processing its pain, its suffering, its woundedness, recognizing in its wounds the wounds of its crucified Lord and viscerally understanding that Jesus’ resurrection triumph over death and sin’s oppression is a sign of the community’s own triumph over death, sin, injustice, and oppression. The Revelation turns pain into prophecy as it lays bare the satanic nature of Empire, imagines Empire’s end, and looks forward to the reign of the Lord of Love that is even now coming into the world. It is literature designed to give hope to the oppressed and to those on the edge of giving up or giving in.

And at every turn in John’s text, there are hymns: songs of praise and high thanksgiving, resurrection songs of wonder, power and supernal joy. Boesak clues us in to why the songs are so important, writing, “it drives the Dragon crazy when you sing about his downfall even though you are bleeding” (87).

These songs of grace equip us to encounter the death-infected world and remain unbowed; they equip us and encourage us to stand with the oppressed and the outcast and the alien (for whom crawling back into bed is rarely an option) and to participate in the work of undoing the Empire of Death, the empire of racism and sexism and transphobia and xenophobia and every ideology of fear that seeks to undermine or erase (through a violence subtle or overt) the indelible image of God in our fellow human beings. These songs won’t prevent us from getting hurt, but our resurrection songs will help us join and sustain the struggle to undo Empire. In fact, Boesak imagines the wounded Jesus asking him, “where are your wounds?” and he writes, “if I say I haven’t any, he will say, ‘Was there nothing to fight for?’” (89)

So when the locusts come to worry joy to tatters, instead of giving in to the messenger of the abyss, the Destroying Angel that would lead us to despondency or self-protection or cynicism or despair or worse, perhaps we could count ourselves blessed to be given a new chance to sing love’s bright fire into the world’s deadly darkness. Our Psalmist this morning begins her own song with “Fret not thyself because of the ungodly … [only] put thou thy trust in the LORD, and be doing good,” and she goes own to sing, “The ungodly seeketh counsel against the just, and gnasheth upon him with his teeth. The Lord shall laugh him to scorn; for he hath seen that his day is coming.”

What might your song be? What song has the Spirit given your soul to sing?

And will you sing it?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+