Somehow, things fail to go as those Asian churches expect. They find themselves undergoing virulent threat from Roman power. The magistrates issue orders outlawing those confessing the Christian faith. Already the appointed Imperial Attorney successfully prosecuted, sentenced to death and executed one of the regular church members. The imperial power polices the streets, opens their mail, places double agents in their congregations, bribes their friends to betray them, tortures them for intelligence. They find themselves excluded from jobs, sent before anyone else to the front lines to die in war against the enemy. Because of their status as religious pariahs, and perceived as probable subversives, the Christians live in ghettos where pestilence and death devastate them at rates higher than the general population. The men and women receiving this letter live in a world where hope seems eclipsed, love in short supply and faith denied in everything but in the gods supporting imperial aggrandizement and expansion.

“What kind of world is this?” they wonder. “Are our churches doomed? Is the world a chaos of violent and oppressive forces? Does might make right? Is the realm of justice, of peace-the world-wide community promised by the God of Jesus Christ-is that promise a fraud, is that world careening to a dead end, is that community a fantasy, is our faith wishful thinking?”

“No! No! Not on your life!” insists the author of this splendid letter. He writes from the Agean Isle of Patmos, the Alcatraz of the ancient world, imprisoned because of his loyalty to Christ’s new world. In this letter, laced with symbols lifted from the Old Testament (remember now, what we call the “Old Testament” served as the Bible of the people to whom our author writes), in this letter soaked with symbols taken from the Jewish prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, who themselves lived in dislocation, exile and oppression as refugees and slaves under cruel and violent regimes, our author-whom we have come to call St. John the Divine-our author affirms a radical hope. He expresses to his Jewish Jesus-movement congregations a confidence and trust in the ultimate sovereignty of the God of love and justice in a world intent on exerting an anarchy of cruelty and corruption. That throne room John so vividly paints for us, with One ensconced on the throne whom we can apprehend only through the brilliance of light radiating from it, that throne surrounded by images of nature and history all rooted in Israel’s saga of hope generated from centuries of oppression and genocide -that throne room reveals a cosmic hope, expressed in symbols unreadable by the oppressive power, yet everyday metaphors for those oppressed Churches-a cosmic hope affirmed through hymns sung day and night by a radiant universe of voices who join in singing:

Whatever else this radiant and iridescent imagery conveys, John intends it to assure us that whatever threats and terrors, violence and discouragement, shocks, illness or irrationality we face in our lives-throwing into question our faith in One who sustains us through thick and thin, eroding our trust in One who promises light at the end of even the longest and darkest of our tunnels, subverting our hope in One who stands ready to open a door apparently labeled “no exit”-John intends to assure us that despite all evidence to the contrary this God remains sovereign, that love sustains and undergirds creation, that hope reflects the ultimately Divine reversal of absurd and cruel assaults on our common life, including death itself. In our world where “No!” to God reverberates, this striking affirmation sings as counterpoint: the Divine “Yes” to you, to me, to the whole creation.

Now, my beloved friends, if there is any one thing we gather for on the Lord’s day in this room, it rests on this confidence and trust in a God who is finally in charge of the dynamics of our universe. The composer of this letter, claiming a divine revelation, conceives this brilliant imagery, he tells us, in church. He sends his letter to churches to be read while they gather for worship on the Lord’s Day, the first day of the week: if you will, a letter for people in church-like us. John envisions this scattered congregation-you, me, gathering here-us coming together to celebrate God’s power conquering death with life, acclaiming love’s lasting presence and singing together, amid a world of despair and cynicism, hymns of triumph and hope.

Indeed, what about us in this room this morning? Does John’s hope really include us? Here we gather, coming in off Copley Square, for what? In any case we enter a remarkable and fantastic room. It is different in here from out there. It bears a different message. It reminds us of quality, depth, of a dimension the headlines in The Herald, the sports section of The Globe, the “Week in Review” of The Times tend to miss. This room with different images, symbols and figures washes over us portraying the same sovereign love and hope we gain from John. This room where we gather this morning in song, poetry, drama, art anticipates, complements the substance of John’s vision.

Those windows, for instance, up there in the north balcony, take them for granted, if you will. They show what we call the Gospel miracles. Miracle: the New Testament’s way of testifying to the kind of existence God wants for us and promises to us. Look at the window second from the left. Here, a girl seriously afflicted, if not dead then so close to it everyone including her frightened father grieves, mourns. The script, then, beneath the pictured event reads: “Damsel, I say unto thee arise.” We see through that window a world God designs without debilitating illness, death-dealing disease. . . Our ultimate hope. No different from John’s triumphant message. Gospel!

Or in the window second from the right: death locked in a tomb, as the fourth evangelist tells us, locked up for three days so the stench of the corpse overwhelms the surroundings. There, at the bottom of the window, the words, “Lazarus come forth!” Love. Light. Life: the last word! John, the beloved disciple, and John the prisoner on Patmos essentially singing with different metaphors the same great music.

Now look at the south windows depicting the parables of our Lord, the one second from the right. Do you feel abandoned, lost, alone, forsaken? Do you see that boy enfolded in his father’s cloak? He believes the deepest ties in his very existence, severed; his life afloat without anchor. And the citation from Luke at the base of that glorious window: “This son was dead and is alive again.” What have we here? A parent’s-in this case a father’s- undying, unbreachable and ever-searching love for all of us; that message flooding this room every day, every Sunday. Luke and St. John the Divine: on the same wavelength.

And yes, take this gorgeous Handel Chandos Anthem sung by our choir this morning: Psalm 42. What do we see, whom do we hear in the very first lines? A lonely deer, a “hart,” in this case, on the basis of Hebrew grammar, not a stag but a hind, a female deer roaming on a desert steppe somewhere east of the Jordan in search of some damp mire, a soft marsh to slake her thirst. As one commentator asks, “Does this illustration suggest that the psalmist, for this once at least, is a woman? And why not?” Her dearest desire: to behold the face of God. She recalls a festival of worship, joy and celebration in Jerusalem, but now her soul, her very being, roils out of kilter; she finds herself cast down, empty. We know not why. But we do know she finds herself far from her roots, a long distance from the place and company of her cherished worship. Was she the captive in a slave raid? Did the enemy raid her village, murder the men, sell the women and children into slavery or drag them off to their alien camp? Or do we hear in this lament a woman now in exile in a Bedouin lair deep in the Eastern desert, or stashed away among the enemy’s caves amid the mountains of what we now call the Golan Heights? She finds herself incessantly humiliated, mocked, reviled: “Where is now thy God?” Her captors deride her: “We see you abandoned, deserted, discarded.” Our psalmist’s memory of the gathered and celebrating congregation haunts her. Yet the dazzling memory triggers in her a radical discontinuity: for she sings again, in her outwardly miserable and, yes, inwardly disquieted condition: “I will put my trust in God, I will praise Him . . . yea in this exile, this slavery, my help, my hope . . .”

O friends, for the hundreds of people who might come in here, who look at these windows and count them beautiful but enigmatic, who might hear this urgent plea from the psalmist and Handel’s faith resonating in this glorious anthem and wonder what we do here on a Sunday morning while Kosovo burns, New York bleeds, Boston’s poverty gap spreads, for them we are here because together-as a body, alert no less than anyone else to resistance and obstacles threatening the human family-we are here because we count important, vital, of ultimate concern in this world, indeed, we worship One who, through everything denying it, wishes us whole, conquers death with life, will never let us go, lives as our imperishable and invincible hope.

Do you believe it? Do you need a guarantee? Our imprisoned and exiled liturgical letter-writer provides one. Remember, there, next to the throne of the sovereign One, a lamb, slaughtered yet standing; the One crucified, yet alive; the One nailed up by ignorance, stupidity, cowardice, fear, hatred; the One cast off, bled to death, entombed, junked, now even alive and going before us creating a new world from this old one of ours. The sovereignty over our history resplendently pictured in John’s revelatory throne room derives from Calvary, from a tomb emptied by the power of One who holds up this creation on broad shoulders. George Frederick Handel, whose magnificent anthem we hear this morning, understood this majestic and tremendous affirmation, grounding his immortal oratorio “Messiah” on John’s glorious tribute:

How more brilliantly to express the Christian hope? Truly, no more brilliantly, but so what? What difference does all this make? Well, friends, gathering here as a community grounded in unconquerable love and invincible hope, singing, praying, confessing, celebrating, we, assured of the ultimate destiny of history, can go into the world as witnesses to love and hope. We express our deepest convictions through the quality of our lives in God’s world. And these qualities? They consist of our trust and confidence, our hope acted out.

Just one more time: look, if you will, to your left to the very top of the transept. See that circular window there? See there in the center panel: The lamb, the crucified Christ, stands at the center. And encircling the lamb from the top, going counterclockwise, the angels of “love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith.” Surrendering to the ultimate Sovereignty of Almighty God who lives among us as crucified servant, prepared to die for love’s sake, to live for hope’s unfolding, we witness to joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith in this neighborhood, this city, this world. We witness out there, just as we worship and witness together in this room, to our very future in God.