I will never forget the fury on the face of that good man as he left this church after the close of worship some 20 years ago. I have forgotten the major issues of the day claiming the headlines of the newspapers and television. Perhaps a crucial stance in a Presidential election, the questionable veracity of particular administration and its policies in Latin America, or perhaps the impact of tax policy on housing or other matters of social welfare. In any case, this devout and committed churchman hunted me down after the service. Trembling, and in a rage almost uncontrollable, he shouted that he did not come to church to hear the daily news; that, indeed, he never read a newspaper, he never turned on Brokaw, Rather or Jennings, much less CNN, and by God he was not going to come to this church, the last place the news should be on the mind of anyone, especially the preacher. And with that he and his wife left the Old South.

Now I have to tell you I believe the matters we see in the headlines are spiritual matters. I believe the God of Jesus Christ cares who eats and who does not. I believe our God cares about the conflict that burns cities to the ground, puts thousands in mass graves, drives tens of thousands from their homes, slaughters hundreds of thousands because of their ethnic identity. Ironically, you see, the news helps us to understand the profound concern our God bears for the quality of life we live on this earth among one another.

Is the news a measure of God’s concern for human life? Are you kidding? No. The reason I say that, being a man of faith and hope, lies in the marvelous passage from Revelation we read this morning. You see, that passage reflects the kind of world we read or hear about in our daily headlines. The passage describes the authentic response of faith as we encounter those headlines. The passage understands how violent and irrational events can put our faith and our hope up for grabs, compel us to question both the sovereignty and the love of God. The author of this wonderful letter we call “Revelation,”-our author, John, condemned to that prison Island in the Agean, Patmos-John of Patmos suffers terribly because of his commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and he knows his churches back on the Asian mainland suffer, too. For years those churches make every attempt to offer the Gospel and its promises to a world grappling with the worst afflictions we human beings suffer at the whim of nature and our own hands. Those churches want to change things. They want what God wants for human life to spread across the world they live in, and it does not happen. They experience instead a world exploding with violence, weeping from injustice, weakened from lethal outbreaks of disease and they wonder just who is in charge of creation. They find their commitment to Jesus and the kind of world he represents filled by deception, cruelty and harsh persecution. They witness their man John banished and another of their church members executed because of their stubborn faith. The world of this God of Jesus Christ seems under the management of brutality and assault. They wonder, “Is anyone alert to our desperate circumstances? Does God care?”

Do you ever echo that question? What is going on in this world? Who is in charge? Is this really God’s world? Here, in this church, in worship, week after week, for instance, we pray for a more Christ-like presence among ourselves and our neighbors across the world; we remember those scattered and killed in Chehnyan combat; we recall those caught in bloody Balkan civil wars. We pray for alleviation of the crises separating the races, the nations, the creeds of the world. We ask our God to help in reconciling antagonists in gender conflict, gay and straight indignities, religious arrogance. Today, as a crowd gathers right outside this church, we pray for wise stewardship of biotechnical breakthroughs and reverent approaches to human life and God’s creations. What good does it do? Do our prayers bounce off the ceiling? Who rules human history anyway? Is faith a fantasy? Is our hope wishful thinking? Is our presence here this morning a hollow, pathetic, straining for a will-o-the-wisp? Are the hatreds driving Israeli and Palestinian apart, the terrors sustaining the nuclear weapons of the Pakistanis and the Indians, the addictions of Americans making the drug lords of Columbia rich-you make your own list-do these acts have the last word, are they finally the driving force and blueprint for the ultimate destiny of your world and mine? Does God, if there is a God, does God care?

Well friends, if there is any one thing that incarcerated seer trapped out there on Patmos wants to tell us, it is this: The God of Jesus Christ, in face of much in our world denying it, the God of Jesus Christ is in charge of what we perceive to be a wild and bloody history. The God of Jesus Christ undergirds and surrounds us even as we pass through events threatening to erode, if not crush, our trust in One who through even the most terrible of circumstances never lets us go. We can rest our hope in One who creates new possibilities for us even when doors slam, stone walls loom, we find ourselves locked in a room with no exit. John celebrates hope against hope. He seeks to answer the question perplexing those of us in every age who ask the desperate question: How could such terrible things be happening if a God of love really lies behind-and cares a whit about-our life together?

Oh, I know it is hard to see that question and John’s answer in the rich and florid symbolism of John’s letter. What is he talking about? Why such arcane language? We need remember John uses symbolic language by necessity. Caesar’s Gestapo seek to demolish John and his churches. The Empire considers him subversive, traitorous. John’s letter comes from prison and he wants to delude the prying eyes of the regime’s secret police. He writes in symbols treasured and understood by his churches alone, symbols all taken from the Old Testament and laced into a brilliant tapestry of ultimate liberation. “What’s going on in this world?” we ask,. “Who can tell us?” And John answers. He answers with brilliant apocalyptic symbols taken from his forebears in the faith: Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.

Now bear with me as we shift to John’s stunning symbols. Remember our Lesson this morning? Into the hands, if you will, of an all seeing slain lamb there goes a scroll. That scroll contains the clues to understanding the mysteries, the terrors, the violence and destructive threads of history. And only that slain lamb, the crucified Christ, carries the key to unlocking the riddle of a tragic world, a tragic world ruled by a God of mercy and of justice. Only the lamb is worthy. Only the crucified Christ: no one else; no, not the scholars, the poets, the novelists, no one- surely not the Caesars of this world, nor those who are victors and write the world’s history. Only the crucified Christ is worthy to reveal the deep meaning of the human story. John sees the wounded, the bruised, the bloodied, the powerless, the stricken, the accused, the imprisoned. Only they, identifying with the One who was condemned by the Roman empire to hang on a tree, only they and their faith and hope can be trusted as authentic interpreters of the human condition. The rich, the well cared for, the satisfied: what do they know of hope against hope, of love when life seems headed for the trash heap? When those who identify with the crucified assert the sovereignty of the God of love, then we must listen. Only the slain One, with eyes seeing everything- “omniscient”-with horns expressing power to take on the worst life can dish out, “omnipotent”-only the slain One with realism and authenticity can illuminate the meaning of our existence and proclaim with unique authority amid what so often appears human chaos and wreckage. Only the lamb, the crucified Christ, can illuminate the majestic and eternal oversight and reign of the loving recreative God.

II

And how does John make vivid this rulership of God? How does John illustrate his faith and his hope in the underlying security the Divine holds for us? He shows us the damage we do ourselves, and especially to those at the bottom of the heap, when we try to run our lives apart from Christ. He draws wild and violent pictures of history run amok when we take our lives into our own hands, give our loyalties to everything under the sun but to Christ and the kind of world Christ offers us. And yes, underneath all the chaos and violence of our life together there lies a loving and gracious divine motive: Our God enables us to create a world where things can get so bad we may decide to change our ways, to turn around, to reverse our direction, to repent and become as God wants us.

Take for instance, the lamb’s-Christ’s-cracking open of that first of seven seals on the scroll. What emerges? What do we see? The first of the so-called 4 horsemen of the apocalypse. A white horse, in this case. “Its rider had a bow, an armament, a weapon, a crown was given him, and he came out conquering and to conquer.”

O John of Patmos, you draw a picture telling the chilling truth. You see that when we grasp life for ourselves, when we decide to do it our way, nation will rise against nation, people against people. You see that when India detonates a nuclear bomb, Pakistan can not be far behind. You see that when one nation crams its mountain caves and ground silos with ICBMs, that when it jams its armories with M1 tanks and F16 attack fighters, when it manufactures laser guided bombs, crowds the sea lanes with Nimitz carriers, outer space with spy satellites, buries deep into the sea submarines with Trident missile ordnance-yes John , you see nations trapped in horrifying arms races, living in fear and terror of one another, readying themselves to conquer, conquering and being conquered. Thus does a world designed for love, forgetting, betraying, resisting the way of the love of God in Christ, realize the consequences of rejecting that love. Thus does it experience the judgment of Divine love spurned. For God’s sake, seeing these terrible consequences, will we not change?

And the second seal? Remember? “And out came another horse, bright red; its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another; and he was given a great sword.”

Yes, John, you see the terrible judgments we face when God is left out of our human equations. You see the intense hatreds next door neighbors, brothers and sisters under the skin, harbor for one another: civil wars with all of their violent and bloody consequences. Oh, friends, what did the President of the United States face when he went to India earlier this week? Scores of slaughtered Sikhs in the Kashmir; Muslim and Hindu, living next door to one another, slitting each others’ throats. And what did Pope John Paul, II, trigger in a Palestinian refugee camp this week? A riot: Palestinians hurling fury at Israelis, a man of peace igniting the angry throwing of rocks, contemptuous epithets and tear gas. And this morning, in the Eternal City, Jerusalem: religious siblings, ethnic cousins, struggling for the same soil, bitterly claiming sacred rights over the same city. Or again, this week, what do American troops, with their colleagues from the UN confront now in Kosovo? Serbs and Albanians, from the same town, even yet ensnared in that terrible human enterprise we call ethnic cleansing; peacekeepers vulnerable themselves to vengeful snipers, the bloodshed of generations continuing to nourish unbridgeable resentment and hatred. And in Northern Ireland? We approach Good Friday, the anniversary of a pivotal peace process, and yet those who live within a block of one another continue to threaten one another with terrorist bombings, random mutilations, searing ruthlessness. And here in Boston, we have neighborhoods divided by race and class; we have men abusing, injuring, killing women, their closest partners, and you can make your own catalog. Thus does a world designed by and for love, yet denying, forgetting, betraying, resisting the way of the love of God in Christ, pay the gruesome price of rejecting that love. Thus do we experience the judgment of Divine love spurned. For God’s sake, for Love’s sake, will we not change? Will we not, with this urgent, bloody message, repent?

And the third seal broken open? “I looked and there was a black horse! Its rider held a pair of scales in his hand, and I heard . . . a voice saying, ‘A quart of wheat for a day’s pay, and three quarts of barley for a day’s pay, but do not damage the olive oil and the wine.’”

Oh, John, you know so well the consequences of Christ’s love ignored, the very foundations of the universe rejected: in justice, poverty, hunger, starvation, homelessness, a world vulnerable to threats to family stability, the deprivation of decent health care, the inadequacy in children’s education, the crisis of child care for the poor who seek work and are, for the most part, working. In a country like ours, that black horse and its rider mean 22 percent of young children in America live in families with incomes below the federal poverty line; that black horse means a poverty rate substantially higher, often two to three times higher than that of other major industrialized nations; it means 34 million in the United States at risk for hunger; it means 32,000 of the world’s children die each day from malnutrition and preventable diseases, this in a world where the quantity of food is adequate to feed everyone. Thus does a world designed for and by Divine love realize the grim consequences of rejecting that love. Thus does it experience the judgment of love spurned. Can we not discern the Divine imperative screaming at us from this unjust condition to turn around?

And that forth seal? John sees “a pale green horse with a rider whose name is Death, and Hades follows him; they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, famine, pestilence, and by the wild animals of the earth.”

Pale green, livid, the color of a corpse-Death! the final sweeping up of the loveless catastrophes depicted by those first three ominous horses and their riders: death through an eagerness to extend empire by flexing military muscle; death by starvation, death by cholera, death by revenge; the mass graves of genocide, the graves filled by those suffering through neighborhood or family or, yes, school violence; the sign of a world designed by and for love rejecting the very foundation of its life, realizing the consequence of rejecting that love, experiencing the judgment of Divine love spurned. The Divine voice emerging from this morbid scene: “Come to your senses. Turn around! Change! Repent!”

And please, from the fourth seal to the sixth for just one moment: that terrible earthquake, the explosion of nature, a blackened sun, a blood red moon, islands, mountains, removed from their foundations. But more: kings, magnates, generals, the rich and powerful, everyone slave and free heading for the hills, a message that nothing lasts forever, that those in power counting on their imperishability, creating self-serving propaganda, entrenched bureaucracy, assembling financial, police and military structures to last are self-deceived, their dreams of permanency doomed to collapse, their institutional architecture a pretense grounded on a massive fault. For the poor, the persecuted of any age, the Divine promise of inevitable collapse of such oppressive regimes spells hope. This abysmal existence in God’s good time does not go on forever.

But it is the fifth seal we close on this morning, the seal when broken by the Crucified reveals the saints whose blood has been shed for Christ’s sake, whose lives have been spent for the cause of creating a world more like that envisioned by Christ: lives confident that, against all evidence to the contrary, lives confident that the world rests securely on the pillars of Divine love, and, yes, witnesses confident the rejection of Divine love and its catastrophic consequences serve as the instrument God uses to drive us toward healing our brokenness. Can we hear those enduring witnesses pleading, “Sovereign Lord, Holy and True, How long before we are avenged? How long before your patience runs out? When, finally, does your vision for a new creation take over? When will your intentions for this recalcitrant humanity, your yearning for us to change our ways, when will you show who really controls the cosmos? Do you really care?”

And here we arrive at the core of this astounding reflection of the love of God and how it embraces your story and mine, the story of our generation, the story of human history. See that slain lamb-the Crucified Christ-opening each those seals? Only the kind of life we see evident on the Cross, the kind of service, selflessness and willingness to risk so that even those who hate may know they are loved, that life-Christ’s life-done in by the same forces made vivid by those four horsemen of the apocalypse, killed by the forces let loose when love is shoved aside, that life, Christ’s life, by the power of God overcomes, conquers the forces nailing Jesus up, burying him in a tomb.

God assures us that through all of the misery and inhumanity we perpetrate against one another saying “thanks, but no thanks” to Love’s design for us, God assures us that finally the slaughtered lamb stands, the crucified, buried Christ lives, that a world apparently ruled by Caesar types and their powerful friends is finally under the rulership of One whose love and whose way can be seen and embraced in Jesus Christ crucified. And John insists Christ’s way in this world is our way. The willingness to put our lives-perhaps our deaths-on the line for the love of God and Jesus Christ is the way in service to the world we show our faith, our trust, our hope in the One we believe is finally in charge. We risk our lives for a better world on the bet that God cares-Love cares- that armaments become irrelevant, that war be stilled, that justice be done, that pestilence breeding death be eradicated, yea, God cares that our witness demonstrate against everything saying chaos and death rule, that our witness demonstrate we trust Love and service are ultimately in charge. Love cares, and, by God, so do we.