In White Robes

Scripture: Revelation 7:9-17

Sermon prepared by Dr. John Rottman, Grand Rapids, Michigan
 

Dear people of God,

Have you ever heard of a company somewhere in the States that cleans up movies. The company is called Cleanflicks.com. All you have to do is send them any movie with "questionable material" and Cleanflicks will edit out any content that you find objectionable. Your movie goes down with its various flaws and comes back squeaky clean. The editors remove every trace of swearing, vulgar language, nudity, drinking, smoking, violence, and the like. Send down a tainted movie and the company will send it back clean and pure. Send down a PG-13 and it comes back ready for the whole family, even grandma and grandpa can watch without embarrassment or irritation.

Of course, sending down a PG-13 movie would be one thing, but sending down a movie with bigger problems would be quite another. Imagine an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie with all the violence edited out. You’d have to wonder if you’d even be able to recognize it as the same movie. Violence seems to mark movies like that so profoundly, you wonder what taking all the violence out of it would do to it. You can’t help but wonder if it even could be done without simply destroying the movie.

Try to imagine an editing process that would do for people what Cleanflicks promises to do for movies. Particularly, think about the destructive effects of shame in people’s lives. For instance, what if someone could perfect a way of editing out all of the effects of shame in someone’s life. In many cases I wonder if we’d even be able to recognize them. What would a person all cleaned up look like.

In the part of the Bible that we read, God gives the Apostle John a heavenly glimpse of people with all of their sin and shame removed. And wouldn’t you know it, John hardly recognizes them. They don’t look quite like anyone he knows or did know. The elder, who is serving as John's spiritual tour guide, shows him a gigantic multitude of people of every size, shape and ethnic sort. Like some huge victory party, they all stand around the throne of God in heaven, clothed in dazzling white robes and carrying palm branches of victory. And then the tour guide elder gently nudges John and says, "You know who these people are, don't you?" John doesn’t quite dare to hope. It would be nice, but it just can’t be.

I suppose that, like us, John knows the destructive effects of sin and shame both in his own life and in the lives of those with whom he lives. Even after experiencing the healing acceptance of God’s love in Jesus, those scars of sin and shame remain to one degree or another. Often those scars are terribly disfiguring even among those who belong to Jesus.

Scott was a boy who carried a heavier load of shame than the other boys in his class. Scott was shy and slight and not terribly bright. Scott mumbled in a nasal voice when he spoke and everyone practically expected him to come up with the wrong answer when asked. When the class had to sing he hung his head and showed no enthusiasm. He had buck teeth, smelled funny, and picked his nose a whole lot more often than the rest of us. His entire family was a bit odd, and he acted like he thought even less of himself than everybody else did.

When the boys picked teams for recess or gym Scott was always last, or if someone was feeling generous, second to the last. He was outstandingly horrible at every sport, football in the fall, basketball in winter, and softball in the spring. As we all advanced through grade school into junior high, Scott’s stock went down even further. Mean kids treated him with contempt and the others pretty much ignored him. Shame seemed to hang over him like a cloud. He walked around hunched over with downcast eyes.

Shame is that feeling of profound inadequacy that comes upon us. Unlike guilt, the feeling that we have done something wrong, shame is the feeling that we are people who fail to measure up. Shame is the feeling that we aren’t good enough and probably never could be. Shame is the feeling that we have somehow failed at being a person, a grey, heavy feeling that seems to colour the whole of life.

Scott seemed to carry more than his share of shame. Shame was such a part of his life. Shame marked Scott. Shame was his great tribulation. After graduating from high school it is hard to imagine that as an adult Scott is completely free of the shame that gripped him. Even if he experienced a powerful touch of God’s healing grace, it’s hard to imagine that he does not still bear the scars.

Though for many of us the burden of shame may be less profound than that of Scott, traces of shame continue to overshadow our lives, even after we’ve experienced the healing acceptance of God made available through Jesus Christ. And even though the Spirit of God works continually to heal and remove the shame that conditions our lives, the scars of shame remain and deface us as persons. Those early feelings of not measuring up to people’s expectations always continue to haunt to one degree or another. Some people live with their shame to the degree that it almost seems to become who they are. Not thin enough, not rich enough, not smart enough, not good enough. I am the one who can never measure up. Shame besets us like tribulation, a powerful effect of sin in a world infected and broken by sin and evil. We may very well wonder if we will ever be rid of it.

Well, the good news of the gospel for those who feel that they might never be rid of those scars and shadows of shame in our life come to us this morning in that picture of the crowd from Revelation 7. This glimpse of that huge crowd of white robed people standing around the throne turns out to be God's answer to the deepest longings of our hearts and a picture of the final healing of our shame. The picture that we see in Revelation 7 is God’s picture.

You realize who this gigantic crowd of people is, don’t you? asks the elder who is serving as John’s spiritual guide. John doesn’t quite dare guess. Well, you’ll have to tell me, he ventures. These are the ones who have come out of the great tribulation, says the elder. You see, God brings an absolutely huge incalculable number of people through the tribulations of life in a world infected by sin and shame into the joy and peace of heaven. In the picture, God’s people from every tribe and every nation across the world and down through the ages appear. They’re ministering in God’s presence. Do you see them? Heads held high, tears wiped away, all traces of sin and shame completely gone. An atmosphere of pure joy.

This is the almost unbelievable good news of the gospel: God brings his people through the great tribulation to be with him and with those they love. Death and sin and shame do not have the final word. As God brings his people through death into eternal life, he edits out all of those debilitating effects of sin and shame. When it comes to shame we will finally be rid of it. God’s people basking in his presence with the shadows of shame dispersed for good. All of those lingering traces of not being good enough, of not measuring up, of feeling like a worthless human being completely removed. No wonder this crowd is all shouting like they've won some cosmic Stanley Cup: salvation belongs to God and to Jesus, the Lamb, our Lord.

Can you see yourself in that picture? Look closely. If you belong to Jesus you are there in the picture. It’s your family picture. Sometimes families will look at their photo albums with pictures of some of their children. One of the kids will suddenly notice a picture of himself when he is very young. He sees a baby picture.  "Who is that?" he will say, suspecting who it might be, but not quite daring to venture a guess, needing to be reassured. And one of the parents will tell the story that goes with the picture. The story of how God gave the child to the family. "You were born at East General Hospital and a few days later we took you home," he or she might say. "And then a couple of weeks later we took you to church, to be baptized. That's you when you were just a little baby, on the Sunday that you were baptized. That is a picture of you the day mom and dad made promises for you, and you became part of God’s family." And sometime later when they look at the album you can imagine the child pointing to the picture of the newborn and saying, "Hey, that’s me."

Today the Holy Spirit guides us as we examine that picture of God’s people in Revelation 7.  That’s you, the Spirit, reassures us. It is as if God takes us upon his lap and shows us a picture of ourselves, not from the past, but in the future. God shows us this picture of ourselves among his people in all their flawless perfection. This picture is a statement of his promise that because we belong to Jesus, we will not forever be beset by sin and shame. There is an end to it, a final and joyful end. Look at the picture again. Hey, that’s us.

In the mean time God gives us moments of joy that point to the complete healing that he will one day enact. Lewis Smedes says that the feeling that we call joy is the ultimate alternative to the feeling that we call shame.  The joys of life are little promises, little samples of the ultimate healing of our sin and shame. That joy comes as little tastes of the fullness of joy pictured in that scene of God’s people celebrating before the throne of God, hearts full of grateful praise, every tear wiped away for good, shame gone forever.

Joy can come at odd moments, but it always comes as a gift. Joy can come both amid those high stakes moments of life or as that which transforms ordinary moments into something better.

Perhaps you can imagine yourself on the umpteenth grey cold early spring day in a row standing by the kitchen window. The grass is dead brown. The forsythia shows no signs of life. The apple tree looks like a winter skeleton and the sky seems ready to smother everything beneath it. When suddenly from out of nowhere the most scarlet cardinal in the whole world lands on the bird feeder. Now you may have seen cardinals before, and there have been other grey days, but the appearance of this lovely bird, for a moment, brings a quiet sense of joy. It brings a kind of lightness of heart that such striking beauty could appear in the middle of what seems so dead. And a promise to which it is almost difficult to give words. That God created a world with such haunting beauty, and invites you to be in on it. At that moment you forget yourself for a just moment, so thankful for this little gift. Nothing to achieve, or live up to. One of those gifts from God in the ordinary.

Now, you have had moments of joy like that too. Both in the ordinary and at weightier times. The spontaneous hug of a child. A phone call from a friend. The satisfaction working in the garden. A laboratory test that brought good news. Precious time with a loved one who was dying but going to be with Jesus. Those moments when you were able to forget about yourself and experience a sort of unbridled joy and gratitude to God in the gift of the moment.

Of course the cynic will point out that those moments of joy are fleeting. Birds fly off, winter once again kills the garden, and human weakness eventually culminates in death. But for those of us who belong to Jesus and have heard God’s promise of complete restoration and life, these moments of joy point to a deep and satisfying reality which we will one day experience in all its fullness. And so we accept those moments of joy not as little teasing moments that only make our hunger more poignant, but as little tastes of heaven when God will have finally edited out all of the shame from our lives, and we will praise him with unclouded vision, and serve him with fullness of joy. And sin and shame will be no more.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Order of Worship

WE GATHER
Call to Worship: Psalm 95: 6, 7

Silent Prayer with hymn: "To God Be the Glory" PsH # 632

Votum: "Our help is in the name of the LORD who made the heavens and the earth"

Greeting, "May God’s grace, mercy and peace be ours in the name of God the Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit. Amen.

Hymn: "Great Is the Lord Our God" PsH # 48

SERVICE OF RECONCILIATION
God’s Law

Hymn of Confession: "Out Of the Depths I Cry" PsH # 256

Assurance of Pardon: Psalm 130: 7, 8

Congregational Prayer

Hymn: "Our God Reigns" PsH # 195

WE HEAR THE WORD
Scripture Reading: Revelation 7: 9-17

Sermon: "In White Robes"
Prayer of Application: "Father in heaven, we are often so scarred and broken by the effects of sin and of life in a sinful world. Sometimes we wonder if anything will ever be alright again. Thank you once again for the promise of the gospel of Jesus Christ as we see it in the Revelation of John. Thank you for promising us that all things will be made new. We pray in Jesus name, Amen."

WE RESPOND
Hymn: "Here From All Nations" PsH # 235

Offering

Benediction: "May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Amen.

Doxology: "By the Sea Of Crystal" PsH # 620