God is faithful until death and gives the crown of life.

We're going off the lectionary for the rest of the summer and I'm preaching on people's favorite bible passages.  This week's favorite bible passage was from Revelation 2, specifically verse 10b: "Be faithful until death and I will give you the crown of life."

The first reading was Job 19:1-12.

The gospel was Luke 12:22-31. 

A reading from Revelation (2:8-11).

God says,

⁸“And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write:

       These are the words of the first and the last,

              who was dead and came to life:

                     ⁹“I know your affliction and your poverty,

                            even though you are rich.

                     I know the slander on the part of those

                            who say that they are Jews and are not,

                                   but are a synagogue of Satan.

                     ¹⁰Do not fear what you are about to suffer.

                            Beware, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison

                                   so that you may be tested,

                                   and for ten days you will have affliction.

                     Be faithful until death,

                            and I will give you the crown of life.

                     ¹¹Let anyone who has an ear listen

                            to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

                                   Whoever conquers will not be harmed by the second death.

The word of the Lord.

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Today’s readings are a bit of a mixed bag.  Job complains about the treatment and poor advice of his friends toward his trials and tribulations while in Revelation we hear God’s words to the church in Smyrna, a community of faith that is afflicted even in its affluence, facing persecution.  And into the midst of that fear God speaks words of encouragement. “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.”

God is saying, “No matter what may come, I am with you.  I have chosen you as my own.”  God does not promise an easy life.  God does not even promise survival.  These words are spoken into the midst of suffering and persecution.  I wonder how those who gathered for Bible Study at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston would hear these words.  "Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life."  Or those whose church buildings have been set ablaze.  What would they hear in these assurances from God? 

But God is the only one who can speak encouragement into persecution and into suffering because God is speaking as one who suffered the deepest depths of torture and death on the cross.  God knows the pain and the sorrow of each community and still speaks words of promise and assurance.

God knows Job’s complaints as he confronts his friends and laments that “God breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, God has uprooted my hope like a tree.”  Job is in the full throes of his despair and yet God knows them and knows it is not the full story.

The ravens have food enough, the lilies are clothed in splendor and Jesus declares, “Of how much more value are you than the birds!”  Job’s worth and yours is so immense that it is immeasurable to God.

Claimed in the waters of baptism, God put our sinful selves to death with Christ, bringing us to new life in the crucified and risen one, giving us “the crown of life.”  We have been put to death and yet are alive, poor even in richness.

As Lutherans especially, we live into the paradox of things that appear to be opposites—dead yet alive, sinner and saint, living into God’s reign on earth, even as it has yet to be fully realized.  Even our language about God is paradoxical!  Jesus is both fully human and fully divine.  God is the alpha and the omega, or as in Revelation, “the first and the last, who was dead and came to life.”  God is a paradox, a mysterious mix of unknown and knowable.

Right now we have many people trying to win the crown to rule our country.  Ok, it might not be an actual crown, but sometimes it seems like that with all the pageantry and pontificating.

Political campaigns are the perfect place to examine human hypocrisy, human paradox.  Each campaign works overtime to root out opponents’ hypocrisies—flip flop positions, suspect donors, and actions that don’t match up with stated values.

Lesson learned:            everyone is a hypocrite:                        you, me, every one of the many candidates for president on all sides;            we’re all hypocrites.  In theological language we could say that “we have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) 

The hypocrisy is not that we fall short, but that we pretend we do not.  We put on a face of perfection, we do our best to appear to all the world as beings without fault, totally put together, without sin, without any complicity in injustice, completely unbroken and unwavering in our faith.

But we proclaim Christ crucified.  The cross, an instrument of political torture used to keep Jesus in his place, has become the symbol of life.  It is our theology based precisely on this cross            that compels us to name reality as it is.   

We mess up.  We are complicit in injustice.  We do not do everything we can to stop the killing of children of God of African descent, we shy away from tough conversations even as we know their importance.  We harm ourselves and we harm others.  We doubt and we worry.  We are slowly being put to death by the subtle ways our culture undermines all of our humanity.

But lest you preemptively despair, joining Job in his lament that “God has stripped my glory from me, and taken the crown from my head,” remember God’s words in Revelation, “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.”

God comes in to save us.  Putting us to death with Christ in our baptism, making us “faithful until death” in order to “give [us] the crown of life.”  God makes us alive again with Christ.

God gives the crown of life to the whole body of Christ, not just you or me or Christ the King or even the whole ELCA, but the whole body of Christ, the whole church.  The crown of life empowers us to live into our new identities as saints in Christ and empowers us to name the ways we are still sinners, the ways we don’t measure up, because no one ever does.  No one can measure up.  And no one has to. 

God doesn’t ask us to be perfect.  God doesn’t ask us to do better than everyone else.  God’s hope is that we will be ourselves, that we will live into our identities as beloved children of God.  God bestows love and blessing on us.  “Be faithful until death,” death at the hands of a racist man with a gun in bible study or at the end of a long life, and even death in the waters of baptism, whether those waters poured over you last year or decades ago.  God’s faithfulness in death brings us to the death of Christ in the waters of baptism so that God may “give [us] the crown of life.”

In our baptism we are crowned with the crown of life, that whatever may come, whatever our mess ups and triumphs may be, our God who loves us is the God of new life.  The God of hope.  The God of our future, with us now and always.

Thanks be to God.