Oct 31 2019 Revelation 5:11-6:11

I looked and there was a pale green horse!

This is precisely those parts of Revelation I have yet to understand. Beasts, and horses, and scales, bow and crown. I’ve had dear friends try to explain it, and I may have for a while. And every time I read it, I’m stuck, imagining a lamb opening seals, with different colored horses carrying different representative things. I definitely am no scholar on Revelation, but I believe it’s largely referencing the evil Roman world, and Christ’s dominion over it. Between the historical context of the time of the writer, and my struggle with allegory, that’s about all I’ve got.

Having said that, Revelation is interesting to me for a few reasons. First, it’s often what many Christians point to about the dramatic next coming of Christ. Think, Left Behind. Given that the images were conjured during a specific place and time, I’m uncertain they hold as truths now. We are not fighting Rome. Yes, sure there are similarities in our current world, and probably have had similarities in every age since the writing of Revelation. But I’m not sure that Christ’s return will be in the mystical, grandiose way of Revelation. I’d rather assume Christ returns every time we see and serve Christ in each other. Maybe that’s heresy, but that’s what I’ve got.

I recently read a book about darkness and spirituality, by Barbara Brown Taylor. One of the things she describes is that before the advent of incandescent lights, not so many years ago, people spent much more time in the dark. Night would fall, and much of the hustle and bustle had to stop, because you couldn’t see. There is some evidence that people spent more time resting in the dark. Not so much asleep, but in something we’d now call dozing or lucid dreaming. Not quite asleep, but not quite awake. Her theory is that much of Scripture stories occur during dreams, and it may be during that time, when everyone started resting at 6:00pm. She actually recommends that we try to do that periodically, live with the cycle of the sun. I tried it one evening when I came home from work, and headed to my darkening bedroom at 7. It was a long, quite, restful couple of hours before I actually went to sleep. And I’d had plenty of thoughts, although no pale green horses.

Finally, when I read Revelation, I think of that Celtic concept of a thin place, a place where the Holy and the worldly are very close. I think John had that, when he was writing Revelation. He was of this world, but he was connecting with the Holy. I can imagine the John was a heavy intuitive imaginative guy. As someone who’s not, my thin places don’t involve pale green horses, or at least they haven’t so far. There are a few places in the world where I’ve felt God’s presence is closer, holy and beautiful man-made and natural places. A hill top outside Bellingham Washington, the cathedral in Cologne, the empty grounds at Machu Picchu.

But more frequent and more meaningful to me are the thin places I encounter through other people. When I worked at the community breakfast, with hundreds of people living on the streets, I frequently encountered thin spaces, where I felt very close to God’s kingdom. In my better moments when I look with compassion on my sick loved one. Generally these moments come when I encounter Christ in another person, unexpectedly and seemingly in the ‘wrong’ place. 

This morning, I’m thinking about if there’s a way I can build in more intentional dark time. While I wake up when it’s dark, I immediately turn on lights. And in the evening, it generally gets dark, I turn on lights, I go lay down, I turn off lights. I wonder if my rest time could be occasionally more aligned with darkness, maybe one day a week. That sounds like a sweet and restful luxury. Maybe I head to the darkening bedroom when the sun sets, and I rest. I’m also thinking about my thin places, about where I sense God’s presence more imminently. Ultimately, I believe God’s presence is all around, so my sense of thinness has more to do with my awareness, rather than the reality of God’s presence. All of this tangential talk from Revelations story of red, white, black and pale green horses.