Way back in the summer of ‘93, in the early days of e-mail, an alert shot around the maze of cubicles where I worked. “We have identified a virus in our local network,” it said. “We have tried but have not been able to isolate the virus. An unknown number of files have been corrupted, although we have been able to restore a few. Please do not panic and have patience! Some day soon we will be back up and fully operational.” That’s the way tech-support people speak. But I am pretty sure I never heard a preacher summarize the message of Revelation any better than that!

Now I realize that the book called Revelation is a peculiar or even unfamiliar one to many of us Christians. I haven’t often preached from it, and you probably have seldom strolled though it on your own, compared with the oft-traveled paths of Psalms or Matthew. Zan Holmes, the preacher who does the recorded introductions for DISCIPLE Bible Study, calls Revelation “the rather bewildering conclusion” at the end of God’s love letter to us, and many would agree with him. After all, in it we read of dragons and sea monsters with seven heads, of ominous seals and pale green horses, and we wonder if maybe being exiled on the Island of Patmos had a little too psychedelic effect on John for us to understand quite where he was coming from.

But Revelation is less about where we are coming from, than where we are going to - or better said, what our world is going to become. With all its strangeness and otherworldly visions, Revelation in fact offers a vision of exactly what we pray for every Sunday, of God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, as a new heaven and a new earth meet once and for all time. Evil is at last overcome and swept away. All reason for crying, for fighting and grieving, all injustice melts away before the reign of the triumphant Lamb – the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to his faithful ones. Chapter 21, and the chapter that follows it, conclude the Bible because they are a vision of the end and the beginning - the epilogue of eternal righteousness. I don’t want to spoil the ending - but if you haven’t been there recently, God wins!

This news was deeply important, when from exile John wrote these chapters. The center of Jewish worship, the holy Temple in Jerusalem, had been destroyed by advancing Roman troops in the year 70. Early Christians in Asia Minor were being persecuting by Roman officials for refusing to worship the Emperor. Some, confronted with imprisonment or possible death, chose to abandon the faith. Others chose martyrdom – a witness for Christ in spite of the circumstances. Revelation was a vision written for a people living on the edge, a people sufficiently desperate, so that the knowledge that God actually triumphs in the end would be glorious and welcome news, even if they did not live to see it.

As I have said, we don’t often seek out Revelation these days. I wonder if it is because we are not sufficiently desperate. We seldom read its strange and awe-filled portents, and I wonder if it is because we, in the world’s mightiest and wealthiest nation, have grown rather comfortable with the world the way it is. As our nation holds its breath on the eve of an historic election, a moment of keen anticipation and perhaps anxiety for millions, I wonder how many of us are hungry for the place that Jesus told us was our true home. Are we sufficiently desperate, that the visions of John would sound like welcome and glorious news to us?

Maybe not. But if we are not quite hungry enough for Heaven, we do at times wonder. We wonder what happens to our loved ones when they die, what will happen to us when we succumb to age or illness. We read alleged accounts of what they call the “afterlife,” from those who have had near-death, out-of-body experiences, in the hope that these may be able to tell us something about what lies beyond this life.

But the news from John is so much better! John’s vision is directly from God, and is shared with us in the Scriptures. In it, despite all our jokes about standing outside the pearly gates, John says that the gates are never closed in the Kingdom, because there is no longer any enemy to defend against. Despite popular fantasies about the endtime, novels that feature Christians being whisked off to heavenly bleachers to be spectators to global suffering, John sees the Kingdom of God descending upon the earth. His images are chosen to show its beauty and perfection. He does not tell us if they play Frisbee there, whether you can get Chinese food there, because to him such things are not important. The ‘Kingdom come’ is going to be beautiful and joyful only because our God is pure Beauty and Joy. Those who believe this will not be disappointed.

His mind aflame with the Holy Spirit, John goes beyond golden streets and jeweled foundations - these images he uses to convey the inexpressible beauty that waits for those who will dwell there. John sees that in the Holy City all the kings, all the rulers of the nations will bring the wealth and the abundance of the earth, this earth, our earth, and that there will be no more weeping for want of food, for lack of warmth or shelter or safety. The refugee camps will be gone when that day comes, the frigid winters without blankets in the mountain snows – all gone. No church will be in the City, for the Church’s job will be done: all the world will be the Church, worshipping the Lamb and bearing witness to his abundant care and love.

This was John’s vision. Again, maybe we are not quite desperate enough to rejoice in it fully. But there is another possibility. We could, from our position of relative comfort and safety, recognize that some in our world are indeed sufficiently desperate, this morning. Your bulletin insert speaks of this, in the clinical language of a statistic. It says that 860 million people on our planet suffer from chronic hunger – from trying to live on not enough food. Malnutrition presently afflicts one in three children in impoverished nations. More than 5 million of these children die of hunger-related causes each year – meaning that among children just like your own, like your grandchildren, about 14,000, half the population of Botetourt, will die today. Due to the present global financial crisis, begun in large part by greedy people in the world’s wealthiest places, the plight of the world’s poor is expected to intensify next year, when some one billion will not have enough to eat.

It’s also true that the world currently produces enough food to feed everyone, enough for 2,700 calories per person per day. But that is not the good news. The Good News, as we have said, is that God wins. The Good News is that in a world that still needs churches, there are people who will stand up and say, “we have seen a vision of the world that is to come. We’ve had a foretaste of God’s justice, and we’re going to feed you, because on that day, even better than the streets of gold will be the feast that’s enough for everybody.” Sisters and brothers, some day soon we will be “back up and fully operational.” Until then, the new Jerusalem is among us, and in every place where people are reminded that God wins.

Amen.