William H. Willimon - "Overwhelmed" (November 26, 2000)
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| - | The second lesson is from the book of Revelation | 0:05 |
| the first chapter, | 0:09 | |
| "Grace to you, and peace from him who is, | 0:14 | |
| "and who was, and who is to come. | 0:17 | |
| "And from the seven spirits who are before his throne | 0:20 | |
| "And from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness | 0:24 | |
| "The first born of the dead and the ruler of the kings | 0:28 | |
| "of the earth. | 0:32 | |
| "To him who loves us, | 0:34 | |
| "and freed us from our sins by his blood, | 0:36 | |
| "and made us to be a kingdom, | 0:39 | |
| "priests serving his God and Father. | 0:41 | |
| "To him be glory and dominion forever and ever, Amen. | 0:45 | |
| "Look, He is coming with the clouds, | 0:51 | |
| "every eye will see him even those who pierced him, | 0:55 | |
| "and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. | 1:00 | |
| "So it is to be, Amen. | 1:06 | |
| "'I am the Alpha and the Omega,' says the Lord God, | 1:10 | |
| "'who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.'" | 1:14 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 1:20 | |
| - | Thanks be to God | 1:23 |
| - | We were at a meeting of, | 1:33 |
| to talk about racial problems in our city. | 1:36 | |
| The meeting was long, it was depressing, | 1:40 | |
| it was hard to find a common theme, | 1:45 | |
| other than that we had problems, | 1:48 | |
| but, no one seem to know what to do about them. | 1:52 | |
| On the way out there was a man, | 1:56 | |
| a man who spent much of his life being active | 1:58 | |
| in the movement for civil rights in this country. | 2:01 | |
| He said to me, "You know it makes you long for the | 2:06 | |
| "60's doesn't it? | 2:12 | |
| "Back in the 60's, when it came to racism, | 2:15 | |
| "we knew exactly what we had to do. | 2:19 | |
| "We had a goal, | 2:24 | |
| "the passage of new legislation, | 2:26 | |
| "we could organize and when we achieved that goal, | 2:29 | |
| "we could celebrate and feel good." | 2:32 | |
| "But, today," he said, "Today things are more subtle | 2:34 | |
| "the conflict deeper, | 2:40 | |
| "there's no clear picture of what we need to do, | 2:44 | |
| "no consensus about what comes next, | 2:47 | |
| "I'm just getting to feel, overwhelmed." | 2:52 | |
| A student group invited me to speak | 2:59 | |
| on a topic of my choice, and so I said, | 3:01 | |
| well, "What if I spoke on current problems on campus." | 3:04 | |
| And there was this long pause, | 3:10 | |
| and the student responded, | 3:13 | |
| "Dean Willmann, frankly, | 3:16 | |
| "we're just overwhelmed with problems, | 3:19 | |
| "we're kind of exhausted from discussion, | 3:24 | |
| "what we'd like to hear is some solutions. | 3:28 | |
| "Have you got any good news?" | 3:32 | |
| Good news indeed, | 3:36 | |
| there is a sense in which, good news | 3:38 | |
| must precede any discussion, any honest discussion | 3:43 | |
| of the bad news. | 3:48 | |
| Because only after we are convinced | 3:50 | |
| of the possibility of | 3:54 | |
| the triumph of right, | 3:57 | |
| are we able to speak honestly about what needs fixing? | 4:00 | |
| Franz Kafka wrote a short story, | 4:06 | |
| one of his parables really called "The Old Page." | 4:09 | |
| And in this parable "The Old Page" | 4:14 | |
| was alleged to be a leaf out of some report, | 4:17 | |
| of some besieged country by some unnamed group of barbarians | 4:22 | |
| who'd overrun the country. | 4:26 | |
| It was a page written long ago | 4:29 | |
| by somebody possibly in the middle ages, | 4:31 | |
| everything had been destroyed. | 4:35 | |
| The king and his cohorts are walled up in the castle, | 4:37 | |
| and leaving the inhabitants of the country exposed | 4:41 | |
| to the ravages of this pagan tribe. | 4:45 | |
| The invaders are said to be without scruples, | 4:50 | |
| they burn, they pillage, civilization is broken down, | 4:52 | |
| there appears to be no hope. | 4:56 | |
| Nobody knows why Kafka wrote this strange, little story. | 5:02 | |
| Like many of his parables, it is difficult to interpret. | 5:06 | |
| Was he perhaps referring to some contemporary situation, | 5:11 | |
| maybe he was talking about the plight of Eastern Europe | 5:15 | |
| in the 20th Century in his native land. | 5:18 | |
| But it stands to me as a haunting image, | 5:21 | |
| of a people just overwhelmed. | 5:28 | |
| That is what the British theologian David Ford, | 5:33 | |
| has called our age, | 5:35 | |
| "The age of overwhelmedness." | 5:38 | |
| Ford says, "That we have been so exposed." | 5:43 | |
| thanks to the media, | 5:47 | |
| "To assorted tragedy, and heartbreak, | 5:49 | |
| "and despair that we get overwhelmed." | 5:53 | |
| The occasional disaster which humanity, | 5:57 | |
| only heard vague reports about long after the effect, | 6:00 | |
| has become the daily diet on the evening news. | 6:05 | |
| Oh, the statistics of pain, | 6:10 | |
| the number of deaths on the highway, | 6:14 | |
| the number of infants, | 6:16 | |
| who die due to sudden infant death syndrome, | 6:18 | |
| the carnage of cancer or AIDS or other epidemics. | 6:20 | |
| In fact we don't even call them epidemics anymore | 6:25 | |
| they are pandemics. | 6:28 | |
| Because the results are so massive, | 6:31 | |
| so overwhelming. | 6:33 | |
| No wonder we attempt to defend ourselves | 6:38 | |
| from some of the pain, | 6:41 | |
| we turn off the evening news before it begins. | 6:43 | |
| Yesterday as they were, somebody was trying to report | 6:48 | |
| on the chaos in Florida, | 6:51 | |
| as this reporter was talking some man was jumping up | 6:54 | |
| and down behind him screaming, | 6:57 | |
| "Kill the media, | 6:58 | |
| "stop the media," (chuckles). | 6:59 | |
| Just, if we could just not get the news, | 7:02 | |
| we'd be better, well, in fact I read the other day | 7:05 | |
| "You can add two years to your life by refusing | 7:07 | |
| "to listen to the evening news." | 7:11 | |
| (audience laughs) | 7:13 | |
| So we turn to the sports section | 7:16 | |
| rather than current event section, we are so overwhelmed. | 7:18 | |
| And yet at our better moments we know that | 7:25 | |
| this psychic numbness, this turning away | 7:27 | |
| is a sorry solution, we got to look at the tragedy. | 7:32 | |
| For one thing, tragedy is a fact of modern life, | 7:38 | |
| and we got to face facts. | 7:41 | |
| For another, if we're going to do anything | 7:45 | |
| about the problems that beset us, | 7:50 | |
| we got to confront the problems honestly. | 7:54 | |
| And yet in an age as Ford says of, "Overwhelmedness" | 7:58 | |
| it's difficult to look at things honestly. | 8:05 | |
| In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the young prince | 8:11 | |
| spends much of the play asking himself, | 8:15 | |
| "What should he do in response to the sin of his mother, | 8:18 | |
| "who killed his father, | 8:23 | |
| "and then now is married to his uncle." | 8:27 | |
| Young Hamlet wonders, | 8:32 | |
| "Is it better to take up the sword against | 8:34 | |
| "the sea of troubles? | 8:36 | |
| "Or simply to pull the covers over his head, | 8:40 | |
| "and sleep perchance even to dream, to end it all." | 8:43 | |
| Young Hamlet is faced by a sea of troubles | 8:49 | |
| that has become a veritable flood. | 8:54 | |
| Our friends from Wilson know about a flood, | 8:57 | |
| not in any metaphorical sense. | 9:01 | |
| And yet I think one reason | 9:05 | |
| the horrible floods in North Carolina, | 9:07 | |
| so captured the nation's attention is that | 9:09 | |
| they were a kind of metaphor | 9:12 | |
| for the way you feel in an age of overwhelmedness. | 9:14 | |
| Where do you get the strength to take up arms, | 9:20 | |
| against the sea of troubles. | 9:23 | |
| Well, here we are at the end of the church's year, | 9:28 | |
| "Christus Rex," Christ the king. | 9:31 | |
| This is the Sunday, | 9:36 | |
| as the Church's year ends when we speak of the last things, | 9:38 | |
| and the ultimate reign of Christ. | 9:43 | |
| Our text is from the Revelation of John, | 9:47 | |
| Revelation, last book of the Bible read on the last Sunday | 9:50 | |
| of the Church's year. | 9:54 | |
| Revelation arises out of a troubled church, | 9:56 | |
| rarely does John turn aside, and tell us what's wrong | 10:00 | |
| with this Church. | 10:02 | |
| But we can imagine | 10:05 | |
| the troubles these fledgling congregations faced. | 10:06 | |
| Reading between the lines, we know we've got a church | 10:11 | |
| that's clinging on for its very life | 10:14 | |
| on the fringes of the empire. | 10:16 | |
| You can almost see the little band of Christians, | 10:18 | |
| surrounded in these pagan cities so small, so overwhelmed. | 10:23 | |
| The other day I read that, | 10:29 | |
| "By the end of the 2nd century, there were probably no more | 10:31 | |
| "than forty thousand, at the most, fifty thousand Christians | 10:34 | |
| "in all of the Roman empire." | 10:38 | |
| That means that in a city the size of Durham, | 10:40 | |
| there could not have been at this time more than about | 10:44 | |
| 40 or 50 Christians total. | 10:46 | |
| So overwhelmed, and what do they do? | 10:51 | |
| They sing, Revelation begins | 10:57 | |
| with this great shout of praise. | 11:00 | |
| Now, one might have expected, | 11:04 | |
| the book of Revelation to begin with a catalog | 11:07 | |
| of the assorted disasters that had befallen the Church. | 11:09 | |
| The empire is stepping up its persecutions, will we survive? | 11:14 | |
| And despite all that evidence, to the contrary, | 11:20 | |
| Revelation begins with a hymn. | 11:22 | |
| A hymn that proclaims that Christ | 11:25 | |
| rules, that he is on the throne. | 11:29 | |
| It begins not in despair but in doxology, in praise, | 11:32 | |
| in poetry, in cadences that scholars think probably | 11:36 | |
| came out of the early hymns of the Church. | 11:40 | |
| They certainly sound like hymns, | 11:42 | |
| "To him be glory and dominion and honor forever, Amen." | 11:45 | |
| "Behold, he is coming with clouds, | 11:50 | |
| "and every eye shall see him even so, Amen." | 11:54 | |
| "I am Alpha and Omega." | 11:59 | |
| John, who should have been overwhelmed | 12:06 | |
| by this sea of troubles, | 12:09 | |
| responds with an overwhelming affirmation of the reign | 12:12 | |
| of Christ, the triumph of God. | 12:16 | |
| John says Jesus has entered the world, | 12:21 | |
| and is decisively defeating the evil of the world. | 12:23 | |
| Revelation begins with these poetic images, | 12:29 | |
| that feel, they're political, | 12:33 | |
| they're about invasion, | 12:37 | |
| they're about an onslaught, | 12:40 | |
| they're about the movement of a mighty army, | 12:42 | |
| they're about who sits upon the throne. | 12:46 | |
| The Lamb reigns by the end of the book of Revelation. | 12:52 | |
| John on this little island of Patmos, | 12:57 | |
| responded to the overwhelmingness of the present evil | 13:00 | |
| with a hymn about the overwhelmingness of the victory of | 13:04 | |
| God in Christ. | 13:08 | |
| This is typical of believers, | 13:13 | |
| back in the Old Testament, | 13:17 | |
| in the exile, when Israel had been carted away as slaves | 13:20 | |
| in the Babylonian captivity, | 13:24 | |
| the prophets of Israel responded with some of their most | 13:27 | |
| pushy, extravagant claims of the power of God. | 13:30 | |
| Isaiah, Jesus' favorite prophet, | 13:35 | |
| sings about "the Lion and the lamb lying down together." | 13:38 | |
| "About how the desert will break into blossom." | 13:44 | |
| "About a highway, | 13:46 | |
| "that is cut straight through the desert back home." | 13:47 | |
| It is fully appropriate to sing these images from Isaiah, | 13:53 | |
| at this time of the year. | 13:57 | |
| As the days grow shorter, | 13:59 | |
| and the world seems to get darker. | 14:02 | |
| Sweeping claims have been made here in Revelation. | 14:07 | |
| Prose, mere prose, just won't lift the luggage, | 14:11 | |
| what happens in Jesus is something that is, | 14:16 | |
| more than personal or private, | 14:20 | |
| as we sometimes prefer to Christian faith. | 14:23 | |
| It is public, | 14:26 | |
| it is political even, | 14:27 | |
| cosmic. | 14:32 | |
| I was in a campus religious group sometime ago, | 14:36 | |
| and we had a Bible study together one evening, | 14:40 | |
| and at the end of the Bible study we moved into the, | 14:43 | |
| what one could tell was the real stuff | 14:46 | |
| of why they had gathered that evening, | 14:50 | |
| we moved into the prayers, | 14:52 | |
| and we took turns around the room, people praying. | 14:54 | |
| Somebody's mother was going to have a gallbladder operation | 14:58 | |
| that week, and we had prayer for that. | 15:01 | |
| Somebody else had a bad exam coming up in biology. | 15:04 | |
| Somebody else prayed, "Lord, help me to meet someone | 15:07 | |
| "on this campus that I could enjoy and | 15:10 | |
| "that will like me, and--" | 15:14 | |
| And these are all legitimate needs, | 15:18 | |
| and legitimate things to request of God. | 15:22 | |
| But I left that evening just thinking about how | 15:26 | |
| small it all was. | 15:31 | |
| Here is this great cosmic Christ | 15:34 | |
| come to take back the whole world, | 15:36 | |
| gonna help me over in the biology department on Monday? | 15:40 | |
| It just, | 15:45 | |
| we have rendered a small God that helps us | 15:47 | |
| across the street, and occasionally runs errands for us, | 15:51 | |
| and no, this is, Revelation is bigger than that | 15:55 | |
| matters of great importance has been laid on the table. | 15:59 | |
| Seemingly intractable problems are being defeated. | 16:03 | |
| There is no corner of all creation immune from | 16:07 | |
| this sweeping influx of grace. | 16:11 | |
| Did you not hear when the choir sang, | 16:13 | |
| "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty." | 16:15 | |
| David Ford finds an analogy here with the | 16:23 | |
| Wesleyan Revival in England in the 18th century. | 16:27 | |
| In the mid 18th century, John Wesley began his ministry | 16:31 | |
| in England, and it was an England | 16:34 | |
| that was mired in massive social problems. | 16:36 | |
| The gem trade | 16:40 | |
| destroyed thousands of lives | 16:42 | |
| with alcoholism, the Industrial Revolution | 16:44 | |
| had laid waste to English towns, and cities, | 16:48 | |
| child labor was the scourge of the land | 16:53 | |
| it was overwhelming. | 16:55 | |
| And Charles Wesley responded with hymns, | 16:59 | |
| this flood of hymns, | 17:04 | |
| "O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing." | 17:08 | |
| "Love Divine All Love's Excelling" | 17:11 | |
| "Hark, The Herald Angels Sing" | 17:14 | |
| And what good did hymns do? | 17:19 | |
| Did they put food on the table? | 17:21 | |
| Did they solve any economic-social problem? | 17:22 | |
| What good did the hymns of Charles Wesley do for England? | 17:25 | |
| Or for that matter, | 17:30 | |
| what good the opening hymns of Revelation? | 17:31 | |
| Well, such songs respond to the overwhelmingness of evil, | 17:36 | |
| with a more overwhelming affirmation of the power of God. | 17:39 | |
| And that is the way we began, | 17:45 | |
| ordinary 18th century English people, lifted up their faces | 17:49 | |
| out of the mire and the muck. | 17:54 | |
| And they clenched their fist, | 17:57 | |
| and they marched, and the world was changed. | 17:58 | |
| If we lack confidence in the ultimate triumph of God, | 18:04 | |
| we'll never get the courage honestly to face the facts. | 18:09 | |
| Was talking to this high school guidance counselor, | 18:16 | |
| and she said to me something I didn't find surprising, | 18:20 | |
| that her biggest task as a high school guidance counselor | 18:22 | |
| is to help restore confidence, a positive self-image | 18:27 | |
| to the young people with whom she works. | 18:31 | |
| How does she do that? | 18:35 | |
| She said something surprising, | 18:37 | |
| I thought she was going to say | 18:38 | |
| "I try to get them in here, I have counseling, | 18:39 | |
| "I have group therapy, I have--" | 18:41 | |
| She said to me, "The main thing I try to do | 18:44 | |
| "is to get them to sign up for chorus." | 18:47 | |
| It's just something that happens to a kid, | 18:53 | |
| it gets in a group, | 18:55 | |
| and finds his or her voice, and sings. | 18:58 | |
| We got to have somewhere to stand, | 19:04 | |
| we got to have some affirmations | 19:08 | |
| that enables us to be truthful about our circumstances, | 19:10 | |
| and only secure, strong people can do that. | 19:13 | |
| And, therefore, Revelation makes us strong | 19:17 | |
| with a great shout, | 19:21 | |
| a great exuberant, confident, poetic affirmation | 19:23 | |
| of the power of God. | 19:26 | |
| This morning, | 19:29 | |
| if you really want to face your problems squarely, | 19:30 | |
| If you really want to stride into this uncertain | 19:34 | |
| century with confidence, | 19:36 | |
| the best thing you could is to sing, | 19:40 | |
| some exuberant hymn about the triumph and the grace of God, | 19:43 | |
| sing it till you believe it. | 19:47 | |
| You know this, | 19:52 | |
| how many Sundays have you come here, | 19:55 | |
| and there is the sermon, | 19:58 | |
| and there is the reading of God's word | 20:00 | |
| but what really moves you is the singing. | 20:02 | |
| To join your voices in some great hymn of praise, | 20:07 | |
| it's then you really believe in the depths of your being, | 20:12 | |
| that Christ reigns, then you know deeper than all knowing | 20:15 | |
| He is the Alpha and the Omega, | 20:21 | |
| He shall rule until He's put all enemies under His feet. | 20:24 | |
| That good will have the last word | 20:30 | |
| in Him and that all should be well. | 20:33 | |
| And you know this is not in some cerebral, intellectual way | 20:37 | |
| but rather in the deepest depths. | 20:40 | |
| It's the singing that enabled you to go on, | 20:44 | |
| I suppose that's why many of you're here, | 20:49 | |
| you're looking for strength, | 20:53 | |
| in an age of overwhelmedness. | 20:55 | |
| And the only way to go on in the face of overwhelming evil, | 20:59 | |
| is with some counterbalancing affirmation, | 21:04 | |
| of the overwhelmingness of the power of God. | 21:09 | |
| Next weekend, we are going to have the Messiah here, | 21:13 | |
| sung three times by our choir and the orchestra, | 21:16 | |
| and every time we're having that, | 21:20 | |
| I think of all those Duke alumni | 21:22 | |
| who've told me about that Messiah there that cold day. | 21:24 | |
| And after things have been sung, | 21:30 | |
| they went out of the chapel, | 21:31 | |
| to see the whole campus gathered around cars, | 21:33 | |
| listening on the radio, | 21:35 | |
| Pearl Harbor had been invaded. | 21:39 | |
| And an alumna told me that, she said, | 21:43 | |
| "You knew in that moment that our whole world | 21:46 | |
| "had been disrupted and changed. | 21:50 | |
| "That all of our youthful plans for tomorrow were now over, | 21:53 | |
| "we were in a war." | 21:59 | |
| And yet we were people who had just heard sung, | 22:02 | |
| "Worthy is the Lamb, | 22:08 | |
| "who reigns forever and ever." | 22:11 | |
| And that made a difference. | 22:18 | |
| Our God is not some distant, uncaring deity, | 22:20 | |
| some empathetic, but essentially powerless being. | 22:25 | |
| Our God doesn't just care, but acts. | 22:29 | |
| Our God not only loves but reigns, | 22:35 | |
| our God has power to heal us, | 22:39 | |
| and that's why we sing, "Crown Him" | 22:44 | |
| (organ plays loudly) | 22:49 | |
| ♪ Crown Him with many crowns ♪ | 23:29 | |
| ♪ The Lamb upon his throne ♪ | 23:34 | |
| ♪ Hark how the heavenly anthem drowns ♪ | 23:39 | |
| ♪ all music but its own ♪ | 23:44 | |
| ♪ Awake, my soul, and sing ♪ | 23:49 | |
| ♪ of him who died for thee ♪ | 23:54 | |
| ♪ And hail him as thy matchless King ♪ | 23:59 | |
| ♪ through all eternity ♪ | 24:04 | |
| ♪ Crown him the Lord of life ♪ | 24:12 | |
| ♪ who triumphed o'er the grave ♪ | 24:16 | |
| ♪ And rose victorious in the strife ♪ | 24:22 | |
| ♪ For those he came to save ♪ | 24:26 | |
| ♪ His glories now we sing ♪ | 24:32 | |
| ♪ Who died, and rose on high ♪ | 24:37 | |
| ♪ Who died, eternal life to bring ♪ | 24:42 | |
| ♪ And lives that death may die ♪ | 24:48 | |
| ♪ Crown him the Lord of peace ♪ | 24:55 | |
| ♪ whose power a scepter sways ♪ | 25:00 | |
| ♪ From pole to pole, that wars may cease ♪ | 25:05 | |
| ♪ And all be prayer and praise ♪ | 25:10 | |
| ♪ His reign shall know no end ♪ | 25:16 | |
| ♪ And round his pierced feet ♪ | 25:21 | |
| ♪ Fair flowers of paradise extend ♪ | 25:26 | |
| ♪ Their fragrance ever sweet ♪ | 25:31 | |
| ♪ Crown him the Lord of love ♪ | 25:39 | |
| ♪ Behold his hands and side ♪ | 25:44 | |
| ♪ Those wounds, yet visible above ♪ | 25:49 | |
| ♪ In beauty glorified ♪ | 25:54 | |
| ♪ All hail, Redeemer hail ♪ | 26:00 | |
| ♪ For thou hast died for me ♪ | 26:06 | |
| ♪ Thy praise and glory ♪ | 26:11 | |
| ♪ Shall not fail throughout eternity ♪ | 26:15 | |
| (organ plays loudly) | 26:22 |
