· And recently with the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing of the federal building passing by and all the media coverage it may have taken you back to a day when our nation went “tilt.”
Following the Virginia Tech shootings, columnist Daniel Henninger, writing in the Wall Street Journal, commented on this growing numbness to bad news. He said that “it may be that as a nation we’ve reached tilt with tragedy. ‘Tilt’ is the famous metaphor drawn from the old pinball machines, which shut down if one banged on them too hard. Pinballs could survive plenty of random shocks to the system. But there were limits. Of late, we have been banged on hard.” Later in the same column, he wrote, “Our capacity for shock at genuine violence has been recalibrated.”
If you’re like most people, you experienced a sense of deep shock and dismay on hearing the news of the first of those events I shared earlier. But unless you were personally connected to a victim of one of the subsequent tragedies, it’s likely that each one had progressively less emotional impact on you. In fact, by the time you have heard these kinds of stories over and over, your reaction may have been little more than a sad shake of the head and a weary utterance of, “Oh, no. Not again.” And you probably turned your attention away from the news much more quickly than you did the incident before.
When tragedies become commonplace, it just isn’t humanly possible for us who are at a distance from them to experience the same level of emotional distress as those who are close at hand. And it is not that we are not caring people. It’s not that we lack empathy for those who are directly involved- emotionally, physically, and spiritually. We, as humans, seek a survival mode that causes us to become protective of our emotional energy. Now I am not passing judgment on you or me, but we can’t continue to dump the images and realities of these extreme events day after day and have any emotion energy left for daily living. And so a kind of numbness creeps in, and to some degree, it needs to. It’s a defense mechanism that keeps us from reaching our personal tilt point.
Maybe our response to these things is not like our crazy pinball player, but even he eventually walked away.
John tells us in this passage today that the best way for us to keep from a “personal tilt point” is to find the place where others know what it means to need to dump some of messiness of reality; need to find comfort and peace in the midst of personal upheaval; need to find some salvation from those things that rock our world, our psyche, our faith, our hope.
We need a place where we can find like-minded people wanting to come together before the God who reminds us that there is a sacred place to slump, dump, and hopefully, get pumped with the realization that God overcomes! The place we need is the place we call “corporate worship.”
You see, John caught a glimpse of what that might look like. John’s vision shows us is that in that place of worship, they jointly perceive what they need to know, that the Lamb is their shepherd.
Worship together with others brings us the assurance that God is with us ... and it keeps us from shutting down hope. Worship can give us a glimpse of divine perspective.
That God, through Jesus Christ “gets us past tilt.”
Where is John’s revelation taking the reader of his time? In the context of John’s time, “getting past tilt” most likely referred to the bitter experiences — the bad news — that fell upon the followers of Jesus at the onset of the Jerusalem war in A.D. 66 in which the Roman army crushed the Jewish army, destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, and dispersed the Jewish people throughout the Mediterranean region. These people, who have come through that great ordeal faithfully, “will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life .... ” (vv. 16-17). They are the ones who were numbed by the battering of bad news in their day, but in the realm to come, they are “un-numbed.” In fact, they have no need for defensive numbing, because “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (v. 17).
That is a huge promise- For them and for us!
But if this passage is to fit into our existence today, it has to be read as belonging to some future that we cannot see and can only, like John, envision. As one person put it- “And then we can only hold on to that vision with the most slender of threads, those of promise and hope, and perhaps even wish.” But what brings this vision home to us today is what the vision was this- the multitude in Revelation sees this brightness because they are gathered around the throne of God in worship together; that in the time to come, the throne of God is the place where they get their questions about life answered.
What brings this home for me today is that John’s vision shows us is that in that place of worship, those gathered in worship together jointly perceive what they need to know, that the Lamb(Jesus) is our shepherd. That image for me is as comforting as that of the image of the Lord is my shepherd in Psalm 23. Remember that image of a God who sends goodness and mercy my way when it would be so easy to just “shut down;” an image of a Shepherd who calls me to the still waters so that I might have my thirst for answers and direction and hope quenched; an image of a Savior shows me that in the moments of worshiping together with each of you I can find rest and power in prayer, in the silence, in the songs, in the giving and receiving of gifts, and in the sharing of proclamation of God’s love for all.
Worship together with others brings us the assurance that God is with us ... and it keeps us from shutting down hope. Worship can give us a glimpse of divine perspective. God has not left us here in this life. We can still sing and proclaim, Shepherd, like a Savior Lead Us. In Jesus Christ, those of us gathered together in worship are invited into a special place- a special relationship- a sacred relationship. In our worship together we can acknowledge in the midst of our “personal tilt” times; in the midst of our confusions; in the midst of a numbness; in the midst of battling with health issues or financial issues or stress over loved ones who are suffering for whatever reason; anything that is wearing upon us that God is in control- that God will never leave us- that God is always calling us into this moment of sacred trust and sacred worship.
Walter Elliott once said, Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another. Worship experiences help us to run the many short races we participate and in that we receive the perseverance to endure.
As we live on this side of eternity, what we need to know is that God is still here in this life, that God hasn’t left us, that God is our shepherd. And corporate worship can bring us that assurance; it can give us a glimpse of the divine perspective. It may it be in our times of corporate worship that we find our peace and rest in the midst of lives that cause us to reach the limit of “tilt” where our hunger and thirst for God’s love fills us to go and serve; where we rejoice in the saving love of God made known by the one called the Lamb, Jesus the Christ.
"Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb…
Praise and glory
and wisdom and thanks and honor
and power and strength
be to our God for ever and ever.
Amen!"
May we leave here with that divine perspective!