We Need Visions: Sermon Preached on 23rd February 2025 (Second Sunday before Lent)

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Revelation 4; Luke 8. 22-25

“…the one seated there looks like jasper and cornelian, and around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald.”

After a stormy week or so in the affairs of the world, the story of Jesus calming a huge storm on the Sea of Galilee seems obviously relevant. It’s tempting for me to say, “Well just read that again at home and trust Jesus in these stormy times.” Then we can all get our post-church coffee and get off to our Sunday lunch ten minutes earlier.

That feels inadequate, and trite, given that we’ve all been on complex journeys of faith through our lives. The truth is that all of us go through stormy periods in our lives where we find it difficult to trust Jesus; there are times when we find it difficult to trust that God wants good things for us in own lives, and also when we find it difficult to trust that a loving God is in charge of the world. In moments like that, I’ve never found being ordered from the pulpit to have more faith did me any good.

Another thing to bear in mind is that we can have faith, and lose faith, in many things, not just in God, or that Jesus Christ was God. This is a time in our history when people are losing faith in many things—especially in institutions and leaders. No doubt some of them have misbehaved or misunderstood their mission and got things wrong, but without leaders and institutions we have faith in, any country becomes a fractured place where the strong dominate the weak, the crooked break the rules without fear of consequences, and where even the strong and successful live much less pleasant lives than they otherwise might.

I think important light on what is happening in our society and politics is shed by the first reading this morning from Revelation. You’re probably surprised to hear me say that, because it’s a reading full of vivid, almost fantastical imagery, of living creatures with six wings full of eyes on the inside, singing constantly before the throne God. It openly acknowledges itself to be the result of a mystical experience where St John of Patmos is “in the spirit”. You can see why many people dismiss Revelation as the ravings of a madman, perhaps even of a drug addict. It doesn’t always make much rational sense—you know, what does it mean to say that “around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald”? Have you ever seen a rainbow that looks like an emerald?

It’s easy to dismiss this part of the Bible as worthless, and many people do. After all, what does this have to do with feeding the hungry and visiting the prisoners and all those practical things that Jesus commanded us to do? The things we are so often told are what Jesus was really interested in.

Yet Christ also talked a lot about Heaven; about the Resurrection and the age to come after which we would be like the angels. He placed very specific demands on our conduct in this life, especially our treatment of the poor and needy—but He linked those very directly with our fate in the world to come. It wasn’t like He thought Heaven was unimportant. So we shouldn’t invent a false division between living well in this world and looking forward to the next world that doesn’t exist in Christ’s teachings.

Where I think this speaks directly to the storms and fears of our own time is that sometimes we dismiss visions as airy-fairy things that easily distract from the practical business of getting things done. But without a vision, the people perish. Without a vision we are lost.

All of a sudden this country is completely lost, as is this entire continent, with many people shocked that the world works entirely differently than they thought it did a fortnight ago. That very much includes our leaders. But the visionlessness of our governing class has been apparent for many years now—and not just them, because it’s too easy to blame the politicians as if they aren’t creations of the votes that we, the people, cast.

For around fifty generations, an unimaginably long time, Christianity provided the sustaining vision in this country. Around two generations ago, that Christian vision suddenly imploded, in a very short space of time. What replaced it was the idea that we could gradually, generation by generation, build something approaching heaven on Earth, through our own efforts; we didn’t need God when we had science and technology and international agreements and laws to save us. That post-Christian vision has itself just imploded, almost overnight. It doesn’t look like we are, in fact, gradually making the world a better place, generation by generation. Young people raised on the idea that human beings are threatening the survival of life on Earth through climate change are never going to believe that once seriously confronted with the question. As faith in our capacity to make a better world has crumbled over the last decade or so, society has lost its direction.

Christ’s promises of Heaven for those who have faith in Him said it would be in the next life, not the here and now. The visions from Revelation put meat on the bones of Christ’s promises. Now, no genuine vision of the heavenly realms could be put into day-to-day language or seem entirely sane. To dismiss Revelation for not being a practical self-help manual for people who want to live better lives is like dismissing Vincent van Gogh because his skies don’t have accurate stars and clouds. I make the comparison with the visual arts intentionally, because one thing to notice about the heavenly visions in Revelation is how much effort they put into to conveying beauty—the one seated on the throne who looks like jasper and cornelian; the sea of glass like crystal, and the beautiful singing above the peals of thunder that come from the throne.

Although life without beauty is hardly worth living, it’s hard to find a rational explanation for why humans find some things beautiful. So it’s no surprise that in our era, obsessed with being rational, we’ve lost track of beauty. I doubt we could build a church as beautiful as this from scratch today even if we tried—which we wouldn’t. We can appreciate beauty in nature in a way that is to our credit, but even our artists in various fields rarely set out to create beauty as their primary goal. Even our appreciation of the human body tends towards the lustful rather than the aesthetic, and our culture is so crude we have to work hard to know the difference. Our buildings are often spectacularly ugly. I’m the last person who would dismiss contemporary art and architecture out of hand, far from it… but art and architecture were far more frequently beautiful when they understood themselves as inspired by God rather than simply capturing the human experience. More than that, we started to reduce everything we did and believed to its measurable, practical, effects on the world and so lost track of what is truly important.

If we dismiss these beautiful visions of Heaven as a madman’s ravings, what is left to inspire us when our practical programme for fixing the world goes wrong? What happens when we find our good works are inadequate for making the world better or, worse yet, we’ve actually been making it worse. The road to Hell, after all, is paved with good intentions.

So if you can’t always hold on to your faith, whether in God or in human efforts, then cling to these beautiful visions, for your sense of the beautiful might be what makes life worth living, and perhaps even be a sign that you were made in the image of a beautiful God.

And if there is a great storm in the world, then remember that it’s just after storms that we see the most beautiful rainbows. A rainbow is part of John’s vision of Heaven – a rainbow that looks like an emerald, mind you – and if that made perfect sense then Heaven wouldn’t really be worth believing in.

And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.

Top image – part of Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ (1889) in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.