3rd Sunday of Easter
Texts: Revelation 5:1-7, 11-14;
John 21:1-19; Acts 9:1-6
Facebook Live (sermon begins at 8:25): https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BVRiJ8V3m/
SING A NEW SONG
“They sing a new song” (Rev 5:9), writes John of Patmos. In his bold vision written down for us as the Book of Revelation, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders represent the whole of creation. And when they behold the lamb slain as worthy to open the scroll — which presumably contains God’s ultimate plan for creation — they sing a new song.
In 1978, congregations of the predecessor Lutheran churches1 began to sing a new song — essentially, the same new song as we find in today’s reading from Revelation. 47 years later, we will sing in a few minutes a later version: “Now is the feast of the lamb once slain . . . all of creation sings for joy.” Before we consider how this was a new song in John’s Revelation, we can take a moment to remember how this was a new song for us forty-plus years ago. We had never sung anything remotely like it as part of our Communion liturgies. Our Communion services were often somber occasions focused on guilt for our sins and the cost of Jesus dying for them. I had a classmate in seminary who came back senior year and told the story of his internship congregation in the Great Plains. The congregation was still offering Communion only four times and year, and Christmas and Easter weren’t among the four. My classmate was aghast. He asked how they could not celebrate Communion on the two most important days in the Christian calendar. The answer was, “Christmas and Easter are such joyful days. You wouldn’t want to ruin that with Communion.” So, yes, when the green hymnal came along in 1978, and we began to sing a hymn of praise celebrating the victory of the Lamb slain, it was truly singing a new song. Do you remember how new it was?
By now, I trust that you are beginning to anticipate what I might say next. That the new sing in our hymnal represents far more than us singing a very new kind of song in our worship. For it is a song that represents — here’s the part you’ve come to expect from me — a revitalization of our entire Christian message. In singing this new song in our liturgy, we are shifting from a focus on forgiving our sins to go to heaven when we die, to that of God saving us from our sins as a step to renewing the whole creation. In the final weeks of this Easter season we will read the ending of the Book of Revelation, which is nothing less than the proclamation of God creating a new heavens and a new earth, of a New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to replace our Rome’s and New York’s with a whole new way of doing business, so to speak.
One of our other favorite songs, George Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” is a joyous celebration wrapped around a verse from the middle of the Book of Revelation. Revelation 11:15 proclaims, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever.” And we joyously sing, “King of kings and Lord of lords, Hallelujah!” And now on Sundays we regularly sing things like, “The lamb who was slain has begun his reign. Alleluia!” Or, “Salvation belongs to our God and to Christ the Lamb forever and ever.”2 The new songs of the Book of Revelation have become the songs of our Sunday liturgies.
Do we truly know of what we’re singing? Do we understand the full ramifications of what we’re singing about? Again, it’s not about going to heaven when we die, because the Book of Revelation gives us the exact opposite: the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, and the kingdom of the world becoming the kingdom of our Lord.
This morning’s reading from Revelation brings the pivot point of the whole drama. That’s why I extended the reading of lectionary. The lectionary gives us only verses 11-14. I think this is like throwing a party without knowing what we’re celebrating. The first 6 verses of Revelation 5 give us the reason. John the Seer’s vision takes him to the throne room of God Most High, and there’s a scroll which presumably contains God’s plan for the whole creation. “Pretty important!” is an understatement. Yet there doesn’t seem to be anyone worthy to unroll the scroll. A real tragedy — again, understatement. John begins to despair. Just then, someone shouts, “Look, the Lion of Judah.” That person must have needed glasses, because John looks and sees only a Lamb standing in the state of being slaughtered. The Lamb slain is worthy to open the scroll, and the throne room of God erupts into the joyous singing of a new song.
And quite a new song it is. Again, understatement. This Lamb slain — who becomes the one and only hero of the Book of revelation, mentioned 28 times throughout the rest of the Book — represents an entirely different way of being human, an entirely different way of ordering our nationalistic ‘kingdoms’ and empires and civilizations. The old way is represented by beasts like the Lion of Judah, the national symbol of the Jewish people. In Rome or America, it is the eagle. Moscow uses the bear. It’s always some beast of prey from the top of the food chain.
But God is replacing all that with the Lamb slaughtered. It is the vast and dramatic difference between Pilate crucifying Jesus and Jesus letting himself be crucified. It is the difference between emperor Nero persecuting the early followers of Jesus and those early Christians choosing martyrdom. It is the difference in our time of America fighting for our independence from Great Britain through a Revolutionary War and Mahatma Gandhi leading the Indian people to independence from Great Britain through nonviolent resistance. It is the difference between Sheriff Jim Clark violently defending racist Voter restriction laws in Selma, Alabama in 1965, and John Lewis and so many others Civil Right marchers choosing to stand up against those laws at the risk of getting brutally beaten.
The human race has for centuries and millennia formed new kingdoms and empires by using force to control anyone who got in the way. In our current climate, we’ve been calling this “nationalism,” where there is a fundamental belief in militaries and the use of force to advance the goals of a nation or empire — always at the whims of an authoritarian leader who gets to call all the shots on nation’s goals are. In short, nationalism is the age-old way of human governance that has led to a seemingly endless history of the strong dominating the weak, marked by a endless stream of wars and bloodshed. To try baptizing a campaign of nationalism as “Christian” doesn’t change its stripes as nationalism. It’s like trying to put lipstick on a pig. We have called “Christian Nationalism” an oxymoron, two words that don’t belong together. Why? Because the New Testament, climaxed with the Book of Revelation, makes it clear that God is bringing a new kingdom, and new way to be human, led by the Lamb slain, not the Lion of Judah.
It’s time to call our fellow citizens to finally choose a new song. Where the weak and vulnerable have center-stage. Where love and nonviolent resistance are the long-term solution to violence. Where all people are created equal means that no one person or small group of wealthy people rule over the majority. Where democracy means that we work together to ensure that everyone has an equal chance to see their lives flourish. Strike up the band. Let’s sing a new song! Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, May4, 2025
Facebook Live (sermon begins at 8:25): https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BVRiJ8V3m/
Notes
1. The ALC, or American Lutheran Church; LCA, or Lutheran Church in America; and AELC, or Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (250 congregations who had split off from the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in 1976) were the publishers and users of the Lutheran Book of Worship (LBW) and eventually merged into the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) in 1987.
2. This is a lesser-known liturgical song that was written for a non-Communion service, the Service of Word and Prayer, in the hymnal supplement titled With One Voice, published by Augsburg Fortress in 1995. “Salvation belongs to our God” is on page 47, and the congregation I was serving in 2022 still used this service and its Hymn of Praise regularly.
