Letting the Trumpets Teach Us

Readings: Revelation 8:2, 6-13, 9:1-4, 13-16, 20, 11:15-19, Apocalypse Revealed #529 (see below)
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Photo by Wim van 't Einde on Unsplash

Welcome, friends, to our continuing series on the book of Revelation. Today we jump around a bit in the text to trace the story of the Angels with the Seven Trumpets. This is now the third series of seven we have seen: seven churches, seven seals on the scroll, and now the seven trumpets. And lets be totally honest. This is a weird and disturbing revelation. We remind ourselves that it is not meant to seem real. Revelation is a spiritual experience, sharing the kind of logic and symbolism that we might see in dreams. Yet it has the potential to speak deeply to our emotions and our imagination.

Last week we saw the great multitude of every nation, tribe, people, and language, gathering to praise the Lamb, the risen Jesus Christ. A blessed, inspiring vision. Now though, we return to a contemplation on how we get to that vision, and what it is that keeps humanity from embodying that vision. The story of the seven trumpets is story of transformation through spiritual and personal challenge. It is a very appropriate text for the beginning of Lent, in fact, because spiritual and personal challenges are often the only way that we truly grow as people. Inside of such challenges, depending on their intensity, we may well hate them and resent them. They might feel unfair, terrifying to our ego, and we resist. They feel like so many kinds of destruction. But, if we are willing to let God lead us, to let harmful or maladaptive patterns within us be destroyed or released by these experiences, large and small, then we can more fully inhabit the life God wants to us have. This reality is one that the season of Lent understands. In Lent, we intentionally disrupt our everyday through some chosen practice, we intentionally create a little bit of challenge, and we pay attention to what it teaches us. 

So, let us begin our journey with the trumpets. In our text today, we hear that the first trumpet sends hail and fire down to the earth which burns up a third of the trees and green grass. Swedenborg writes that green living things like leaves and plants represent things that we put our faith in, and grass in particular, our external ideas and perspectives that we perhaps haven’t examined before.(1) They can be ones that have sprung up on their own within us due to various influences, or perhaps ones that we have purposefully cultivated. But the ones that no longer serve us, the ones that harm others intentionally or not, they need to be scorched, they need to be burned away. This practice of examination is an important starting point.

Next, the second trumpet sends a huge fiery mountain into the sea. A mountain represents affections, good things we love and bad things we love. In this case, the burning signifies not the good fire of mutual love but a kind of fire that destroys.(3) We are prompted to ask ourselves: What emotions burn inside of us that need to be cast aside? Resentment, shame, self-centering, or others? This is the point in which we take accountability for our emotional narratives and start to the do the work to heal the emotional habits that no longer serve mutual love.

Now, we go even deeper with the third trumpet, which sends down a star from the sky that makes the waters bitter. In the Swedenborgian worldview, water signifies truth, which our minds need just a much as our bodies need water. It is all well and good to say we need to let go of harmful perspectives and emotions, as the first and second trumpets declare. But sometimes, it is not as simple as all that. What happens when the water itself is bitter? What happens when the we must start to question truths that we had previously relied on? When we question the authorities, the elders, the institutions that might have provided these harmful perspectives, encouraged maladaptive patterns. We receive all kinds of bitter, poisonous information masquerading as truth from culture, from peers, from social media, from family, from religious institutions, and many other places. It is a difficult and sad process to untangle from these narratives, to recognize where they are preventing us from thriving. 

Which leads then to the fourth trumpet, depicting an even deeper questioning, and the darkness and emptiness that we encounter when we have to let go of patterns and perspectives we used to rely on. The sun, moon, and stars represent love, faith and truth. (4)Many times, this process will cause us to have to redefine how we love, what we believe and trust, what we know to be true, especially if the way we used to view those things was harming ourselves and others. It may feel like certain lights are going out, that the sky is darkened, and we don’t yet have anything to replace them. But as dark as that night sky may be, this is the moment when the story turns, this is the moment when something new can be born. It might not feel like it yet, as there are still trumpets to come, but this dark empty moment is about to become the compost for growing an entirely new way of being.

But there is still more work to do. The 5th trumpet brings one more star to earth, one that opens an abyss. This is where we face off with our deepest challenge: our need to be the smartest and the best, the need to be right. The need to be right is not actually the same thing as having some measure of clarity for ourselves. The need to be right —what Swedenborg calls the conceit of self-intelligence— is the need to be right over and against others. The need to be superior over others. This is a deep dark abyss that can never be filled, can never actually be satiated because it originates in fear rather than an actual desire to know truth. A fear that doesn’t feel safe without self-centering. It is fear we all share and it deserves some pity, for it is so very human. But when indulged, it is uniquely dangerous, and can lead to the worst of humanity’s atrocities. The smoke issued from this pit of self-centeredness obscures any truth of another person’s dignity, their human rights, their precious personhood.(5)

And so the 6th trumpet is the true moment of choice: will we let go of this self-centering, will we let go of ego? The sixth trumpet releases four angels who will kill a third of humankind. This symbolizes the death of our selfhood, the selfhood that wants to be central all the time, that resists this whole process because it cannot bear the reality of God’s love and the reality of God’s kingdom, that faith must be lived, that we exist for each other, that we are all a part of the beautiful multitude of mutual love from last week, part of the beloved community in the phrasing of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In this last pivotal moment, some will continue to resist. In verse 20 we are told that some of humankind “still did not repent of the work of their hands, they did not stop worshiping demons, and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood—idols that cannot see or hear or walk.”

They continue worshiping idols that are not even alive, and that cannot possibly provide life. We could contrast these idols with the living God who provides life for everything. We could contrast these idols with actual human beings in front of us, who are living breathing beings. We are invited to question ourselves: What do we hold up in front of us that obscures our vision of the suffering of human beings right in front of us? Daily our newsfeed tell us of the suffering that our adminstration is purposefully perpetrating upon those in immigration detention centers, as just one example. The conditions are appalling and inhumane. What idols of ideology, what idols of power and control, what idols of tribalism and white supremacy, keep those policies in place, keep so many unable to see what is right in front of us all. This is the work of this last trumpet, to commit to consistently brushing those idols aside so that we might keep our eyes trained on God and our fellow human beings. Sometimes those idols distract us, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for a lifetime. The work remains to try to see them and then put them aside, so that we can repent of their pernicious and diverting influence.

If we do, we reach the seventh trumpet “the kingdom of our world has become the kingdom of our Lord.” This is the moment of integration. We have come through the challenge, the growth period that has rid us of the obstacles that prevent us from accepting and cherishing the reality of God’s kingdom. We hear that God’s temple in heaven is opened and we are able to see the ark of the covenant. This ark holds the ten commandments: simple promises to embody love for our God and each other.

We live this process again and again in our lives in large and small ways. Let us rejoice for every time we have managed to hear the herald of the seventh trumpet, to know the freedom and relief of having worked our way through some challenge that has led us to become a better person.

And let us also have compassion for the ways in which we are still at the first trumpet, needing to begin once again. For even at the end, with the open temple and the ark, there remains lightning and earthquakes, a sign that there is always more we can pay attention to. This is the work of Lent that we return to every year, this is the path we are seeking to walk with intention and courage. May God guide our journeys, and we always support each other in them. Amen.

(1) Secrets of Heaven #57, Apocalypse Revealed #936
(2) Apocalypse Revealed #401
(3) Ibid #403
(4) Ibid #413
(5) Ibid #422


Readings:

Revelation 8:2, 6-13, 9:1-4, 13-16, 20, 11:15-19
2 And I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them.

6 Then the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to sound them.
7 The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down on the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up.
8 The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood,
9 a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.
10 The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water--
11 the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.
12 The fourth angel sounded his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of them turned dark. A third of the day was without light, and also a third of the night.
13 As I watched, I heard an eagle that was flying in midair call out in a loud voice: “Woe! Woe! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth, because of the trumpet blasts about to be sounded by the other three angels!”


9:1 The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss.
2 When he opened the Abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the Abyss.
3 And out of the smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth.
4 They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads.


13 The sixth angel sounded his trumpet, and I heard a voice coming from the four horns of the golden altar that is before God.
14 It said to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.”
15 And the four angels who had been kept ready for this very hour and day and month and year were released to kill a third of mankind.
16 The number of the mounted troops was twice ten thousand times ten thousand. I heard their number.


20 The rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands; they did not stop worshiping demons, and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood—idols that cannot see or hear or walk.


11:15 The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign for ever and ever.”
16 And the twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God,
17 saying: “We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign.
18 The nations were angry, and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and small— and for destroying those who destroy the earth.”
19 Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant. And there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake and a severe hailstorm.

Apocalypse Revealed #529

Then the temple of God was opened in heaven, and the ark of His covenant was seen in His temple. (11:19) This symbolizes the New Heaven, in which the Lord is worshiped in His Divine humanity, and where people live in accordance with the Ten Commandments, which constitute the two essential elements of the New Church that are the means of conjunction.