Protecting Us from the Dragon

Readings: Revelation 12:1-17, Apocalypse Revealed #561 (see below)
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Photo by Emanuela Meli on Unsplash


Welcome, my friends, to our continuing series on the book of Revelation. Today we explore the story of the Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Great Red Dragon. While this may be a somewhat obscure passage for most, it has always been a beloved story in our tradition, for the ways that it speaks of God’s provision for humanity. It explores the power of self-delusion and self-centeredness while also speaking powerfully about God’s protection. It is once again a wonderful text for Lent, prompting us to notice where the red dragon might be showing up in our lives and in our world, while also grounding us in a vision of the way that our own, and humanity’s, spirituality is always growing.

In our text today, we are introduced to a pregnant woman who is “clothed with the sun.” In our tradition, we understand the woman to represent a new spiritual consciousness for human beings that is anchored in the Divine Love of God, pictured by being “clothed with the sun.” The child that this woman gives birth to is all the new thinking that this new consciousness might birth, new ways to honor and embody God’s love in our perspectives and ideas.

And as we have come to see over these weeks, the book of Revelation has many levels of meaning. Swedenborg liked to view it in particular through the lens of the religious institutions of his day and their predominant theologies. Which surprisingly, 270 years later, is still a pretty helpful lens. He likened the dragon to a particular theology known as Faith Alone. This is a Reformation theology about salvation that states that since our motivations will likely always be self-serving, what we “do” cannot and does not contribute to our salvation because our actions can never be pure. Only belief in Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross can be pure, and therefore, it is this belief that actually saves us. What we *do* doesn’t really matter. Yes, there is a caveat that if our belief is real, we will act with charity and kindness, but for some that becomes just an afterthought.

Because, as Swedenborg observed, this theological formulation has a loophold so big you can drive a truck through it. What happens when you think faith is the only thing you need? What is the very next step for a self-centering person who thinks they are saved by what they believe, and that only? They jettison charity, kindness, and love, as superfluous. Swedenborg saw this again and again in his own religous context and we still see it in ours. Especially right now, with the rise of Christian nationalism.

It is no surprise that, for people who have stopped going to church, that the number one reason they cite is the hypocrisy of Christians. The fact that Christians claim to believe in the love and grace of Jesus, glorify the life of one who gave such a loving sacrifice, who called us to love our neighbor and showed us how to do that, and then basically ignore everything that Jesus said that doesn’t specificially serve them. I do not blame anyone for rejecting Christianity in the face of such hypocrisy.

For we are constantly seeing evangelical church leaders and political figures proclaiming faith and then supporting cruelty towards the most vulnerable in our society. In Swedenborg’s phrasing, they are practicing “faith divorced from charity” and this is pictured in the red dragon. The red dragon who wants to devour and destroy all the goodness that comes from seeing God as love rather than judgment, believing in a God who loves everyone, not just Christians, standing for a God who is in everyone’s corner, especially the least, the lost, and the left behind.

Because, as Swedenborg repeatedly wrote, there really isn’t any point to belief divorced from caring about others. There is no other reason for religious “belief” apart from caring about others. God doesn’t want us to have an abstracted faith. That’s just playing around with ideas. And look, I love to play around with ideas. It’s so fun. But faith is not actually supposed to be like a game. It is supposed to be for the purpose of helping us become more loving. That’s what religious belief of any kind is actually for. Not for getting us to heaven, not for letting us feel superior to others, definitely not for letting us demonize others, and not for manipulating others. 

And so, now we can fully appreciate the danger of the dragon, and the way that that kind of faith just wants to devour a spiritual consciousness oriented around love and caring for our neighbor. But today, I want to pivot away from the dragon for a moment. Never fear, we hear plenty of the dragon’s pernicousness with its handmaiden, the beast, next week. Today I want to rest in the elements of protection that we hear in the story. 

In the woman clothed with the sun, we have a beautiful and powerful depiction of what Swedenborg calls “the new church,” a way to be spiritual that centers love, practicing wisdom drawn from love. Our tradition is named after this “new church” but that doesn’t mean this way of being spiritual can definitley or only be found with us. It really can be found anywhere, because it is a provision of God for all humanity. We will hear more about the way this provision will be embodied on earth in our final sermon in this series, when we encounter the Holy City New Jerusalem. For right now, the woman depicts this “new church” in heaven, a potentiality that will always exist for human beings in God’s spiritual reality, what the bible called God’s kingdom. I think of it this way, that the new church has to actually exist first in heaven, so that we can draw from its power and make it real here on earth.

And so, our restfulness and hope can first be found in the image of the woman, and the way that God believes in our spiritual potential to grow and learn. God has provided us a spiritual power bank to draw from, a heaven full of angels cheering us on, and a vision of human community that is worth striving for.

Then, as we all work to birth our small piece of humanity’s new spiritual consciousness, we will encounter personal challenges, as depicted in the seven trumpets of last week. Birthing is hard work, as is spiritual growth. But as we persevere we will bring forth newness into our lives, precious new ways of thinking and loving. The dragon, all the cynical, power-hungry, self-centering aspects of our world wants to devour our precious new insights and transformations. Well, the dragon cannot have them. Because the story tells us that the woman’s child is “caught up to God.” If our new insights and transformations are anchored in the Divine Love and Wisdom of God, they are safe, because God is inexhaustible and utterly steadfast.

Next, the woman is given the wings of an eagle, which, as we heard in our readings, represents protection, insight, and foresight, from a higher place. When anchored in God’s divine love we will always be coming from a higher vision, a higher purpose, than the world can offer. When we let Divine Love guide our reflections, and our discernment, it will lead us more truly than the dragon ever could. Perhaps we could even call Lent our season of the eagle’s wings as we devote these pre-easter weeks to seeing the bigger picture of our lives and where we can adjust, improve, or heal.

Finally, as the dragon spews out a flood of water, a flood of false ideas, justifications, and disinformation, we find that the earth swallows the water, and once again the woman is protected. The falsity of the dragon comes to nothing when it is viewed according to its outcomes. The dragon will try everything to make us look away from the fruit of its pernicious ideology. It says: believe me and look at the power you will have, look at the superiority you will have, look at the freedom you will have.” But instead, if we look at the ends of the dragon’s work, it will always be full of cruelty, arrogance, incompetence and self-delusion. We are seeing this in our newsfeeds everyday. Instead, if we look to the outcomes guided by Divine Love and effected by Divine Wisdom, what do we see? We see all people cherished, held in dignity and love, and we see concrete actions designed to embody that truth. Actions that love and serve our neighbor have a concrete reality and goodness that make the dragon look pitiful and small, and shows its self-serving ideology to be nothing but smoke and mirrors. We know what is real, and we know what is truly powerful: mutual love practiced in community.

So, what will protect us from the dragon? Being caught up to God, being given wings of an eagle, and the earth swallowing the water. Which is: God’s Divine Love, intentional reflective practices, concrete loving action. Love, wisdom, and usefulness, the blessed trinity of God’s nature, and our own. This is what will protect us, and it is the most enduring and inviolable thing there is.

Amen.

Readings:

Revelation 12:1-17

1 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.
2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.
3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads.
4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.
5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was caught up to God and to his throne.
6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back.
8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven.
9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.
11 They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.
12 Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.”
13 When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child.
14 The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach.
15 Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent.
16 But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth.
17 Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.


Apocalypse Revealed #561

But the woman was given two wings of the great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place. (12:14) This symbolizes the Divine vigilance for the New Church and protection while it was still among a few.

The woman symbolizes the New Church (no. 533). Wings symbolize power and protection (no. 245). An eagle symbolizes intellectual sight and the resulting thought (no. 245). To fly means, symbolically, to perceive and be watchful (no. 245). The wilderness symbolizes the church desolate and thus existing among a few (no. 546). Her place symbolizes its state there. It follows from this that the woman's being given two wings of the great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, symbolizes the Divine vigilance for the New Church and protection while it was still among a few.