Rev. Dr. James Goodlet…Biblical Odyssey: The End of the Odyssey

Sunday Worship - FPC LaGrange - July 26th, 2026

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Well, I'll admit I have not got on Revelation, preached on it as much as I could or should. It is, it's too often, in my opinion, just placed on the shelves, gathering dust when it comes to Sunday mornings. Yet the reality is it's really Revelation is easily, if not one of the most controversial, it is certainly one of the most fascinating books in the Bible. Have any of y'all read Revelation from beginning to end before? Okay, a few of y'all have before. There have been those over the years who have wondered why it's even in our scriptures. It's been popularized really in ways that I don't think are particularly helpful or productive. People have emerged from reading this text or interpreting this text with this idea that God apparently raptures the faithful while leaving the pagans and sinners behind to fend for ourselves, which, if that's the case, I'll probably be one of those who are left behind. It has all too often been depicted through the lenses of fear, and I would even say horror. There are horror movies that are supposedly apparently based on revelation. And I don't think that that was really the intent of the writer. In fact, I would say this might seem strange, but I think we actually receive a far more accurate interpretation and fear of and feel of what Revelation is supposed to be about at Kairos Kids, of all places, or vacation Bible school, or at the Montreat Youth Conferences. Because it's there that we hear words from the final book of the Bible and we don't cower in terror, but actually we energize. So I'm looking at you, Jack and Ellie and Mary Maddox and Sam and those of y'all who have been to Montreat or any of y'all who've done Kairos Kids before, VBS, it goes something like this. The book of Revelation. There it is. The book of Revelation, chapter 7, verses 16 and 17. What happens next? Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Jill, you know it too. They shall hunger no more, neither shall they thirst. Come on, what does he say next? Preach, preacher. That's right. For God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes. Get ready for a revolution. And y'all know it. Yeah, look at, yeah, you know it. You know it. That is what it's supposed to be. When we interpret this book, it's not supposed to be fear. It's supposed to be a dance. And yet we get quite the opposite. Revelation. It literally means a revealing. The word is apocalypsis. That's the Greek word. You've heard probably the word apocalypse. And apocalypse, when you translate it from the Greek, doesn't mean the moon turns to blood and there are four horsemen that are going to be galloping down toward us to get us all. That's not what apocalypse is actually translated. It literally means unveiling. It literally means revealing. As in revelation. We often associate apocalyptic literature with end-of-time stuff. And it's usually, quite often, it is terrifying when the reality of Revelation is that it's meant to be hopeful. It is meant to be hope-filled. The writer of Revelation, his name, he was called John. He was on an island of Patmos. And he was writing a piece that was encouraging the faithful to stand strong in spite of significant headwinds. They had been rocked by persecution. They had been rocked by oppression. They had been rocked by violence from the Roman Empire. It was meant to reassure the faithful not only that the end of their Odyssey would be filled with all the stuff that dreams are made of, but also that God was with them in the midst of their current circumstances. If you look at the scripture for today, it's actually very nuanced, I will grant, but it's actually very, very telling. If you look at the verbs, and specifically, if you look at their tenses, it opens up, John speaks of a prophecy, of something that he experienced in past tense. Then I saw a new heaven and earth. For the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. Why would the sea, by the way, be no more? Well, if you remember the last couple Sundays that I preached, the sea was wilderness. The sea was filled with terrifying creatures. The sea being gone was a good thing from the worldview of antiquity. The sea was no more. And I saw a holy city, all past tense. But then something happens. A change. And then again, he will dwell with them. They will be his people. God himself will be with them, and he will be their God. Again, it seems nuanced, but here's the point that you have all these different verb tenses used. You have past, present, and future. And the point being that revelation isn't meant only to be relegated to the realm of the future tense. It isn't just something that happens in the sweep by and by, down the road of peace. Revelation speaks of a time in the present, saying that God is with us. And God has always been with us, and God will be with us, past, present, future. And that God won't, God isn't going to come down and grab all the good little saints of the world and then take them back to heaven. That's not how it works. To quote the great saint Belinda Carlisle, heaven is a place on earth. And we are called to be part of that heavenly reality, both in the present and in the future. See what John is revealing in Revelation is not ultimate, our ultimate end to our Odyssey, that is a heavenly place far beyond ourselves. But what John is saying is that we should also take stock of the fact that God is with us here and now. And that through the person of Jesus Christ, God has been with us, inaugurating and initiating a kingdom that is in the present tense. And that perhaps the only thing that should be left behind is a theology painting a picture of a God who cares not for the stuff of this world. When truly that is not the case. God brings heaven to us. That's what Revelation says. The theme was the gospel according to Chat GPT. And to come up with a plan, I literally asked ChatGPT, I said, chat, what are young people wrestling with? What are the questions that they are struggling with more so than any other these days? I was just curious what I would get back from the gospel of AI. And it actually gave me a number of options. And from those options, I crafted a lesson plan. And one of the questions, perhaps unsurprisingly, that I received was this. What happens when we die? And so my task at Youth Group was to tackle the question of what happens when we die. Now I wish I could tell you that I could give them a definitive answer, but of course I could not. That's why we hired Jacob. The reality is we don't know what happens. We hope and we believe that through the resurrection of Christ, death has been defeated, and that there is more to our Odyssey. And we can look at the scriptures and we can see what that might look like when you look at the resurrection accounts and when you look at what Paul has to say and what other writers have to say, be it in a place that is loosely termed heaven or somewhere else, but we don't precisely know what that will entail. We have to trust, we have to have faith, as it were, that the God in whom we believe and place our ultimate faith will handle that as only God can. With love and with grace and with something far beyond we can imagine. But what that looks like, you can talk to him. Or not. But here's what we can say. There is so much concern about the next. But what's now. The now matters. If the now didn't matter, then God would not have sent Jesus here in the first place to show us how to live in the now. And so I don't believe that our calling is to do whatever it is we can do to procure a ticket to heaven from earth. I think our calling is to partner with God, doing whatever we can do to bring heaven to earth, to reveal precisely how God is with us now. That's our calling. Why live in the future? When there's so much we have to do in the present. Well not most every Sunday, but a lot of Sundays, I stand at that back door and I shake hands. How you doing? Good to see you. But every now and then I get a note. And it's not necessarily a note critiquing my sermon, it's a note from a child. And it just says something simple like, God loves you. That is a revelation in the now. I was asked recently to write a college recommendation letter for a person who's headed in that direction. And that person said to me that they feel like their calling, whatever it is they do, wherever it is they land, their calling is to see the unseen and listen to the unheard. That is a revelation in the now. I know a deacon. Deacon's job is to care for our people. And often it comes through hospital visits, visits to nursing homes, whatever it might be. But let me tell you about one deacon who every Sunday sends the link to our live stream to one of the people in their care so that they can watch worship every week. That is a revelation in the now. I sat with a group of Presbyterians at a funeral this last week. And true to Presbyterian Forum, where did we sit? In the back row. But they were there. That is a revelation in the now. And I saw some Presbyterians help move in a friend into their new home this week after a really difficult time in their life. That is a revelation. Now we may not be able to reveal precisely what happens next, but we can reveal how God is with us now and how all of that is a foretaste of what is to come. Not by fear, which in my experience does very little good, but through love.