A reading from the Revelation of Saint John, chapter thirteen.
"And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy." And a little further on, the whole world looks at this creature and asks, "Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?"
Hold that question. We will come back to it.
John did not invent this picture. He borrowed it. Long before him, in the book of Daniel, chapter seven, a man in exile had a dream at night. "Behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea. And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another." The text tells us the first was like a lion, the second like a bear, the third like a leopard. And the fourth had no animal to compare it to. Daniel calls it "dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth."
Now listen to John again. His beast is like a leopard, with the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion. Do you hear what he has done? He has taken all of Daniel's beasts and rolled them into one body.
We owe you honesty before we offer you anything else. So here is the plain sense of this passage. Daniel himself is told, in the same chapter, that the beasts are kingdoms. Empires. Powers that came up out of the churning of history and ate whatever was in front of them. And John, writing to small, frightened churches, is almost certainly looking at the empire of his own day. A power that demanded worship. A power that hurt the people who would not give it. The beast of chapter thirteen is a persecuting empire. That is what the words mean on their face, and most careful readers through the centuries have said so. We will not pretend otherwise.
There is a warning in that plain sense, and it is for us too. Whenever any power says, bow down, and who can fight me anyway, that is the beast talking. It can be a throne. It can be a church. It could be this church, if we ever forgot ourselves. So keep the plain sense close. It protects you.
Now we will tell you what this church sees, and we tell it as a reading. It is offered. It is not imposed. You may set it down and still belong here.
Later in the same book, in chapter seventeen, a woman dressed in scarlet sits upon a scarlet coloured beast. The book names them both with hard names. Our reading is that a frightened age gave those names. That the woman is Mary Magdalene, and the beast is Jesus Christ, and that each was handed a wrong name by people who could not hold what they were. The Bible does not say this. We say it, as people who have been called names ourselves.
And here is why we stand that reading beside chapter thirteen today, and do not hide one from the other. Because the two together teach us to ask a careful question. When someone points and cries monster, there are two possibilities. Sometimes it truly is a monster. Empires are real. Cruelty is real. Some of you carry the marks. And sometimes the thing called a monster is only something too large, too strange, too free for a frightened room to hold. The work of a lifetime is learning to tell which is which. The test is not hard to say. The true beast demands worship and makes war. The other one gets called a beast and goes on healing people anyway.
Remember that Jesus was called names in his own lifetime. The text tells us that people said he had a devil. That he was out of his mind. That he kept the wrong company. They looked at mercy walking around without permission and they called it dangerous. So we know it can happen. A frightened age can look straight at love and see horns.
Some of you know this from the inside. You were told you were the problem. Too much. Too loud, too sad, too questioning, too different. Somebody stood on the shore of your life, watched you come up out of deep water, and named you a monster. And then they shut the door.
We will not flatter you. Being put outside does not make a person right about everything. But it does not make you a beast either. A wrong name is only a name. It does not reach down to what you are.
Now come away from the shore and get into a boat.
The Gospel according to Mark, chapter four. It is evening. Jesus says to his friends, "Let us pass over unto the other side." So they push out, and the text tells us there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full.
Remember what the sea meant to these people. The sea was where Daniel's beasts came from. It was the old chaos, the deep, the place where things rise up that you cannot fight. And now they are on top of it, in the dark, in a boat filling with water.
And where is he? "He was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow."
Asleep. On a pillow. Somebody had put a cushion in the back of a fishing boat, and he lay down on it, tired as any working man, and slept through the thing that was killing them.
They wake him with one of the most honest prayers in the Bible. "Master, carest thou not that we perish?"
Don't you care? If you have prayed that, you are in good company. That prayer is in the Gospel. Nobody is scolded for praying it. It was said by people who had left everything to follow him, and it got him up.
"And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm."
Three words to the deep. Peace, be still. He does not shout a long spell. He does not fight. He speaks to the sea the way you might speak to a frightened animal, or a child awake at three in the morning.
Then they say, "What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"
Set that beside the question from Revelation. The world looks at the empire and asks, who is like unto the beast, who can make war with him? The disciples look at a tired man in a wet boat and ask, what manner of man is this? Both are questions of awe. But one is awe at a power that crushes. The other is awe at a power that calms. The beast rises out of the sea and rules by terror. This one lies down on top of the sea and sleeps, and when he wakes, the sea obeys him.
That is how you tell them apart.
So now, your own deep water. You have one. Everyone does. Things come up out of it. Old grief. Rage you did not ask for. Memory with iron teeth. Shame with a great many heads. And at night, when the four winds strive on that sea, it can feel as though a beast is rising in you, and you ask, who is able to make war with this?
Hear the gospel. You are not asked to make war with it. Nobody in that boat calmed the storm by rowing harder. They woke the one who was with them.
And notice. He was already in the boat. He did not arrive when the storm did. He had been there since the shore, close enough to touch, quiet enough to be forgotten.
Notice also that he did not calm the sea from far off. He was wet too.
What comes up out of your deep is not all monster. Some of it is only what a frightened age could not hold, in you, and so it was pushed under. It needs a true name and a quiet voice. And what truly is a storm, he can speak to. Take every good help there is while you cross. A doctor is help. A friend is help. Medicine is help. The disciples used the boat, and the boat was not a lack of faith.
He said, let us pass over unto the other side. He did not say, let us go out to the middle and drown. The other side is where you are going.
Let us pray.
Lord of the deep water, you slept in the storm and were not afraid of it. We are afraid. Wake for us. Say to the sea in us what you said that night. Take the wrong names off us gently, and give us the true ones. Keep us from ever becoming the beast that demands and devours. And carry every person hearing this to the other side. Amen.