'The Greatest Worship Service'

I’m on a lot of email chains, and every so often I open an old one and find a name on the list that should not be there anymore. Nobody removed it. Nobody can quite bring themselves to. My phone is the same. It still has a contact that says Dad, and a dozen voicemails from him, just saying hi, sometimes passing along news. I have not deleted them. They make it feel like he is still close. On All Saints Sunday, the first Sunday of November, our church remembers and honors the members who died in the past year, and for many of us that raises a plain question. Where are they now? The book of Revelation gives us a picture.

It was written by a man named John, exiled on an island called Patmos. In one vision he sees a crowd too big to count, from every nation and language, standing before God’s throne in white robes with palm branches in their hands (Revelation 7:9). Palm branches ring a bell for anyone who knows Jesus’s story. On what we call Palm Sunday, crowds took palm branches and went out to meet him as he came into Jerusalem, shouting (John 12:13). Now the palms are back, and so is the shouting. This time it is a cry of victory: “Salvation be to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb” (Revelation 7:10). The Lamb is John’s name for Jesus, and the word salvation also means victory. It is what people shout when they win. Then the angels join in, falling on their faces to worship God (Revelation 7:11). In John’s picture, heaven is a worship service, and everyone in it is celebrating.

One of the elders asks John who these people are and where they came from. The answer: “These are those who came out of the great oppression” (Revelation 7:14). John’s verb is in the present tense. They are coming out now, which means the crowd is still growing. The saints we remembered on All Saints Sunday are joining that worship, and others will follow. So when you see one of their names this week, thank God for them and picture them in that crowd, waving a palm branch.

If you could picture one person waving a palm branch in heaven today, who would it be?

Blessings,

Jonathan