‘Dwelling in the Word’: Looking at the Book of Revelation in a parish study group during apocalyptic times of huge turmoil

Book of Revelation 1 (NRSVue). ⁴ John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, ⁵ and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

To him who loves us and freed^[a] us from our sins by his blood ⁶ and made us a kingdom, priests serving^[b] his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

⁷ Look! He is coming with the clouds;
    every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him,
    and all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him.

So it is to be. Amen.

⁸ “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

A week or two after Easter, I took a new small-group adult faith formation (aka bible study) format out for a metaphorical test drive. (At least the role of facilitating the discussion was new to me.) We hit a few bumps in the road, but I got through it without humiliating myself, and, more importantly, the format passed the test with flying colors. Six months later, I’m still thinking about the points we raised.

Which is exactly what I’m looking for in a small-group discussion!

I don’t know exactly how to categorize the format. More of a spiritual practice than a curriculum, it’s called Dwelling in the Word; in my parish we use a simplified version recommended by the Central/Southern Illinois Synod (C/SIS) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Even though it guides discussion around three prescribed questions, it’s “not about answering questions or getting to particular results but rather allowing ourselves to be present with God’s living Word,” according to a C/SIL synod tip sheet. It’s adapable to all kinds of church gatherings, and at Peace Lutheran we mostly use it for a weekly bible study that follows the lectionary or gospel readings through the church year.

Here, according to the tip sheet, is what I like most about the Dwelling format: It “does not require a leader steeped in biblical scholarship.”

We were in between pastors back in April, and that first Sunday after Easter was my first time facilitating the group (the other, more experienced co-facilitator had another commitment that week). So the night before, I looked up the assigned pericope or gospel reading, John 21 — the post-resurrection appearance where Jesus shares a breakfast of broiled fish with the disciples on the Sea of Galilee.

Good! I know the story. No prep time needed.

In fact it’s one of my favorite post-resurrection appearances, the one in which St. Peter is commissioned to head the new church — when Jesus says, “Do you love me? Feed my sheep.” I’ve even been on the scene, visiting a lovely Franciscan shrine on the lakeshore not far from Capernaum. It’s called the Church of the Primacy of St. Peter, and it features a large stone said to be where Jesus laid the broiled fish he served the apostles that morning. Cool, I thought! I’ve got this.

Came Sunday morning, and I’m sitting in the pews during the 9:30 service trying to listen instead of rehearsing what I want to say when we meet for Dwelling in the Word after the service.

Then the supply pastor, who has a gift for biblical scholarship, announces he’ll be preaching from an alternate text in Revelation instead.

Uh oh.

Not the Book of Revelation! Especially not on short notice.

Growing up down South, I’d heard quite enough to last me a lifetime about the end of days, Armageddon, the Antichrist and seven-headed dragons on 500-watt daytime-only radio stations. And I didn’t understand a word of it. More recently I’d read Elaine Pagels’ Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Bo of Revelation as well as other New Testament scholars; I enjoy Pagels’ scholarship, but I can’t quite relate a first-century apocalypse to my 21st-century daily life. How could I lead a discussion on the Book of Revelation? As it turned out I didn’t need fo worry.

The new format, new-to-me at least, saved the day.

According to the C/SIS website, “Dwelling in the Word is a […] process for becoming aware of God’s presence and the Spirit’s movement by listening and reflecting on Scripture as a gathered community.” Our lectionary study group meets right after the Sunday service — and the all-important coffee time in the narthex — to preview the gospel reading for the next week. Luckily, DiW is very specifically designed to keep discussion down to earth. Says the C/SIS tipsheet:

The practice of Dwelling in the Word invites communities to live together with a text for a period so that the reflections, wonderings, and promptings of God’s Word form and shape our faith and living. The purpose of Dwelling in the Word is not about answering questions or getting to particular results but rather allowing ourselves to be present with God’s living Word. Dwelling in the Word does not require a leader steeped in biblical scholarship.

The three questions, in my experience, serve to focus discussion on the here-and-now, but, perhaps most of all, just to keep it focused and guide it to a practical conclusion. Even that first time I tried to lead a group back in the spring, that’s how they worked. The questions are:

• What captures my attention?
• What questions do I have? What do I wonder?
• Where might God’s Spirit be nudging us?

It turned out that Sunday’s alternate gospel reading was the first of four alternate lectionary passages from Revelation and the pastor planned to preach on all four. But after hearing that first introductory sermon, I felt a little better about the idea.

So I grabbed a cup of coffee and looked up the new pericope. It was obscure, but, hey, I thought, I can do this. More to the point — we can do this. After all, the DiW questions were more about what the passage says to each of us, individually, rather than whatever veiled message St. John of Patmos might have had in mind for the Christian communities 2,000 years ago in Asia Minor. It can’t be any worse, I figured, than leading a class discussion on Yeats or Shakespeare in freshman English.

I won’t rehash our discussion that Sunday. (So if you were there, you can relax — you won’t be quoted.) Instead, let’s just say we spent the next four weeks on the Book of Revelation, and by the time we were done, I was looking at it with new eyes.

Six months have passed now, and I’m still wrapping my head around it. In fact, the Jesuit magazine America dropped an hourlong “Jesuitical” podcast on it while I was editing this post was in final edit, and I want to find time to watch it, ironically enough, after I finish journaling on Revelation.

I’m wrapping my head around the Dwelling in the Word format, too.

After six months, I think I have enough experience with the format to take stock. Time to take it out on another test drive, to stretch the metaphor a little more. Or a 3,000-mile checkup? So I’ll take those three questions — what do I notice? what do I wonder? and where does the Spirit nudge me? — and apply them to what I’ve learned (noticed, wondered) about the Book of Revelation overall.

What captures my attention? What do I notice?

Like I said, I always had a chip on my shoulder about the Book of Revelation. But I knew there are some lovely passages toward the end, after the armies of God have defeated the hosts of evil at Armageddon and the reign of Christ begins. God “will wipe every tear from their eyes,” goes one passage, and “death will be no more.” I’ve always associated it with funerals, and it always brings comfort when I hear it.

Which makes it good reading for us all in the 21st century, when we have their own tribulations to contend with. Elaine Pagels, emeritus New Testament scholar of Princeton who has dealt with the loss of her son and her husband, finds hope in those last chapters of Revelation. When she was plugging her book Revelations on public television, she shared a more scholarly version of the same takeaway as I find in it now:

It’s really about what we hope and what we fear, and it’s as though you take all of your nightmares about plague or destruction or war or torture or natural catastrophe, and you just wrap it into a huge single nightmare, you get the Book of Revelation. But it comes out with hope at the end, so it’s very appealing to people who live in times of huge turmoil.

Decidedly less scholarly, but at least equally powerful, is the blues song “John the Revelator,” first recorded in 1930 by a Black street musician and Church of God in Christ pastor named Blind Willie Johnson. A gifted musician whose influence is still felt in American roots music, he experienced personal tragedy and poverty until his death in 1945 at the age of 48. His lyrics reflect a hope of redemption common in African American culture. Like this (at 2:09 in the linked recording on YouTube):

Well Moses to Moses, watchin’ the flock
Saw the bush where they had to stop
God told Moses, “Pull off your shoes”
Out of the flock, well you I choose.

The verse is a paraphrase of the Book of Exodus, not Revelation. But the next verse (at 2:45) combines allusions to Revelation, Luke and Acts. And, in a way, I think it completes the story begun with Moses in the Old Testament:

Well who art worthy, thousands cried holy
Bound for some, Son of our God
Daughter of Zion, Judah the Lion
He redeemeth, and bought us with his blood.

Like other songs in the oral tradition, “John the Revelator” had no set lyrics. Another influential version was by Son House, a gifted Mississippi Delta blues musician whose career was interrupted by the Great Depression — when his mostly Black audience was too poverty-stricken to buy records — but revived during the folk revival of the 1960s. His version, recorded live in 1965, similarly compresses the story of the Old and New Testaments in one two-minute song. It begins with:

You know God walked down in the cool of the day
Called Adam by his name
And he refused to answer
Because he’s naked and ashamed.

And it ends like this:

Christ came on Easter morning
Mary and Martha went down to see
He said, “Go tell my disciples
To meet me in Galilee.”

[Call] Who’s that writin’? [response] John the Revelator […]

Somehow I can’t escape feeling if they’d played Son House and Blind Willie Johnson on those 500-watt radio stations back in Tennessee, I might have come away from it with a better understanding of the Book of Revelation.

What did (do) I wonder?

When we started our discussion of Revelation back at the end of April, I was willing to set aside my adolescent distaste for fire-and-brimstone sermonizing back in East Tennessee. After all, I’d heard some nice stuff at funerals about wiping away tears from everybody’s eyes. And Elaine Pagels has some interesting theories about who John of Patmos might have been, and what he might have thought about St. Paul. (Spoiler alert: He thought Paul was a heretic.) What I wouldn’t have expected, however — as we kept talking at Dwelling in the Word sessions, I found myself drawn more and more to Blind Willie Johnson’s way of thinking.

Since I’m kind of a theology nerd, I like DiW precisely because it gets me out of my academic bubble talking with people of faith who have different perspectives. I can chime in with what I’ve picked up about New Testament Greek — like the etymology of logos, for example, which meant both “word” and “idea” — as long as I don’t wax too professorial and monopolize the conversation. In the meantime, I can learn from others in the group when I shut up and listen.

One thing I learned is that Revelation develops theme a theme that ties together the creation story in Genesis and the first chapter of John — “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God” — with the final vision of the New Jerusalem, a heavenly city that incorporates details from the Garden of Eden, including a Tree of Life, in the Book of Revelation.

in August, four months later, I came across a book review by Jesper Svartvik of Sweden’s Lund University in Christian Century. His title (or the editors’) is “Christology without Supersessionism,” combining two $2.95-cent words for a phenomenon that has plagued Christianity for 20 centuries — a doctrine suggesting that Christ superseded, or somehow replaced, the teachings of Torah, the law, and the prophets. He suggests the book he ‘s reviewing, The Fire and the Christ by Chris EW Green, makes it possible to reclaim more of Christianity’s Jewish heritage:

One theological route that could be explored further is the implications of Logos Christology for the Jewish-Christian dialogue: Jesus the incarnate Word as the center of Christian adoration, similar to the Torah as the center of Jewish worship, but never in the sense that one form of revelation is better than the other. Another, related line of thought is to describe a bifocal hermeneutics that not only recognizes but also celebrates the validity and value of Jewish scriptural readings, including those which offer alternatives to Christ-centered interpretations.

This is a little too abstract for me at first reading. There’s a reason I studied history and English in college, and not philosophy.

But I can relate to the first chapter of John — the gospel, not John of Patmos’ book — and the way it hearkens back to Genesis. Bruce Hillman, a former Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor who now writes for New Reformation Publications, explains Logos theology like this:

As it concerns the Divine Logos, Jesus Christ is fully God, fully present in his word. Logos theology gives a foundation for sacramental theology, where Christ is seen to be present in the bread and wine. Logos theology allows God’s word to be miraculous, killing with the law and resurrecting in the gospel. 

There’s a lot here to chew on, and I want to sit with it a while. But I think it can give me a philosophical framework for the importance I attach to the eucharist. It might even help me understand the Lutheran attitude toward the sacraments, which is quite different from what my own (Anglican) spiritual formation taught me.

But I studied English instead of theology, and I was a newspaper reporter for 20 years. So I’m all about the story. Here are the stories I’ve learned to value after mulling them over in DiW.

First, the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis:

When God began to create^[a] the heavens and the earth, ² the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God^[b] swept over the face of the waters. ³ Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

⁶ And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” […]

Next, the first chapter of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴ in him was life,^[a] and the life was the light of all people. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

After a brief aside about John the Baptist, the evangelist (yet another John) returns to the “true light,” to Jesus of Nazareth:

¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to what was his own,^[c] and his own people did not accept him. ¹² But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son,^[d] full of grace and truth.

And finally, the 21st chapter of Revelation:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. ² And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home^[a] of God is among mortals.
He will dwell^[b] with them;
they will be his peoples,^[c]
and God himself will be with them and be their God;^[d]
4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for^[e] the first things have passed away.”

⁵ And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” […]

Where is the spirit nudging me?

Two directions. After six months, I like the way Dwelling in the Word is shaking out. We have a new pastor now, and we’re continuing to meet Sunday mornings. I plan to continue that, and in the meantime I’ve taken on the responsibility of chairing a parish committee on faith formation. At the same time, I’m still an English teacher-y retired academic at heart. So the spirit is giving me a reading list. A couple of items:

I want to read more about the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism. Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, suggests in another book — a mass market introduction to Judaism simply titled To Life!: “the religion of Jesus (love your neighbor, turn the other cheek, prepare for the End of Days)” rather quickly became a “religion about Jesus (he was the Son of God who died to absolve us of our sins).” I still feel like there’s way too much of the latter in the way we look at the New Testament.

This is more indirect, but no less important. Jesper Svartvik holds the Krister Stendahl chair in theology at Lund. I should look him up and give him more study, especially with regard to Judaism. Also I should reacquaint myself with Stendahl’s work, which seems especially timely again. Stendahl, who served at various times as dean of the Harvard Divinity School and bishop of the Swedish Lutheran archdiocese of Stockholm, grew up in the shadow of World War II and made a lifelong project of working for interfaith understanding and combatting antisemitism.

In 1997 Stendahl presented a paper — actually a response to another scholar’s paper — at  a 1997 symposium on the people of God (laos tou theou in New Testament Greek) hosted by the World Council of Churches, in which he called for the Christian church to be more of a “an ‘Operation Headstart’ for the Kingdom of God” — fundamentally a Jewish concept (the kingdom and not Head Start) — and to deepen interfaith relations:

Jesus’ choice of the Kingdom as the aim and end of the whole enterprise, i.e., the Mending of the Creation (what Jews call Tikkun Olam) is paradigmatic. The laos [the people of God], when faithful and creative, is supposed to help in that mending not only of itself but of the world. And the imago dei, i.e. that all are created in the image of God, is the common bond of humankind, and a fact more decisive than the tarnish and brokenness that have occured subsequently and that varies in degrees according to various doctrinal traditions.

In 1997, when Stendahl presented his thoughts on the people of God to the World Council of Churches, antisemitism seemed to be waning and liberal democracies, in the original sense of the word, seemed to be ascendent. Since then, and especially since 2016, intolerance and repression of all kinds have come roaring back. The times, not to put to fine a point on it, seem more apocalyptic now than ever. Maybe it’s a good time to take another look at the Book of Revelation.

Links and Citations

“Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation,” interview by Bob Faw, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, PBS, Feb. 24, 2012 https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2012/02/24/february-24-2012-elaine-pagels-on-the-book-of-revelation/10372/.

Bruce Hillman, “A Very Brief Introduction to Logos Theology,” 1517, New Reformation Publications, Oct. 13, 2022 https://www.1517.org/articles/a-very-brief-introduction-to-logos-theology.

Harold Kushner, To Life!: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking (Boston: Little Brown, 1993): 286.

Krister Stendahl, “Formation of Christian Folks in a Plural World: Response by Krister Stendahl to the paper ‘Formation of the Laos’ [by Godlind Bigalke,”] Le Cénacle, Geneva, 7-10 May 1997 https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/education-and-ecumenical-formation/ecumenical-lay-formation/formation-of-the-laos/response-by-krister-stendahl.

Jesper Svartvik,” Christology without Supersessionalism,” Christian Century, August 2025 https://www.christiancentury.org/books/christology-without-supersessionism.

[Uplinked Nov. 2, 2025]