On the second of November 2016, after a hundred and eight years, the Cubs won the World Series. Plenty of fans had died waiting. The game went like a heavyweight fight - the Cubs ahead, Cleveland roaring back, a seventeen-minute rain delay, then a slow roller to third in the tenth and a throw skidding across the infield into Rizzo's glove.

The best footage is not the field. It is the crowd outside Wrigley, thousands of people watching on their phones and the marquee, and the roar that moves through them as the out registers.

That roar is Revelation 19.

Chapters 17 and 18 showed the destruction of everything that had corrupted the earth - commercial, political, religious. Chapter 19 opens with the response.

Hallelujah. Then again, Hallelujah. Then the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fall down and say Amen. Then a voice from the throne. Then a sound like many waters and like mighty peals of thunder.

Four times the word comes, and Revelation 19 is the only place in the entire New Testament where it appears at all.

Heaven's reaction to justice finally being done is not relief. It is noise.

In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood tells his partner there are two kinds of people in this world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.

You dig.

There are endless versions of the line. Those who walk into a room and say "there you are," and those who say "here I am." Those concerned with doing the work and those concerned with getting the credit. Those you want to drink with, and those who make you want to drink.

Then there is the Red River Showdown, where the stadium is split down the middle - crimson on one side, burnt orange on the other. Two kinds of people, literally, seated in two halves of one building.

Revelation 14 gives two visions of two groups, and both are set in the future.

The first is the Lamb on Mount Zion with those redeemed by his blood, singing a song nobody else can learn. The second is judgment, and this sermon does not soften it.

Chapter 12 looked back to the Christ child and the dragon. Chapter 13 showed the present, with its counterfeit trinity attacking the church. Chapter 14 tells you how it ends.

Everyone is sitting in one half of the stadium. The question is which one.

Revelation covers the period you are living in - the stretch between the resurrection and the second coming - shown over and over from different angles.

Its purpose is encouragement, written to first-century churches trying to stay faithful in a world hostile to them.

Chapter 11 opens with a measuring rod and a strange instruction. Measure the temple, the altar, and those who worship there. But leave out the outer court, because it is given over to the nations, and the holy city will be trampled for forty-two months.

Both things are true at once. The church is measured - counted, known, kept - and trampled.

Then the two witnesses. They prophesy. They are killed. Their bodies lie in the street of the city where their Lord was crucified, and the people watching refuse to let them be buried. They exchange presents over it. For three and a half days the world celebrates that the testimony has finally stopped.

Then a breath of life from God enters them, and they stand up on their feet.

Trampled, testifying, triumphant. In that order, and never out of it.

Lost ended its first season with characters staring down into a hatch and no explanation. Dallas made the country wait months to find out who shot JR. The cliffhanger is an old trick and it works, because a story that stops in the middle of a question is almost unbearable.

Revelation 6 ends exactly like that. Six seals opened, judgment poured out, people begging the rocks to bury them - and then a question nobody answers: who can stand?

Chapter 7 is the interval. Before the seventh seal opens, John is shown the answer, and it comes in two parts.

First, 144,000 sealed from the tribes of Israel. A number counted out tribe by tribe, ordered, complete, nobody missing. Then John turns and sees something he cannot count at all - a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing in front of the throne in white robes.

The question was whether anyone could possibly survive what chapter 6 described.

The answer is more people than can be numbered, and they are already standing.

Not a cliffhanger after all. A pause, so you could see who was safe.

If you have seen Tombstone you already know Revelation 6:8. Johnny Ringo translates the priest's curse for the outlaws - "Behold, a pale horse, and its rider's name was death, and hell followed him" - and it becomes the film's theme, vengeance riding in.

It also gets the book wrong, and this sermon opens by saying so. It is the book of Revelation, singular. Not a catalog of disclosures about the future, but one thing revealed: the glory of God and his plan of redemption carried out through Jesus, the Lion of Judah who is also the Lamb who was slain.

That changes how chapter 6 reads. The four horsemen are genuinely terrifying and the sermon does not soften them. But the hand opening the seals is the Lamb's.

Conquest, war, famine and death ride out because he permits it, not because he has lost hold of it.

By the end of the chapter people are begging the mountains to fall on them and bury them, and a question is left hanging that chapter 6 refuses to answer.

The horsemen are not the point. The one holding the scroll is.

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? The commercial said the world may never know, and forty years on it still doesn't. Purdue built a licking machine modeled on the human tongue and got 364. Michigan got 411. A high school group, unimpressed by the universities, ran their own experiment and got 144.

Nobody agrees on the number. Everybody agrees the center is the point, and the shell is just what you get through to reach it.

Revelation 4 pulls the curtain back on what sits at the center of the universe. Not a system, not a force, not history quietly working itself out. A throne, with someone seated on it. Lightning and thunder coming from it. Twenty-four elders around it who keep taking their crowns off.

John has just finished writing to seven struggling churches - compromised, exhausted, one of them dead. Then a door opens in heaven, a voice says come up here, and he is shown what had been true the entire time they were struggling.

The center was never in doubt. Only our view of it was.

Philadelphia sat near active volcanoes. The ash made the soil extraordinary - this was vineyard country, something like Napa. It also made the ground unreliable. When the earthquake of 17 AD leveled the city, other towns rebuilt quickly. Philadelphia couldn't. The aftershocks kept coming, and people eventually gave up on buildings altogether and moved into tent camps outside the walls, choosing open ground over a roof that might fall on them.

That is the church Jesus writes to. People who know exactly what it is to have little power and no stable ground under them.

Philadelphia is one of only two of the seven churches Jesus does not rebuke. There is no correction here, no "but I have this against you." What he says instead is: I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name. Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. And to a congregation camped outside the city because the city was not safe, he promises to make them a pillar in the temple of God - the one structure that never has to be evacuated.

The weakest church gets the door nobody can close.

Last week the church at Pergamum had married the world. This week, Thyatira is celebrating the anniversaries.

That is the difference this sermon turns on. Pergamum tolerated what it should have refused. Thyatira went further, absorbing and endorsing and finally celebrating the thing, until sin was no longer something the church struggled against but something it no longer had a word for.

Jesus introduces himself here as the Son of God - the only time in Revelation he uses that title - with eyes like a flame of fire and feet like burnished bronze.

Picture chrome after an hour's polishing, catching the light so hard you cannot look at it casually. He sees. And he judges.

Thyatira was the smallest of the seven cities, a commercial hub where two Roman roads crossed, and it receives the longest of the seven letters. The small compromised church gets the most words.

What Jesus offers it is time. He gives opportunity to repent before he comes to judge. The letter is severe precisely because nothing about it is final yet.

The eyes that flame are the same eyes that wait.

In the mid-nineties that AOL voice saying "You've got mail" meant something was waiting for you. Sometimes it was good news. Sometimes it was the other kind - the doctor who tells a patient he has twenty-four hours to live, and then explains that the bad news is he has been trying to reach him since yesterday.

Jesus opens his letter to Sardis the same way. "I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive." That sounds like commendation. It isn't. The sentence finishes: "but you are dead."Sardis was a wealthy industrial city, famous for wool and dyed fabric, reputedly the first place gold and silver were minted. The church there had a matching reputation. It was known. People spoke well of it. And it is the one church in these seven letters where Jesus finds nothing at all - not one attitude, not one action - that he can commend.

This sermon sits in the uncomfortable gap between what a church is known for and what it actually is. Notice that the instruction is not to start something new. It is to wake up and strengthen what remains.

Reputation is what other people can see. Sardis shows how little that is worth.