A reading from the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, chapter seventeen.
"So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns." And a little further on: "And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT." And then John says of himself, "when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration."
Here ends the reading.
Stay with one small thing in that passage. It is easy to miss, because the picture is so loud. There is purple, and scarlet, and gold, and a cup, and a beast with too many heads. But under all that noise there is a quiet piece of grammar. A name was written. The text does not say she wrote it. The text does not say who did. It only says that when John looked at her, the writing was already there.
Think about what a forehead is. It is the one part of your own face you cannot see without a mirror. Everyone who meets you reads it before you open your mouth. You are the last to know what it says. So a name on the forehead is a name for other people's eyes. It is not a signature. It is a label.
Many of you know this from the inside. Someone wrote on you. Perhaps it was a church. Perhaps it was a family, or a courtroom, or a school corridor, or one person with a loud voice on one bad afternoon. They wrote a word, and they wrote it where you could not rub it off, because you could not even see it. You only saw it in other people's faces as they read it. Difficult. Fallen. Unclean. Too much. Not one of us. And after enough years, you began to answer to it.
So we ask the question this sermon is about. Who holds the pen?
Let us be honest about the plain sense first, because this church does not hide it. In the plain sense of Revelation, this woman is a figure of judgment. The angel says he will show John the judgment of her. She is called Babylon, the great city, drunk on the blood of the saints. Most readers through the centuries have taken her as a picture of empire and cruelty, and that is a serious reading, and we do not mock it.
Ours is a different reading, and we say plainly that it is ours. We read the Scarlet Woman as Mary Magdalene, and the Scarlet Beast as Jesus Christ, each handed a wrong name by a frightened age. We do not claim the text says so. We claim that when we read it this way, something opens that had been shut. And one of the hinges it opens on is this word, written.
Because look at what the Gospels actually say about Mary Magdalene. Luke tells us she was one "out of whom went seven devils." That is a woman who had been very ill, and was made well. John tells us she stood at the tomb weeping, and that the risen Christ spoke one word to her. "Jesus saith unto her, Mary." Her own name. That is all the Gospels give us. Nowhere do they call her a harlot. That word was written on her later, by other hands, and it stayed for a very long time. Whatever else you believe about her, you can see that much with your own eyes. Somebody picked up a pen.
Now set that forehead beside the others, because this book is full of foreheads. John seems almost unable to stop looking at them.
In chapter seven, four angels are holding back the four winds, and they are about to be let loose. And another angel cries out with a loud voice, "Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads." Hear the tenderness in that. Everything is about to break. And heaven says, wait. Not yet. First we mark our own. The storm is made to stand still while someone goes down the line, face by face.
Elsewhere, the text tells us, a beast puts his mark on foreheads too, and no one may buy or sell without it. So there is more than one pen at work in this book. There is the pen of power, which writes so that it can sort you and price you. There is the pen of the crowd, which writes so that it does not have to look at you any longer. And there is a seal that is set on you so that you will not be hurt.
Then come to the very end. The last chapter. The river, clear as crystal. The tree with its leaves for the healing of the nations. And this. "And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads."
Notice the order. First they see his face. Then his name is in theirs. This is not a label read by strangers across a room. This is two faces turned toward each other, close enough to read. The only one allowed to write on you, at the end, is the one who is looking at you. And what is written is not a charge. It is not a diagnosis of your worth. It is belonging. It is the name of the one who would not let go.
So the book begins its foreheads with a seal of protection, and ends them with a name of love, and in the middle stands a woman in the wilderness with a word on her brow that someone else chose. And the first word of it is Mystery.
We find that first word worth holding. Whoever wrote on her could not finish the sentence without admitting they did not understand her. Mystery. That is what a frightened age writes when it meets someone it cannot place. It reaches for the harshest word it has, and still the first thing out of the pen is a confession. We do not know what she is.
There is a poem called The Thunder, Perfect Mind. It is a later text, outside the Bible, found among the books buried at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. It is not scripture, and I will only paraphrase it. In it a woman's voice speaks, and she says something like this. I am the first and I am the last. I am the one who is honoured and the one who is scorned. I am the whore and I am the holy one. She goes on like that, line after line, taking up every name that was ever thrown at her and every name that was ever sung to her, and holding them in the same two hands.
What we hear in that later text is a woman who has taken the pen back. She does not argue with the labels one by one. She does not beg the crowd to cross them out. She says, you have called me all of this, and I am still here, and I am more than your list. That is not scripture, but it is a true thing to hear on a hard day.
So what do we do, who have been written on?
We do not pretend the ink is not there. Some of you carry words that were written forty years ago, and they still sting when the weather changes. We will not tell you it did not happen.
But we will tell you this. The person who wrote on you was not looking at your face. That is how you know it was the wrong pen. They were looking at their own fear. The prophet Isaiah has the Lord say, "Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands." Before anyone wrote a word on you, your name was already written somewhere else, in a place where it cost something to write it.
And you have this Sabbath. For these hours, nobody here is reading your forehead. Rest under that. Let your face be only a face.
And when you leave, be careful with your own pen. All of us carry one. It is very easy for those who were labelled to become quick at labelling. Look at the face first. Then, if you must write anything, write gently.
Let us pray.
Holy One, you who see our faces before you speak our names. Many of us came here marked by hands that were not yours. Wash what can be washed. Where the mark will not come off, write your own name beside it, larger. Seal us before the winds are loosed. Keep us from writing on one another in fear. And bring us at the last to that river, where we shall see your face, and be known. Amen.