Proper 28 B 2009

A Sermon for Proper 28 B

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope with wavering…And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching. [1]

If, like me, you stayed up too late in early November watching the World Series, you probably saw the trailer for the movie 2012 which opened on Friday more than once. In case you've missed it, 2012 is another in the line of end-of-the-world disaster movies created by director Roland Emmerich, who also brought you Independence Day and The Day after Tomorrow.

2012 is based on a misreading of an ancient Mayan calendar that supposedly predicts the end will come on December 21^st of that year -- and this movie shows that happening in spectacular fashion.

Of course, Emmerich doesn’t have a corner on the apocalyptic movie market. Two more such movies, The Road, and The Book of Eli, are due out soon – and the concept isn’t exactly new. If you go back to the 50’s and 60’s, nuclear war themed end of the world movies were common. The past decade has brought us Armageddon, Deep Impact, The Core and other movies in which the world ends – or almost does – for a number of improbable reasons.

The topic of world-ending disaster has moved into slightly more serious venues, as well.

Not long ago, Judith and I found ourselves watching a Discovery Channel show on what an asteroid impact of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs 70+ million years ago would do to present day human civilization. It wasn’t pretty – and I don’t just mean the fairly basic special effects.

In fact, worry about the end of the world in popular culture – and real life – has been around for the whole of my 55 years. I’m sure I’m not the only one here who remembers being told to put your head under your school desk during air raid drills during the Cold War – as if that would protect you from a nearby nuclear explosion! – or walking en masse into the school basement to avoid fallout.

Not long after the Soviet Union’s demise made the nuclear threat feel less immediate, we began to become aware of the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming – though, sadly, not yet aware enough to make those radical changes in our energy consumption patterns that would reduce that very real danger. Terrorism, foreign and domestic, has become a world troubling,

if not world ending, fact, and the recent economic upheaval has had its fearfully earth-shaking moments.

End of the world, apocalyptic thinking has been part of our culture for most of our lives and will be for years to come. There are reasons for that. Our culture is living through an extended period of enormous change in politics, technology, warfare, social norms, psychology, religion, economics and more. The seemingly fixed anchors that gave earlier generations some sense of stability and security have largely come unstuck. We can’t return to the past; the present is moving under our feet, and all we know for sure about the future is that it will be different from both past and present.

Such upheaval is enormously stressful, often threatening, not only to individuals but whole cultures -- and the turn of the millennium just 9 years ago didn’t help us feel any more secure: do you remember all that Y2k anxiety? As the world we once knew breaks apart before our eyes, we wonder whether the world will even survive. It is no surprise that world-ending apocalypses show up in our movies – and beyond.

Of course, we’re not the first humans to live through times of frightening cultural change – things were pretty dicey in much of Western Europe around the year 1,000, for instance. More to the point today, the Christian Church we are part of was born in such a time, as today’s New Testament readings reveal. The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the “approaching Day.” In the Gospel, Jesus predicts wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and famines -- and these as but the beginning of the birthpangs of the coming age.

These are just two of many texts in the New Testament about a coming cataclysm in which the world will end – or be radically remade – at God’s behest. The most famous of these, of course, is Revelation, a whole biblical book devoted to the end of the known world, peopled with strange monsters, fearful plagues and heavenly visions.

What you may not know is that Revelation and the other early Christian apocalyptic writings like the 13^th chapter of Mark from which today’s Gospel comes, have their sources in pre-Christian Jewish writings such as the OT Book of Daniel and The 2^nd Book of Esdras in the Apocrypha. Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic writings appeared, not surprisingly, during a times of great upheaval, stress and threat for the culture that produced them. We make movies; they wrote books, filled literary special effects..

The larger Mediterranean world went its usual way with empire succeeding empire: Alexander the Great, his successor general, and eventually the Romans, who kept the region stable for many years. But to the relatively tiny Jewish community that lived, then as now, at the crossroads of empires and battlefields, it was a time of great stress indeed. As they became subject to one foreign power after another, the question of how they and their unique faith would survive was very real, and their hope that God would intervene dramatically to set everything right was intense.

Its little wonder that those Jews who first believed that Jesus was the Messiah sent by God should have expected that after his death and resurrection, he would soon return in power and great might to bring this fearful, troubled world to an end. Disasters would inevitably accompany his return, but they would be the birthpangs of a new world God would usher in – a faith-filled hope, you’ll note, largely lacking from modern era end of the world movies. The records of that hope are scattered throughout the NT and the Church bids us read them every year during these days in which darkness grows, and the light of hope seems distant.

Of course, that sudden, world-changing intervention our ancestors in faith hoped for has not happened yet – so here we are still, living through yet another stressful, fearful time in human history. That leaves us with two questions, at least: First, what are we to make of these ancients texts in our own day? More importantly, how does God bid us to live in such times?

Perhaps the most important thing to say about the ancient Christian apocalyptic texts is that we should not use them to try to predict what will happen in our own time. As I’m sure you know, some evangelical and fundamentalist Christians try to do to just this – and I understand the temptation. The stress and foreboding of those first Christian centuries and of our own times are quite similar. Moreover, the obscure symbolism of books like Revelation (which, by the way, originally referred to the ancient Roman Empire) -- can, with a little imagine, be made to fit almost any troubled time in history, including our own. So people use these to texts to map out the sequence of disasters to come. Even if this was a sensible intellectual or spiritual endeavor – and it is not-- predicting the end is not and never has been the point for Christians. Later in Mark 13, Jesus says that he himself doesn’t know that day or hour. [2] If Jesus didn’t know, it doesn’t make much sense for us to try figuring it out!

Much more to the point is the question of how to live faithfully in stressful and apocalyptic-feeling times such as our own. Throughout Mark 13, Jesus has some basic instructions:

Watch out for trouble when you see it in front of you; [3] keep awake and alert to what is going on around you; [4] endure faithfully; trust God. [5] In sum, be attentive to the challenges, risks and possibilities before you, and engage them with courage and faith in God’s guidance and presence.

Hmmm… Does that sound much different from what we’re called do as Christians at any time?

The Letter to the Hebrews offers these words about how to live: Let us hold fast the confession of our hope with wavering And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching. [6]

We are to be steadfast in our trust in God, says this writer; we are to support each other in love and good deeds; we are to gather regularly for worship, fellowship and mutual encouragement. In other words, we are to be the Church, doing the things the Church always does and has always done in good times and bad; in stable times and times of stress; whether it seems the world is solid or about to fall apart. We are to keep on keeping on, alert, enduring, faithful; living in trust and hope; worshiping the God who loves us; supporting one another; loving our neighbors.

The challenge of apocalyptic times like ours does not mean we are to live any differently than Christians ever have or that we would at any other time. We are simply to live as faithfully and steadily as we can with God’s help, no matter what the world around us is like -- trusting, always, that God is there to support, guide and love us.

I recently came across a saying on-line that captures this truth wonderfully and simply. I’ve discovered that versions of it have been attributed to Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Jr., evangelist D. L. Moody, poet W. S. Merwin, the prophet Mohammed and the Jewish Talmud. Such widespread attribution suggests there is deep spiritual wisdom in it, whoever said it first.

Here is the first version I saw: When asked what he would do if he knew Christ would return tomorrow, Martin Luther is said to have replied, "I would plant a tree.”

I would plant a tree. That is, I would keep doing what will be of good and lasting worth to the world God has made and loves has called me to serve. Whether that world is ending today, tomorrow or millennia from now, our call is to keep doing God’s work where I am, faithfully, trustingly, lovingly. That is what the Church has always been called to be and to do, and that is our call in our time.

The Rev. Jack Zamboni

November 15^th, 2009