Sunday, Dec. 3 - 1st Sunday of Advent
The end is near!
Used to be you’d hear that from preachers when you came to church. Nowadays you get that from other kinds of preachers from other kinds of pulpits.
Your doctor, for instance. With lab reports and a medical record in one hand, she reads you the signs of the end. You’re overweight, like most Americans. Your blood work shows that this or that is wrong with you. You have only so much time to live. The end is near.
This is one kind of end-times prophecy we heed by getting into better shape, watching what we eat, deciding that even though we are going to die, it could be delayed a bit. Go to any bookstore and you can see how earnest people are about this. Or is it just that I am getting older and notice it more? Anyway, we should be grateful for everyone that wakes us up to this truth. We are all going to die, sooner or later—unless, of course, Jesus returns in the meantime.
But that isn’t exactly the kind of end Jesus is talking about. He has lots to say to us about getting ready for our individual ends, but our text today is about his being the last word on last things in another way.
A second kind of end-is-near word from doomsayers concerns the end of the earth as we know it. These too are mostly not religious, although we could do with a good bit more attention to this from the religious. We get this word from every scientific corner, and from some political corners, too. This last word on last things says we are destroying the earth, ruining creation, bringing an end to planetary life. Our wasteful energy consumption, our destruction of species in the name of progress, our unwillingness to curb pollution that depletes the ozone layer: everywhere you turn you find that we are speeding the end of the earth.
I’ve just been reading an interesting book entitled The Creation by the retired Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. [Norton, 2006.] Wilson grew up in a Southern Baptist church in Alabama but figures he long ago grew out of the primitive worldview of Christians and other religious people who think you need God to explain the place of human beings in the world and the meaning of our existence. Science has for him far surpassed religion as a satisfying source of all the knowledge we need to make sense of things. But he is now concerned that unless he can enlist us intellectual inferiors that mount sacred pulpits week by week into this larger effort to save the earth, a cataclysm will come upon us all, and the wonders of nature will be lost. So he writes an open letter to a fictitious caricature of a Baptist pastor, urging an alliance for life in order to save the pitchfork ant and the ivory-billed woodpecker and the like.
Now, I’m all for the pitchfork ant, don’t you know?! And let’s save the lovely ivory-billed woodpecker while we’re at it, too. I agree with him that we should work together to cherish and nurture life on this planet. And it doesn’t bother me one whit that we align ourselves with nature-loving atheists to do it. In fact, I was terribly encouraged this week, and discouraged at the same time, by what I believe is a growing-up going on in the conservative religious community on matters like this. The president-elect of the Christian Coalition, the Reverend Joel Hunter, a mega-church pastor from Longwood, Florida, resigned before officially taking office. Seems he wanted to broaden the agenda of the group founded in 1989 by the Reverend Pat Robertson. He wanted to tackle poverty, the minimum wage, global warming, death-penalty opposition, and HIV/AIDS. Said he: My position is, unless we are caring as much for the vulnerable outside the womb as inside the womb, we’re not carrying out the full message of Jesus. But the board was not ready to go beyond their narrow agenda of opposing abortion and electing conservative politicians. They began to think this might threaten their base, he said after they agreed to separate. I hope we can break out of’ “liberal” and “conservative’ I’m not sure when compassion became fitted under “liberal.” There are many Christians, especially in their twenties and thirties, who don’t care about liberal and conservative. They just see that if you’re going to love your neighbor, you have to address things like the environment. [Alan Cooperman, Washington Post (Nov. 29, 2006): A13.]
Good for him, and shame on the board. But my question to Dr. Wilson, the secular humanist biologist, is whether he cares as much for humans inside the womb and outside of it as he does for nonhuman creatures. We need larger coalitions for good that will help heed the prophecies of the last things in regard to the earth and all creatures great and small.
But that isn’t what Jesus is talking about, either. He might have words for us about these last things, but our text is giving us the last word of Jesus on something else.
Maybe it has to do with the end of the universe and all life as we know it. This has some echoes in the Bible and even seems to have something to say to us from our text about the signs in the sun and moon and stars. Heaven and earth will pass away, Jesus says. And that means everything altogether.
There are secular and sacred versions of this. On the scientific side, physicists tell us that just as the universe began once upon a time in a so-called Big Bang, it is expanding now at such a pace that it will reach a point at which galaxies break apart and form black holes, or if gravity has its way, the expanding universe will slow and turn back on itself. We will someday, maybe five billion years from now, undergo a Big Crunch, in which everything will be destroyed, and after that, who knows?
It is as sure as can be, writes the physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne,
that humanity, and all forms of carbon-based life, will prove a transient episode in the history of the cosmos. [Quoted by Daniel Clendenin http://www.journeywithjesus.net (Dec. 3, 2006).]On the sacred side are the end-times predictors, like Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, who wrote the Left Behind series of novels. In their reading of Scripture, God has given the last word on last things, and it is bad. The only good word is for those whod know Jesus and will escape the end-times disasters that are coming before the Second Coming of Christ. I have spoken about this many times, but let me say that I believe the theology of the Left Behind books is a massive misreading of Scripture and has given a misleading understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is no ejector seat for Christians. That isn’t what Jesus means by escaping the trials to come. And yet, along with all the other end-is-near prophets, they call us to pay attention to the last things—whether the end of our individual lives, our planetary life, or the end of all things.
And yet this still is not what we are reading about in Luke’s gospel. Jesus is giving us the last word on last things of a fourth kind: the end of the kingdoms of this world that operate against the kingdom of God. Jesus foretells the end of all empires that work to oppress the poor and empower the rich, that neglect the weak and vulnerable in favor of the strong and able, that persecute the righteous in order to preserve their own power.
Jesus has the Roman Empire in his crosshairs when he speaks about distress among nations and the powers of the heavens being shaken. He uses language that comes from the book of Daniel and that makes sense to the prescientific worldview of the day. When people looked up and saw the regular patterns of the heavenly bodies, they assumed they were reflecting the earthly interests of the ways the world was ordered. When the Star of Bethlehem appeared in the heavens, those who looked for such things knew that changes were near politically. Jesus refers to these kinds of signs that would precede big changes in Rome’s rule.
Followers of Jesus needed such encouragement. They were persecuted by Roman rulers and Jewish leaders both. Jesus has just finished predicting the end of religion, as they had known it, with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Now he foretells the end of the Roman Empire, too. Anything and anyone that stands against the will of God in the world, against God’s agent in the world—Jesus; and against God’s people in the world—Jesus’ followers—would pass away. Jesus’ last word will not pass away.
And even though all this had to do with Rome in Jesus’ time, it still holds in our time. Look at all the empires that have come and gone. None survives forever. The empire of the Greeks gave way to Rome. The ancient Persian Empire had given way to the Greeks. The British Empire, on which they said the sun never set, is no more. The Soviet Union is history. And no matter how much we love our own country, I can promise you it is not eternal. It lives under this same word of Jesus—that it will fall and fail if it pursues the marks of empire instead of living under the demands of God’s will for the well-being of all people.
Jesus tells us that he and we and all those whom God seeks to defend against the forces of empire will be vindicated at the end. Hold on, he says. Don’t get caught up in the ways of living that make you more a part of the ways of the world that is passing away than the ways of the world that is coming to be. Stay spiritually sober, and stay morally awake. Don’t get out of shape. Don’t let yourself think that reckoning will never come.
I run early most mornings with a group at White Rock Lake. Dave Dozier has run countless marathons, and next Sunday will run his 27th consecutive White Rock. Dave has a saying about these things that plays off the old saying, You’ve got to pay the Piper. He’s crusty character, Dave, a colorful storyteller— sometimes even tinting toward the hue of blue. But he talks about how in every marathon, the Piper comes out of the crowd for every runner about mile twenty-one. He’s got his hand out demanding that you pay him if you haven’t already paid him in your training. And for the last miles of the marathon, he just keeps waving his empty palm at you, mocking you and demanding payment. But if you have put in the miles in training, if you have paid the Piper ahead of time in blood, sweat and tears, then the Piper comes out and smiles and waves good luck to you as you pass his way.
Friends, a reckoning is coming upon the earth. The Son of Man will be exalted by God, and all who have paid him homage ahead of time will find it welcome news. Those who have been trapped by the ways of this world will experience the great reversal when the end comes. Their comfort will be given to the uncomfortable. Their prosperity to the poor. Their place of honor to those they have dishonored.
On this first Sunday in Advent, we heed Jesus, the Last Word of God himself. We pay him now with our love and faithfulness through thick and thin, so that we do not have to pay him later. He has given us his last word now, so that when the last things come, we too will last with him.
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