Scripture: Mark 13:1-8;17-20
This is the time of year when the lectionary readings, the suggested scripture readings for the various Sundays of the year, when those readings tend to be like the one you heard from the gospel of Mark. This last Sunday before the beginning of Advent, the end of the year in the liturgical calendar, often has scriptures that deal with visions of the end of the world, and describe the sort of cataclysmic events that will be part of those end times. Even the first Sunday or two in Advent often has readings that point us toward Christ’s second coming more than his first, focusing on the return of Christ, and for many Christians this is how we are to understand the times we live in. Having already received Christ’s first coming, we now live awaiting his return, which will signal the end of the world as we now know it, and the beginning of some entirely new age.
I don’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to things like the lectionary readings or the liturgical calendar, except for the big things like Advent, and Christmas, Lent and Easter. Sometimes that’s because I have other things on my mind that I want to talk about. Sometimes it’s because the themes suggested by the lectionary readings and the liturgical calendar are troubling to me. That is the case with readings such as the one from Mark and the themes that typically come up at this time of the church year.
I frankly don’t have a lot of use for the parts of the Christian faith that have to do with things like the end of the world, the end of the age, or the second coming of Christ. For one thing, I confess that I associate all of this with groups that have predicted the end of the world—in every case so far erroneously, and with complicated interpretations of various verses of the Bible that are supposed to contain some kind of code that tells us when the world will end, and with bumper stickers that say “in case of rapture this car will be empty”…though I do enjoy the bumper sticker that responds “in case of rapture, may I have your car?” In other words, I associate talk about Christ’s second coming and the end times with a style of Christianity and with a kind of theology that I find at best way different from my own and at worst downright offensive. Offensive because it promotes a Christianity that is based on the fear of being “left behind” and most often, in my mind anyway, a Christianity that assumes that only Christians will be saved, saved from the terrible sufferings that the rest of humanity will have to endure at the end of things, and of course saved from eternal damnation.
And even if we’re not dealing with some of the more extreme forms of end-of-the-world-ism, I still don’t relate very well to such speculations. My everyday faith is not focused on the world’s end or Christ’s second coming. I’m content to leave that in God’s hands. I have all I can do to try to be a little more loving day by day, to try to be a little bit more courageous in seeking justice day by day, to try to be a little more open to the spirit of God day by day, without trying to figure out the future or anticipate the world’s end. Better for me, better for all of us really I can’t help but think, to leave the world’s end in God’s hands and attend to matters of love and justice that are staring us in the face every day. Even if these themes do not necessarily carry the negative connotations I referred to earlier, they are at the very least distractions from the many immediate matters to which faith ought to turn our hearts. That’s pretty much the attitude that I have always had and to a large degree still do.
But all of that said, there is a reason why I am even bringing this up today. One of the books I read during my sabbatical was a novel called The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It is a very bleak story of a father and son wandering through a world where some unnamed catastrophe has taken place that has destroyed civilization and that has left the father and son to fend for themselves in a desolate landscape, scrounging for every bit of food they can find and trying to avoid the human predators that seem to be lurking everywhere and who could be encountered at any moment. I had read some of the reviews of this book and had found even the reviews to leave me feeling depressed, so I was not expecting to be entertained. I read the book because I thought it would be a respectable representative of a worldview that I sense is fairly widespread in our culture right now, a worldview that is not at all limited to certain branches of Christianity, a worldview based on the feeling that we are living under a constant threat of impending catastrophe.
The “left behind” books are one example of this, based in that case on what some believe are Biblical prophecies of the end, though I think even those books and the movies based on them may appeal to a lot more people than just those who share that particular way of reading the Bible. I can’t comment too much on them. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read any of them, for several reasons. From an entirely different perspective Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth suggests a similar sense of things. I do apologize to Al Gore for mentioning him in the same paragraph and implying even the slightest connection to the “left behind” books. But they do have a connection in my mind. Both suggest that the end of the world as we know it is a very real possibility in the not very distant future. For those who don’t find so-called Biblical prophecies credible or compelling, Gore offers an equally disastrous vision based on scientific evidence and projections, for many of us much more believable and therefore much more frightening. When just a few days ago we were having 70 degree weather the week of Thanksgiving, I let slip out of my mouth the statement, “must be global warming”, which of course is a thought that has no scientific basis and which I meant somewhat jokingly, though not completely I think. I took it as an indication that the threat of global warming has worked its way pretty solidly into my psyche.
Then of course there are the kinds of threats which September 11 has come to be symbolic of, fears that future terrorist actions could be much more destructive than anything we have known so far, and then on top of that the ways those fears are focused on and magnified by political purveyors of fear who benefit by keeping the danger level high and do their best to exploit whatever fears we may already harbor. Some people seem to have an interest in promoting the sense that we live under the threat of impending catastrophe. And there is the media which in one sense is just reporting the news but in another sense is also purveying and benefiting from a climate of fear. When we are constantly warned about diseases invading school rooms, scam artists on the prowl, internet pedophiles, security failures at airports, all the ways we are embarrassingly vulnerable to terrorist attacks, and so on, regardless of the fact that each individual story has its justification, it all adds up to a worldview that says we are surrounded by danger, threatened from every direction. It is not so easy to avoid, this worldview, and I believe it has worked its way inside us. I read Cormac McCarthy’s book (to get back to that) hoping that it would somehow, as novels sometimes do, help me process this climate that I believe we are living in, a climate of pervasive fear and of catastrophe lurking in the background. I can’t really say that reading his novel helped me. It did give me further evidence that we are living in such a climate.
All of which is to say that as we approach the season of Advent this year, as I approach the season of Advent this year, I do so recognizing that I am living in a culture that has a widespread sense of impending catastrophe, and believing that this must be resisted. Advent is often spoken of as a time of hope. For me that has a special meaning in the times in which we live. If we are not careful, fear can take us over. If we are not careful, we can find ourselves living out of fear in ways we may not be fully conscious of. In the climate we are living in it takes some concentration, some mindfulness, some intentionality, some whatever-word-you-want-to-use to live out of hope as opposed to living out of fear. Like I was trying to say last week about the spirit of gratitude, hope doesn’t necessarily come naturally to us. It is a choice we need to make. It is a choice I believe we desperately need to make. Not because the world gives us substantial reasons for optimism, but precisely because our world often does not provide us with those reasons. Hope is different from optimism. Hope is a choice. It’s a choice I believe I need to make every day. I feel like the season of Advent this year is calling me to make that choice. Advent calls me to hope.
One of the things that I see in the life of Jesus, one of the things that makes me want to be a follower of Jesus, is precisely the way I see him living in fearsome and threatening times but not being controlled by them. It was of course not just the times that were threatening. Impending catastrophe hung over the last years of Jesus life in a personal sense as well. How does one resist the tyranny of fear and the threat of catastrophe, choosing instead to live out of love and the spirit of God? The story of Jesus in one sense is a story of how that is possible. And that possibility is the meaning of hope. We will soon be reflecting on the beginnings of that story, the story of Jesus of Nazareth, child of God. May those reflections help us to be persons of hope. May they help us to be a people of hope. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 25, 2007