SERMON Envisioning 2012

Pentecost 24B (Lectionary 33) (Proper 28): Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Hebrews 10:11-25; Mark 13:1-8

End-of-the world envisioning is not new, but, at the moment it is all-consuming. Mostly prompted by the release of the movie "2012" last Friday. To quote one of at least six articles on the subject appearing in the Chicago Tribune in the last eight days,

It's the end of the world as we know it, and Hollywood feels fine.

Global warming, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, continuing terrorist threats and the economic meltdown have people in a gloomy, even end-of-days frame of mind. Filmmakers are tapping into worries about humanity's future with apocalyptic sagas such as "2012," ''The Road" [to be released November 25] and "The Book of Eli" [scheduled to open January 25] along with documentaries about environmental or economic doom.

And this nothing new!

End-of-the-world stories have been a cinema subgenre since the early Cold War days with such nuclear-war movies as "On the Beach," ''Fail- Safe" and "Dr. Strangelove." The advent of environmentalism and overpopulation concerns resulted in another wave of films depicting bleak futures, among them "Soylent Green," ''Silent Running" and "The Omega Man."

The end of the world currently envisioned takes many forms. In "2012" the Earth's crust is shifting and tumbling into the oceans after solar neutrinos heat up the planet's core, the flood waters rise, and earthquake fissures open up. Other scenarios range from plagues of vampires and zombies to economic calamity to environmental catastrophe to devastating warfare between humans and machines

But it's not only the how that is envisioned but the when. Prompted by the film title "2012," there is new interest in the Mayan calendar based on a 5,126 year great cycle that began on August 13, 3114 B.C.E. and will end on the winter solice, December 21, 2012. The Mayan calendar is all explained in Friday's Tribune, "Countdown to 2012."

We've just heard a reading and a gospel that are like the current films and documentaries. Each is meant to make end time envisioning possible. Both the snippet from Daniel and the gospel from Mark are taken from longer texts.

The longer Mark text, including what we hear today, has a lot of parallels to the longer Daniel text. Both are apocalyptic, describing, in fantastic and frightening images, what will happen before and when God reigns.

Now, at first glance, what we hear about Jesus and disciples this morning doesn't seem particularly fantastic or frightening. Or envisioning for that matter. The disciples leave the Jerusalem temple and one of them says to Jesus, "Look teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!" Nothing out of the ordinary here. The disciples are, after all, tourists in Jerusalem.

As Chicagoans, we know how that goes. We immediately identify tourists, don't we? Especially tourists from small towns. They can be spotted craning their necks looking up at whatever tall building they happen to be near. Well, the country Galilean disciples are doing that in Jerusalem. No mystery.

And to us, Jesus' response does not seem particularly fantastic or frightening or requiring any envisioning."Do you see these great buildings?" Jesus asks. "Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down." And to us this does not seem fantastic or frightening because in August of 70, some forty years after Jesus' death and four years after its completion, Roman soldiers burned the temple buildings and razed them to the ground. So efficiently that the Jewish historian Josephus writes that nothing was left to persuade the later visitor that anything had ever been there. (That by the way is not completely accurate. The western retaining wall remained.)

This is a prediction that Jesus almost certainly made before his death. It is a prediction that does not seem particularly fantastic or frightening to us in hindsight or one requiring any envisioning.

But it is a prediction that must have been impossible for the disciples to fathom when it was made. When the disciple remarks that the stones and buildings are large, he is, if anything, understating their size. One commentator writes:

As reconstructed by Herod the Great at immense cost, the Jerusalem temple was one of the wonders of the ancient world. The enclosed site was four times as large as the sacred Acropolis in Athens, twice as large as the Roman Forum. Very impressive were the huge retaining walls that were erected in order to provide the large, level surface for the temple complex. One of the stones in the Western Wall (now known as "the Wailing Wall") is forty feet in length. Archeologists estimate that a still larger stone in the South Wall weighs over one hundred tons. Herod used so much gold in decorating the exterior of the buildings that according to Josephus, the sight almost blinded spectators when the sun shone on it. [Hare, 1996, 167-68]

How could anyone envision the total destruction of anything so massive? Or anything held quite so sacred by a people? Notwithstanding the current plethora of doomsday films and documentaries, how can we envision, really envision, the end of all human life? Or eight years ago, could we have envisioned, really envisioned, the total destruction any thing so massive, so sacred to our image, as the World Trade Center? Yet, that was what Jesus was inviting the disciples to do.

And Jesus doesn't stop there. His first four disciples -- Peter, James, John, and Andrew -- sit with him on the Mount of Olives looking at the temple and privately ask when this will be and what the sign will be that "all these things are about to be accomplished." Pre-resurrection disciples, they were undoubtedly trying to get their minds around not only the razing of the temple but what was to follow. Maybe some sort of kingship?

And Jesus doesn't answer them directly but instead warns them to be on the look out for, and not to be alarmed by, what will happen: false prophets, wars, rumor of wars, nations rising against nations, earthquakes, famines.

Now, over the centuries, every generation has had Christians who have taken Jesus' catalogue of things that will occur -- things that unfailingly do occur in every time -- as signs of the end -- even though Jesus specifically says, "but the end is yet to come." For some Christians, September 11 marked the beginning of the end. There are websites that catalogue events since September 11 -- events like the earthquakes and famines and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- as signs and proof that the destruction of the World Trade Center initiated the end Jesus is speaking of today.

But what is "the end"? For Jesus, in Mark, the end is the Kingdom of God. That day on the temple mount, the disciples are thinking that the Kingdom of God will involve a political kingship. That is not Jesus' vision. And there are two other things that Jesus does not envision when he speaks of "the end."

One thing Jesus is not speaking of is the end of the world. At the turn of the last century, Albert Schweitzer theorized that Jesus believed that the Kingdom of God meant the destruction of the world, and because the world did not end and the Kingdom of God did not come, Jesus died a failure. This theory is based on the mistaken belief that Jewish apocalyptic writings, like the Book of Daniel, anticipate the end of the world. They don't; Schweitzer was wrong.

(And, so too, is Terry Gilliam, whose films include 1995's "Twelve Monkeys," about a world where plague has wiped out most of humanity. Quoted in the Tribune this week he says, "We always need a boogeyman, we always need the end of the world . . . . I think it's the problem of being in a Christian society. It's based on it. If you don't have the end of the world, you don't get heaven and eternity." -- Wrong, wrong, wrong!)

The other thing that Jesus does not mean by "the end" is some sort of space wars invasion of earth. This notion comes from apocalyptic writings like the gospel we will hear in two weeks -- a gospel that borrows from Daniel and this chapter of Mark -- about signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, the powers of the heavens being shaken, and the Son-of-Man coming in a cloud. (Luke 21:25-26) Tom Wright, an Anglican bishop and my favorite New Testament scholar, writes:

The funny thing about modern understandings of ancient Judaism is that we have been taught to read highly coloured, flowery flights of Jewish imagery as though they were plain plodding prose. When we read a passage which says that the "sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall give their light", we ought to know . . . that the passage will not go on to say that "the rest of the country will have sunny intervals and scattered showers". The language simply doesn't work that way.

When, for example, we speak of an event as being "earth shattering," we do not mean that, a huge earthquake struck shattering the ground. The same use of language applies here. Bishop Wright:

When Jewish writers spoke of the sun and moon being darkened; when they spoke of angels gathering people from the four winds of heaven, when, in particular they spoke of a Son of Man who would come on the clouds of heaven -- in each of these cases they were using language in [a] metaphorical way. It is flagrantly absurd to think that Jesus, in saying that sort of thing, envisaged himself or anyone else literally flying around mid-air on an actual cloud. This is well-known first-century imagery, and what it means is something like this: (a) the people of God are being oppressed by a pagan foe; (b) God will vindicate them soon; (c) when this happens the effect will be (in our language) "earth-shattering" . . . . The purpose of the highly charged metaphor about . . . 'clouds', and 'Son of Man' is to invest events of that sort with their real theological significance. (N.T. Wright, 1992, 54-55)

So if "the end" is not the destruction of the world or a star wars invasion (neither of which is very easy to envision), what do we envision?

We envision the Kingdom of God. Something that happens here. Something that bears a remarkable similarity to what many think the Mayans actually believed December 21, 2012 will usher in. According to students of Mayan prophecy quoted in Friday's Tribune, the planet will not explode. Instead, there will be a shift in human consciousness, an opportunity for transformation, and the advent of a golden era.

But the Kingdom has another dimension. I once heard a suburban pastor talk about highly structured, very emotional "Kingdom" retreats that he runs. Fascinating stuff. But at one point he said, "we tell each person individually: 'Jesus said the Kingdom of God is within you.'" And I found myself wondering, "Where does that come from?" Thinking, "That can't be right."

Where it comes from is from the King James Version of the Bible. And it's not right. The "you" is plural. The Greek and every English translation since has Jesus say, "The Kingdom of God is among or in the midst of you" -- in other words, among or in the midst of you as a community.

And that's true. And it is also true that the kingdom is to come. We pray in the Lord's Prayer, "thy Kingdom come."

Envision with Bishop Wright in his book The Lord and his Prayer:

[T]hink of it like this. Jesus is the medical genius who discovered penicillin; we are the doctors, ourselves being cured by the medicine, now applying it to those who need it. Jesus is the musical genius who wrote the greatest oratorio of all time; we are the musicians, captivated by his composition ourselves, who now perform it before a world full of muzak and cacophony. The Kingdom did indeed come with Jesus; but it will fully come when the world is healed, when the whole creation joins in the song.

This morning may we, the community of faith at Wicker Park Lutheran Church, envision our life in community. May we pray:

[M]ake us Kingdom-bearers! Make us a community of healed healers, make us a re-tuned orchestra to play the Kingdom-music until the world takes up the song. Make us, in turn, Servants of the Lord, the few with the message for the many.

Amen

November 15, 2009

Ruth VanDemark, pastor

Wicker Park Lutheran Church

Chicago