A Proper 28 33
BFC 2017
1 Thessalonians
5:1-11
November 26,
2017
About
five years ago, you may remember that there were a number of New-Agey spiritual
folk who were worried about the Mayan calendar coming to an end signaling that
the end of the world was upon us. Present
Mayan shamans universally came forward to say, “The end of the calendar does
not mean that the world will come to an end.
It means that it will be transformed.”
Carlos
Barrios. a historian, an anthropologist and investigator, after studying with
traditional elders for 25 years since the age of 19, became a Mayan Ajq'ij, a
ceremonial priest and spiritual guide, Eagle Clan. Barrios said,
Anthropologists visit the temple sites and
read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read
the signs correctly. It's just their imagination. Other people write about
prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December
2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be
transformed. "We are no longer in
the World of the Fourth Sun, but we are not yet in the World of the Fifth Sun.
This is the time in-between, the time of transition. As we pass through
transition there is a colossal, global convergence of environmental
destruction, social chaos, war, and ongoing Earth Changes. He
continues: "Humanity will continue, but in a different way. Material
structures will change. From this we will have the opportunity to be more
human. We are living in the most important era of the Mayan calendars and
prophecies. All the prophecies of the world, all the traditions are converging
now. There is no time for games. The spiritual ideal of this era is action.[1]
Likewise, Christian scholars have often been caught translating
the mythic as otherworldly with no sense of a people, who pine--a God, who
longs for justice.
Christian
missionary and theologian, Albert Schweitzer, charted the course for New
Testament scholarship for many years by saying that the historical Jesus was
largely irrelevant because he was apocalyptic, predicting that the world would
come to an end. Jesus was deluded. The world did not come to an end. Schweitzer believed that what Christians
needed to follow was the Christ of faith, the teaching and ministry of Jesus developed,
discerned, confessed, and described in the continuing work of the Christian
Church, to continue with the basic spirit of Jesus and his reverence for life.
Something was lost
in that though. The radical Jesus that
Schweitzer taught and lived became lost in a relativized, homogenized,
milque-white-toast Jesus. I was in
seminary as the Jesus Seminar became popular.
The long-awaited response to Schweitzer came as the Jesus Seminar said
that not all things attributed to Jesus were Jesus. In particular, Jesus did not predict the end
of the world. He was not apocalyptic. He was more of a counter-cultural
wisdom-giver. Those apocalyptic predictions
were done by gospel writers over and against the movement’s early enemies as
things like the cataclysmic destruction of Jerusalem happened before their
eyes. The scale of
destruction—with perhaps millions of Jews killed, with Judea and Galilee laid
to waste, and with Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean attacked
must have felt like the end of the world to many Jewish people.[2]
But
then came a rejoinder to what I learned in seminary. Something grittier and more true to who Jesus
was as a Jew. Other Biblical scholars
said, “Wait a minute! Paul is even more
apocalyptic than Jesus. And all of the
Jewish prophets were apocalyptic, but apocalyptic is not God’s truth-teller
saying that the end of the world is afoot.
Apocalyptic is akin to the Mayan understanding that means not the end of
the world but the end of the world as we know it. In particular, within Jewish apocalyptic
thought, was the great and terrible Day of the Living God as shared in Paul’s
letter to the churches in Thessaloniki.
Knowing that a new world would never come without the imploding of the
old in violence, warfare, and destruction, Jewish prophets used the Day of the
Living God to tell people who gained nothing from imperial power that God was
at work, empire was not sustainable, and that what the world was experiencing
in the present moment are the labor pains of something new waiting to be
born.
For
Jewish prophets, Jesus, and Paul, talking the end of the world was not about
some otherworldly promise. Here is a Biblical
story that should be informative for us.
Paul writes that the official, imperial message shall be, “I will bring
you peace and security.” Know then, Paul
writes, know that they are espousing a gospel of destruction. Throughout Paul’s letter he has been using
Roman imperial language in the alternative to say there is something broader
and wider than the worship of the Roman Caesar.
Paul uses words we have translated as epiphany and Second Coming which
were actually words for the manifestation or arrival of the emperor into a
village or a city. Thessaloniki was
thoroughly Roman, a temple built with the inscription to Caesar Augustus, the
son of god. Coinage was minted and
transacted in Thessaloniki which proclaimed Julius Caesar god on one side, and
on the other side an imprint of his adopted son, Octavian or Augustus. Lord and Savior were titles used by all the
emperors to declare what they coveted most from their populace—loyalty.[3]
Loyalty,
loyalty. That term used by the apostle
Paul for what has become traditionally translated as faith.[4] Do we have faith in or give our loyalty and
allegiance to whom Jupiter has appointed king and lord and ascending to god in
Julius Caesar and the dynasty that followed him? Or do we give our loyalty and allegiance to
Jesus the Christ, Mediterranean Jewish peasant and prophet?
Loyalty
oaths were common things demanded of the subjected populace by Caesars and
their protectors and those who crossed them were hunted down and killed to remind
the populace that purity demanded allegiance to one Lord and King and one
alone.. Only 13 years before 1
Thessalonians was written, this was the loyalty oath spoken by the people of
Aritium in support of the new emperor, Caligiula:
On my conscience, I
shall be an enemy of those persons whom I know to be enemies of Gaius Caesar
Germanicus, and if anyone imperils or shall imperil him or his safety by arms
or by civil war I shall not cease to hunt him down by land and by sea, until he
pays the penalty to Caesar in full. I
shall not hold myself or my children dearer than his safety and I shall
consider as my enemies those persons who are hostile to him. If consciously I swear falsely or am proved
false may Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the deified Augustus and all the other
immortal gods punish me and my children with loss of country, safety, and all
my fortune.[5]
Loss of country, safety, and
fortune is a steep price for lack of loyalty.
And if others should show lack of allegiance imperial Caesar, it is my
sacred obligation, as a citizen and/or subject of Rome to hunt these
non-loyalists down.
Modern-day Christians are often critical of the language
Paul uses. It’s too “us” and “them”, too
“black” and “white”, too polarizing.
Sometimes I wonder if we don’t use that language because our neutrality
allows us to maintain Caesar’s easy peace—where wars are fought without reason,
troops are killed in places where we didn’t even know we were at war, and every
knee shall bow in allegiance to one idol.
W1e may regale the present Caesar in office, but the longest running war
in U.S. history, ravaging God’s good earth, violence against people of color, a
patriarchy that only demeans and devalues anything other than one solid gender
and sexuality, and demonization of the poor and immigrant have been going on long
before this person and party.
And the apostle Paul makes it clear that this is not just
about Caesar. It’s about a system, a way
of continuing to suck on the exhaust pipe of a ’57 Chevy, where we are all
lured to inebriation and the imperial dream.
Whispered softly to us day after day is a voice saying, “It’s easier,
just drift off. Stay drunk.
Shhhhhhh. I know you’re anxious. I know you’re afraid, baby. Sleep.
Sleep. There are always
tradeoffs. It will all be ok. Just trust me and I’ll give you all the peace
and security you need.”
Paul responds to a cultural drunkenness and dream by
counseling vigilance, “Stay awake. Stay
sober.” So that you may greet the Day of
the Living God with joy. Stay
awake. Stay sober. So that you may not fear the necessary transformation
that is taking place. Stay
vigilant.
The great American prophet William Stringfellow preached at
the ordination of 71 year-old Anne Garrison back in 1981. At that ordination he told the gathered
congregation that they were ordaining Anne for being a religious person, as if
she had achieved perfect attendance at Sunday School for all these years. Instead, Stringfellow believed, she was being
ordained, as all Christians are, to a life of vigilance. Her ordination was an opening to future
vigilance, not a reward for a virtuous past.
Vigilance is our dew line, our early warning system, our watchtower, our
way of moving to the watch tower to greet the day when dawn does not even seem
possible in the night. Vigilance is that rapt attention that actively beckons, plans for,
and awaits the new day. Some have their
whole lives destroyed when the transformation comes. Others have been planning for it, making room
for it in their hearts and homes, and painfully participating it over and
against the wider culture. “The Spirit of God praying in us and through us provides an inner
vigilance of Spirit--the Spirit of watchfulness and discernment.”[6]
Those children of
the light also know when invitations to the night come. They sometimes make huge sacrifices to not be
swept away in the bright, shiny, new and improved invitations to make hate and
cruelty fashionable and enlist in its ranks.
Franz Jägerstätter, Austrian peasant and
conscientious objector, was beheaded by the National Security State known as
the 3rd Reich on August 9, 1943, for refusing
induction into the German army. While in prison, his chaplains, military
officers and attorneys tried to persuade him against his conscience to accept
induction. He could not be
swayed, and "described a dream he had had in 1938 in which crowds of
people were struggling to board a shiny new train. At some point he heard a
voice announce, ' This train is bound for hell.' It occurred to him afterward
that this train was a symbol of the Nazi movement. Surely, he concluded, one should not board such a train; surely,
having discovered its destination, one ought to jump off such a train before it
reach its goal, even though it might cost one's life."[7]
His dream speaks to us now:
Jump . . . Off . . . This . . . Train. We too, are
called by Paul, to be the children of light, the children of the new Day that
is dawning, and patron saints of conscientious objectors to the neo-fascism
that has been bending knees and swearing allegiance to the night stallions of
war and military mayhem.
"You are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night.
. . for those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at
night." The nation is drunk.
Paul’s
prescription is that of an "Intervention" by people who know their
loyalty and allegiance outside of what is pounded into us, whispered into our
ear, day after day. These children of
the light are vigilant about extricating themselves from the anxiety and fear,
the stupor created by war. The Church is called to be an Intervention
Team to put a final NO to the world's drunken binge of self-destruction,
and a joyous YES to embracing the sobriety of solidarity with the poor, who are
the future of humankind, in a non-violent, non-consumptive world.[8] Children of light, jump off the train, join
hands, so that we may forever encourage each other in staying awake and staying
sober. On this Sunday, the Christian
Church is to proclaim, not Caesar but Christ.
And Christ, Christ said not the Roman Empire but God’s Empire. And Christ did not point to himself, but said
the Empire of God is like a weed, like a shepherd, like a woman, like a wedding
banquet. Jump off the train. The banquet awaits. Amen.
[2]
James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age (New
York: Viking, 2014), p. 46.
[3]
J. R. Harrison, “Paul and the imperial gospel at Thessaloniki,” Journal for the
Study of the New Testament,
25 no. 1 Sept. 2002, pp. 78ff.
[4]
The word pistis (pistis)
means loyalty or allegiance to sovereign or dynastic rule. Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone:
Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), p.
79.
[6]
Grant Gallup, “November 13, 2005,” Homily
Grits, http://rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits04_05/msg00077.html.
[7] Ibid, quoting "Franz Jägerstätter, Conscientious Objector, Martyr (1907-1943", in All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time. Robert Ellsberg. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.1997
[8]
Ibid.
No comments:
Post a Comment