Reign of Christ Sunday, "It's the end of the world as we know it"

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. 

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[1] The Shamanic Times, http://theshamanictimes.com/mayan-indigenous-prophecies-2012-world-of-the-fifth-sun.html. 

[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. 

[5] Harrison, “Paul and the imperial,” p. 80, Quoting CIL II172

[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.

Sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2015

B Trinity BFC 2015

Romans 8:12-25

June 4, 2015

          Author Dani Shapiro shares about the spiritual practice of writing,

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know — if we know anything at all — is how to write the book we’re writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won’t succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt — spectacularly, brazenly — into the unknown.[1]

 Shapiro relates the focus of spiritual practice.  It is not in developing personal perfection, but in a willingness to risk transformation into the unknown, to step in and start. 

In contrast, on a decided focus on the afterlife, Christian spirituality lost much of its grit, practical application, and courage for justice.  We hear talk of the need to develop an inner life separate and apart from an outer life of action and advocacy.  But that split between inner and outer is a fiction that can leave us untransformed and disconnected.  As the African-American spiritual says, “There’s a new world coming.  Everything’s going to be turning over.  Where you gonna’ be standing when it comes?”

In this passage of Scripture from Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul hops back and forth between inner and outer, blurring the line until we recognize there is no line at all.  He critiques the principalities and powers, the systems and the structures, and relates that the whole system is a system of slavery.  Paul states that people who do not participate in that system, do not benefit from it, are adopted as God’s children, and inherit a spirituality of freedom with Christ. 

          This passage has long been misinterpreted.  Long been misinterpreted because a Greek word has been literally and lazily translated rather than poetically and symbolically translated.   Sin is translated as acting according to “the flesh.”[2]  When all sins are translated as according to “the flesh” it connotes that our intended separation from God has to do with a need to transcend our physical body, its natural sensuality and sexuality. 

          Slavery is an economic and political reality.  And Paul hearkens back to foundational Jewish stories of bondage and slavery to explain what it means to be spiritually rich.  To be spiritually rich is not based in otherworldly, unembodied practices.  As I have stated many times, the Roman Empire was a system based on domination, hierarchy, and slavery.  Rome left its conquered peoples disconnected, rootless, and pitted against one another.  A spiritual life that does not speak to these realities is meaningless.  Sin is then defined as those who are slaves to a system that continues to grind, destroy, and hold power over one another.  As a result, freedom is one of the primary spiritual values for Paul.  Freedom connotes a person, a people, who are not participants in a system of slavery, hierarchy, and domination.  On an inner, personal, and practical level, freedom is about choices, practices and values that are not dictated to us by the wider culture. 

          As Christians, as the daughters and sons of God, we are adopted and connected into communities and families that are not defined by blood, rooted in practices that show us not to be dependent and slaves to systems that rob the world of life, and moved to transcend labels that keep us separate from one another. 

          Today we commissioned missionaries who communicate that kind of freedom with their willingness to imagine a world transformed.  They represent us and interrupt their lives in the hope that we might collaborate with God to bring about a world that now suffers with labor pains.  There’s a new world comin’.   These missionaries will return to us to share with us the signs of God’s activity and presence in the world. 

          My experience has been that missionary trips like these affirm the activity and presence of God in the world.  Though they might be witnesses to immense suffering of people in Tanzania or of the earth in California, they will have strong and unforgettable experiences of the activity and presence of God. 

          But hear this.  Too often we have been sold a bill of goods in Christianity spirituality which indicates that there is a hierarchy of being.  Some people know how to do it.  Some do not.  Some have a gift for spirituality.  Some do not. 

I say that this is a lie!

People in Tanzania, the earth along the coast of California have knowledge we need as well.  And our missionaries are tasked with coming back to share the good news they learn in those places. 

We are born as spiritual beings.  As Paul relates in his passage, the earth too is imbued with spirituality such that it is throbbing with new life, ready for the waters to burst forth from the womb.

We are spiritual beings.  The truth is that no work we do on ourselves or in God’s creation is too humble, too unglorious, too small to join with God in transformation.  We need not be unblemished, perfect, accomplished, or experts.  We do not need the perfect path.  As Paul tells it, in collaborating with God to give birth to a new world, we often cannot even begin to see what that would look like.   We need to just begin, enter into the struggle, to begin to do the little things in the name of unarmed truth and unconditional love.   

          God does not need perfect people on a perfect path.  God needs walkers. 

In 1987, two giants in the work of social transformation came together to have a dialog about what brings about social transformation.  The funding of their conversation was considered so important that it was sponsored by what used to be the United Church of Christ Board for Homeland Ministries.[3] 

Myles Horton founded the Highlander Folk School in Grundy County, Tennessee, one of the poorest Appalachian counties and an area dominated by powerful coal interests. During the 1 930s, at the time of Highlander's founding, the region was being swept by industrialization. Myles and Highlander started their programs with rural workers, who were being displaced from the land and driven into the textile mills, mines, and factories as part of the "development" of the rural South.  

As I began to read his work seminary, Paulo Freire became one of my greatest teachers.  Paulo Freire grew up and began his work in one of the poorest regions of Brazil—the northeast region.  The region has been plagued with poverty, hunger and illiteracy for many years.  The northeast has Brazil's highest birthrate, shortest life expectancy rates, severest malnutrition, lowest literacy rates, and highest levels of unemployment and underemployment. 

Both the rural South and northeastern Brazil were dependent upon powerful economic interests, initially the plantation owners and later the multinationals, and were characterized by sharp dichotomies between rich and poor, powerful and powerless.  

Not unlike the historical Jesus, both men began their movements recognizing a strong need for social transformation.  But where does one start?  How does one begin?  The work of each man relied on making the people who sought liberation the subjects of their own destiny.  This could not be charity work where liberation was handed over to people.  Both men recognized that real liberation had to happen through popular participation and probably could not happen through existing institutions.  Myles Horton said,

When people criticize me for not having any respect for existing structures and institutions, I protest. I say I give institutions and structures and traditions all the respect that I think they deserve. That's usually mighty little, but there are things that I do respect. They have to earn that respect. They have to earn it by serving people. They don't earn it just by age or legality or tradition.

As an existing structure and institution, we need to ask whether we get by based on age, legality, or tradition.  Is new birth possible or are we holding on to that age, legality and tradition to stand in a place where we are forever protecting the old order?

Both men quickly realized in their work that the questions and concerns they had were not the questions and the concerns of the people with whom they were working.  For interest and participation, the people themselves had to work out the particularities of their struggle with their particular skills and intelligences.  Their relevant questions had to be brought forward.  Participation was the key with an understanding that once they were able to train themselves and the people with whom they worked not to follow conventional wisdom, a whole other wisdom broke out as they continued their work in the struggle.   But they all had to enter that struggle together.  They had to start struggling.  They had to start working.  They had to start creating.  Just begin.  To express this understanding, both men turned to a poem by Spanish poet Antonio Machado: 

          Wanderer, your footsteps are

          the road, and nothing more;

          wanderer, there is no road,

          the road is made by walking.

          By walking one makes the road,

          and upon glancing behind

          one sees the path

          that never will be trod again.

          Wanderer, there is no road—

          Only wakes upon the sea.

The road, O wanderer, O sojourner, O pilgrim, is made by walking. 

And, really, that is the struggle we have in this day and age is it not?  Not surprisingly, emerging church leader Brian McLaren recently wrote a book recognizing the same relevant issues in the North American church.  He titled his book after Machado’s poem, We Make the Road by Walking. 

Too often, in the North American Christian Church we get to claim we are Christian without any form of participation.  Particularly in the mainline church, there are few demands, if any, put on people who join our company. Once someone assents to our creed they are left frighteningly alone.  Our membership totals are far higher than the people who show up Sunday morning in worship.  Our nominating committees struggle to find people who will fill slots on committees and boards.  Though our committees and boards may do herculean tasks, we do not demand anything of them or expect to hear from them the goals and work they shall do over the coming year.  We become a people fighting for ideas in our community rather than practicing our faith.  Sometimes we not only move to the sidelines but to the judge’s box where we call ourselves Christian for assenting to similar beliefs, we keep score of those who are actually doing the work for social transformation to tell them when we think they have it right or wrong.  The little energy then left in the church is stripped and stolen by an audience that was supposed to be a congregation.  And creation is suffering, groaning under the weight of a world waiting to be born. 

There’s a new world coming.  Everything’s going to be changing over.  Where you gonna be standing when it comes?

The path, the new world, is made by our walking.  So as our missionaries get ready to travel to other parts of the world, I invite all of us to begin as the imperfect Children of God to begin the walking so that a road may be made and we may be birthed into freedom and away from slavery, domination, and hierarchy.  In turn, may our spiritual practices collaborate with God to midwife a new world God now groaning and suffering in labor.  We may not know what the road or path looks like it.  No matter.  God awaits us.  Walkers are needed.  Let us make the road.  Amen. 

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[1] Dani Shapiro, Still Writing:  The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life  (New York:  Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013)

[2] sarx is the Biblical Greek word.  This is where literal translation of the Bible misses the mark.  Paul is spending a great deal of his time talking about a world to come, and the thin veil that exists between this world and the world to come.  So the very literal translation of this word is the outer covering of the body.  It relates to something that is surface without much depth or, as I stated above, a thin veil.  I chose to relate it in the Scripture verse as the way the present world works or its values.  Within context, Paul is clearly making a reference to the system of slavery, domination, and hierarchy that is the Roman Empire.  He is referencing the stories of his people in Exodus and Exile to say that the antidote for this slavery and bondage is “freedom.”  We show “freedom” through our inner life by collaborating with God to not choose or making priorities that are slavery, domination, and hierarchy.  And we show “freedom” through our outer work to collaborate with God to transform systems and structures.  Inner and outer are two sides of one coin.  They cannot be separated.  For example, I cannot ask for wholesale change of sweatshop labor and not be concerned about my individual spiritual practices that move me to make just and right purchases. 

[3] Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking:  Conversations on Education and Social Change (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 1990).