Advent is a jolly time of year. The decorations go up on the tree and around the house. There’s a party every other day for some group or another. There’s all the fun of shopping for presents. Advent Calendars are particularly jolly. Every day there’s another chocolate, or, more recently, a small bottle of gin to get you in the Advent spirit.
So in that jolly spirit I have decided to preach a sermon series entitled ‘Getting Ready for the End of the World’.
Now, before we consider getting ready for the end of the world, I need to talk about what I’m not going to talk about. We are not going to talk about getting ready for the end of our own lives, even though that is important topic. In fact, many people spend their whole lives getting ready for the end of their own lives. It’s not always spoken about explicitly, but many of us, of all ages and circumstances, let our aspirations for the end of our lives shape our decisions. So, some of us focus on our legacy – perhaps it’s a professional or social reputation, or the size or type of family we will leave behind, or even the size of the inheritance that might be passed on to our children. Some of us focus on achieving milestones. People now talk openly about their ‘bucket list’ and really want to cram in certain activities before they shuffle off this mortal coil. Some of us focus on prolonging death – exerting a lot of energy to address physical and medical issues in order to stay alive for as long as possible. And some of us live in fear of death. Fear of the physical or emotional pain, fear of the unknown, and, for some of us, fear of wrathful and vengeful God. Even though I’m not going to be specifically talking about getting ready for the end of our own lives, I do think that getting ready for the end of the world might also help us to process some of our thinking about the end of our own lives.
The other thing I am not going to be talking about is the so-called ‘end times’ movement. In the history of Christianity, this is a new and narrow expression of the faith, though it is of course hugely popular in parts of the USA. There’s quite the market in predicting the return of Christ, and surmising about certain events that will happen before and after this event. This movement is based on the peculiar intersection of: a simplistic literal reading of the book of Revelation, Christian Zionism and its support for the modern nation of Israel, US right wing politics, the military-industrial complex and marketing.
So, if I’m not talking about the end of our own lives, and if I’m not talking about the ‘rapture and Armageddon’ end-times narrative of US fundamentalism, what am I talking about?
I’m talking about that line in the Nicene creed that says ‘he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end’. I’m talking about that bit in today’s gospel reading from Mark that has Jesus saying ‘Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds…’ I’m talking about the bit we heard from 1 Corinthians today ‘…so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It’s no accident that people sometimes read the bible and get fixated on the end times or the second coming. It’s everywhere. At the Eucharist every Sunday when we respond ‘Christ will come again’, what do we really mean?
Well, firstly I want to acknowledge that for most of Christian history, it was normal to think that at some future point in time Jesus would return to the earth to inaugurate a new kingdom. Whether or not people behaved in that way, or whether or not everyone genuinely believed it, the formal language and doctrine of the church was predicated on there being a future time when Jesus comes back, the dead are resurrected and judged, and the new kingdom is inaugurated.
But increasingly, particularly in the last hundred years, this language has become less popular. It has become more common to view the return of Jesus through a metaphorical lens. Perhaps, people of faith have begun to say, rather than the return of Christ being a single moment in time, it is instead something that is constantly unfolding, both in the life of a believer and in the life of the church, and in the life of the world. Jesus is constantly reappearing, if we only have eyes to see it.
Theodore Parker, who was a Unitarian minister in the 19th century said ‘I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.’
If that sounds a little bit familiar, it’s because Dr Martin Luther King Jr. paraphrased Parker saying ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’. For both of them, there was a sense that the Holy Spirit is at work in the world, that Jesus is constantly re-appearing and that they and we can discern a tendency, or a bias towards wholeness and goodness and truth. I imagine this view as a little bit like the way many streams flow into one river. If you can only see a little muddy trickle, you might be despondent, but if you could see all the little trickles flowing into creeks, and the creeks flowing into rivers, and the rivers flowing in to the raging torrent that flows into the deep ocean, you would understand just how all the little things in your view are part of the flow towards God’s dream.
Now I want to affirm that if you find it most helpful to understand the return of Christ as a concrete event happening at some future time, God is ok with that and I am ok with that. And I want to say that if you find it most helpful to understand the return of Christ as a process that is constantly unfolding, God is ok with that too and so am I. For me, I think neither are quite good enough. But I’m not actually here to impose my problems on you, so if you prefer to just tune out for the next few minutes that’s totally OK.
So, for those of you still left, here’s my problem. As I’ve said before in this place, I don’t get up every morning thinking that Jesus might return today on the clouds and the dead will rise from their graves. I just don’t. But I also struggle to get on board with this idea that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. My heart desperately wants to believe that things are, overall, getting better. But my brain tells me that things are actually getting worse – that the world is fragmenting, that poverty is increasing, that injustice is become more prevalent, that despite some gains, the world is a bleak place for a huge number of humans, not to mention the other species. So while I truly, genuinely, want to believe that Jesus is becoming increasingly more powerfully present in the world, I think that actually the reverse is true. The world is disintegrating.
But here’s what helps me and gives me hope. For humans, time is experienced in a one-way, linear fashion. History, as they say, is just one bloody thing after another. But God is beyond time and space, and so we might imagine God seeing the whole of history, from it’s genesis 14 billion years ago to its ending at some point unknown to us. For God, there is no tomorrow or yesterday, there is no future or past. Every ending is a beginning and every beginning is an ending. God can ‘see’ the beautiful commencement, the tragic destruction and the glorious reconciliation kind of ‘all at once’. God can ‘see’ the truth of how the disintegration is re-integrated, it’s just that we can’t yet.
The reason I find this helpful - and let me emphasise that I’m not her to enforce thought control on you – is that it allows me to hold in tension the dark, sordid reality of a broken world and the glorious redemption of a world restored to wholeness. And because it allows me to imagine God as something like a parent, or maybe even a grandparent or a lover, who cradles the sick world in her arms like a baby and says ‘I know, there there, I know this is bad, but it won’t always be like this’. It helps me to imagine a God who is more than just some ultimate life force, but a God with personhood, a God who can experience pain and joy but not despair.
And maybe that helps us live in this moment. Fully accepting that our own lives will end, that the whole world as we know it will end, that the mess might get messier and the darkness may close in before the new world is inaugurated, but all of it, all of it, is held in the embrace of a compassionate creator.
The Lord Be With You