Matthias Gerung, "Die Hure Babylon, Offb 17, 1-18" c. 1531,
Ottheinrich-Bibel, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
“Hope amid Trauma”
18 November 2018
Proper 28B
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
The Very Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
8:00 a.m. Spoken, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass with Holy Baptism
What a blessing to renew our own
baptismal covenants today together with little Arabella and Robert! I think today’s Epistle tells us what our
reaction to baptism should be: “let us approach with a true heart in full
assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and
our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our
hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider
how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” Then it adds this, evidence
that in some ways, not much has changed in the Church over 2,000 years, “not
neglecting to meet together, as is the
habit of some, but encouraging one another.”
Hope, clear conscience, meeting
together, encouragement: this is the
life of Christian! It is decidedly not
fear, depression, and guilt.
Contrast this joyful encouragement
with the banner held up for years now by a group of grim marchers calling
themselves Christian in the Ashland 4th of July Parade: “Repent, for
the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord is coming!” Contrast it with the headline from this week,
“Colorado Pastor says God is burning down California as punishment for Support
of Homosexuality.” These people call
themselves Evangelicals, or people of the Good News. But with their focus on the grim, I prefer to
call them Dysangelicals, people of the bad news. They usually like to quote parts of the Bible
like Daniel or the Revelation of John that speak at times about horrors coming.
But they decidedly do not follow what
Jesus counsels us in today’s Gospel.
Daniel, Revelation, and today’s Gospel
lesson are examples of what scholars call apocalyptic
writings. The Greek word apokalypsis
means an uncovering or a revelation of what is hidden. The question is: what do they uncover? Is it coming events, or is it God’s ultimate
purposes?
Apocalyptic includes some Jewish
writings like the Book of Daniel and the non-canonical Book of Enoch, as well
as Christian writings like the Revelation of John, and the “Little Apocalypse”
of Chapter 13 of Mark, together with its parallels in Matthew 24 and Luke 21.
This literature is rich is images: symbolic
figures, numbers, angels, and animals.
It includes disturbing and shocking scenes: a third of the sea or the
moon turning to blood here, the stars falling from heaven and killing most
living things there, a scarlet-clad crowned prostitute corrupting all nations
here, a multi-headed beast covered with eyes and horns devouring the righteous there. Though the earliest Christians understood
this all allegorically and symbolically, occasionally Christians living in
times of turmoil have seen these stories almost as if they were predictions of
events to come. In the year 1,000, penitentes were running all over Europe
whipping themselves and declaring the end of the world quoting such
images. In the 1970s, we had “the Late
Great Planet Earth”; today we have the Left
Behind novels and even support for the State of Israel or President Trump
because some think this hastens the great train schedule for the "Rapture" and the Last Day.
But this reading completely
misunderstands apocalyptic. Jesus, in
today’s Gospel, won’t have anything to do with such thinking.
Just before his arrest, Jesus is
with his disciples at the Temple in Jerusalem.
It is pretty impressive: 10 stories high, with masonry stones
embellished with smaller carved jewels glittering in the sun, gold leaf
covering large parts of it, truly a marvel.
A disciple says, “Wow! Look at that, Jesus! Isn’t that impressive?” Jesus replies by dismissing it all and
saying, “Don’t get too excited. Soon not one stone there will be left
standing on another. It’s all going
down.” Later, when they are on the
Mount of Olives across the Kidron valley opposite the Temple Mount, with a
panoramic view of the complex, the other disciples ask him about this. If it is going to be destroyed, this must be
something on the scale of those troubling apocalyptic books. So they ask him how his prediction fits into
the weeks, days, numerology, and timetables of the Book of Daniel and Ezekiel:
when will this destruction happen, when is the end of the world? What will be
the signs preceding it?
Jesus explains that such a scorecard
approach to end-time signs is pointless—too many people abuse such imagery for
their own advantage (“many will come and say…”). He says they shouldn’t be too alarmed or
overly excited by the appearance of apocalyptic stage props of “wars and rumors
of wars” or natural catastrophes. Such
things, he says, are “but the beginning of the birthpangs,” that is,
Braxton-Hicks’ contractions or false labor. Jesus is saying, “Don’t worry too
much about any of these things. They’re
just a false alarm. Keep calm and carry
on!” Jesus denies that apocalyptic
should be read as a coded playbook of good guys versus bad guys, but rather as
an invitation to hope.
The fact is, Apocalyptic is
primarily about events and people in the world of its authors, not the distant
future. The Revelation of John, the
classic Christian Apocalypse, itself says that it is about things that will “come
to pass soon” (Rev 1:1). That doesn't mean soon to us, but soon to the writer.
Apocalyptic is literature written during persecution. It seeks to understand the sufferings of the righteous and encourage them to not lose faith, and to keep resisting the oppressors. In John’s Revelation, these are Romans under the Emperors Nero and Domitian, who put Christians in the arena to be torn apart by wild animals because they decline to offer incense to a statue of the Emperor. In the Book of Daniel, they are Greek Syrians under Antiochus who flayed alive or boiled in oil whole families simply because they kept the Law of Moses.
Apocalyptic puts its message in rich
images and code so that the readers can read it without the censors and secret
police of the persecutors catching on and then using the possession of this
literature as evidence against them.
These books read sometimes as if some
mental patient wrote them. That is
because the authors were traumatized people.
Whatever the specifics of the hardships they describe, we must remember
that these books are about hope and
perseverance, and the ultimate
triumph of the Good. People like our
Dysangelical friends who take these books as coming events and cause for threat
and alarm just don’t get it. Instead of
“Keep calm and carry on,” they, like Chicken Little, run about and shriek “the
sky is falling! The sky is falling.”
Jesus’ “false alarm!” approach here
suggests what is the real message of Apocalyptic: as Winston Churchill famously said in WWII, “If
you are going through hell, then keep on going!”
Apocalyptic is a lens to help people
through bad, horrible times. Its vision
amid persecution is of a bright future city of God where God will wipe away
every tear. Trying to turn Apocalyptic
into something it is not, into predictive television of coming events, lurid in
horror and dim in its threats, misses the point entirely.
Jesus is saying here that we should
take the traumatic events we experience, whether war or natural disasters, as
occasions for drawing closer to others, for helping them, for being helped by
them. Like Mr. Rogers, he asks us to
look for the helpers, and even be the helpers, in horrible times. This is the heart of the coming of the
Kingdom.
And this is exactly what we
celebrate in baptism, and in the encouragement of hope that we owe to one
another. “Let us hold fast to the
confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. Let us figure out ways to encourage each
other more and more to love and good deeds.”
In the coming week, I invite us to
ask how we react to bad things in life.
Do we blame God for them, or say God is punishing someone? In prayer, let us seek ways to help use the
traumas we experience or witness as ways to draw closer to others. Let us encourage each other in hope
unwavering and thus bring closer the great day when God’s kingdom comes and
God’s will is done on earth as in heaven.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
