Apocalypse Now!
Proper 28C
People around the world watched the Blood Red Beaver Frost
Moon go into total eclipse. It was mysterious and powerful. Try to imagine
ancient people seeing such a phenomenon for the first time. How easy it would
be seeing such a drastic transformation of the moon as a kind of “dreadful
portent and great sign from heaven,” as Luke’s Jesus says will be signs of the
coming Day of the Lord. He says there will be insurrections, earthquakes,
famine, plagues, nation fighting against nation. Many will come claiming to be
messiahs, sent by God to save you – do not listen to them. They are false
prophets and false saviors proclaiming false messages. [i]
Luke’s account of what many call “The Mini Apocalypse”
concludes, “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars and on
the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the
waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the
world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the
Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.”[ii]
That is, real hope, reliable hope, will come!
We tend to hear these texts as bizarre. Unsettling. We ask
ourselves, what does it all mean? And yet, when we look around, it’s all there.
All around us, these “signs and portents” seem to be coming faster, bigger and
more dangerous, day after day, year after year. Just ask Floridians who are
emerging from the second hurricane in as many months. Ask the people of Ukraine
fighting for their lives and their country. Just ask the Polar Bears, wasting
away as their ice and snow hunting grounds disappear; simply vanish with
temperatures rising. While California and Colorado suffer draught and fires.
While rising sea levels threaten all civilizations built along ocean
waterfronts. Apocalyptic signs and portents.
We may find these texts odd, inscrutable, difficult to
understand - but that's the point, isn’t it? Luke, and Isaiah 500 years before
him, try to understand what with Babylon and now Rome had reduced, not just the
Temple, not just the city of Jerusalem, but the entire state of Israel had been
reduced to rubble; scorched earth. What had been was no longer. YHWH had been
replaced by a Caesar, considered to be the deity of the Empire! Of the world! Holiness
had been replaced once again with idolatry, the one sin that is the constant
and eternal focus of nearly the entire Bible!
And right now, how many self-proclaimed messiahs are
clamoring for our attention, our consideration, our devotion to their cause? We
should not be surprised at all. Jesus says it is always so. Only I can save our
nation, they say. This will be the war to end all wars they say! Look in the
sky and see the portents - a blood red moon in the sky! Look, they say, the
Bible tells us “Now is the time!”
It's times like these when we need to heed this caution of Biblical
Scholar John Dominic Crossan when he reminds us, “My point, once again, is
not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough
to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now
dumb enough to take them literally.” [iii]
Apocalyptic texts in the Bible are meant to point those who
fear the current events toward hope – real hope, as in Faith, Hope and Charity,
abide these three. It is when we question, “Where is our God?” that we need to
reclaim our faith, our hope, and to practice acts of charity toward one another
– especially those others we fear the most. So-called Third Isaiah, writing
around 500 BCE writes of the centrality of claiming our hope while announcing a
New Jerusalem:
“For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and
rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a
joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in
my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of
distress.” [iv]
We tend to think of a literal rebuilding of Jerusalem and
its Temple is what YHWH and the prophet have in mind. But God’s eye was on
another kind of Jerusalem and Temple — a Jerusalem not of bricks and mortar,
but of the human heart. The prophet Jeremiah envisioned a new covenant, written
within the hearts of God’s people: “I will put my law within them, and I
will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my
people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother,
saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to
the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will
remember their sin no more.” [v]
A New Jerusalem, a new Temple, a new covenant inscribed in
our hearts, not a city of stone, and walls, and gates. But open hearts, opened
by God’s forgiveness of all those times we, as a people, as a nation, have gone
astray from “the Way of the Lord.” The real question in all of these
apocalyptic visions is: will we open our hearts to let God in; to allow God to
write of his love for us in our hearts so that we may once again love one
another. All others.
This is where Clare of Assisi may come to our aid. First,
she calls us “Not to let the empty spectres of a deceitful world torment you.”[vi]
Once one turns away from the vanities of this world, one is to “…drink at
this banquet in order to cleave with all [your] heart to Him, at whose beauty
all the blessed hosts of heaven unceasingly wonder, whose love stirs love,
whose contemplation remakes, whose kindliness floods, whose sweetness fills,
whose memory glows gently, whose fragrance brings the dead to life again, the
glorious vision of whom will make all
the citizens of the new Jerusalem above most blessed, He is the splendour of
eternal glory, the brightness of everlasting light, and an unspotted mirror.
Gaze into this mirror every day…and constantly see your own face in it” [vii]
Turn away from a world that seems to be falling apart, and
turn toward the One who can make all the difference; who makes all the citizens
of the New Jerusalem most blessed. No more shall the sound of weeping be heard,
or the cry of distress. Gaze into the mirror of Christ every day to see your
true self. Cleave to Jesus and His name, the name of Love, will be written in
our hearts. Faith, Hope and Charity will be who we are, and we shall know Him. And
he shall know us. And all shall be well. Forever and ever. Amen.
[i]
Luke 21:5-19
[ii]
Luke 21:25-27
[iii] Crossan,
John Dominic Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus
(Westminster John Knox Press, Nashville: 1996) p.79
[iv] Isaiah
65:17-25
[v]
Jeremiah 31:33b-34
[vi]
Downing, Sr Francis Teresa Downing, OSC, Letter to Ermentrude of Bruges (Tau
Publishing, Phoenix, AZ:2012) p.101
[vii] Ibid, Downing, Fourth Letter to Agnes of Prague, p. 85
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