Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Hope without Apocalypse
Scriptures: Isaiah 64:1-9;
Every Advent the same challenge comes up for preachers: we light candles for Hope, Peace, Joy and Love, but the lectionary recommends scriptures that are all about the end of the world!
Theologically, this is because the very word “Advent” is about the arrival of Christ in human history and we have to deal with the two contrasting ideas: of Jesus arriving two thousand years ago; and all those verses of the Bible that we lump together as describing the “Second Coming”, an Advent that hasn’t happened yet, for which we are supposed to be preparing.
The first Advent is easy: we really get into celebrating Jesus’ birth, but all that apocalyptic stuff makes us uncomfortable and we can be very critical of all those branches of the church that make the second coming the core of their preaching.
I propose that we try a bit of empathy and consider why, on this Sunday of Hope, the earth-shattering arrival of God, or the Son of Man as God’s representative, would seem hopeful to anyone.
Look at our reading from the Prophet Isaiah. It starts off with a real note of yearning:
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
This chapter was written after a kind of second exodus had happened and the Babylonian exiles had returned. They were working hard to restore Jerusalem and build the second temple. Life wasn’t easy: they were in conflict with the people who had never been taken into exile and who now owned all the property, many of whom were the Samaritans of the former kingdom of Israel.
The returnees were still under the Imperial thumb of Cyrus the Persian who had conquered Babylon and let the Jews go home (which was great: they named him the messiah for that great work). But the life these folks lived was very hard, with a lot of powerful people around them telling them what to do.
Naturally, they looked back to that first Exodus from Egypt with the plagues, the pillar of fire and smoke, the parting of the sea, the manna in the wilderness and water from a rock, all culminating in the conquest of Canaan, with powerful deeds like shaking down the walls of Jericho.
By contrast, this second Exodus was embarrassing! Where was the obvious glory of God? A foreign king feels merciful and lets them go, no plagues needed and no new Moses. Instead of conquering the inhabitants of the land with a wilderness-hardened army, they have to negotiate, work around land claims, argue with these cousins they haven’t seen in over 70 years and physically restore walls that had been lying in ruins for decades. It all probably felt humiliating.
If you read on, you discover more obvious signs that this writer felt powerless. All this work felt like judgement from God and although he wouldn’t dare suggest that he and his people were blameless or perfect, he points out in a couple of ways that God is all-powerful and that the people can’t resist the way God made them.
That’s coming as close as possible to blaming God for all the bad stuff that is happening as any prophet might dare to get. But it helps us to understand the mind of the person who wants to see the end of the world, the person who wants a vengeful God to come stomping in with judgment and wrath.
It’s often someone whose life is hard, very hard, someone who is being oppressed, who feels like hope is reserved for the powerful, someone who feels like their only hope is for the ultimate power – God – to create justice, because they have no hope for it any other way.
Jesus lived in a land under the rule of Rome and its brutal client kings. The kings paid lip service to the idea of God, but Rome cared nothing for the God of Israel and even less for the people it had conquered.
Talk of the Son of Man coming to rule from the throne of David was rife in Jesus’ day and he addressed it, to some degree, although most of what he said was intended to call people to a radical new way of thinking about how to live for God, not how to take up arms against the oppressor. Indeed, what he did on the cross can be seen as the ultimate victory of weakness over power, of the last becoming the first.
The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD happened because another group, the Essenes, started a literal revolution and marched out, men, women and children to fight the Roman army. They expected God and an army of angels to come to their aid and they were utterly destroyed. Jerusalem was torn down and the second temple destroyed, all as punishment for this rebellion.
I make this contrast because all the people of that area and time felt the same way: they wanted God to break into life; for the Son of Man to come and impose justice and peace, but some tried very different ways of making this happen.
Most Canadians have been spared this hard kind of life for decades, but the 21st century has given us a new appreciation of how many people may feel this way: with the invasions and wars we have witnessed recently; in meeting some of the refugees fleeing oppressive lands; and with a deeper understanding of the ongoing experience of the indigenous people, their loss of land and their residential school experiences.
And then there are all those people who are not indigenous or recent arrivals, who have lived here for generations but who have no hope for higher education, no hope for a decent pension and who find themselves at food-banks or possibly even homeless because they can’t afford elevated rents. These are all people who might hope for an apocalypse.
Jesus’ words in our Mark lesson reassure us that there is no way to predict any kind of literal apocalypse. But it’s not enough for us to breathe a sigh of relief and decide we don’t need to worry about it. Jesus’ whole approach was to do something hopeful with the real people in front of him, who were often the lowest of the low.
I would suggest that Jesus’ approach right now would be to ask how we can give hope: create justice and peace day to day. It fits with the Mark lesson where the servants are left with their tasks and urged to stay awake, stay alert, so they are ready for the master’s return whenever it happens.
The original followers of Jesus, however much they longed for his return to overthrow the brutality of Rome, knew they were not called to the futile armed rebellion: the attempt of sincere but mistaken people to force God’s hand by marching out as an act of faith.
Instead, they recognized their call to wait patiently; not passively, not sitting on their hands, but doing their work, following the example of Jesus and bringing hope by changing people’s lives.
Two thousand years later, that is still our calling.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 