Straw Lion
Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 21:5-19
November 14, 2010
“It’s the end of the world and we know it.” So goes an ironically bright and upbeat song. Serious talk about the end of the world always attracts many ears, even when we believe that the speakers have their calculations wrong. That isn’t how it will end, many protest, we’ll finish ourselves off in a different way!
Doomsayers are a growth industry in our generation, for we can always find ways in which we do awful things, create terrible, virtually unsolvable problems and the church either joins in the chorus with no unique solutions or thoughts of its own or goes off into some fanciful flight of imagination about the way the world will be when God comes and cleans things up, and of course, rewards us.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamasov, the atheist intellectual Ivan keeps careful count of every injustice, outrage, absurdities and deprivations that the destitute and oppressed peasants of Russia must endure on a daily basis. Rick Mercer’s rants have a sharp edge of humour in them, but not for Ivan. He challenges his seminarian brother Alyosha to come up a counterargument. Either God does not exist or God is criminally indifferent. Is God alive and involved or is God impotent? If there is a God, what is God waiting for? We heard this yesterday and will hear it tomorrow, anywhere we go. Is there anything we can say?
We have heard read two responses, not answers or solutions, mind you, to these indictments of the failure of God’s world and the approaching holocaust. Jesus hears his disciples oohing and aahing over the majesty of the Jerusalem Temple, its mammoth stones in place evincing the dazzle of jewels. Power exuded at every glance and everyone was nodding that this was a witness to the way God’s power worked. Everyone except Jesus.
These stones may be big and impressive, but not one of them will be standing on top of another in time. Now we know that Jesus was referring to himself, his body as the Temple, and that it was going to be torn down. And by the time Luke set pen to parchment, the Temple would have been beaten into rubble as a result of the Roman-Jewish War in 70 A. D. But the disciples were still being dazzled by power, and likely thought Jesus was going to be the next ruler of all of this grandeur. Like people before and since, the disciples wanted to know when and how and to whom all this was going to take place. Jesus told them it was no use trying to figure these things out for they are beyond our knowing, plus it never happens so suddenly, so precisely as we think it should.
The disciples must have gasped for breath, yet Jesus was on a roll, listing all the terrible apocalyptic disasters that are coming, stuff no one really wants to listen to, unless you are listening to the evening news. Like Brother Ivan Karamasov we hear this stuff about wars, oppression and murder, abuse of children and the environment for the sake of profit. It never stops. Is it getting worse? Actually, no, it isn’t getting worse, it’s just getting different. We were not able to listen to the broadcasts back in antiquity and medieval times to know how cruel it was then, because nobody was.
Sure, there are all those apocalyptic movies and novels depicting the end of the world as we know it, nuclear world wars, meteors striking the earth, pandemics and what not. What Jesus is talking about is not the annihilation of Earth or the annihilation of humanity, but how this utter destructiveness, evil and depravity creeps into every moment. Most people will not notice that anything other than business as usual is going on. It’s the Christian, the person of faith in the One God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, who notices and is sorely distressed. In a way, the way of the world is described in the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus who supplied human beings with fire, thereby empowering humanity, which the gods did not appreciate. He was condemned to roll a huge stone up a long steep incline, get it nearly to the top of the hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom, which Prometheus was obliged to go down and repeat the fated task again and again, forever.
If we believe that by our goodness, our ingenuity and our righteousness that we can eventually conquer evil, then we are counting on the wrong guys. Even your friends and family will betray you and hate you, a strong hint about Judas, but Jesus assures that not a hair of your head will perish, for by your endurance through all of this muck you will gain your lives. “Staying with it - that’s what is required. Stay with it to the end. You won’t be sorry; you’ll be saved (The Message).”
That sounds terribly grim and all too terribly real. Isaiah, however, heard another Word from the Lord describing a new heaven and a new earth. This wasn’t all about the pearly gates and streets paved with gold and all those other popular other-worldly attributes. Isaiah was talking about this creation that the Lord God had created and what it will be like when all relationships are reconciled and restored to their original state. It will be a time of joy, when it is God first who rejoices in the people and weeping and distress will be no more. We won’t remember all the former bad stuff. It’s almost unreal; how can there be no sadness? There won’t be any infant deaths, and old people will get to 100 years old as a normal thing. People will live a normal, joyful life with children and houses and fields and vineyards and no one will steal or cheat you of what you have planted or constructed. There will be justice, not as an imposing set of laws, but as the natural inclination in minds and souls of every person.
It won’t just be humans that are reconciled, but all of God’s creation which necessarily means the creatures who came before humanity. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, says the Lord, and human beings won’t be destroying or hurting any one or thing either. That’s unreal, except....
Except that every one of us has experienced a few moments when war stops and peace breaks out, when nature is unnatural and exquisitely beautiful, when individuals sacrifice their safety for the sake of good and the lives of others instead of their bank accounts, when a diverse group of people used to conflict and argument think and act lovingly with one mind and one soul.
The New Testament word for the End is eschaton, and a previous generation of Biblical scholars called such moments as these “realized eschatology” - the End, the Kingdom of Heaven, has arrived in this particular moment. One of the most popular words in the Gospels is “look” - we used to say “behold” - because if you look with eyes that see, you will perceive the best world there is for a moment because human beings cannot hold it that long.
The End is here, both in its apocalyptic cruelty and in its just as frequent times when heaven merges with earth. Ivan Karamasov demanded to know where God is in all this moral mayhem. He just didn’t know where to look.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan