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| Good Times, Bad Times, End Times |
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(please feel free to send questions or comments) Nov. 22, 2009 Revelation 1: 4b-8; John 18: 33-37 May God’s grace and peace be with us this day as we reflect upon the meaning of God’s word in our lives – the word of the one who is and who was and who is to come. Amen. Have you checked your Mayan calendar lately? If you have, you know that this ancient calendar reaches the end of one of its long-count cycles on Dec. 21, 2012 - about two years from now. And the way people are thinking about it, that date will give a whole new meaning to the idea of a “Longest Night” celebration like we have here on the evening of the winter solstice. Depending on your interpretation of the Mayan calendar, Dec. 21, 2012 could either be the beginning of a new era or the beginning of an apocalypse. It all makes for great drama – and even for catastrophe movies, like 2012 that opened this month at theaters in Fitchburg and Madison. Here’s the way the New York Times described the basic plot of the movie: “An alignment between the Sun and the center of the galaxy on Dec. 21, 2012, causes the Sun to go berserk with mighty storms on its surface that pour out huge numbers of the elusive subatomic particles known as neutrinos. Somehow the neutrinos transmute into other particles and heat up the Earth’s core. The Earth’s crust loses its moorings and begins to weaken and slide around. “Los Angeles falls into the ocean; Yellowstone blows up, showering the continent with black ash. Tidal waves wash over the Himalayas, where the governments of the planet have secretly built a fleet of arks in which a select 400,000 people can ride out the storm.” And you thought the Book of Revelation in the Bible had some pretty fantastic scenes! Just in case you were wondering, for all the excitement about the Mayan calendar and the imminent end of the world: Dec. 21, 2012 marks the end date of the 5,125-year Long Count Mayan calendar. The Mayan calendars go in cycles, so this marks the beginning of a new cycle. And for contemporary Mayans in places like Guatemala, the calendar has neither great significance nor great meaning. As one Mayan archeologist told an Associated Press reporter: "If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn't have any idea. That the world is going to end? They wouldn't believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain". I think it’s worth keeping all of that in mind as we listen to the words at the opening of the book of Revelation in today’s readings. And it also has some bearing on Jesus’ talk about God’s kingdom in his showdown with Pilate that we heard about this morning. These are images filled with meaning, not hard and fast forecasts about our world. We are at the end of a cycle in the calendar we use to structure our worship services in the Christian community. We start a new cycle next Sunday with the beginning of Advent – the four weeks of preparation for Christmas. If that season of Advent is a season of anticipating Jesus’ birth, this Sunday marks the time when early Christians anticipated that new era when God’s realm on earth would be complete. They referred to it in many ways – the Second Coming of Christ, the coming of God’s kingdom, the time when Christ would reign as king of all the earth. It was a time of ultimate transition. While the official church calendar designates this as the Sunday of Christ the King, we are calling this Transition Sunday here. It’s hard to get our minds around some distant point in time. It’s much easier to note the kinds of transitions that occur every day in our lives and in our world. Those transitions have something to do how we see God in our lives. The writer of Revelation saw God as a steady force in the midst of turmoil. We have used these words several times this morning – “the one who is and who was and who is to come.” These opening words of Revelation are in the form of a hymn, a song of praise to the God who is constant in the midst of change. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says God, seen in the writer’s vision among the clouds. The beginning and the end. The writer is drawing images from many cultures here, picturing a divine being who transcends our human limits. The “one who is” draws on a Jewish name for God. The Greek god Zeus, the mightiest of the Greek gods, was referred to in an oracle as “Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus shall be.” Sound familiar? And the terms Alpha and Omega draw on the magical properties those vowels were given in the Hellenistic world. This God who is a steady force is also a universal force, not a God who is of only one culture or only one belief system. Nor is this a God limited by political boundaries. Revelation was written in the midst of hard times for the early Christians. Although the tradition is that this was written by John, the apostle, most scholars think that is unlikely. Some describe the author – who may have been named John – as a Palestinian Jewish Christian who fled from Israel after the clash between Jews and Romans in the late 60s and early 70s, after the Romans has destroyed the Temple and consolidated their power. So the writer is telling these early Christians that their fate is not really dependent on Rome, whose power and glory are passing things. There is this God who is and was and shall be. And there is Jesus, who loves us, who overcame sin and death, “who made us to be a kingdom,” in the words we heard today. The followers of Jesus thus have power and dignity no matter how they are viewed by the Romans – or by any other political entity. And the question for them – and for us – is where do we put our loyalty. Elizabeth Forney, who is a pastor at a Presbyterian church in Tennessee, suggests that “the empire that threatens the heart of Christianity today with commercialism, self-indulgence and increasing isolation is as deadly as the Roman Empire was when John was writing. Many are literally dying of thirst for the words ‘grace and peace’ from the eternal One, like those with which John opens his letter.” Keep those two words – “grace” and “peace” – in mind for a few minutes. I’ll get back to them. But first, let’s revisit the scene with Jesus and Pilate in Pilate’s headquarters. Pilate represents the Roman emperor, who thinks of himself as a god. It doesn’t show up in John’s version of the story, but Luke has the Jewish leaders telling Pilate that they found Jesus “perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor and saying that he himself is the Messiah, the king.” So the health care debate may not be the first place where political exaggeration has come into play. But I digress. So Pilate is trying to figure out who this man is before him and whether he really represents a threat to Rome. What Jesus tells him defines the terms for how we might think about God’s kingdom. It’s not a political realm. It’s a place for truth – not truth in a scientific, factual sense, but truth as an understanding of God’s vision for the world and an honesty about how we live into that vision. It’s a place that defines our worth and dignity as coming from God, not from the state or from bosses at work or anyone who thinks they can control our lives. It’s a place where the followers of Jesus’ ultimate allegiance is to God and God’s vision for the world, not to any political entity. Keep in mind that Jesus did not argue that his followers should ignore the powers of the world – he did say give to Caesar what is Caesar’s despite what the temple leaders claimed. He simply said that the powers and principalities of states and nations don’t have the final claim on us. Let’s go back to those first words we heard in the reading from Revelation: “Grace to you and peace from the one who is and who was and who is to come.” The author is drawing on multiple traditions in the opening of this letter, using a common Greek word for a greeting but giving it the meaning of “grace” and using a common greeting in Jewish letters – shalom – and including it as part of the greeting. Thus, grace and peace. This was a common greeting for the early Christians. It shows up in the letters of Paul as well as those of Peter and Jude and John. We still use it often today in church settings. So the questions I would leave you with today revolves around those two words. In times of transition in our lives, how can we bring grace and peace to one another? As our society tries to cope with rapid change in so many areas, how can we bring grace and peace to those we encounter? As we face a world where people thirst for grace and peace, where they even die from that thirst, how can we as a community of followers of Jesus be a church of grace and peace? There are not quick answers to those questions. But as we search for those answers and try to live them out, we will be living into the truth of God’s vision for the world, we will be part of that kingdom that every time we say the Lord’s Prayer, we wish would come for our world. Grace and peace to you this day and always. |