Thirty-second Sunday, 1996 (#2)

The end of everything

Three weeks from today is the first Sunday of Advent, it is the beginning of the church year--the Sunday before Christmas. So today, and next Sunday, and the Sunday after that, which is the Feast of Christ the King, the readings all have as a theme "the end," not just the end of the church year, but the end of everything..., the end of the world. And in the Biblical understanding, of course, that means that the end consists of God simply organising, through the agency of Jesus who will return at this point, the reconciliation of everybody who has ever lived; the Kingdom of God, all of humanity constituting one family...

We'd like to think in the church that what goes on in the New Testament is continuous with what we're doing today, and I think that there is a bunch of places that that is at least liable to question, if there is at least one place where we really cut ourselves off from the New Testament it is precisely this notion that we are living at the end of time, we're living right before the conclusion of the whole human enterprise.

And in that light it is interesting and important to see what goes on in these readings because, as you heard in this passage from first Thessalonians, what is going on there is that Paul, who until the day he died, thought that he'd be around when Jesus returned. Writing around the year fifty to these people in Thessalonika--had to write them because they were really worried because some of the people who had joined that community believing in Jesus as the Messiah had died, and Jesus hadn't returned, and the end hadn't occurred. But they thought because Jesus had been raised from the dead --that was the crucial issue, so, right after this, this meant God was going to clean up the whole scene. But it didn't happen; these people died and so the other people were scared that their

relatives and the people that they loved had just kind of fallen into a cosmic hole, or evaporated, or something...But Paul said "no, no, no, God's going to take care of them, and God's going to take care of us." In other words, the earliest followers of Jesus lived in this intense state of expectation, and we don't... We surely don't. And even in the times of writing of the New Testament, forty years, thirty-five years after Paul wrote that, we have this passage in the Gospel of Matthew where there is this little story about these ladies, some of whom are prudent and some who are imprudent, and the point of that story, that Matthew probably made up, was to address a whole new situation because those people, since Jesus hadn't come back, (around the year eighty, eighty-five, ninety), they just kind of said "phooey on that." In other words, they're in a kind of similar situation as us: the tension that is supposed to be there between living in the world as it is right now and living in the world that God promises it is going to be, namely, where we human beings don't have to hide from each other. That tension had begun to disappear and so this story was created with the point of saying "no, you guys--c'mon, c'mon..."

Of course, what happens when that tension disappears? Well, we in the Roman Church have a bunch of strategies for that. I mean, the Church I grew up in, the Church I learned about in the Seminary, was the Church described as the perfect society; you know, everything in the Roman Church is going to be just... finished... So there's no tension. If Jesus comes back it's just going to add a kind of exclamation point to what's already here. Nothing new...

The problem with that, of course, is, and we have the same problem that Matthew's community had, that is to say that, well, nothing's going to happen and the way things are right now is the way they're always going to be. So you're going to say that the church is the Kingdom of God, which it surely is not, and that nothings going to happen, nothings going to change. And the second alternative, which is very understandable, is probably what has hold of most of us, it certainly does of me, I mean, life goes on--I get up in the morning, I take the dogs for a walk, I get ready for class, I do my teaching, I say mass, blah, blah, blah, go home... The next day exactly alike..., the next day exactly alike--I mean they're indistinguishable. There is this endless kind of series of all the same things happening.

What happens to us when we lose the vision of all of us human beings forming a single family? I think one of the things, besides just getting used to the things as they are and figuring, well, that's how they're going to be, we end up blocking out all kinds of places and realities in the world, or we take them for granted, which is the same thing. For instance, there are 30 wars going on in this world right now--we know, I mean, we watch T.V., or the news, that there are millions of people in Africa that are very likely to starve to death, or die of cholera, or dysentery, or some other horrible thing..., and meanwhile the U.N. Security Council gets together and the Americans say "well, we can't do this because it is not politically shrewd," or all this other kind of stuff--and nobody's surprised at that... People die. Everyday we get this little pile of corpses--35,00 everyday over the world. 35,000 children under the age of five die daily on this planet because they don't have any proper nourishment.

The problem ,of course, of thinking about that stuff is that it drives me crazy if I think about it. For, after all, we're North Americans. We're imbued from birth with the "can do" mentality: "By God, there is nothing that we can't solve--Can do!" You know, there is that "go get 'em spirit that we all call the Western Spirit, or the King's Spirit, or the Bank of Montreal Spirit or the Wal-Mart Spirit or whatever. "We can do it, by God!" But, you see, in order to sustain that we've got to blot out all the stuff that we can't do anything about, to pretend that it doesn't exist..., that it doesn't impinge on me. And, as a small footnote, everybody knows that our lives are too busy and too full anyway. Most of us don't have time to breathe really deeply. We've got too much stuff on the go that has to be done..., my plans, my projects, and they all have to be planned as projects that I can do.

You see, the point of these readings is precisely to put the skids to all that stuff. There are two major problems with that point of view: first of all, you have to have a world that is manageable; and, secondly, there is the problem of miniaturising that world, or making it no bigger than the end of my nose, or the line of my sight. Which is where we are, most of us, most of the time. I mean the thought that God is going to make all of us human beings that have ever lived together constitute one whole, one honest-to-God human whole, where everybody can stand openly before everybody else who has ever lived. I mean all these people around the world. But, not just them--everybody. Naw, c'mon, get serious. You see the question is, what is serious? My imagination of the world, my blinkering of great ranges of reality, the reduction of the world to only what I can control and manage, or this other thing?

Well, "the end?" Paul, 'til the day he died thought he'd be around for the end. He was probably killed around sixty-four or sixty-five, nobody knows for sure. And so we know twenty-five years after that this terrible corrosive effect of the routinization of life where we habituate ourselves to whatever it is--"yeah, that's okay, that's the way it is..." Whereas whoever this clever person was says: "no, no, folks, you're falling asleep, you're unconscious." To be alive is live with the expectation of the end. To be alive in a Christian way is to live in a continual state of discontent. To be alive is to try to make one's self as available to the world in its full breadth and scary reality... To put it summarily, to be alive is to live in hope. But the world which is literally intractable.......[tape is blank here]........ about our obtuse matter, about our self-preoccupations, about the littleness of the world that we create to make it habitable for ourselves, to make it liveable. These readings for today and for the next six Sundays, I think, are really extremely important because they give us the chance to look at where we are and to ask of ourselves: "I'm awake to what?" To me the Gospel says "stay awake." To what?--Good question.

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