The End of the world is nigh?

A Sermon preached on November 29^th (Advent I) at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

Jeremiah 33:14-16, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, Luke 21:25-36

The End of the world is nigh!

It certainly sounds as if it is in today’s Gospel. As we heard Jesus say, 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." (Luke 21:25-27)

You can almost imagine Jesus walking around with a couple of sandwich boards with this message on it. Though of course today sandwich boards are out, and we read it all on Facebook or Twitter instead. There are certainly many prophets of doom around and much of what is happening around us – the terrorist killings and threats, the huge number of people seeking protection, the war in Syria which is escalating as we watch – is a cause for fear and concern. 

It is also the case that this passage from Luke has been read as a prophecy, as a direct prediction of events yet to come and in each generation a new group of people have become convinced that they belong to the “generation that will not pass away until all things have taken place.” (21:32) Actually the passage is a prophecy and has already come true – not about the end of the whole world, but about the end of the world that Jesus’ contemporaries knew. In 70 AD, just 30 years or so after Jesus’s death and triumphant resurrection and what I would see as a return with power and great glory, Jerusalem would be taken and destroyed by the Romans, and Herod’s 2^nd Temple, just finished, completely demolished. 

It was the same situation for Jeremiah – at the time of writing the words we heard in the Old Testament reading, all about the promise that a branch, a descendant of David will usher in a reign of justice and righteousness, and that Jerusalem will live in safety, at this very time in 587 BC Jerusalem is under siege by the Babylonians and the city will fall the following year. The city will be wrecked, the 1^st Temple destroyed, and the elite of the nation exiled: so the end of Jeremiah’s world was nigh. 

Both passages were written just before, or in Luke’s case possibly just after, a huge and tragic disaster, after the foundations of the known world were shaken. So how can Jeremiah be so confident of God’s promise of restoration? And how and why can Jesus tell his disciples to stand up and raise your heads at the very moment most of us would be keeping them down and us out of sight? For one thing because Jeremiah’s faith in God came from his personal experience, trust, and knowledge of God, and it was not dependent on things going well all the time. On the contrary, Jeremiah felt God’s presence most often when things were not going well, which in those last days of the Kingdom of Judah was quite often. 

As for Jesus, one thing he constantly told the disciples was that it was not going to be easy for them. In the words of the 70’s pop song “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.”[1] No – disbelief, rejection, imprisonment, and persecution were not a rose garden. And yet he still has a message of confidence and hope. Whatever happens to your lives and to the things you have known and trusted I will be with you and my word – the good news of God’s love and forgiveness and new life – will stand true. It may well seem as if heaven and earth are passing away, he says, “but my words will not pass away,” (21:33) the Good News is in the world and cannot be driven out. 

It is so sad that a message of hope and love meets such resistance in the world, but it does. Power and control are so much more attractive than the sharing and sacrifice that come with love. But it is at this moment, when resistance is strongest, in times of great conflict and turbulence, that we must stand up, not hide and not close our borders and our hearts. When “these things” take place we must overcome our “fear and foreboding” and open our hearts to others, just as God has disclosed and demonstrated his love for us in Christ. 

But Jesus has another warning for his followers. We can lose sight of God and of what God wants for us not only when tragedy strikes, which is often when many people who do not normally look to religion for comfort, try and find it there. The cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was packed after the attacks. No it’s the long haul that can be even more distracting and depressing, the seemingly endless wait for things to get better. "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life.”  (21:34) Dissipation and drunkenness are not references to you drinking too much Glühwein at the Sternschuppenmarkt, by the way! This is a warning that the world can wear us down, if we let it. Genuine followers of Christ must remain vigilant and on guard for the coming of God’s kingdom even in a world such as ours. There is a reason why patience is one of the fruits of the Spirit along with love, joy, peace, kindness, generosity, and faithfulness! (Galatians 5:22)

This is also where Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians and his prayer for them comes in handy. They knew they were in for the long haul, their initial expectations of Jesus’ immediate return had not been fulfilled while the horror of the fall of Jerusalem was still 20 years in their future. Their main concern, and Paul’s concern for them, was how to live as Christians, remember still a very small group of people in a small number of geographically dispersed cities. How can we grow in faith, how can we grow in hope, how can we remain focused on God? These were their questions and these are also the themes of his letter and especially of the prayer that made up the second part of the reading this morning. Paul’s advice, in the language of a prayer is threefold: 

Always let yourselves be guided and directed by God, as I do: “Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. (1 Thess. 3:11) Secondly, keep those heads up, keep those hears open, live for others, pray for love not just in abundance, but in superabundance: “And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you.” (3:12) Finally pray for your continual transformation to become those people that God wants you to be, when God’s Son returns: “And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” (3:13)

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. In Advent we look forward to the celebration of Christ’s birth and to the redemption he brought. We also look forward to God’s future and to the fulfillment of the promise of a kingdom of justice and righteousness, love and perfection. So despite all that is going around us, Advent is a season of hope. It is a time that reminds us that the world will not continue to get darker and colder forever. In the northern hemisphere we are in the winter season, but our spiritual winter will come to an end, and the fig tree and all the trees will again blossom and bloom. “Summer is near,” our Lord reassures us – even at the beginning of Advent. It is also not only symbolic that we celebrate the Feast of the Incarnation just after the winter solstice, after the longest night, and so by December 25^th the nights are becoming shorter just as we rejoice in the birth of the Light of the World. No my brothers and sisters, the end of the world is not nigh. On the contrary, thanks to that light that is Christ Jesus, the night of the world is ending.

Amen

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[1] Sung by Lynn Anderson in 1970

Hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest

A Sermon preached on November 15^th (Proper 28) at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

1 Samuel 1:4-10, Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25, Mark 13:1-8

In some Anglican churches today is known as “Bible Sunday,” because of the theme of the Collect of the Day that I prayed earlier. So it might seem more than a little ironic that I am going to talk mainly about that collect, the prayer for the day. But don’t worry. I will fit the Bible in as well! So what is a collect? When I was a much younger churchgoer I thought it had something to do with the collection – so I probably mispronounced it as collect much as I spent years referring to that one unfortunate Biblical character as job instead of Job! I do remember finding it strange that there was such a long gap between the prayer and the collection. 

But no, although collect and collections share the same Latin root, they have little to do with one another. The Latin word collecta just means “gathering.” It might originally have referred to the gathering of the people as the collect was once said just before the procession into the church where the people were gathered. Or – this is a more common explanation – because it is a prayer that collected the prayers of the individual members of the congregation into one, and also often gathered together the themes of the service – either the seasonal or the scriptural themes. Though the latter rarely works at all anymore as we have a 3 year cycle of readings and a one year cycle of collects! The collects in the first 1549 Book of Common Prayer, which are still the source for most of the collects we use today in our Episcopal worship, were mainly translations by Thomas Cranmer from the Latin prayers for each Sunday of the year. But not today’s – this one is an original composed by Cranmer and perhaps his team.

The prayers we call collects also have a particular structure – they are usually made up of five parts:

1. The invocation or address: indicating the person of Trinity addressed, usually God the Father
2. An acknowledgement: a description of a divine attribute that relates to the petition, so … God who saves or comforts or whatever
3. The petition, what we are asking God for. Traditionally "for one thing only and that in the tersest language"
4. The aspiration, this is the desired result – what happens if the petition is fulfilled and finally
5. The pleading – the conclusion of the prayer calling for the mediation of Jesus Christ, the one who intercedes on our behalf – followed by the people’s response: Amen – so be it.

And we can see this structure in today’s collect – on page 236 of the prayer book, and yes, you may look it up! 

Our collect is addressed to “Blessed Lord” – this is unique by the way, no other collect starts this way. God’s attribute is to be the one “who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning.” I hope it’s becoming clear why we call this Bible Sunday. So what do we want, what is our petition? “Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” And what is the desired result of this hearing, reading etc.? “That we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us.” As you can see the aspiration sort of runs into the pleading to “our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”  

Today’s Collect is in a way a little summary of the Anglican approach to Scripture. You may have heard of the so-called three-legged stool, the concept that in Anglicanism authority derives from Scripture, Reason, and Tradition. Yes, but the three are not equal. Richard Hooker, one of our greatest theologians, described a hierarchy of authority, with scripture as the foundation but informed by reason and tradition. And that is what we see in this Collect, it is through scripture that we learn to “embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.” Which is another way of saying, to continue this morning’s history lesson, and quoting from Article VI of the 16^th century 39 Articles that “Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation.” But that is all of Scripture, not just the bits that we like and that fit our particular agenda. You heard that too in the prayer to our God who caused all Holy Scriptures to be written!

You see, Cranmer and his contemporaries felt very strongly that the whole Bible should be read – both successively and in context.  One of their criticisms of the Pre-Reformation practice were the frequent interruptions in the flow of the readings caused by all the Saint’s days and other festivals. So his Prayer Book contained a schedule of readings that covered the entire Bible during the course of the year – but only if you attended Morning and Evening Prayer every day. That was rare then, and is even rarer today. But the idea of reading the whole Bible on a daily basis has recently had a renaissance in the Bible Challenge[1] – a guide to reading the entire Bible in a year that comes from within the Episcopal Church. Its founder, Rev. Marek Zabriskie, says that “understanding how the entire Word of God coheres and what God is saying to you daily through Holy Scripture is a transformational experience.” I know some people in this congregation have taken the Challenge and I can provide you with more information if you would like to have a go.

Another aspect of the Anglican understanding of Scripture is hidden in the collect in the little phrase “who caused all holy Scriptures to be written,” This reminds us of Paul’s words in 2 Timothy (3:16): “All scripture is inspired by God,” but it is not written or dictated by God. Scripture is a human record of the experience of or encounters and interaction with God by nations, groups of people, and individuals – and as a human record it is by no means infallible. Reading the whole Bible helps us to notice the often different or even contradictory accounts of the same events and to reflect on where they come from and what these different interpretations mean for our learning for today. When we read the Bible we always need to think both of the context in which a particular passage was written and how it might have been understood – although that understanding also that changed over time. Just look at some of Paul’s reinterpretations of parts of the Old Testament. And we must also consider our own context – both our personal situation, wants, needs and fears as well as our society’s.

This is something that cannot just be done alone. Note how Cranmer’s prayer asks that we may “hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” Scripture, not just read it alone, in the solitude of our homes. We hear Scripture when it is read by others – in worship or in a Bible Study – and we learn from the insights of others, perhaps even from mine. We can and should read such insights in books by eminent theologians – as well as gain insight by discussing Scripture and its application in a group with others – for which this church also has plenty of opportunities!

The prayer also asks that we mark and learn. To mark means to take notice of something and to learn means to change – ourselves, our acts, and our behavior – based on what we have heard, read, and taken note of. I really love the final phrase in this section, to inwardly digest. Yes, the word of God is nourishing, we feed on it and we feast on it. In the Book of Proverbs (16:24) we are told that “pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.” To inwardly digest Scripture is more than an intellectual understanding, it is about making the contents of Scripture part of our very being. Yes, Scripture contains everything necessary for salvation – but only if we act on what we hear and read and mark and learn. In this morning’s reading from Hebrews – I have to bring at least one of our lessons in somehow – you heard how the author holds up the importance of meeting and worshipping together as a means of encouragement and learning: “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” (Hebrews 10:24-25)

To be encouraged is the ultimate purpose of Cranmer’s prayer, to be encouraged by the “blessed hope of everlasting life” that we find in Scripture. And right now – in these times of terror – we need hope mist of all. Cranmer’s Collect may have been an original composition, but it is not just a prayer about Scripture, it is also inspired by it. His words echo the words of Paul about the connection between Scripture and hope from the Letter to the Romans (15:4): “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.”

And in the end our hope does not come from Holy Scripture, from a book, but from the God whose acts and deeds of love are described in its pages. Our hope comes not from words but from the Word of God, God’s Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who we not only hear and read about, but can encounter personally here at his table in the meal he instituted for our comfort, solace, empowerment, and renewal. Amen.

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[1] http://thecenterforbiblicalstudies.org/