December 1, 2024

Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36

Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

Heaven and earth will pass away for the end is nigh.

The end – but the end of what? The end for whom? The end leading into the beginning.

These readings are apocalyptic in nature. This term “apocalypse” is often used in modern times but the way it is used differs from its religious origins. The modern usage has to do with some world ending situation. Many movies have been based on this premise of some catastrophe, whether through global warming, alien invasion, or a plague of zombies. But that is not the original meaning of apocalypse.

Apocalypse refers to the disclosure of something, the revelation of that which is hidden. Biblically, there are multiple apocalypses across the centuries of both the Jewish and Christian traditions. For example, our first reading was from the Book of Jeremiah which offers one of several revelations about the troubles looming on the historical horizon for Israel. Northern empires would attack, first the Assyrians and then the Babylonians, as a sign of God’s judgment. This would be revealed to the people through prophecies.

In the Christian tradition, there are additional apocalypses. In the Gospels, there are references to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. Jesus had described that prior to our passages from Luke this morning. There are similar stories in Mark and Matthew. These stories reveal the coming destruction brought on by political revolution against the Romans.

And so, the world came to an end.

Now you might be thinking, no it didn’t. The world did not come to an end because here we are. Here we are, so something seems to be amiss. That depends entirely upon your perspective.

These readings from Jeremiah and Luke are each apocalypses unto themselves. Each serves to reveal what is to come. In these cases, that revelation is about the destruction of something familiar to the people of that moment.

Jeremiah explains to exiles in Babylon the reason for what has happened. The invasion and the exile are forms of divine judgment on the people for their failures to live up to a covenant with God. It does not matter that this is an explanation rather than a prophecy, prophecy in the sense that it predicts the future. Much of Biblical prophecy is not about predicting what is to come but explaining what has happened and why it has happened. Prophecy refers to someone speaking on behalf of God, not fortunetelling.

In the case of Jesus, he is anticipating what is going to happen but note that his predictions were most likely set down after the destruction of the Temple. He was explaining that the rebellion would not come to a good end. The people needed to be prepared for their likely persecution and to bear up under that unfortunate series of events.

There is a difference between the world ending and my world coming to an end. In both examples from Jeremiah and Luke, the world came to an end, meaning the end of the world for the Israelites and the Judeans. The Israelites and their independent kingdom were destroyed. Then the Judeans (known by a provincial name at this point) and their religious autonomy within the Roman Empire were destroyed.

Their worlds ended.

In the case of Rome, the destruction of the Temple made it impossible for religiously observant Jews to follow the strict requirements of Biblical Judaism. You could not make sacrifices in the Temple, which was how people could atone for their sins. And what is more earth shattering than being unable to reconcile with God?

The world ended for traditional Jews and Jews that following Jesus. Because Jesus was following a variation of Jewish practices, even teaching in the Temple quite frequently. Jesus was not trying to destroy the Temple, but he knew it would be destroyed.

What do you do after the world ends? You pick up the pieces. You cobble together something from what you have managed to save. And you build something new.

This was a time of crisis. There was no way to worship consistent with the practices of the past. Other Jews, known as the Samaritans, had tried to set up separate worship sites when the northern and southern kingdoms broke apart. But the southerners, who endured longer than the north, spent many pages in the Bible decrying the northerners’ efforts.

For example, the northerners rebuilt old religious sites that had been displaced by the Temple in Jerusalem. There was only one Ark of the Covenant, which was in the Temple, so the north had to create something new. They built a substitute ark, which effectively served as God’s footstool when his presence enters the Temple, or in this case the renewed shrine at Bethel. That substitute ark, that heavenly footstool, was a golden calf.

And if a golden calf sounds familiar to you, yes indeed it was the golden calf that the rebellious Hebrew slaves had forged when Moses went up the mountain to obtain the Ten Commandments from God. The priests of Jerusalem inserted a little bit of religious controversy into the Book of Exodus, explaining that what the north had down was tantamount to idolatry. It helps if you are the one writing history, especially if you are the last one standing.

The same is true for the Gospel of Luke. The reason the Romans came in and destroyed the Temple, besides that they were ruthless oppressors and would crush anyone who dared to disobeyed, was that the people of Judea had rebelled. The Temple supported this independence movement, likely because there was no alternative. And the Romans tore apart the literal Temple stone by stone to punish the Judeans and the priests in equal measure.

An apocalypse has become associated with the end of the world, but that ending is often very limited and rather personal. Even the Book of Revelation with its scary imagery was likely a coded apocalypse only meaningful to Early Christians as they suffered through Roman persecution. It has already happened as it most likely describes events around the time of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, when Jews and Christians would have been in a terrible state of disarray. They had yet to figure out what it meant to be who they were. How to worship God given that they were no longer able to go to the Temple. Who to rely upon without the Temple or Jesus.

It was for them the end of the world – their world. The world in which they were comfortable, or at least the world they knew and understood. Because does the world itself really have to end for us to feel like it is ending?

Has the thought ever crossed your mind that the world was coming to an end? That this has to be it, game over? Maybe even quite recently, has that thought popped unbidden into your mind?

When I was a kid, we were living through the so-called Cold War. We wondered if the Russians were going to do it, if they were going to launch a nuclear war. And I presume, that the Russian people were worried that we were going to launch a nuclear war. Those were existential threats against all life on this planet. So, I will suggest that we have become habituated to the idea the world will come to an end within our lifetimes.

But is it a real worry? Is it something that we should allow to occupy even a corner of our waking minds?

I am not a prophet from God, in any true sense of that term. But I think that we have allowed our anxieties about the world, and our personal place in it, to overwhelm our practical sense about the actual world. And in that respect, the end of the world in our minds is the same as the end of the world in those various Biblical apocalypses. The end is coming, but it is not the world that is ending.

Think about the world that you lived in when you were a child. When I was in grammar school, we did not have many of the technological advances that we currently take for granted. We had rabbit ear antennas on the television. We had a phone attached to the wall, though my phone had fancy new buttons rather than the rotary dial. My grandparents had one of those.

A few years ago, my daughter and I were at a flea market, and she came across a T-shirt. It had a slogan on it: “Don’t Yank the Crank!” There was a drawing of an old style of phone, the one with the ear and mouthpiece that were separated and a crank on the side that generated the signal to the live operator waiting for your call. This T-shirt was part of a campaign to stop the last crank telephone system in the US from being removed from Bryant Pond, Maine. The last of these phones was still in use in 1981.

Isn’t it terrible that they got rid of this little piece of history? Well, from my perspective, not really. That system requires a person to connect your call, someone likely named Mabel down at the exchange sitting by a panel of cables, one for each literal phone line. You could not easily get emergency services. You could not break out of that tiny system and connect with others. Yes, a crank phone is charming in its way, but is it worth the tradeoffs?

What about the changes Jews had to go through when the Temple was destroyed. When everything fell apart, they had to find a way forward. They had to change. And even our most ancient practices were new at some point.

What we now think of as Judaism developed over the ensuing centuries. Synagogues were community centers and schools but became the centers of religious life. And those far from even these new religious centers had to build ways of being together in small family groups. Sabbath service on Friday nights with the lighting of candles and the saying of prayers was a new mode of religious practice invented because the Temple had been destroyed. A more portable system of worship and prayer was created.

Christians were excluded from the synagogues because they were considered radicals following an upstart cult. They started to meet in houses, the so-called house church movement in its earliest form. You took turns going from place to place without a fixed religious home.

All that changed when Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire. Churches are built, displacing big Roman temples with big Roman cathedrals. Everything changes, even as Christianity incorporates Roman religious practices with little translation. The chief priest of Rome was known as pontifex maximus, leader of the college of pontiffs, the other priests of the city. This becomes the Pope and his college of cardinals.

The new world sometimes looks like the old one.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the start of the church’s religious year. It is about the beginning of the life of Jesus but draws upon apocalyptic language to mark a change from old to new. Advent started in the fifth century in France. It was a period of fasting observed by various monks. Some fasted for three days per week, while others did it every day for the entire four-week period. Yes, there were (and are) many religious showoffs. Pride is said to be the only inescapable sin.

And I think that pride is at the core of most apocalyptic thinking. Ignoring the real threat of nuclear war during my lifetime, most other apocalyptic predictions have to do with cultural, social, or technological change. The world as we know it is ending.

We can get ourselves caught up in a fever pitch of anxiety when we imagine the only possible version of the world is the world we currently know. And we will sometimes go to extreme lengths to protect that idea of the world against all perceived threats.

We saw this during the Cold War, when the slogan “Better Dead than Red” cropped up in our country. Because it was better to die than to become a communist, to become a Marxist, to become a socialist. But what does it mean to be a communist, a Marxist, or a socialist?

Socialism is not the same as Marxism or communism, but that word gets trotted out as the villain whenever a social program is proposed or expanded. Social Security was branded as socialism. Medicare was socialism. Critics might blissfully refer to a time before medical insurance when your doctor stopped in for a house visit and you paid him five dollars and a chicken. And then you died of Scarlet fever.

And yet nostalgia is a powerful idea. We think of golden ages when everyone was happy and everyone knew their place in society. But if we just scratch the historical surface, we will realize that very few people were happy and being told your place in society was at the root of that unhappiness.

Women knew their place was in the home, a viewpoint that enshrines a twenty-year period from 1945 to 1965 as the perfect moment of society.

Men knew their place in society was at the top of the heap, a ridiculous notion when most men struggled daily in grueling agricultural and industrial jobs that often ended their lives before the age of 50. And yes, the average life expectancy for an American male in 1920 was around 54 years. For women, it was 55. The leading causes of death were heart disease, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. Socialism in the form of medicine isn’t looking so bad anymore.

The end of the world is a slogan more than a reality. It is a way of making people fight for some idea or tradition even when that might not be the best thing for them. Social changes are hard to navigate and there will clearly be people who suffer the brunt of those changes. Working class people, in particular, have little cushion from change, fewer resources to soften the blow.

However, I think it is a mistake to assume that we only need to have a sit down with people to explain to them the error of their ways. If only you would listen to my twelve bullet points about the economy then you will realize that the price of eggs really is of no great consequence because leading indicators suggest that you should be happy. So get happy.

One of the great mistakes of our current social moment is the belief that we can explain away what people are feeling. People feel how they feel. And those pessimistic feelings are just as valid as someone else’s bright-eyed optimism. We can look at the same moment in time and come away with different interpretations.

Why? Because, for example, a college educated person living in a busy urban center in the Northeast or the West Coast has far more opportunities before them than someone in a rural area in the South or an old Rust Belt city in the Midwest. We are looking at the same picture, but we are seeing different things. Those differences are respectively valid, they are respectively true. Understanding that two independent worldviews are equally valid even when they are wildly different may be the most necessary social change our country needs in this time of tension.

There is an old expression about one person seeing the glass as half empty while the other sees it as half full. I would always add that it felt like mine was cracked and leaking. And when I was in my twenties that was probably an accurate understanding of my circumstances. Yes, I was a college graduate, but I was also arguably poor. I had no health care. My wife and I had entry level jobs and a young child.

It would be years before we got to a point of relative security, when we had enough money coming in to make everything add up. But before that time, it felt like the world might end every month. That everything would come crashing down. And, to be honest, it did crash a few times. I was evicted from an apartment. My son almost died from a sudden illness and we had no insurance. It would have been the end of our world, again and again.

Over the coming months, I am guessing there will be moments of anxiety. There always are, so why would this time be any different? And yet, someone might say that this is different, this is more significant, this is truly the end of the world.

Obviously, that is speculation about the future, so I cannot tell you much about that imagined moment of crisis. But if I were to leaf back through the pages of history, I am betting that I can come up with a moment much like it. I can look back to the eve of the American Civil War in 1861, but still that was not the end of the world. But it was a terrible time for many. I can look back at 1929 when the stock market collapsed and the Great Depression began, but still that was not the end of the world. But it was a terrible time for many.

There have been wars and economic collapses, there has been social unrest and even social revolution. And in the moment, it seemed like the world might be ending. It truly ended for some, for many, but not for everyone. The world did not end, but the world was changed.

The season of Advent is the beginning of change. We are called upon to imagine those changes and how we might meet the possibilities of such change. The challenge of change is not merely that we somehow come through to the other side of it, but how we respond within it. How we act throughout and how we live up to our better instincts.

This moment is not the end of the world, but it might be the beginning of a change, a change from something we have known. Changing times are both a trial and an opportunity. A trial to be endured as best we can. And an opportunity to be embraced if we are courageous enough in the moment. Only time will tell.

Amen.