Claiming to be the messiah can get you killed in a terrible and violent way, and not just in ancient Palestine. It happened in Texas in 1978, when George Roden murdered Wayman Dale Adair with an axe bow to the head. You may not remember this particular incident, but it was one part of a larger story you do know. George Roden had been locked in a struggle for several years with the much younger lover of his late mother, who had served as head of their breakaway sect of a breakaway sect of a breakaway sect of a… well, you get the idea.
It all starts during the Second Great Awakening, early in the 19th century, when a Baptist preacher became maybe a little too focused on the parousia. The word parousia is Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, and was most frequently used in secular texts of that age to indicate the arrival of an important person, like an official from the imperial court. In the New Testament, parousia appears twenty-four times, with seventeen of those referring to the second coming of Jesus. During that same age, coins were struck to commemorate Nero’s visit to Corinth, coins that carried the inscription Adventus Augusti Corinth, for advent was the Latin word used for parousia. Advent meant arrival or coming. When we celebrate Advent, we are celebrating the first coming of Christ.
The Rev. William Miller, that Baptist preacher swept up in the fervor of the Great Awakening, calculated that the parousia, or second coming, would take place in 1843. His followers came to be called at first Millerites, then later Adventists. Eighteen forty-three came and went and Miller died, but the apocalyptic fervor remained. Ellen White would transform the Adventist movement, convincing most adherents to observe the Jewish sabbath on the seventh day, creating the group with which most of us are familiar, the Seventh-Day Adventists.
Skip ahead almost a century. In the 1930’s, a Bulgarian immigrant named Victor Houteff called for reform in the Seventh-Day Adventist church, which remained committed to the Second Coming, to the Advent. Like Martin Luther, Houteff did not intend to breakaway from the church. He only broke with the Seventh-Day Adventists when he and his followers were disfellowshipped. They moved to Texas, where the group, known as The Shepherd’s Rod, established for themselves the Mount Carmel Center, just outside of Waco. That group was displaced by another breakaway under Benjamin and Lois Roden, parents of George. When Benjamin died, Lois took a much younger lover, Vernon Howell, who would change his name after her death to David, after the the great Hebrew king, and Koresh, the Hebrew version of Cyrus, the Persian king referred to in Hebrew scripture as a messiah. David Koresh and his followers would then displace George Roden and his group, taking over the Mount Carmel compound.
It is a jagged line that takes us from William Miller calculating the date of the parousia in Poultney, Vermont in 1818 to the insanity at the Branch Davidian compound one hundred and seventy-five years later, but it is a line, and the common thread is the idea of apocalypse, of Second Coming. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols would cite the incident at Waco as one of their motivations for the act of domestic terrorism in Oklahoma City, and they carried out that attack on the Murrah Federal Building on the second anniversary of the dramatic and violent end of the Waco siege.
Apocalyptic urgency hinges on two key ideas. The first is belief that the world is broken, corrupt beyond repair. The second is belief that only an act of divine power can set things right, an event that is both dramatic and violent. There are three apocalyptic texts in the Bible, all written between 167 BCE and 96 CE, about a century and a half. These texts are the latter half of the Book of Daniel, the 13th chapter of the Gospel According to Mark, and the entire Revelation to John of Patmos. Some argue that other figures in scripture are apocalyptic, including Jesus himself. In the case of Jesus, it very much depends on how you understand his message about the Kingdom of God. If you are inclined, as I am, to believe that Jesus was announcing that the Kingdom of God, the rule of God, was already on hand for those who chose it, then apocalypse is unnecessary.
There are many complicated questions, questions of belief, here. If there is an evil power that God cannot defeat that has corrupted creation, then is there something bigger than God that created good and evil divinities? If God inserted the corruption or designed a system that allowed for evil, then is God good? Is God an absentee landlord, with creation running amuck until there is a divine correction? If God has remained engaged and active in the world, have we completely misunderstood God?
While the Book of Daniel is a historical and religious fiction, the Book of Revelation hallucinatory, we do have a powerful image of God present and active in the world in the Book of Ezekiel, a text from the period of the Babylonian Exile that most scholars believe to be authentic. The prophet follows the traditional Hebrew theology of a localized presence of God, what the Rabbinic tradition would refer to as shekhinah. This idea, that God is physically present in a single place, in the Temple’s Holy of Holies or in a pillar of fire, is somewhat at odds with our understanding of God as omnipresent, and both Rabbinic Judaism and the Christian trajectory would move away from this notion that God had a street address after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. But the idea that God had lived in the Temple was very real to Ezekiel, an exile from a family of priests. The First Temple had been destroyed, and the Temple elite had been taken hostage in the east, which complicated matters. Where was God living if not in the Holy of Holies?
Describing a future vision of the Eastern Gate of the Temple Mount, Ezekiel writes “The Lord said to me: This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it; for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut.â€
We have no idea if the current gate, called the Golden Gate or the Mercy Gate, and built at least five centuries after Jesus, is in the same location as the ruins of the original at the time of Ezekiel, or even if it is at the same location it was in during the time of Jesus. Archeological digging is forbidden, so we will likely never know for certain. What we do know is that so powerful was the idea of that gate as the entry point for God’s messenger, for the Messiah, for the shekhinah, that it was sealed by Muslims, opened by Crusaders, walled up by Saladin, rebuilt by Suleiman the Magnificent but then walled up yet again. So powerful was the idea that the presence of God might enter Jerusalem from the east, ushering in a new age, that those who opposed the idea put a graveyard in front of it, for they misunderstood scripture, believing that God’s messenger, the new Elijah, would be forbidden to walk through a graveyard.
Though the Epistle to the Hebrews is a sermon rather than an epistle, it is clear that the intended audience, if not actually composed of Jewish-Christians, was at least thoroughly familiar with the idea that God was present behind the curtain in the Holy of Holies. Jesus is described in today’s reading as creating a new entry into the Holy of Holies, into the divine presence, through his body. Humans, then, can approach the divine through Jesus.
But here’s the thing. We can approach God through Jesus because God first approached us through Jesus. Even before Jesus, scripture is not the story of humans stumbling upon the divine. Buddha, and I love me some Buddha, might get to enlightenment through strength of will, through discipline and effort, but our faith is not about what we can do on our own. Our faith story is and always has been the story of a Divine Mystery we name God who is not only the source of all life, but that is also oriented toward life, toward love, toward us. God calls Abraham. God calls Moses. Mary doesn’t go looking for an angel. God’s messenger finds her.
God’s move toward us in love, God’s desire that we might experience life in full, is what we call grace. Unfortunately, grace gets tangled up with all sorts of other thorny topics, especially sin and the toxic notion of original sin that claims we come out of the womb broken, not so far from the idea that the world is irreparably broken. People try to parse grace and label it and stick it into a box. But grace is nothing more than divine love, and it will not fit into any human box, and it is not there because of what we aren’t. Grace is not there because we have sinned. Grace is there because of what we might be. A powerful force for creativity and love isn’t going to sit around cataloging every single thing that might go wrong, that might have gone wrong, that we might have done wrong. That isn’t how this exuberant creation works. Life is always facing forward, always looking for a way. Species adapt and plants push up through the asphalt.
Grace isn’t about God’s ability to forgive us. The image Jesus gives us for God is that of a loving parent. The prophets centuries before Jesus began saying the same thing. God moves toward us, and all of the bricked up gates in the world cannot keep God out.
Grace isn’t about God flipping a heavenly coin to decide whether or not to forgive us, or even worse, a God who creates some beings predestined for damnation and some for redemption. Those are human ideas because that is how we work, how we think, because we are finite and afraid. God is love, and God forgives before we even know we’ve done wrong. The grace we need is the grace to trust that God is toward us, to trust the love and forgiveness of God, then, with help from the Spirit, to forgive ourselves, and to forgive one another.
Now, I don’t really care if you can check every box in some ancient creed. I sure can’t. I don’t care if you are filled with questions and uncertainty and a fair dose of skepticism. But I hope you choose to believe that there is some power in this world that is oriented toward creation, that that power is best described as love. I hope you choose to believe this because, quite frankly, I can’t imagine finding true happiness, finding meaning, if you believe that everything is just randomness and chaos, a game of percentages. I can’t imagine finding true happiness if God is some angry dude in the sky. There is nowhere to go with that. But God as creative love? God that moves toward us? That’s like finding an origami napkin in your lunchbox. That is life with a surprise bonus.
If creation is broken and humans are powerless, then there is no reason to try to make the world a better place. Victor Houteff’s original publication was about identifying the 144,000 that would be saved from the apocalypse. If you believe that stuff, you want to make sure you’re in that number when the saints come marching in. You want the end to come as soon as possible. And since you expect apocalyptic events to be violent, you welcome violence as part of that system,, as inevitable and desirable might even be inclined to violence, might stockpile weapons in your compound in Waco.
Paul believed in the parousia, in the second advent, so much so that he told people to try not to change their lot in life, as it would not matter. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, writing after Paul, still believes, as it states in the text, that the day is approaching. But the text is not a call to passive waiting. It is a challenge to action, to discipleship. God is moving toward us, but we are not to just sit still.
Provoke one another to love and good deeds. Meet together. Encourage one another.
Focus on some furious future of fire and retribution, and you won’t only be wrong, you’ll miss now. And now is when God is love. Now is when God calls and seeks and move toward us in exuberant creativity. Now is our grace.
Now get up and do something. We’re not waiting for God to come change the world. That’s our job. Provoke one another to love and good deeds. Meet together. Encourage one another.
Doing that should give us all the drama we need.
Amen.