Luke 21:25-36
SERMON
I always wonder what to do about scholars and religious leaders who are right on some things but cling to barbaric and hateful ideas in other areas. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th and current Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, supports social acceptance of homosexuality, but insists that it constitutes sexual misconduct, a Buddhist version of the “love the sinner, hate the sin” hypocrisy that has done so much harm and destroyed so many lives among Christians. Seems a little lacking in compassion to me.
The Anglican scholar and retired bishop N.T. Wright is willing to challenge the received understanding of Jesus and the end times, a revolutionary re-reading of a key New Testament concept, but he is behind our times on LGBTQI+ issues, even behind his own benighted Church of England. We can be happy that at least he no longer has the authority to sanction clergy.
It is to Wright and his rebellion against scholarly orthodoxy that I turn this morning. Christians have interpreted the teachings of Jesus and subsequently of Paul as predicting the sort of cataclysmic re-ordering of the world we later find in the Apocalypse of John of Patmos, better known as Revelation. In fact, heaven come to earth or a rapture into heaven and some sort of divine wrath is pretty central to many fundamentalist theologies. For progressive and reconstructive Christians, reading texts like today’s gospel suggests that Jesus, and therefore Paul, were wrong. I mean, clearly the world did not end and get a divine re-ordering during the lifetimes of the disciples.
Jesus draws on the language of the Book of Daniel, the last of the original works in the Jewish Bible to be written. It introduces the “Son of Man,” better read today as “the Human One” or as a representative human, as a divine game-changer. That book, as well as the recorded teachings of Jesus, the authentic letters of Paul, and the other collected works in Christian Scripture, all refer to a “Day of the Lord.”
And because we have been taught to read this as apocalyptic, we read it as apocalyptic, read Jesus exclusively through the lens of the Book of Daniel, which is a pious fiction written in the 2nd century B.C.E. It is only one of twelve in a collection known as the Minor Prophets, and then there are the major prophets: in historical order, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.
Wright suggests we read Jesus through the lens of this broader prophetic tradition in pre-Rabbinic Judaism, which often spoke of and witnessed actual cataclysmic events like the first destruction of Jerusalem. Wright would read phrases so long translated as “end of the world” as meaning “earth shattering events.”
Wright could be right. We have to remember that Jesus probably taught in Aramaic, and those teachings were transmitted as oral tradition for approximately forty years before we begin to see written gospels composed in Koine Greek, an entirely different language. And what happened in the fortieth year after the execution of Jesus? Precisely the sort of earth shattering events Jesus seemingly predicted.
In this reading, the message remains that the Kingdom of God is at hand, that followers could choose to live the “as-if” of the kingdom, while also pointing out that the current kingdom, the cruelty and exploitation of Rome, the self-serving cooperation of the wealthy Jewish elite, was not sustainable, that disaster was inevitable. This is exactly how prior prophets spoke, and it turns out to be exactly right. Jesus offered a spiritual opt-out of the accelerating crisis, a model of selfless love and community that was open and filled with grace.
For nerdy types, theological and otherwise, this idea that New Testament prophecies have been fulfilled is Preterism in various shades, and Wright may well be called a Preterist, but we’re not going to get into all that.
Instead, I want to consider what we should do about it, the “it” being the facts on the ground, living life near the breaking point, because you know, we might be there.
One option would be a little R&R, rebellion against Rome and a revolution against the Jewish elite. This is not Christ’s gospel.
In today’s reading, Jesus warns against drunkenness and dissipation. Paul would issue similar warnings to churches he founded. It seems neither hedonism nor despair is the correct answer when things are difficult. Jesus is teaching and healing. Paul isn’t just founding and supporting churches. He’s also on a fundraising mission, send funds back to drought-stricken Judea. In the middle of all the gloom and doom, the prophets, Jesus, even Paul who can be a bit of a knucklehead, are actually still out there doing stuff, still out there imagining what might be, still pouring compassion and creativity into the world, and calling people to their better selves.
And here we are, at a moment when stupidity, cruelty, and greed seem triumphant. It has been clear to many of us for some time that the consolidation of wealth in an exploitative economic system was incompatible with democracy. The myth of rugged individualism and the cult of Ayn Rand has undermined the importance of family and community. “We” is bad enough when “we” is narrowly defined, but “me” is absolutely fatal. Drunkenness and dissipation and despair may seem like our only options. Or…
Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly.
Our Stewardship Team challenged us to imagine.
Imagine that in a time of chaos and confusion, a community taught and practiced a different way of being in relation to our neighbor, the cop-next-door neighbor and the kicked to the curb one too many times un-shelter neighbor and the Palestinian neighbor, for the Palestinian is our neighbor, especially as long as we are paying for the bombs that are falling on their families.
Imagine a community that preached justice, and not the “I got mine” kind of tit-for-tat justice, but the kind of restorative justice that sees the holy and beautiful, the miraculous, in every single person, in every single creature, because as the Medieval mystic declared, every being is a book of God.
Imagine a community that doesn’t gaslight the oppressed or enable toxic systems by dulling to worst sins, but instead imagines a world where none need be oppressed or poor, then gets about the business of building better systems, paying off medical debt, sure, but also lobbying for universal healthcare or a single payer system or, quite frankly, anything except the illness industrial complex we have now.
Imagine that your answer is as good as mine, because your answer is as good as mine, for you too are loved by God and share in God’s holy creativity and imagination.
It is a difficult time, no question. Break the bread and bless the cup. Jesus did. But not too much of that cup. There are people waiting to be fed, children waiting to be healed, broken folks looking for forgiveness and reconciliation, and some dude down there in the ditch that the religious people just walked right by… It is time we get to work.
Amen.