Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning’s readings may strike us as a bit disconcerting, as well they should. They all deal with last things, the events which precede and surround Christ’s return on the last day. We’re a couple of weeks away from Advent, which is the season typically associated with these last things, and specifically with what have been called the “four last things”: namely death, judgment, heaven, and hell. But, since we also get to talk about Mary and Joseph and John the Baptist and all that in Advent, the lectionary has wisely given us a few extra weeks before to get a good healthy dose of teaching on these often difficult themes. I concluded last week’s sermon by saying that reasonable Christians need to spend more time proclaiming our beliefs about eschatological matters, and here is our chance.

As I said, we might find this morning’s readings a bit disconcerting. The long section of potentially terrifying prophecy we heard in today’s Old Testament reading from Zephaniah concludes with the assertion that “in the fire of [God’s] passion, the whole earth shall be consumed; for a full and terrible end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth.” And, in the famous “parable of the talents” from Matthew, we hear the master rendering a very final judgment against the unproductive servant: “throw him into the outer darkness,” he says, “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

All of this is enough to send us each into a tizzy. However, this is precisely the wrong approach. We learn in today’s epistle the necessity for approaching the anxiety about last things, and indeed all of life’s troubles, with seriousness and calm clarity rather than panic; or to use Paul’s words, with sobriety rather than drunkenness.

In this morning’s epistle, the apostle writes to the church in Thessalonica commanding such spiritual sobriety. “Therefore let us not sleep,” he wrote, “as do others; but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober.” The command was all the more appropriate for that young Christian community considering the occasion for Paul’s letter to them. The year was A.D. 52, not twenty years after Our Lord’s ascension into heaven. Paul had sent his young apprentice, Timothy, from their headquarters in Corinth to check up on the church in Thessalonica.

The news with which Timothy returned to Paul was not encouraging. Now, the Christians in that little missionary outpost believed that Jesus would return within their own lifetimes, a common expectation among the first generation of Christians. When members of the church had died, they were unsure of the eternal fate of their recently departed loved-ones, and some began to lose their faith entirely. The result was fear and mourning and probably, as we might imagine, in at least a few cases, panic. They suffered from spiritual drunkenness.

It is because of this that Paul wrote the epistle from which we read this morning. He began the letter by reminding the Thessalonians of the good faith with which they received the initial proclamation of the Gospel, and, in the letter’s climax, which we heard last week, he explains the Christian view of Jesus’ return and the general resurrection of the dead. Remember what we read last week:

But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again: even so them also which sleep in Jesus, will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them that are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive, and remain, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

In short, those which are dead by the time of Christ’s return will precede the living to be with him, so there is no theological rationale for the kind of reaction suffered by the Thessalonians. Of course, loss (especially, the death of a loved one) can cause profound grief and even fear, which God, it seems to me, would not hold against us. Even so, the Christian message compels us to remain both faithful and hopeful in the midst of such hardships, knowing that on the last day God will raise his faithful people and make all things to right.

The theological problem addressed, Paul proceeds to the spiritual problem, namely what I termed spiritual drunkenness. Spiritual drunkenness, it seems, is the tendency to take our eyes off of the ways of God in an attempt to run away from painful reality. Its effect may be panic, an utter and irrational loss of hope like that experienced by the Thessalonians. Or its effect may be denial; as Paul said “when they shall say peace and safety: then sudden destruction cometh upon them.” Indeed, our reaction to the apparently nasty bits we read earlier from Zephaniah and Matthew might lead us to either panic or denial. So, too, might be our response to any profound troubles we experience in this life. In all events, the spiritual drunkard is like the literal drunkard–he cannot see things clearly for how they are. His vision is blurred and his reason is compromised. He cannot see God’s Providence at work in the time of trial. He sees only a world of horrific danger, and either he refuses to acknowledge it or he succumbs to sheer terror.

Indeed, in these last days—for just as St. Paul lived in the last days so do we still—there will continue to be trials, but however long they last God will, in the end, make all things new. In this same lesson from Thessalonians, the Apostle likens it to a woman in child-birth. It is a painful process, for sure, yet at the end comes a new and beautiful creation, a child. New life is always born of pain. So it is with the world to come. Its approach is beset by toil and peril, and ultimately death, for each and every one of us lest we’re fortunate enough to see Christ’s return in our own day. Yet the end for all of us, whether we live or die, is finally and unspeakably good.

In the meantime, the time in which we still live between Our Lord’s ascension and his return, we are called to stand firm in our faith and follow the counsel of Paul in his letter to the Ephesians to “be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the sleight of men.” This can only be achieved if we grow in our souls a spirit of sobriety. We must remain serious and steadfast and vigilant if we are to respond to the pain and travail of these days faithfully. St. Paul commands it, as does St. Peter in his first epistle general. “Be sober,” he says, “be vigilant: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

Spiritual sobriety is being able to see things clearly as they are and in the light of God’s plan for us all. It is also a matter of seriousness and intentionality in the spiritual life. This isn’t brain-surgery. It’s as simple as saying one’s prayers and reading one’s bible and coming to church on Sunday. This isn’t just naïve churchiness; it really works. A simple, serious commitment in these basic disciplines gives us the grounding we need to grow mature in the faith and approach the spiritual life with sobriety because they instill in us both the substance and the spirit of faith. The bible and the prayerbook especially, used together over many years of practice, build in us a firm foundation on which to stand, so that “in all the cares and occupations of this life” we may not stumble about as the drunkard, but remain awake and watchful and sober. And then, when Our Lord does at last return, He may find us to be a people who persevered during the time of trial.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The current Middle East crisis is complicated, and I’ve seen enough folks online, including some colleagues, providing simplistic, ill-advised “hot takes” to know that this is not a wise thing to do. The only thing I will say is that for years it has troubled me when certain American politicians get this complex issue all tangled up with a peculiar and, frankly incorrect, eschatology (that is, a theology of the end times). That is to say that a view which holds that a particular political settlement in the Holy Land will hasten Christ’s return, as if we can manipulate Divine Providence, and that this will bring about a state of affairs having something to do with a rather fringy interpretation of today’s Epistle is more than a little scary to me.

In his First Epistle to the Thessalonians Paul writes:

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

This has become a key text in the ideology of modern Christian fundamentalism. You may know that already, but what you may not be aware of is how this came to be the case.

In the year 1827 an American preacher named John Nelson Darby popularized a theory called premillenial dispensationalism. He was building on some of the hypotheses of the seventeenth century puritan preachers Increase and Cotton Mather and the eighteenth century Welsh historian and Baptist preacher Morgan Edwards. While the Mathers and Edwards were somewhat oblique in their description of the eschaton, or end-times, Darby developed a remarkably specific vision of the future. Taking the passage from First Thessalonians as a centerpoint and placing it in the context of apocalyptic events described in the books of Daniel and Revelation, Darby presented what he believed to be a timeline for the end of the world.

While the theory is complicated the short version is as follows: Jesus will return and believers will be raised bodily into heaven and disappear, the unfaithful will be subjected to seven years of tribulation, Jesus and the Church will return to reign on earth for a thousand years, there will be a final battle between good and evil, and then the final judgment will take place and everyone will go to either heaven or hell.

This remained a somewhat marginal view until the 1909 publication of the Scofield Reference Bible. Taking a cue from the 1560 Geneva Bible, this translation included extensive commentary right alongside the Scriptures themselves, encouraging one to read the bible in such a way as to accept Darby’s theory. Incidentally, it was also the bible which introduced the modern strain of “Young Earth Creationism”- the idea that God created the world sometime in the last ten thousand years. It is Scofield whom we can thank for Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, the popular Left Behind series of books (as well as the feature film starring everyone’s favorite crazy man, Nicholas Cage), and a whole host of prognosticators who have from time to time speculated on the timing of the Apocalypse.

The most remarkable part of this story is that a guy in the nineteenth century basically made it all up. Virtually nobody believed any of this stuff two hundred years ago. This is not to say that every Christian in the world believed exactly the same thing about the eschaton prior to Darby. There have been good and healthy debates between people who believed different things about the second coming, particularly whether things were going to get better and better or worse and worse leading up to Christ’s return and the General Resurrection. Each of these schools of thought can be argued on the basis of Scripture and traditional Church teaching. But each of these schools of thought reads the fourth chapter of First Thessalonians as referring to the General Ressurection on the Last Day which immediately precedes Christ’s judgment and his gracious act of establishing a new heaven and a new earth, not some early boarding pass for the heavenly banquet while the unbelievers are left to suffer below.

This is neither a conservative nor a liberal point of view. Anglicans teaches it. Lutherans and Prebyterians and Methodists believe it. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians believe it. Moderate and Progressive Baptists believe it. The Amish and the Mennonites believe it.

But a heck-of-a-lot of Christians in this country have been taught premillenial dispensationalism. Seven of the Left Behind books have reached “number one” on the New York Times Best Sellers list, which gives you a good idea of how popular the theory is. I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of television and radio preachers teach the theory- a theory which simply doesn’t hold up under any serious program of reading and interpreting the bible. But why, you might ask, does it matter?

Is this not an issue on which we should just agree to disagree? I don’t agree, for example, with the Presbyterians on how many sacraments there are or with the Roman Catholics on papal infallibility. These issues seem more important or at least more relevant, yet I don’t get really exercised about their points of view, at least in my preaching.

First, I think theological positions like that have a basis in at least some ways of faithfully interpreting Scripture and Church Tradition. One can have civil, theologically informed debates over those issues. Maybe it’s some unexamined prejudice on my part, but I just don’t see the same conversation being possible with the issue in question. It’s almost like fundamentalist eschatology uses a language which isn’t intelligible to me, like I’m speaking in English and they’re speaking Mandarin, and neither of us even has a phrase book.

The other reason is that I honestly believe that premillenial dispensationalism produces a dangerous worldview. This is not a polite or absolutely inclusive thing to say, and I beg your pardon for that, but I believe this to be both true and deadly serious. The idea that one smart or lucky enough to be a believer should be spared difficulty while the nonbelievers deserve tribulation leads one to one of two equally dangerous conclusions- either we should stop caring about the plight of those whose creed is different from our own because God ordained them to suffer or else our only responsibility in this world is to rack up converts, put notches in our belts for the souls we (not God) have saved. I’ve not read the Left Behind books, but I have read exerpts of some of the nasty bits as well as interviews with the authors, and the tortures they describe being inflicted on nonbelievers(by Jesus himself, no less) is nothing short of despicable. It reminds one of the genre of film which includes the Saw movies (which just released its tenth film) in which one is meant to get a kick out of horrible violence being inflicted on people. It dehumanizes “the other”, making the most depraved, wicked sort of hatred not only palatable but fun. It is not hyperbole to say that this sort of “entertainment” harms ones soul, and when one doesn’t believe it’s entirely fictitious it can eventually make one vicious.

The most terrifying thing to me, as I suggested earlier, is that there are people who completely buy in to this theory and believe the State Department should making decisions based on it. I imagine there are people here who agree with me on certain matters of our country’s foreign policy and those who don’t. That’s perfectly fine. Reasonable people can disagree. It scares me witless, though, to think that there are some people with a lot of pull with regard to our policy in the Middle East who honest-to-God believe that the modern state of Israel has something to do with Jesus’ second-coming.

I’m sure there are some here who disagree with me with regard to education and energy and environmental policy. That’s fine, too. Reasonable people can disagree. It horrifies me, though, that there are people deciding what textbooks our children read who don’t believe in science and that there are lawmakers and bureaucrats who believe that the world is going to end anyway, Jesus is going to give us a thousand-year-long do-over, so our planet is more-or-less expendable.

So, what do we do? I believe it is time for reasonable Christians to start talking about eschatology again. We’ve been reticent to do so and have ceded that topic to a very vocal minority. It’s time for us to say that Jesus is coming again, but not to torture heathens. He’s coming to breathe new life where death reigns. It’s time to admit that we’ve made a hash of things, but we don’t get a millenial do-over so we’d better start being more virtuous and responsible and loving here and now. It’s time to start preaching the Resurrection again, because that message is a whole lot more compelling than anything a fundamentalist post-apocalyptic horror story can come up with.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I have a confession to make. I have long appreciated well-crafted art with whose apparent or even explicit message and underlying worldview I fundamentally disagree. That is, so long as those pieces remain niche, so long as they don’t enter the mainstream. This is not me confessing to being a “hipster”–that is, the sort of person who defines himself by liking marginal culture so long as it remains marginal. It is a much more pernicious sin–probably a combination of intellectual elitism, cultural chauvinism, and paternalism.

So, for example, I appreciate the plays of Samuel Becket, the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, and the early novels of Haruki Murakami, but the idea of somebody consuming such literature without the tools to reject their ideological implications worries me. I was, thus, of two minds when Annie and I went to see the University of Findlay’s production of Jean Genet’s Les Bonnes last month. On the one hand I was impressed that folks in the rural Midwest would produce such a thematically difficult, edgy play. On the other hand, I was a little worried about what an unsuspecting theater-goer, out for some light Sunday afternoon entertainment, might have taken away from it.

The thing that worries me about so much of what has remained inaccessible art, then, is not that it will be misunderstood if made more accessible, but that they will be embraced without a compelling, intellectually serious counterargument. This is not to say that the so-called “cultured despisers of religion” are more intellectually serious than Christian critics of culture (I generally find them to be less so) but that the latter generally don’t get jobs at The New Yorker or The Paris Review.

To cut to the chase, one of the prevailing modes of highbrow art and literature over the last three-quarters-of-a-century, has been an embrace of absurdism, particularly riffing on Albert Camus’ philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The basic idea, to grossly oversimplify it, is that the universe is meaningless and that there are three options: religious faith, suicide, or a revolt against meaningless by making one’s own meaning and finding some “happiness” in the midst of existential nothingness, and the absurdists almost invariably take this last approach.

I said that I can appreciate art on its own terms so long as it’s well made, even if I disagree with it, so long as it doesn’t enter the broader zeitgeist; so long (to fall back into my paternalistic sin) as it doesn’t lead the little ones astray. So you can guess my reaction to the tremendous box office success of last year’s Everything, Everywhere, All At Once–a beautifully shot, well-written and produced movie with humane performances, which nonetheless had at its heart this nihilistic philosophy. When we went to the theater to watch it, I thought both “this is a beautiful movie” and “this movie’s point is abhorrent.” One can hold both of these responses in tension, and perhaps I should have more trust in the average movie-goer to make the same distinction, but it does give me pause.

My concern is that the assumptions of such absurdist works has already and may become more and more the neutral position of people who would be better served by recognizing what we believe to be the truth of the matter, namely, that the universe is full of meaning (we don’t need to make it up for ourselves) and the human condition is not existentially hopeless, because there is a God who created it and us and promises us a life full of immortality, to quote The Wisdom of Solomon.

If you’re not as concerned as I that the former is becoming an apparently viable worldview for many, I’d simply note that a couple of weeks ago the Courier ran an editorial written by the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker. Parker claimed that we only live on after death so long as somebody remembers us, that she is making an effort to remember somebody who died without family or friends (itself an admirable thing to do), but that when she’s gone that person will be lost forever in the sands of time. Oh well. As often as the Courier runs letters to the editor written by cranks of various types I was certain that somebody would write in to take issue with this from a potentially embarrassing if at least putatively religious standpoint, but no. Radio silence. We can throw scripture grenades about all manner of hot-button social and political issues, but a vacuous op-ed leaves us gobsmacked.

Perhaps I should have written a letter to the editor about it, but I need to try to present myself as less of a crank than I may sometimes be. So, instead, the best response I can think of comes ready-made from this morning’s Old Testament Lesson, from the Book of Ecclesiasticus:

There are some of them who have left a name,
so that men declare their praise.
And there are some who have no memorial,
who have perished as though they had not lived;
they have become as though they had not been born,
and so have their children after them.
But these were men of mercy,
whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten.

Here is an apparent contradiction, which I contend is no contradiction at all. There are those who have died, whose descendants have died, and been entirely forgotten. Yet they are remembered. It is only a contradiction so long as the only people capable of remembering are mortal men, doomed to die. But there is another rememberer, whose memory is perfect. That is the Lord God, who remembers both the forgotten and his own mercy, and who promises eternal life.

So, two points by way of concluding. As we do every year, we will in a few minutes remember by name the faithful departed who are near and dear to us. That is a good and appropriate thing. C.S. Lewis, in response to those who claimed that we ought not pray for the dead gives a perfect, pragmatic argument:

Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden.

There are plenty who would quibble with this, no doubt. Just because something is intuitive doesn’t make it so, necessarily. It does, I think, mean the burden of proof rests squarely on those who suggest such a natural impulse is inappropriate, and lest I get too much into the weeds here, I’ll just say that I have not encountered a convincing repudiation of the practice.

In any event, we strive every year not to let names drop off this list. Many more names will be read than those which have been submitted over the last few weeks, and this is at least partly as a reminder that even after one has been “forgotten” to us, they are remembered by God, and the church strives to model that. But should a name inadvertently drop off through a typographic error (or should I be followed in several years by a Rector who cares more about liturgical brevity and efficiency) those names, those human beings marked with the seal of Baptism and claimed as Christ’s own forever, will indeed be remembered by the perfect rememberer, not just in some vague sense, but in the provision of eternal paradise.

Second, even before we get to the reading of the necrology, a new name will be entered into that greater and larger book, the Lamb’s Book of Life, when Lilly McConnell is baptized with water in the name of the Trinity and marked as Christ’s own for ever. This, too, is an act full of promise, the promise that as a member of Christ’s own household, she too will be remembered. Perhaps she will be among the famous men and women whom the writer of Ecclesiasticus praises, renowned for some great work or witness to the Kingdom of God as she grows (as we will promise to support her) into the full stature of Christ. Or perhaps she’ll turn out like the rest of us, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, always dependent on the love of God and his promise of salvation among the changes and chances and messiness of life in the midst of a fallen (if meaningful) universe. Either way, it doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the fact that she will belong to God, like all of us, that she will never be forgotten in that most important sense.

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, known and unknown. Because, as the hymnwriter Lesbia Scott just reminded us, the saints of God are just folk like me and you and Lilly and the people whose names we remember at the altar and thousand of thousands whom we may have forgotten but who nonetheless were marked as Christ’s own, and whose hope is full of immortality.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.