Apocalypse When?. Jerry L. Sumney

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СКАЧАТЬ of festivals around the change of seasons and years, and this is no different in the church. The liturgical year marks both the internal cycles of time (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost), and the progression of time over weeks, months, years, centuries, and millennia. Eliade explained that through myths and rituals that give access to this sacred time, humans can protect themselves against what he called the “terror of history,” the fear that human existence is a pointless exercise ending in oblivion.15 In other words, sacred time always involves a return to a paradigmatic mythic period in the past in order to give meaning to the present and to bolster courage for the future.

      For Christians, the liturgy within our worship services gives us access to that sacred time. Both the cyclical and linear timelines converge because God is active in history, is active in the here and now, and will be active in the future—what the Greeks called eschaton, the end times. Every worship service in a sense proclaims the in-breaking of God’s kingdom into this world, bringing the fullness of time upon us. This means that the liturgy (and thus preaching) situates us in that liminal, in-between time which transcends past, present, and future, but is also very much a part of real time as well.

      How does God’s future manifest itself in our present time? There is another interesting Greek word called prolepsis, which means “anticipated.” When we participate in and lead the liturgy, we are in the midst of a paradox: Christ’s coming has already happened, but it has not yet come upon us in the fullness of the present moment. We can catch glimpses of it, but we only experience his return (called the Parousia) in an “already but not yet” way. Thus, we exist in a state of anticipation and expectation. Prolepsis allows the liturgy (including the sermon) to create hope because it anticipates the return of the resurrected Christ within this very time and place.

      Think of it this way. Ephesians 1:9–10, states: “[God] has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” In other words, time is moving forward to an inexorable point of Christ’s coming, the fulfillment of the kingdom of God at the eschaton. And because we believe that promise, it has an effect on the here and now, so that in our proclamation, in our worship, in our service, in our work for justice and peace, we are actually participating in the coming of God’s realm. We are part of Christ’s work of bringing the realm of God into the world—even when it seems the world is falling apart around us.

      Thus, it is through Jesus the Christ that past, present, and future come together. And we experience that mysterious convergence through the rituals of the liturgy where we read from ancient Scriptures, preach, and partake in ancient rituals (such as baptism and communion) that have been with us for thousands of years. As Hebrews 1:12 states: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.” The question for preachers and their listeners, however, is how to live in these “last days” when suffering seems to be increasing on scales of magnitude that are overwhelming.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel _______”(fill in the blank)16

“We are moving fast—nose-diving—toward ecological catastrophe and/or nuclear Armageddon. If we cannot pull out of this nose-dive the short term future can evaporate at any moment.”17 So warned feminist psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein in 1989. She continued: “And to pull out of it—to avert the death of living earthly reality—means mustering a huge, miraculous spurt of human growth and change: fast change; change within persons and within intimate groups, and change in the nature of the larger societal units (cultural, economic, political and regional) on whose level the developments we call historic take place.”18

Voices within the secular realm have joined in the clarion call for action in the face of impending apocalyptic doom. Thomas Friedman’s book, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How it can Renew America, attempted to tap into the can-do spirit of American ingenuity to avert the disastrous trifecta of global warming, the demands of the global economy, and human overpopulation.19 Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit called for a “global Marshall Plan” to respond to the global environmental crisis and even evoked religious language. “We have had a warning of the fate that awaits if we ‘bow before the accomplished fact.’ God and history will remember our judgment,” he solemnly intoned.20 Nearly thirty years later at the time of this writing, climate scientists have estimated that the time remaining is terrifyingly short for humans to radically curtail carbon emissions before a cascade of catastrophic events threatens all life on this planet.

      In many ways Creation itself is already in the eschaton. This is especially true for the strip-mined mountains, decimated forests, and other devastated areas of Earth for whom “the end” has already happened. The preacher working from an eco-hermeneutical reading of Revelation might consider Earth and Earth’s other-than-human creatures as “hearers” of the sermon even if they are not present per se in the human congregation. Because, in fact, the “end of the world” has already come to pass for countless extinct species whose history has come to an end at the hands of human beings. Doomsday has come and gone for the North American Passenger Pigeon, Australian Toolache Wallaby, Indian Arunchal Hopea Tree, and St. Helena Olive, not to mention untold numbers of plant and animal species whose final dying members passed into oblivion unnoticed and unmourned by human eyes.

      And what of the impending apocalypse for the hundreds of plant and animal species currently facing threatened or imminent extinction? Countless species languish in prisons of shrinking habitat, poisoned waters, and diminishing food supplies. We have ghettoized Creation, delineating by way of concrete and metal boundaries where greenery, fur, and feathers can and cannot live, blocking them into increasingly smaller areas of living that isolate and cramp them in what had once been vast and free-ranging bioscapes. Meanwhile, human suffering from the effects of climate disruption manifests in catastrophic storms, rising sea levels engulfing homes, droughts and blighted crops, wildfires raging through entire communities, and wars over diminishing resources.

      This means that when we read John of Patmos’s vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Revelation, we can see that this is not some otherworldly portent of impending doom. They represent real human riders subjugating animals, ecosystems, and humans (especially those of color and those in poverty) in the service of conquest, war, famine, and death. Humans may delight in (and profit from) the publishing success of apocalyptic fiction such as the Left Behind series. But Earth watches the drama unfold in real time, its future uncertain, save for the knowledge that suffering is happening right now and will continue to happen for generations to come. Thus, the preacher’s proclamation about the certainty of God’s presence, care, and desire for justice is all the more necessary.

      Not Our First Apocalyptic Rodeo

      While the writers of apocalyptic texts did not face the global scale of environmental, socioeconomic, cultural, military, and institutional pressures that, for us, seem to have reached their breaking point, they did face their own version of a cataclysmic collision of these forces. Sumney’s descriptions of the circumstances faced by the oppressed people to whom these apocalyptic texts were written will be found throughout this book. As we will see, whether at the mercy of ancient rulers or our current neoliberal-industrial-capitalistic-military complex, those caught in the totality of empire find themselves desperate for release. We can understand, then, the need to turn to apocalyptic texts and the feelings that these texts want to address—hopelessness, panic, foreboding, frustration, helplessness, and perhaps even suicidal despair. These are the feelings that the preacher will need to be aware of when crafting sermons that address biblical passages about end times and the coming of divine judgment.

      Yet the preacher will also recognize that not all people experience these feelings. Some try to numb them through artificial, chemical, or technological escapes. Others just appear to be happily oblivious—especially СКАЧАТЬ