The Church of the Ascension
November 18, 2007

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

Well….the time is here again.  Those who scour the scripture looking for clues about the end of time come out of the woodwork. It gives me the willies, and I dread it every year.  This passage from Luke is one of the ones used to raise the cry.  In a nutshell, many understand the message of this passage as “prepare yourselves, brothers and sisters, because the end is coming:  Jesus is coming back and boy is he mad!”  Volumes have been written, and fortunes have been made in the predicting of this event.  “Nations will rise against nations; there will be great earthquakes, famines, plagues, and all sorts of dreadful portents.”  According to this line of thinking, as human beings we have screwed it up so royally that only the coming of Christ again into the world in some great flash of final power can redeem the whole mess.

Who knows?  It is an amazingly popular notion.  Perhaps many of you believe, perhaps you have been taught this idea; but even if you believe that such an ending is that for which we all headed, the very scripture used as a signpost for the approaching end is clear that such speculation is part of the problem.  Listen carefully to what Jesus is recorded to have said in this passage.  When they asked him, “Teacher, when will this be,” he said to them, “beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say: ‘I am he’ and ‘the time is near!’  Do not go after them.”  Jesus seemed to be saying, “Don’t waste your time on this foolishness; figuring out when the time is near is not the point.  It simply distracts us from living fully in this life, and you will never be able to accurately predict it anyway.”

So if Jesus himself taught that it is a waste of time trying to predict when the end is coming, where does this near obsession through the ages come from?  This we know for sure: the idea underlying the hope for something like a second coming was not new to Luke or to the other narrators of the Gospel.  The early Christians adapted this notion from the Jewish dualistic thinking of the time that viewed the present age as so wicked and so deformed that only an action of God of cosmic proportion could introduce a new age of peace and joy and love.

Persecution and misery formed the air that Jews breathed during the life of Jesus.  Some way of accommodating this fact had to reached.  Believing that a dramatic reshuffling of power was to come was a way of doing so.  Once and for all, the wrongs, political and otherwise, of their lives would be set right.  Without being patronizing, surely their acceptance of this world view may have been their only option; and, of course, that affected their understanding of theology; culture always does.  But is that still our view of the world?  Do we believe that?  We know the guys holding the loudspeaker and the placard in Times Square believe it, but do we?  Further, because we care about believing properly, the question is do we have to believe that?

Now knowing and believing are different things.  Of course, I do not know; I admit that fully; but I can tell you that I do not believe that all of history is being hurled toward such a climax.  Further, I don’t believe that our creed or our orthodoxy requires that we accept only this interpretation of the fullness of God’s plan for us.  Like Luke and his contemporaries, we sometimes wonder if the hopelessness and despair of our age are not of such immense proportion that the end must be near.  Every age (and it seems to get more so the older I get) has on some level thought that its time was the worst.  Yet, enough centuries have passed between Luke and us for us to know that suffering exists in every age; and that bad times, times of disbelief and wickedness, do not necessarily signal the end of anything. If that were the case, the world would have long since come to an end.  Over time, we have come to understand suffering and dilemmas of all sorts and conditions simple to be part of what it means to be human.

So…if we question the whole end of the world bang, what do we believe about Jesus’ return in glory, that event to which we pay creedal adherence every week?   I can’t answer that for you; but I would be less than honest if I claimed to believe it literally.  I do not.  Such thinking rests on an ancient view of the universe to which we no longer adhere.  Does that mean that we no longer believe in the second coming?  It doesn’t for me.  In fact, I emphatically believe in it – perhaps now more than ever.  Let me tell you how.

We live in hope not of a single great moment of triumph but in a hope nourished and sustained by God’s constant love for us even in the depths of injustice, evil, and suffering.  God never gives up; God is always here.  The second coming is a way, for me, of talking about God’s presence in our lives.  The God in Christ we know and love never left us and never shall.  In the midst of pain we can feel ourselves cradled in the love of God, who suffers with us!  A God who shares our pain, rather than one who simply teaches through it, is exalted in my mind not diminished.

One of Walker Percy’s novels, The Second Coming, illustrates wonderfully the point I am trying to make.  The main character, Will Barrett, retires too early from his Wall Street law practice and moves to the country.  When his wife dies unexpectedly and he becomes deeply estranged from his daughter, he becomes involved in a series of meaningless relationships.  Concluding that his life is no longer bearable, he walks into a nearby cave to commit suicide.  As he enters the cave, he plunges through a dark hole, explodes on a hard surface, and blacks out.

But then he wakes up; he is not dead.  Having fallen through an air shaft that carries warm air into a greenhouse, he awakes to find a young woman who has escaped from a mental hospital.  She is rebuilding the greenhouse.  Though obviously emotionally ill, she gives him the gifts of water, time, and attention as slowly he mends.  In the end as their hearts touch, their relationship becomes for each of them a second coming.  We learn that she has a better handle on life than those who locked her up, and she gives Will a reason to live.  His heart leaping with secret joy, Will ponders: “What is it I want from her, not only want but must have?  Is she a gift and therefore a sign of a giver?  Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading behind this simply holy face?”

Yes, the Lord is here among us, becoming known to us in the most extraordinary and unexpected ways.  No doctrine could ever describe any better what I believe about the second coming.  Christ comes to us a second time, a third time, and again and again – as often as we breathe.  Each time the light of redemption shines in our hearts, Christ has come again.

Will there be some cosmic blow up some day that ends it all?  I don’t know….and in the end I don’t think it matters.  Jesus said not to listen to those who ponder when it will happen but to live this day as it happens.

In the name of God: AMEN.