Proper 28B 2006 Daniel 12; Mark 13:14-23

There are only two weeks left in this Church Year B. Next Sunday is Christ the King Sunday, also known as the Last Sunday after Pentecost. And the sometimes momentous calendar year 2006 ends shortly thereafter. A new Church and a new calendar year will have begun. So in a real sense we are in both a time of last things, an end time, and a new liminal time, a threshold time of new beginnings.



“There shall be a time of anguish,” God said to Daniel. But at that time your people shall be delivered.” “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” wrote the author of the letter to the Hebrews. This is a phrase too often taken by our fundamentalist brothers and sisters to mean something like “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.” “But we are not among those who shrink back and so are lost,” Hebrews continues, “but among those who have faith and so are saved.”



Scary stuff. It’s apocalyptic language. The technical term for such writings is apocalypticism. It’s scattered in bits in pieces throughout most of the Bible but large doses are found in the books of Daniel in the Old Testament and in Revelations in the New. The church has had to deal with it for two millennia now.



Apocalyptic literature is concerned with the end of human history, an end described as characterized by

cosmic upheavals and final judgment. The Greek word apocalypse means “revelation” – in fact the original Greek title of Revelation is Apokalypsis Jowannis, the Apocalypse of John. Apocalyptic writing is highly symbolic and was intended to provide encouragement to the faithful during

times of trial in both Old Testament and New Testament periods.



Apocalyptic texts can also be used to reflect current issues and situations. The apocalyptic writers were successors to the prophets, who repeatedly warned of God’s judgment and the coming day of the Lord, bringing a new creation and justice for survivors of the great final cataclysm. You can hear emphasis and echoes of this in the sermons and writings of the more extreme fundamentalist evangelical Christians and their leaders – but they usually reserve the future beyond the end times only for those who subscribe to their own narrow beliefs without question.



And that’s what our lessons and gospel today are about: the end times or maybe even the end of time. Who knows the hour or the day? When one considers the wide band of unrest, uncertainty, increasing tensions from Israel to North Korea, the open warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq whose end time is not at all clear, certainly these seem to fall into the wars and rumors of war about which Jesus spoke.



And there has been a strange malaise throughout this fair land for many years. We Americans, blessed by a gracious Lord more than most, we are beset by mistrust, by litigation, by special prosecutors and congressional investigations, by the threat of foreign and home grown terrorist, and by legislative stagnation from overly partisan politics.



Almost two decades ago, the distinguished Washington Post commentator Haynes Johnson spent two years traveling around these United States to take the pulse of land and people. He was deeply disturbed.



He wrote: Nothing in my previous experience of traveling across America prepared me for the depth of feelings – the fear, the doubt, the anger, the rage I encountered everywhere. Strangest of all was a feeling of bewilderment, a troubling sense that the assurances of the old America were passing and that the uncertain new America emerging promises to be far more unsettling.”



Writing at a time of Waco, Ruby Ridge, the first World Trade Center attack, Oklahoma City, extremist movements of right and left, and so on and on and on – how much more despairing might he be today. For those who are bent on seeing the signs, the desolating sacrilege can be seen everywhere, especially where other people, not so apocalyptic by nature, disagree with them. And for many, perhaps most of us, 9-11-2001 seems the main desolating sacrilege here in our midst. But the usual ones haven’t gone away: drug addiction, alcoholism, homelessness, poverty, the beginning of an almost endless list right here – plus human slavery and worse abroad. Those of us who are older have lived through the almost half century long Cold War and its attendant fears of massive thermonuclear exchange as the veritable fires of hell on earth.



Lots of sectarians and fundamentalists of every persuasion—from the authors of the Left Behind books to the Islamic extremists—endlessly offer up scenarios for the end time. Anyone who knows anything about church history—or history in general -- is aware that the signs of the times are difficult to read and that the doomsayers of the apocalypse have been wrong from the beginning. There

have been too many false prophets and false messiahs to count. There are too many extremists who believe that only they know the truth, that only they can read the signs correctly – and some who try to tear our church apart, our country apart, the world apart.



In Time Magazine on October 6, 2006, Andrew Sullivan, commenting on the rise of fundamentalism and why embracing spiritual doubt is the key to defusing the tension between East and West, had this to say:

“There is, however, a way out [of this destructive polarization]. And it will come from the only place it can come from--the minds and souls of people of faith. It will come from the much derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews and humble Christians. The alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to say it is, is the great lie of our time.”



Perhaps some day there may be a true prophet, but until then we must simply “Stay awake!” Love God and love our neighbor. And live in the present time as if Jesus were coming today.



AMEN



Note: drawn from Synthesis for Proper 28B 2006 and a sermon preached for Proper 28B 1997 and revised/updated.

Wicomico Parish Church
PO Box 70
Wicomico Church, Virginia 22579