| Rev. Jen Miller Hoffman |
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| December 3, 2006 |
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"There will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth dismay among nations, in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting from fear and the expectation of the things which are coming upon the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see the Human One coming in a cloud with power and great glory. But when these things begin to take place, straighten up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. Be on guard so that your hearts will not be weighted down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of life, and that day will not come on you suddenly like a trap; for it will come upon all those who dwell on the face of all the earth. But keep on the alert at all times, praying, that you may have strength to escape all these things that are about to take place, and to stand before the Human One."
O Come, O Come Emman/Rosemary’s Baby. And ransom captive/Linda Blair. Who mourns in lowly exile/George W. Bush is president of the United States... God have mercy! Who would have thought that this would be an Advent text? When Rev. Pat asked me to preach on Luke’s gospel the first Sunday of Advent, Corrine in her kerchief and I in my cap went to bed dreaming of a sweet nativity sermon. Something about angelic hosts singing Gloria, and pastoral fields sprinkled with sheep and shepherds, and a wee babe innocent and perfect and adored. Maybe a cattle lowing. Maybe a little drummer boy if I was feeling frisky.
So imagine my confusion and, frankly, horror, to find this freak show instead. It was as though suddenly the baby Jesus blinked glowing snake eyes and the angels start to fall one by one, bloody and dismembered, from the sky. I get a fair amount of my apocalyptic imagery from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I’m picturing Dawn at the pinnacle of the tower, hand pierced, blood dripping and tearing the veil between this world and hell. Demons streaking and shrieking through the sky. Or, for those of you with more classic tastes, Demi Moore and her soulless pregnancy, catastrophes wiping out the world as we know it in Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua. (Did anyone else notice that God’s apocalyptic map in that movie mirrored exactly Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy?)
It surprised me that any other religious organizations besides the Pentecostals would want to interject quite so much fear and dread into this season of Promise, Anticipation of Justice, Deliverance. This seems more the faith of my youth, calling the world to accountability, delivering a final and painful judgment on sin, invoking threat and punishment to promote righteousness.
This particular prophetic tone and the apocalyptic images are Pentecostal favorites, so apparently we don’t have the corner on scaring people: Isaiah 13, “See, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the earth a desolation, and to destroy its sinners from it. For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light”; Ezekiel 32, “When I blot you out I will cover the heavens and make their stars dark; I will cover the sun with a cloud and the moon shall not give its light. All the shining lights of the heavens I will darken above you, and put darkness on your land”; and my personal favorite – and, yes, that is sarcasm – Joel 2, “I will show portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” I don’t know how old I was before the sight of a harvest moon stopped paralyzing me at my bedroom window, convinced that the end of days was here and too frightened to move and see whether the rest of my family had been left behind, too, or just me.
Those who have read these texts as fearful and dreadful coming days, those who made movies like A Thief in the Night, threaten an indiscriminate and comprehensive torment, God vindicating, willy nilly, the rejected Son of Man, or Human One, and heroic acts of martyrdom on the part of the faithful saved. The end of time will be awful, and only if we are very lucky will the righteousness of God’s wrath allow a pre-tribulation rapture, sparing the faithful few as God has done for Noah, Lot, Israel, Rahab, Shadrach Meshach and Abednigo, and the chosen remnant.
I don’t know that I have to tell you that this threat-based, paralyzing fear-based theology doesn’t work for me anymore. Scaring me isn’t an effective way to motivate me anymore to “be good.” I boxed it up and put it in the attic right about the same time that I returned “spare the rod and spoil the child,” right around the same time that I gave back “Women, be silent in the church” and “as Christ is the head of every man, the man is the head of a woman,” right about when I threw out “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female, it is an abomination.” I do not and cannot and will not believe that God ever uses violence or threat of violence against life. That simply isn’t God.
And so I understand this text is an altogether different way. This text represents the symbolic and natural clash of two worlds orders: One human and based in privilege and status, invested in accumulating wealth and power, where the first shall be first and whoever wants to enter into the reign must first become well-respected and influential. The other order is divine and based fundamentally in love and peace, is invested in all of life coming to know our sacred worth and value, and is where whoever would be first in the kingdom of heaven must first submit to the needs of those who have no power or authority, who have nothing whatever material to offer in return.
That wee babe in Luke’s nativity isn’t about being innocent and pure. Children are the exemplar of the powerless. Children could be and were left on garbage heaps to die of exposure. Some of them were rescued from death to be raised as slaves. Depending on who was the head of household, any number of people could decide that it was no longer expedient to keep a child alive. And although Jewish parents did not engage in infant exposure, their children had no more position or social standing.
Did you think that shelter downstairs for queer and genderqueer homeless youth is just the right thing to do? A charitable act, a way to do good works and get writ in the Book of Life? That the pantry providing groceries to hundreds of families every month, providing a meal for hundreds of homeless, positive, trans neighbors mere obedience of the commandment to love one another as we love ourselves? That shelter, that pantry, the ministries of this community especially to those who have nothing, to those who are the Weeds and the Nobodies of This World, are the very incarnation of God’s reign.
In this interpretive world, we – those who will discard hierarchy, status, comfort – will be delivered! Only Luke makes this promise of all the gospel writers. “When these things begin to take place, straighten up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near!” We are delivered from the inevitable torture of God’s loving rule coming into contact with the violent dynasty of human conquest. We are delivered not from individual guilt and sin – certainly not for engaging in loving sexual acts with our non-“opposite sex” partners, not for coming into ourselves and expressing a gender identity different than that assigned at birth, not even for the more and less angry and destructive ways that we Are in relationship to one another – we are not delivered from individual guilt and sin but from the systemic evil of the world expressed by empires and tyrants who continue to invest in power-over, in an economy of debt and exchange, who broker life according to a currency that de-values and fears difference. Redemption, then, is not an individual and exclusive lifeboat but the promised arrival of God’s world order that brings “transformation, healing, and wholeness to all of life” (Ringe).
In this interpretive world, those who are left behind, those who are not delivered and who experience pain and torment endure the torture of seeing destroyed the scales and stock markets of power that they have spent lives establishing and securing. Those who are left behind endure the torment of having their hands pried away from those structures that demean and disregard human life. The apocalyptic imagery is concrete and literal. There are signs in sun and moon and stars: those bodies so fixed and iconic in the world as we know it will crumble. On the earth dismay among nations, in perplexity at the disappearance of every monolith and bedrock of human social hierarchy. The roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting from fear and expectation. Their pain is real. Their pain is disfiguring. Their pain is self-inflicted, clutching to the doomed standards of wealth and power and influence. And they, too, with all of life, will be redeemed, they will be delivered by the Advent of God’s great and loving and triumphal Common Wealth. The apocalyptic imagery represents the reality of the end of the world as we know it and points also toward symbolic expressions of birth and rebirth. “The created order will resemble again the moment before God’s voice shaped them and called them good. All is poised on the edge of space and time, between chaos and new beginnings” (Ringe).
Sharon Ringe states: “The biblical witness is clear: God’s plan for redemption is not in our hands,” and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, too, wrote that “Advent is like sitting in a prison cell. One cannot do anything except hope, pray, and wait; deliverance must come from the outside.”
Ringe reassures us that the point is not to be scared and lost in dire signs and warnings, nor is it to be led astray to calculate particular dates and events but to recognize and rejoice in our deliverance. God is faithful to God’s promise of salvation, and God’s gracious purposes are being worked out. Luke’s exhortation is neither a threat nor the conditions by which we will gain God’s approval or earn deliverance, but rather it illustrates the appropriate way to live in a world where God’s expansive and unconditional love has triumphed. As the sun and moon and stars are signs, we will ourselves be signs – testimony told in our words and faithful actions – of our place in the cosmic purposes of God.
Isn’t that sweet? I’d say that was a perfectly respectable re-interpretation of a childhood’s worth of threat and violence. Worthy of a good, queer, barely-Christian-certainly-unconventional (depending on who you’re talking to), Union Theological Seminary-trained liberal. I had thought originally that this is where I would leave you, that the take-home today would be a more-or-less feel-good message of Keep up the good work! Stay gold, Pony-Boy!
But I got my first inkling that it wouldn’t work when I realized that God could not vindicate the rejected Human One on a systemic evil because it is human participation that creates and perpetuates a system. To pretend otherwise is to end up in Stephen King’s Night Shift running from a murderous dishwasher. Dishwashers don’t kill people. People kill people.
Our promised deliverance which these signs portend is the promised arrival of God’s world order that brings “transformation, healing, and wholeness to all of life.” When we straighten our backs and lift our heads to encounter our redemption, we will greet a comprehensive salvation. And that means that all flesh will see it together – “good” or “evil,” whatever they mean half the time, across race, class, gender, sexuality, class, size, ability, nationality, faith, citizenship, health status, are you hearing universal here? because that’s what I’m talking about – all flesh will be saved by God’s triumphant loving and peaceful reign.
When we straighten our backs and lift our heads to encounter our redemption, we will greet a comprehensive salvation. And that means too our individual acts of brokenness, the ways large and small that we participate in violence and power-over, the ways we withhold comfort and de-value those who cannot reciprocate to build our social position and status, the ways that we participate in the creation of and perpetuation of a systemic evil. Our personal and private redemption is nigh, our individual seat on the lifeboat of salvation, because the assumptions and priorities that drive our acts of brokenness, the framework that supports our drive to be first of all, will crumble in the face of God’s triumphant rule of love.
I got my second inkling that it wouldn’t work when I read an article this week by Walter Wink. When I was in seminary, Richard Wong, one of my classmates, was always talking about Walter Wink. Walter Wink this. Walter Wink that. I had no idea who this guy was (frankly, I barely do now) and I kept thinking he meant Art Linkletter. I had some kind of “Jesus says the darndest things” sort of free-association thing going. Now I know just enough to read any article I can find of his on Textweek when I start preparing for sermons.
This article blew me away. It brought me right back to square one, right back to O Come, O Come Emman-Rosemary’s Baby. Right back to the baby Jesus blinks glowing snake eyes and the angels start to fall one by one, bloody and dismembered, from the sky. Demi Moore’s soulless pregnancy and God-slash-Reagan’s apocalypse-as-U.S.-national-foreign-policy.
Only this time in a good way! God have mercy.
Walter Wink writes in this paper about the positive power of apocalyptic, or what is called anti-apocalyptic, an idea developed by Cold War theologian Gunther Anders. The positive power of apocalyptic is “its capacity to force humanity to face threats of unimaginable proportions in order to” generate and galvanize efforts to avert disaster. In other words, facing the apocalypse may frighten us into action. Wink says, “The apocalyptic situation dwarfs our human capacity and reduces us to powerlessness. The negative response is passivity and despair; the positive is a superhuman effort and assault on the impossible.” As W.H. Auden wrote, “Nothing can save us that is possible. We who must die demand a miracle.”
Gunther Anders explains the bizarre imagery of apocalyptic literature by saying “Imagination is the sole organ capable of conveying a truth so overwhelming that we cannot take it in.” Whereas good, queer, barely-Christian-certainly-unconventional (depending on who you’re talking to), Union Theological Seminary-trained liberal optimists might want to deconstruct Luke’s apocalypse and tame it and make it reasonable, wanting not to scare us, wanting to provide a security for us, wanting to focus on the promise, Anders “insists that it is our capacity to fear which is too small and which does not correspond to the magnitude of the present danger... Therefore the anti-apocalyptist attempts to increase our capacity to fear. ‘Don’t fear fear; have the courage to be frightened, and to frighten others too. Frighten thy neighbor as thyself.’”
Wink and Anders compel me to acknowledge my impulse to numb myself a bit; they convict – there’s a good Pentecostal word – they convict me to own up to my desire somewhat to dope myself with visions of a peaceful nativity, perhaps claiming a triumphal loving rule prematurely, perhaps not properly anticipating its Advent. Whether the magnitude of the present danger that we face is a nuclear crisis, an AIDS pandemic, racial or ethnic genocide, whether it is loud and visible or quiet and insidious, the positive power of apocalyptic calls us to face the horror, to name it, and to repent and act, heroically, to participate aggressively in the new world order of God’s loving and peaceful reign.
MCC Binghamton believes in its core values that Emmanuel is a verb – that we do not wait passively for the reign of God to happen to us, we do not await deliverance but rather we act to participate in bringing it about. We act for justice and right relationship, and our actions – like the shelter downstairs, like the food pantry, like the Brooklyn Center for Anti-Violence Education bringing skills and empowerment to women, trans folks, and children to end violence, like the Poverty Institute at Union Theological Seminary working to bring together the voices of the academy and those most affected by poverty to end it – our words and actions are the incarnation of God’s reign.
Later on this month, no doubt, Rev. Pat and I will get the chance to talk more about what it all has to do with angelic hosts singing Gloria, and pastoral fields sprinkled with sheep and shepherds, and a wee babe innocent and perfect and adored. Maybe a cattle lowing. Maybe a little drummer boy if we’re feeling frisky? But for now I’ll leave us with the exhortation that Emmanuel is not so much a baby, not so much even a baby born in a manger on a pastoral, angelic night as Emmanuel is becoming like a child – identifying so strongly with the de-valued and despised that we become them. And becoming so terrified by our fate in the current social order that we act, heroically and miraculously, to avert disaster and bring down the reign of God, loving, peaceful, and triumphant.
Peace.
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