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4.19.2020The Myth of the Apocalypse
Dear Lord Jesus, preacher
said you are coming real soon.
Now would be a good time.
—The pre-math test prayer
of all Evangelical children
Like all children raised
under the apocalyptic cloud of Dispensationalism, I spent a great deal of my
childhood alternately fearing and hoping for the end of the world. I was a bad
child raised by good parents, so the Rapture was particularly troubling, as I
knew they would go and I would not.
Later in life, I turned the
fear into a standard Chicago-based joke. “People say that no one can predict
when the Lord will return. This is not quite true: I know exactly the place and
quite a bit about the timing. It will be at Wrigley Field. The Cubbies will be
about to win it all – top of the ninth, two outs, two strikes against the
batter. Then the trump will sound, and Jesus Christ will land on second base.
Because the Universe cannot allow the Cubs to win the World Series.” The repeated
telling of that joke, added a special layer to the terror-joy I experience on
November 2, 2016 when the Cubs won it ALL. When Anthony Rizzo caught the final
throw and tucked that ball safely in his pocket – I was liberated from several
curses
.
In my previous career as a semi-pro
religionist, I sometimes encountered Apocalypse rooters. These folks bill
themselves as proponents of glory. In my experience, they are often a bitter
and shrinking remnant of a narrow theology of judgment. When they see that the
world is not only failing to embrace their world-view but rapidly leaving it in
the dust, they hunker down into an attitude: “Just you wait and see. Jesus is
going to return, and then you
will find out how wrong you are!” Sometimes they pine so much for Armageddon
that they actually do things to try to make it come. They say “Come Lord
Jesus!” but what they mean is, “Come and prove me right!”
Then I discovered that
Christians do not have a lock on Apocalypse-rooting. I have met
environmentalists so frustrated that they rooting for Global Warming or some
other enormous disaster to prove them right, to bring dismay and destruction to
the deniers. Their Fundamental judgment and ire can match any
fire-and-brimstone preacher. They predict and pray for a new heaven and a new
Earth, where the remnant will survive and return to an imagined peaceful,
joyful, agrarian way of a past - that never existed.
What all world-enders miss
is the fact that apocalypses are as common as dirt. When Jesus wept over
Jerusalem and predicted its doom, He wasn’t being especially prophetic.
Anyone with eyes could see that Roman train wreck coming. Foreseeing the apocalypse
of Jerusalem wasn’t exactly hard.
Homo sapiens seems to be good at wiping things out. Met a Neanderthal
recently? A Javan tiger? A West African black rhino? A member the Yuki Tribe in
California? We have seen the Rwandan apocalypse; our parents saw the Nazi
apocalypse. Maybe we learned this from Mother Nature – she did a pretty good
job on the dinosaurs. And now we are given a special lesson in viral Pandemic.
Tiny things you can’t see can wipe out communities. Name an epoch, century, or
continent that is apocalypse-free. Can’t.
The other thing that the
doom-sayers miss is that life so often finds a way through. Have you ever
witnessed a personal apocalypse – that of a serious addict who completely flames
out, then finds recovery, sobriety, and life? I have; it is a glorious thing.
Flattened cities build on the rubble. Ozzy Osbourne is walking around today
with Neanderthal DNA. We are told that the birds we feed in the park are
descendants of dinosaurs. Destroyed matter turns to energy and back again.
Stars and planets die and are born again. On some cosmic level, nothing is
lost. God built this into the universe so we would understand, and have hope.
Hope even beyond death.
Existence is hard. It is so
tempting when facing the apocalyptic to pray for escape, to pray for the
judgment of the stupid and mean. We all do it. But this isn’t Life’s way. Life
works through the stupid and the mean (including you and I) to find a way
forward. There is no escape from the tribulations of the hard work of progress.
Quakers have made a
theological suggestion about this: the idea of Christ, come and coming. I
believe that Jesus of Nazareth was The Christ. But you do not have to believe
that to see the Christ spirit in Him. The Christ spirit is simply Love, given
place and breath. This Spirit pops up everywhere, often in the most unlikely
places. It is most crystalline and transcendent in the ugliest of surroundings.
This Spirit is so strong that it cannot be put down. It is so pervasive that it
permeates all that is. The Anti-Christ is the futile attempt to kill Love. We
all have the choice to express Christ or anti-Christ with every breath and
every deed. When we cooperate with Christ and express that Spirit, we incarnate
it. Again. Perpetual Christmas Day. There is and will be no second coming of
Christ. What there is and will be are the infinite comings of Christ.
I hear the dread hoof beats
of horsemen as often as I am tempted to sin. I find Jesus at my side, sliding
off his white charger as often as I need Him. Together we root out the
anti-Christ in my soul and then move the lines forward. I find Christ
everywhere. I take the process of Christ-finding as far afield as I can, to the
places and people that the fear-peddlers judge. I hear the trumpet sound a
dozen times a day. Daring me to explore the depths of the Divine. Challenging
me to make God real to the very edges of my world.
Calling me to glory.
.
4.12.2020The Good Shepherds
(This post was written for Easter Sunday in the First Spring of the Covid pandemic -New York had Morgue trucks and Italy was hit exceptionally hard. Most of Christendom stayed home from church.) We should not have to, but sometimes we must state the plain thing.
There is one Good Shepherd, and many lesser shepherds. And there are wolves who wear a murdered sheep's skin as their clothing as an attempt to fool other sheep.
Sheep can be very stupid.
But to tell the shepherd from the wolf is not hard.
And the examples of each are plentiful.
This Easter morning the sheep should all be safely in their folds with their lambs.
Good shepherds have encouraged this, and stand at the gate protecting.
Wolves have called them out into a dangerous field.
Wolves have no patience, wolves don't like to be challenged.
They howl. A lot.
They yell.
"You are not the boss of me!"
"God is my special buddy and will contradict all the rules of God's very own natural world for me!"
"Anyone who doesn't agree with me - doesn't listen to me - is obviously not a buddy of God."
What they really want, of course is to skin some more sheep. Because too much is never enough. And Easter Sunday is their biggest day of the year. Biggest crowds, fullest offering plates. The most people looking at them, and listening to them, while they howl their heads off.
The good shepherds are standing by bedsides and in doorways, and are quietly talking on phones. Their patience is long. They do not yell. They do not lie, but they do comfort.
In Italy, many dozens of priests have died, and more will die.
Hundreds have come out of retirement to do the hardest work in the wards of contagion.
When they know it will very likely kill them.
This is one such shepherd's testimony.
“I blessed him and absolved him from sins, he squeezed my hand tightly
and I stayed there with him until his eyes closed,” the Priest said. “And then I said the prayer for the dead, and then I changed
my gloves and continued my rounds.” (NYT)
Multiply by thousands.
The Priest knows, what I know, and what you know; that God will receive their souls to God's breast with love and care - with or without the Priest. But the Shepherd knows his flock, and when they were born - the church was there. And when they married the church was there. And they have always believed that when they died, the church would be there. And to deny them that would be a betrayal of the worst order.
So the shepherd makes the round of his dying sheep. And lays down his own life.
It is so easy to tell them apart.
.
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