Lectionary blog for Nov. 15, 2015
Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Text: Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16;
Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25; Mark 13:1-8
At various times in the history of the church, dire circumstances have been interpreted as a punishment from God and a sign that “Angry Jesus” is about to put in an appearance, accompanied by the Archangel Michael.
May 19, 1780, was a strange day all across New England. An “eerie, smoky pall” covered much of the region. “The gloom was apparently quite stark, as birds returned to their roosts early, thinking it was night. Forest fires in Canada likely produced the darkness, but many in New England interpreted it as a sign from God.” (Kidd and Hankins, “Baptists in America.” Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 53)
Not only did many interpret it as a sign from God, they interpreted it as a bad sign, a sign that God was angry, that God was not only coming soon, God was coming full of judgment and anger. Many of the churches in New England, especially the more evangelical Baptists and Congregationalists, experienced a major increase in both attendance and conversions as people fled the wrath to come and hurried to “get right with God.”
One of the standard numbers sung by the gospel quartets that appeared at homecomings, revivals and such in the evangelical churches of my youth was “Jesus is Coming Soon.” It had a strange mixture of upbeat tempo and beat-down lyrics in four-part harmony:
Jesus is coming soon
Morning, or night, or noon
Many will meet their doom
Trumpets will sound
Trumpets will surely sound!
As someone said to me recently, “I’m not sure what Episcopalians mean when they say, ‘He will come again to judge the living and the dead,’ but I’m pretty sure they don’t mean THAT.” Well, if we don’t mean that, what do we mean? What are we to make of these lessons we read today? While it may be easy to slide by Daniel without paying much attention, ignoring Jesus is a bit more difficult, we have to give him a careful listen.
The first time we read through or listen to these texts, we are likely to hear violence, judgment and discord. We will recoil from words like “anguish,” “shame” and “contempt” in Daniel. We will pull away from images of disagreement and discord, of natural disasters like earthquakes and the wanton human destruction of war in the gospel. We especially dislike thinking about them as something necessary, something God is doing in the world.
But this is one of those times when the message of hope is a still, small, voice straining to be heard in the midst of a lot of bombastic noise. The real message here is that, as inevitable as those things are in a fallen world, God is in the midst of them, and us, with another message and another work going on. God’s hand, God’s word, is working “in, with and under” the harsh realities of the world to bring us the message and the reality of our deliverance.
Look at Daniel. Michael arises, there is a time of anguish but – listen: “at that time your people shall be delivered,” and “those who sleep in the dust shall awake.” The Psalm contains two of my favorite lines in the Bible, lines I want carved into my gravestone; “My body also shall rest in hope, for you will not abandon me to the grave” (Evangelical Lutheran Worship, Psalm 16: 9b, 10a). Hebrews rehearses the story of Christ as both our Great High Priest and the ultimate sacrifice and then says, “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23). And finally, in the midst of talking about all the bad things that will happen, Jesus says, “do not be alarmed,” (Mark 13:7) and reminds us that these are “birth pangs” (Mark 13:8), which means God is in the midst of all of this, bringing something new into the world.
The message today is one of hope and promise in the midst of doom and gloom, which fits the way our lives tend to work out. We live each day in the already but not yet hope of God’s new kingdom of love and grace. Though we know about God’s love in Christ, though we have felt that love, both in the world and in the church – we also spend a lot of time in the midst of confusing difficulty and occasional despair – both in the world and in the church. These Scriptures call us back to a fundamental trust in and reliance upon God as the cornerstone of our life and our life together – they remind us over and over that “the one who has promised is faithful.”
I have a Baptist minister friend who went to Vanderbilt Divinity School. He often reminds me that one of his professors there, Liston Mills, frequently said that every religious or theological question really boils down to just one, “Can God be trusted?”
In the midst of trials and tribulations, distress and destruction, can God be trusted to still care about us?
When we have failed to be good, failed to be the people God wants us to be, failed to be the people we know we should be, can God be trusted to forgive us and love us still?
When we come to the end of our days, when we close our eyes in death, can God be trusted to be there when we open them again in that undiscovered country? Will we go to sleep in death and wake up in Christ? Can the promises of God be trusted?
The message today is yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. The one who has promised is faithful; we need not be alarmed.
Amen and amen.
