The End in Mind

Propers: The Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 33), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New are one and the same. This has seemed to some contradictory.

In the Old Testament God is presented as often violent and volatile, while in the New He’s all love and grace and mercy. How is it that the same God who threw the armies of Pharaoh into the Red Sea also prayed for His own murderers from the Cross, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do”?

The differences between the Testaments have been of course exaggerated. The Old Testament is full of mercy and grace and love, of God’s care for orphans and for widows, of God’s compassion for peoples claiming not to be His own—while the New Testament has some fairly frightening passages about judgment and the consequences of our own merciless transgressions.

What changes throughout the millennia of biblical history is not God mellowing with age but rather the expansion of our vision. When we were warring Bronze Age tribes, every setback, every tragedy to the clan, was taken as God’s act of vengeance. If the world seems fickle and cruel, as it so often does, then God may seem that way as well.

But throughout the history of the Bible, God is ever coaxing us to see the bigger picture, the broader meaning. Maybe it’s not just about us. Maybe it’s not just about Israel. Maybe it’s not just about the clan or the tribe or the nation or the church. Maybe our concern should be as much for others—other peoples, other faiths, other worlds—as it is for ourselves. Maybe then, in our compassion, in our selflessness, we might actually be able to glimpse the world as God sees it, as God loves it.

When we love God with all we are and love our neighbors as ourselves, the tragedies, the terrors, and the turbulence of life don’t simply vanish. Suffering is real, after all. But they lose their power to consume. Ultimately, we find, God is in control. He doesn’t will our suffering. He doesn’t make bad things happen. In point of fact, He can’t. God can’t do evil, otherwise He wouldn’t be God. But the big picture is that He loves us, He forgives us, and He never ceases to call us all home in Him.

If that then is God’s endgame—if that truly is the big picture of life, the universe, and everything—then that changes our vision. It opens our hearts. If love, forgiveness, and new life in Christ Jesus really are the beginning, the middle, and the end of our being, then that changes how we see the world, and our suffering, and our neighbor in his need.

A good author will always tell you that the end is the most important part of the book. A great ending redeems a mediocre tale, because the ending transforms all that went before it. The end of the book changes what we’ve read, how we interpret it, what we’ve experienced. Because “end” doesn’t just mean termination. It means the purpose, the meaning, the goal. The end of the book is the reason that we read anything in the first place. And just so, the ending of our own stories—the story of each and every human life—makes sense of life itself.

This is what people get wrong about the apocalypse. We think it means the end of the world, when everything goes down in flames, like that poem by Frost:

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice.

But that’s not the point of apocalyptic literature at all. Apocalyptic literature, in the Bible, always arises amidst a crisis. When everything’s going to hell in a handbasket and the world as we know it comes apart at the seams, we want to know: Is this it? Is this the apocalypse? Is this the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper?

And the answer of the Bible is always, “No!” No, this isn’t the end. No, this isn’t the last word. It’s not going to be war and fire and zombie hordes. It’s not going to be Surtr with his flaming sword bringing about the nihilistic prophecy of Ragnarok. What we think is the end is only ever the beginning. Our God is forever calling forth something from out of nothing, redemption from out of despair, and life from out of death. The tree dies, but thereby sprouts the seed. The fire consumes, but thereby fertilizes the ground.

In God there is always a new beginning. In God there is always new and eternal life.

Someday the world will end, but not in the way we expect. It will end but fulfilling its purpose, by coming at last to the meaning, the resolution, which makes sense of all that went before. No one knows the day nor the hour save God alone in Heaven. Thus any attempt to predict the Second Coming of Christ has rightly been met with ridicule.

Yet we have been told, we have been promised, that when it does come it shall be the greatest of all possible endings. Death shall be no more. Pain shall be no more. Every tear shall be dried, every child raised up, and every godawful tragedy will somehow at last be made right.

And there shall be perfect mercy, perfect justice, perfect goodness and truth and beauty forever—beyond space, beyond time, beyond our ability to comprehend. And all, at long last, shall be revealed. Pure light, pure truth, no more shadows in which to hide—which is, after all, what “apocalypse” really means. It means revelation. It means the end that makes the whole journey worth it and infinitely more.

So what, then, shall we do, my brothers and my sisters? How then shall we live? Having been promised an ending like no other—that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well—should we then abandon our posts? Should we ignore the needs and the sufferings of this fallen world in our confidence that God at the last will set all things right? Should we, in short, sin that grace might abound the more? To this we say, in the words of St Paul, meganoito—hell, no!

Setting our vision upon the love of God in Christ—seek ye first the Kingdom of God—we are thus liberated for the work set right before us. The big picture frees us to address the immediate need: the beggar at our gate, the hungry in our town, the sinner in the mirror. The end makes sense of the work, invigorates us to continue. Because for as often as we fail and fall short of the mark—and how we all do fail, each and every day—nevertheless our victory is assured in Christ Jesus, who has already defeated sin and death and hell and arisen in glory to heaven that God at the last shall be all in all.

I leave you with a reflection by Fr Ken Unterer upon the murder of St Oscar Romero. It is called “Prophets of a Future Not Our Own.”

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the Church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.