Eucatastrophe

Winter Person: An Album of Defiant Hope

Propers: The Third Sunday After the Pentecost (Lectionary 11), AD 2021 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.

We’re all familiar with catastrophe, are we not? It means overturning: an abrupt, unforeseen disaster. Things are going along quite well—or so we like to tell ourselves—when suddenly, catastrophe! The world turned upside-down. It is the fear that no matter how good we have it, we could lose everything in a moment. So much of modern life consists of insulating ourselves from, and insuring ourselves against, catastrophe.

But we may not be so familiar with a companion concept, the eucatastrophe. That little prefix changes the whole word. Eucatastrophe means a good overturning, a prosperous up-ending. Eucatastrophe is when things are going just awful, and then bam! Out of nowhere, joy! Out of nowhere, victory. It is the good resolution, the happy revolution, we never saw coming. And our only possible response is a gracious exultation. All was lost, and lo, we are saved.

Some would call this poor storytelling, a sort of deus ex machina. But in fact all our best stories, the ones that move us most deeply, culminate in eucatastrophe. Think of The Lord of the Rings. All is lost. Even the Ringbearer, the best of us, at last succumbs to the evil of the One Ring. But just then, just at the darkest moment, the brink of the abyss, some unseen hand uses evil to defeat evil, redeems the irredeemable, and the entire world is saved. And not just saved, but reborn! It is eucatastrophe; it is pure joy. And it is ours purely by grace.

Tolkien drew this from the Bible, from the Theology of the Cross, finding salvation, finding God, in the least likely place we would expect: the greatest light bursting forth from deepest darkness, not for merit but for mercy. The Bible is the story of Exile’s end, the story of our rebellion, our rejection, of the One who loves us so, who gives His only Son, who is the only Son, who goes all the way to hell and back, just for you, for love of you, to bring you home in Him.

Adam and Eve in the Garden eat forbidden fruit, reject the Tree of Life, to judge good and evil for their own. And what a bang-up job we’ve done of that, eh? But what does God do? How does God respond? Does He reject them? No! He leaves the garden. He goes with them into exile. And He promises that an offspring of the woman, the seed of the woman, will crush the serpent’s head. Eucatastrophe.

In the time of Noah, sin has spread through every human heart—“their every thought was only evil all the time”—so that we, who were blessed and tasked with care of Creation, now threaten to pull the whole world down with us. And what does God do? He sends a Flood, not to punish the wicked but to save world, to wash it clean, to give Creation second birth through water once again. Eucatastrophe! And what happens to the dead, to the sinners who have drowned? Christ descends to the dead to liberate them from death to life. Their every thought was only evil all the time—and Jesus died for them. No merit. Only mercy.

Abraham and Sarah, old and withered, “as good as dead,” childless, futureless, without legacy or hope, at the end of their stories—are called by God to be a family, to have a child. And that child, they are promised, will bless all the peoples of earth. It is utterly ridiculous, utterly fantastical, for a hundred-year-old man to father the father of us all. Yet this is how God works. Victory from the midst of humiliation. Life sprouting forth from the very jaws of death. The glory of inconceivable salvation.

Over and over again, eucatastrophe. 400 years of slavery in Egypt culminate in an impossible liberation, a litany of wonders in which the lowliest of peoples humble the greatest empire of the ancient world through no work of their own. Wandering desert wastes, they are given manna in the wilderness, water from the rock, impossible blessings, grace made manifest in geography and time.

When they settle in the Promised Land, and time and again fall back under the yoke of foreign domination due to their own faithlessness and sin, God raises up Judges, the unlikeliest of heroes, to set His wayward people free, to liberate each and every generation once again by grace. The Kings of Israel, by wickedness and war, bring Exile upon their people, disaster to the land, an utter overturning. And all seems lost for a time, does it not? The Temple, the land, the Covenant, the kings, all are swept away and the Israelites find themselves strangers in a strange land, bereft of all they’ve known of God.

Yet God follows them into Exile and promises Return. They find new births of faith in foreign lands, a deeper, richer relationship between God and His beloved, so that when they do come home, when the impossible promise indeed is fulfilled, they are reborn, an ancient people ever new, stronger than they were before in all the ways that count. From catastrophe, eucatastrophe; from disaster, new life. They are turned over as the soil, so that they too can produce good fruit.

Look no further than Jesus Christ. Here at last the long-awaited Messiah, here at last the Warrior-King so prophesied of old, comes as a wandering rabbi in off the Galilee, with fishermen’s hands and a Word of upturning. And He isn’t what we wanted. He’s not what we expected. He forgives willy-nilly as though He Himself were God. He refuses to pick up the sword, let alone call lightning down from heaven. And always with the foreigners, always with the sinners, always with Beatitudes that undermine the rich.

What a disappointment, isn’t He? Even Judas couldn’t get Him to fight, Judas who betrayed Him with a kiss, and tried to force His hand by night. So we do to Him what we always do with troublemakers, dreamers, and folks who don’t get with the program. We arrest Him, beat Him, humiliate Him. Show Him how powerless He can be. And after we’ve tired of torture and teasing, we murder Jesus, as slowly as soldiers know how, simply to watch Him writhe for a while. Then we drop a rock on top, and go back to a hearty sabbath meal.

Utter disaster. A murdered Messiah. And yet—and yet!—eucatastrophe. The very death we force-fed Jesus caused all of death to die, harrowed hell, toppled Satan from his throne, liberated the ransomed dead, and opened heaven to humankind. In Jesus, one has died for all, so that we who live no longer live for ourselves, but in everyone who is in Christ there is the New Creation! Behold: everything old has passed away, and everything now is new!

We have not accomplished this for ourselves. We have fought it every step of the way. We deserve fire and flood and disaster and death but God will have none of it. We can abandon our churches, but God will still be here, still be with us, still be for us. We can live for the belly and for Amazon Prime with nary a care given for the state of our own souls, let alone for the love and the need of our neighbor. And you know what? Still will Jesus die for you, still will Jesus rise for you, every single day. We simply could not kill His grace. We could barely slow it down

We have no idea what the Lord will secretly sow. We have no idea what new life He is even now producing for us from this earth. We find ourselves in Exile, in a society that believes only in pocketbooks and purchases, that gives far more thought to appetite and Amazon than it ever does to meaning, purpose, value, goodness, truth, and beaty. Religion, they claim, is letting loose one long, last, dying roar, even as the West worships the new old gods of silicon, silver, and steel. But we do not despair.

For today, in this place, with the words of Jesus Christ and our own two sinful hands, we will call heaven itself down to this earth. We will break eternity into time. And here, here on this altar, here on this table, God Himself becomes our bread whom we then take and eat—and thus become His Body. And thus become His Son. We may be tired or discouraged or cynical or bored. We may be looking for a calm within the storm, or perhaps new life among the dead. Whatever our weariness, now take heart! Here is eucatastrophe; here is Jesus Christ. Here is the grace that cannot be earned, the promise that cannot be broken, and the life that cannot die.

We are a people of defiant hope. And hope is a choice, not a feeling: the choice to live our lives as though all the promises of faith have already been fulfilled, and to place the love of neighbor far before our love of gain. Everything has already been accomplished for us in the love of Jesus Christ our Lord.

So when all seems lost or dark or dead, and we are strangers in this land, lift, O martyr, high your cross, for resurrection is at hand.

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