Photo by Wendy Bandurski-Miller on Unsplash
The End of the World: A Meditation on
Christian Apocalyptic Thinking
Teri Daily
a sermon on Luke 21:5-9
We live in uncertain times. Armed conflicts continue in so many areas of the world, the environmental crisis is hitting us harder each day, public impeachment hearings began this week and the divisions in our nation seem to be as hostile as ever. And then we get to church and all our readings have to do with the end of the world. So, is this mere coincidence or divine revelation?
In truth, the Christian church in the west has long wondered about “the end of time.” If you grew up in a church similar to the one in which I grew up, then you know what it means to have “rapture anxiety” – a term describing the distress that occurs when someone fears that Jesus has returned and they have been “left behind.” My family and my church never did anything to physically prepare for the end of the world. But some groups have done so.
There was the Great Disappointment of 1844, when William Miller (a Baptist living in upstate New York) used an interpretive technique on the Bible that allowed him to calculate when the second coming of Christ would occur. Many of his followers, known as Millerites, sold their possessions and waited for the rapture. When Jesus did not come as “a thief in the night,” the group began to divide into different sects, one of which ultimately gave rise to Seventh Day Adventists.
Then there are the modern-day “preppers.” Approximately three million Americans are “preppers” – they are preparing for an apocalyptic event which will change the world as we know it. There are numerous websites where one can learn how to survive an apocalypse – what clothes to pack and how to pack them, what kind of foods to stock, what medications and personal hygiene items are crucial to have on hand, fire building supplies, and what is needed to protect oneself from others. As one survival website urges, “Be prepared for aggressive behavior and don’t be surprised when even your closest friend turns on you! Some might armor up and pack a handgun, rifle, and extra ammo. Others prefer their collection of knives, and there are those who want to take after The Walking Dead’s Daryl Dixon with his impressive crossbow skills. It is ideal to test different weapons to establish which ones you are most comfortable with. You may also like to stock more than one type of weapon.”[1]
What we learn from these two groups is that, not surprisingly, people tend to react to predictions of the end of time with our two of our most common reactions to fear – fight or flight. The Millerites sold their possessions and withdrew from the culture (flight); survivalists prepare to fight anything that reduces their own chances of survival. Jesus understood these tendencies.
In today’s gospel reading from Luke, Jesus is watching as people gaze in wonder at the grandeur of the Temple – at its beauty, at the huge stones standing one upon the other. He tells those around him that the day is coming when all they now see will be destroyed. When they ask when this will be and what signs they should look for, Jesus lists the events that, throughout the Bible, signify periods of cataclysmic change – wars, famines, plagues, and earthquakes. But for Jesus, the point is not so much about the things that will happen as it is about the way the disciples should respond.
First, do not chase after false Messiahs – those who come promising certainty and deliverance and a game plan (one that often meets destruction with even more destruction). Jesus knew that sometimes when that which we have taken to be sure and certain – the center of our culture and “just the way things are” – has been destroyed, we are tempted to grab onto some other “certainty,” be it a false prophet, idol, or person with the best fight plan. Like preppers, we take our future into our own hands and try to secure our own survival. Jesus tells the disciples not to fall for this.
Second, the warning not to be led astray by others does not mean that the disciples are to sit and do nothing, withdrawing from an active life and just waiting for the end to come. This is the complaint Paul levels at the Thessalonians in today’s epistle reading. Evidently the church in Thessalonica expected Jesus to return at any moment, and some had fallen into a life of idleness – like the Millerites, they were just waiting for the end. The second letter to the Thessalonians was written to encourage members to continue living faithfully, fruitfully, with purpose. According to Jesus, this purpose is to bear witness. Even the persecutions and imprisonments that the disciples will undergo are opportunities to bear witness to a wisdom much deeper than our own.
Finally, our gospel passage ends with Jesus choosing what seems like a strange way to “reassure” someone. He tells the disciples, “You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.” In other words, Jesus tells them, to save your life you have to be willing to lose it. It is the logic of resurrection. Out of the hardest and most destructive of times, out of even death itself, God can and does bring life.
Does what Jesus say have relevance for our life today? Are we at the end of the world? Well, in a sense, yes.
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, we live our whole lives at the end of the world. He writes: “One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. … No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.” If we think of the “end” as an “edge,” I think he’s right. Every moment we stand on the brink of a new moment and we do not know what it will bring; every moment we stand at the edge and the next step we take will be on unmapped terrain. We are always living at the edge of our knowing. Sometimes we live in blissful ignorance of this fact; sometimes this reality is brought home to us by events in the world around us.
The disciples experienced the edge of the world, the end of their knowing, during their time in Jerusalem – they knew it in the mounting hostility of those in power and in the crucifixion of Jesus. The first readers of the gospel of Luke were also standing on an edge. They had recently experienced the destruction of the Temple, and now they had no idea how their religion and traditions would continue. And perhaps we, too, stand anxiously on an edge – at an end.
Standing at the edge of what we know, with all the uncertainty that it brings, can influence the way we think. Movies and novels, and even some images in our book of Revelation, portray the end times in violent, polarized ways – as a moral battle between good and evil, between “us” and “them,” as a triumph marked by rigid certainty in which the side deemed “morally correct” is (in the end) the only side remaining. Theologian Catherine Keller believes that this version of the apocalypse has seeped deeply into our Western way of thinking; we have subconsciously developed an apocalyptic way of thinking. We have developed a polarized “either/or” morality that self-righteously seeks the destruction of the other side, albeit with the best of intentions.[2]
So maybe, at this moment in time, this is the challenge: Can we stand at this edge of our knowing and not seek to destroy those who think differently from us, not seek the annihilation of our differences, but instead maintain relationship with one another across our differences? Can we conceive of a way that our division can be healed without the destruction of difference? I think Jesus shows us something about this way forward.
First, in the midst of uncertainty, we can avoid the temptation to immediately latch onto false Messiahs, idols of our own making, game plans that spell a path to victory. We don’t become fighters like one of the three million Americans who are prepping for a survivalist world. We don’t allow ourselves to become so ensconced in our own certainties and judgments and dualistic ways of thinking that we seek to destroy everyone in the world that we can’t bring over to “our side.” Instead, we stand in the midst of division with the ear of our heart open and ready to hear. We engage in conversations with those who hold views different from our own. After all, Jesus never asked someone to believe in him or to subscribe to his way of understanding before he sat down and ate with them.
Second, we also don’t throw up our hands and say “God is in control. It will all work out in God’s good time.” God is at work in the world, that we can trust. God is always at work in the world – opening up pathways to move forward, offering new possibilities where we thought there were only closed endings, bringing light into darkness, turning death into life. But God chooses to do this work through us and, I believe, God chooses to do this word through those of other faiths, too.
God works through us each and every time we bear witness to another way of being in the world – each and every time we stand with the stranger or refugee among us, our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters, the disabled, the poor and the hungry and the homeless, the women in our nation who experience sexual assault and receive low wages at disproportionate rates, those of other faiths and other skin colors, and those whose politics may be very different from our own.
Yes, this is in a sense the end of the world. Yes, we do stand at the edge of our existence, the edge of our knowing, waiting for what will be revealed. But we don’t wait, as the Millerites did, for that next world to arrive as a gift that comes down from the sky. Instead, we have to help to usher in the next world – co-creating with God the very future for which we wait.
I know that many of us are anxious and worried about the state of our world these days, and you may occasionally need a little distance. So watch some of the theatrics on TV if you’d like, scour Facebook for beautiful and uplifting quotes, and rest when your soul is weary. But don’t, like the Thessalonians, fall into idleness. There is much, much work to be done.
[1] “How to Survive the End of the World: Preparing for the Worst,” Survival Mastery website, http://survival-mastery.com/basics/survive-the-end-of-the-world.html#.
[2] Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). Many of the ideas in this book, though not explicitly expressed, underlie the thoughts and feelings of this sermon.
In truth, the Christian church in the west has long wondered about “the end of time.” If you grew up in a church similar to the one in which I grew up, then you know what it means to have “rapture anxiety” – a term describing the distress that occurs when someone fears that Jesus has returned and they have been “left behind.” My family and my church never did anything to physically prepare for the end of the world. But some groups have done so.
There was the Great Disappointment of 1844, when William Miller (a Baptist living in upstate New York) used an interpretive technique on the Bible that allowed him to calculate when the second coming of Christ would occur. Many of his followers, known as Millerites, sold their possessions and waited for the rapture. When Jesus did not come as “a thief in the night,” the group began to divide into different sects, one of which ultimately gave rise to Seventh Day Adventists.
Then there are the modern-day “preppers.” Approximately three million Americans are “preppers” – they are preparing for an apocalyptic event which will change the world as we know it. There are numerous websites where one can learn how to survive an apocalypse – what clothes to pack and how to pack them, what kind of foods to stock, what medications and personal hygiene items are crucial to have on hand, fire building supplies, and what is needed to protect oneself from others. As one survival website urges, “Be prepared for aggressive behavior and don’t be surprised when even your closest friend turns on you! Some might armor up and pack a handgun, rifle, and extra ammo. Others prefer their collection of knives, and there are those who want to take after The Walking Dead’s Daryl Dixon with his impressive crossbow skills. It is ideal to test different weapons to establish which ones you are most comfortable with. You may also like to stock more than one type of weapon.”[1]
What we learn from these two groups is that, not surprisingly, people tend to react to predictions of the end of time with our two of our most common reactions to fear – fight or flight. The Millerites sold their possessions and withdrew from the culture (flight); survivalists prepare to fight anything that reduces their own chances of survival. Jesus understood these tendencies.
In today’s gospel reading from Luke, Jesus is watching as people gaze in wonder at the grandeur of the Temple – at its beauty, at the huge stones standing one upon the other. He tells those around him that the day is coming when all they now see will be destroyed. When they ask when this will be and what signs they should look for, Jesus lists the events that, throughout the Bible, signify periods of cataclysmic change – wars, famines, plagues, and earthquakes. But for Jesus, the point is not so much about the things that will happen as it is about the way the disciples should respond.
First, do not chase after false Messiahs – those who come promising certainty and deliverance and a game plan (one that often meets destruction with even more destruction). Jesus knew that sometimes when that which we have taken to be sure and certain – the center of our culture and “just the way things are” – has been destroyed, we are tempted to grab onto some other “certainty,” be it a false prophet, idol, or person with the best fight plan. Like preppers, we take our future into our own hands and try to secure our own survival. Jesus tells the disciples not to fall for this.
Second, the warning not to be led astray by others does not mean that the disciples are to sit and do nothing, withdrawing from an active life and just waiting for the end to come. This is the complaint Paul levels at the Thessalonians in today’s epistle reading. Evidently the church in Thessalonica expected Jesus to return at any moment, and some had fallen into a life of idleness – like the Millerites, they were just waiting for the end. The second letter to the Thessalonians was written to encourage members to continue living faithfully, fruitfully, with purpose. According to Jesus, this purpose is to bear witness. Even the persecutions and imprisonments that the disciples will undergo are opportunities to bear witness to a wisdom much deeper than our own.
Finally, our gospel passage ends with Jesus choosing what seems like a strange way to “reassure” someone. He tells the disciples, “You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.” In other words, Jesus tells them, to save your life you have to be willing to lose it. It is the logic of resurrection. Out of the hardest and most destructive of times, out of even death itself, God can and does bring life.
Does what Jesus say have relevance for our life today? Are we at the end of the world? Well, in a sense, yes.
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, we live our whole lives at the end of the world. He writes: “One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. … No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.” If we think of the “end” as an “edge,” I think he’s right. Every moment we stand on the brink of a new moment and we do not know what it will bring; every moment we stand at the edge and the next step we take will be on unmapped terrain. We are always living at the edge of our knowing. Sometimes we live in blissful ignorance of this fact; sometimes this reality is brought home to us by events in the world around us.
The disciples experienced the edge of the world, the end of their knowing, during their time in Jerusalem – they knew it in the mounting hostility of those in power and in the crucifixion of Jesus. The first readers of the gospel of Luke were also standing on an edge. They had recently experienced the destruction of the Temple, and now they had no idea how their religion and traditions would continue. And perhaps we, too, stand anxiously on an edge – at an end.
Standing at the edge of what we know, with all the uncertainty that it brings, can influence the way we think. Movies and novels, and even some images in our book of Revelation, portray the end times in violent, polarized ways – as a moral battle between good and evil, between “us” and “them,” as a triumph marked by rigid certainty in which the side deemed “morally correct” is (in the end) the only side remaining. Theologian Catherine Keller believes that this version of the apocalypse has seeped deeply into our Western way of thinking; we have subconsciously developed an apocalyptic way of thinking. We have developed a polarized “either/or” morality that self-righteously seeks the destruction of the other side, albeit with the best of intentions.[2]
So maybe, at this moment in time, this is the challenge: Can we stand at this edge of our knowing and not seek to destroy those who think differently from us, not seek the annihilation of our differences, but instead maintain relationship with one another across our differences? Can we conceive of a way that our division can be healed without the destruction of difference? I think Jesus shows us something about this way forward.
First, in the midst of uncertainty, we can avoid the temptation to immediately latch onto false Messiahs, idols of our own making, game plans that spell a path to victory. We don’t become fighters like one of the three million Americans who are prepping for a survivalist world. We don’t allow ourselves to become so ensconced in our own certainties and judgments and dualistic ways of thinking that we seek to destroy everyone in the world that we can’t bring over to “our side.” Instead, we stand in the midst of division with the ear of our heart open and ready to hear. We engage in conversations with those who hold views different from our own. After all, Jesus never asked someone to believe in him or to subscribe to his way of understanding before he sat down and ate with them.
Second, we also don’t throw up our hands and say “God is in control. It will all work out in God’s good time.” God is at work in the world, that we can trust. God is always at work in the world – opening up pathways to move forward, offering new possibilities where we thought there were only closed endings, bringing light into darkness, turning death into life. But God chooses to do this work through us and, I believe, God chooses to do this word through those of other faiths, too.
God works through us each and every time we bear witness to another way of being in the world – each and every time we stand with the stranger or refugee among us, our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters, the disabled, the poor and the hungry and the homeless, the women in our nation who experience sexual assault and receive low wages at disproportionate rates, those of other faiths and other skin colors, and those whose politics may be very different from our own.
Yes, this is in a sense the end of the world. Yes, we do stand at the edge of our existence, the edge of our knowing, waiting for what will be revealed. But we don’t wait, as the Millerites did, for that next world to arrive as a gift that comes down from the sky. Instead, we have to help to usher in the next world – co-creating with God the very future for which we wait.
I know that many of us are anxious and worried about the state of our world these days, and you may occasionally need a little distance. So watch some of the theatrics on TV if you’d like, scour Facebook for beautiful and uplifting quotes, and rest when your soul is weary. But don’t, like the Thessalonians, fall into idleness. There is much, much work to be done.
[1] “How to Survive the End of the World: Preparing for the Worst,” Survival Mastery website, http://survival-mastery.com/basics/survive-the-end-of-the-world.html#.
[2] Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). Many of the ideas in this book, though not explicitly expressed, underlie the thoughts and feelings of this sermon.