Episcopal Church of the
Incarnation
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28 B)
Daniel
12.1-3 Psalm
16 Hebrews 10.11-25
Mark 13.1-8
May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart,
that I may rightly and truly proclaim His Holy Word. Amen.
Apocalypse. That’s not a “friendly” word. When we think of an apocalypse, we think of
an overwhelming event, of doomsday. This
popular usage is found in the title of a current exhibit at the Smithsonian
Institution, which is about the “apocalypse” of WWII. But, if you look up the word in a dictionary,
that’s no higher than the fifth alternate definition of the word, as in
“any universal or widespread destruction or disaster”. All the prior four definitions relate to what
the word means from the Greek: “revelation” or “uncovering” or
“disclosure”. That’s the way the word is
used in the Bible, and this causes some confusion. For example, you’ll sometimes hear people
claim that Catholic bibles don’t include the book Revelation. They’re ignoring (if they ever knew) the fact
that in a Catholic bible the book is called Apocalypse, whereas in
Protestant bibles the title is the same word translated into English.
In our
lessons today, both the prophet Daniel and Jesus start to talk about
revelation, about “pulling the curtain aside” to describe what happens when the
world does end, using words like “anguish” and “birth pangs”. Our lessons only start the descriptions,
which go on at some length and are, of course, amplified greatly in Revelation. The end of the world is a popular topic,
indeed. I wish I had a small fraction of
the money now being made from books about how the world is supposed to end in
2012. I was recently standing in a book
store in Jackson when a man about my age came up to me (I was wearing
clericals) and asked whether it was true that the world would end in 2012. I asked him what made him think this might be
true, and he showed me a magazine which said that the Mayan calendar predicted
this as the date of the end of an age, an end in which the earth would be
remade.
My first
thought was to wish I wasn’t then wearing a clerical collar. My next reaction was to notice that three
other people had turned toward us, and were attentive on what I had to
say. I told the man that I did not look
to the Mayan calendar to reveal truth to us, particularly in how this calendar
is “explained” by people out to make a buck, and so I wasn’t really worried about
a particular date. I then went on to say
that when the world ends doesn’t matter; that we are to live in such
wise as to be always ready for our Lord to call us into another life. The man and the bystanders seemed happy with
my answer (which I’ve abbreviated here), although maybe the cashier was annoyed
that the man didn’t buy the magazine.
The lessons
today are a little problematical because they are too abbreviated. When Jesus speaks about the end times in
Mark’s Gospel, He goes on for all of chapter 13, and here we just have nine
verses. Jesus goes on to be pretty
specific about the trials of the end times, but then, despite the fact that
He’ll be killed within a week, Jesus assures us, “[T]he one who endures to the
end will be saved” (Mark 13.13). He
warns that in the end times false prophets will arise (Hmm. Can you say 2012?), but that He “... [has]
told [us] all things ...” (Mark 13.23).
God will gather His elect (Mark 13.27), and we are to watch, for we “...
do not know when the time will come” (Mark 13.33).
We do not
know the time, whether this is the time when we will die or the time when the
world will end. I’m reasonably
healthy. My statistical life expectancy
is for about another three decades, but I could always be an outlier in the
statistical spread. The point is not how
long I live, or how long any of us lives, or how long the world survives. The point is whether or not we are living in
such a way as to be ready for our Lord.
Do we, in fact, in the words of the Collect, “... hold fast the blessed
hope of everlasting life, which [God] has given us in our Savior Jesus Christ
...”?
That’s what
this is about. It’s not about a set of
rules, about how we are to live. We are
called to holiness, but no amount of good deeds will save us: Jesus will.
We are called to holiness, but our sins will not damn us. We will damn ourselves if we conform
ourselves to a pattern of sin and reject God.
Jesus tells us that it is the “... Father’s good pleasure to give [us]
the kingdom” (Luke 12.32). It is more
likely that we will reject God if we live in sin. It is more likely that we will not be
ready for our Lord, we will not hold fast the blessed hope–or any
hope–if we conform ourselves to sin, but if we live our lives in the hope of
salvation because of our own good works, through our own observance of the
“rules,” then we can claim to know our Lord no better than did the chief
priests who plotted with Judas Iscariot.
So how do
we then live? How do we hold fast the
blessed hope? How do we come to know our
Lord better? We do so by paying
attention to what He has revealed to us, by the revelation (the apocalypse)
of His will. And where do we find
this? Where do we find God’s will set
forth; find “all things”? In Scripture. The same Collect which prays that we may
embrace Jesus Christ first tells us that God has “...caused all holy Scriptures
to be written for our learning,” and then prays that we might so “... hear
them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them ...” that what we hold fast
to is not simply a rule of life, not simply a self-protecting vision that
things will be OK, but a living God who breathes His will for us in His living
word.
That’s the
difference between worrying about 2012 and living in joyful expectation of our
Lord. If we’re worried about 2012, we
are worried about the end. When we pay
attention to what God reveals to us in His word, then we know that at His
coming Jesus brings not an end, but a glorious beginning, a new birth in which
we will (in the words from Hebrews) “... have confidence to enter the
sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for
us through the curtain ...[that we may] approach with a true heart in full
assurance of faith ... for he who has promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10.19-23). Then we can pray with the psalmist, “I have
set the Lord always before me;
because he is at my right hand I shall not fall” (Psalm 16.8).
Jesus
speaks of the birthpangs that herald the end of the age. He speaks of this knowing that He will soon
be killed, and knowing that between us and judgment He places His
passion, cross, and death (Book of Common Prayer, Burial I, 489). He places His glorious resurrection and
ascension. He intercedes and reigns in
heaven to grant mercy and grace to the living, pardon and rest to the dead,
everlasting life and glory to those who turn to the Lord, who, in Daniel’s
words, “shall shine like the brightness of the sky” (Daniel 12.3).
Hold
fast. Let us hold fast to the confession
of our hope (Hebrews 10.23). In holding
fast we live conforming ourselves to that which is good, to that which is of
God. In the words of Hebrews, we
“... provoke one another to love and good deeds, ... encouraging one another
... as [we] see the Day [of the Lord] approaching” (Hebrews 10.24-25). Hold fast, cling to that which is of
God; proclaim it. Proclaim that the hope
to which we hold is the one hope offered to all. This hope has a Name: Jesus.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it
was
in the
beginning is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.