The Park Road Pulpit

“www.terramortis.com” is a website dedicated to, “the most informative links, and very latest news, on anything related to the potential demise of our planet or the human species.” This week I read the following, thrilling, advent headlines:

According to an article written by Linda Moulton Howe, the Fijian strain of influenza is similar to the Hong Kong Flu of 1968. An expert predicts that 50 million Americans will catch it [and]… 70,000 could die from it.

Some people think it is due to their navigational system going haywire … It could be that we are all freaking out at the prospect of our planet's impending doom… that even animals will be topping themselves. A few weeks ago a flock of starlings committed suicide in Germany. If I'm right, it will become more commonplace....

Far below the blue waters of Yellowstone Lake, a mysterious dome 2,100 feet across and 100 feet high is causing concern among scientists and citizens who don't know whether it's a harmless curiosity or a hazard on the verge of exploding.

A megaton-class, thermonuclear explosion about 250 miles over Omaha, Nebraska, would emit an Electromagnetic Pulse… strong enough to collapse information society from coast to coast at the speed of light. You wouldn't feel anything. It would come and go in less than a second, a massive radio wave, everywhere at once. Picked up by copper wires and carried to the extremely vulnerable integrated circuits at switching centers, the explosion would guarantee that there will be no official announcement of what has happened… This is the Blackout Bomb, the bomb the government doesn't want to talk about.

It was this same kind of wet blanket that the eccentric Prophet, John, the Baptizer, threw over an anxious crowd who stood on the muddy banks of the spindly little river called Jordan. It was a sunny advent afternoon, and the fearful and the faithful and the fallen and the free were drawn to this magnetic little brute of a preacher who stood knee-deep in the current, trembling a stumpy and muscular fist, and spewing his good news beneath a red and furrowed brow -- “Vipers. …hisssssing sssnakesss… every one of you! Who warned you!?”

I had always thought of John as the original fear-inducing evangelist, shouting out his paradoxical “good news” of “hellfire and damnation.” But someone else had already gotten to this crowd – “who warned you to flee the wrath that is to come?” The theology of fear has always been too tempting to preach. It has a long, sad (but successful) history.

In reading this text again this week, I have come to wonder if this crowd had not actually come to the Jordan for comfort. Seeking a baptism in waters of a soul-cleansing-self-assurance. After some other preacher scared the “fear of God” into them, I can imagine that this crowd might just have come to John (of all people), for some easy and “blessed, assurance”… But it is advent. And then, as now, if you take your preparation for the coming of God seriously, there is no easy advent assurance.

I don’t know in what month this episode actually occurred, but I do know that I have the season right – because the word advent means, “to come.” So, we might translate John’s opening question, literally, as, “Who warned you to flee… the wrath of Advent!?”

By looking at just a handful of strange and obscure texts, which are scattered across the Bible, twenty centuries of “poets, priests, and politicians”[1] have made healthy sport (some have made great fortunes), predicting the “end of time.” By taking the great revelation of another prophet named John literally, at every turn, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it prophets predict a thousand-year period of peace on earth (a millennium), before the final battle of the apocalypse. The great question for these prophets concerned with such futuristic fantasy has been, “So when, exactly, will Jesus return – before the millennium, or after? (Is it pre- or post-?) In the last century there was a seismic shift in the predominant theological view concerning a literal return of Jesus, and because of this, I fear there has also been a great change in the content and character of advent preparation.

Prior to the great depression and the Second World War, the progress of technology and the advance of western civilization had been so rapid that the future was regarded with unencumbered theological optimism. With the world getting better and better and better, the millennium was obviously just around the corner, coming with the inevitable fulfillment of Christ’s own prayerful petition, “thy kingdom come on earth -- as it is in heaven.” Jesus would only be needed post-millennium, because the immediate future was secure. Secure in our own, very able hands.

But a quiet Sunday morning, sixty-two years ago, today, did much to destroy such optimism. The attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor signaled the beginning of a second world-wide cataclysm, and with that war, even looking back, the future no longer seemed so bright. The world had already witnessed one global conflict. America was still withering its near-fatal bout with financial depression. And in the years to come prophets of doom would add to their sermons the body counts of this second World War, the great evil of Holocaust, the millions starved and frozen in Stalinist Russian, the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, a “cold war” with its constant threat of global meltdown and nuclear winter… Every headline now looked progressively worse, and with each one the prophets looked again at our hands. Soaked with the blood of the most destructive century in human history, these hands no longer looked capable of bringing anything even faintly resembling peace.

With each new fear, and every new day, John’s so-called “good news,” began to echo in their ears: who warned you of the wrath that is coming…

Get ready. Since we can’t bring peace for ourselves, God will do it for us. But it won’t be pretty this time around.

Pre-millennialist? Post-millennialist? Please don’t misunderstand my almost tongue-in-cheek usage of these descriptions — I have no patience with such theologies (though I am fascinated by them). To read scripture with such a need for wooden literalism is to miss the great depth of its poetic and mythical and mystical beauty. But you should be aware of these concepts, for the fear-filled cry of the pre-millennialist is ever with us. The millions of copies of “The Late Great Planet Earth” in the last generation, and the “Left Behind” series in the current one attest to the pervasiveness of this influence in our culture and in our lives. To hold such a fear-filled theology is to convince ourselves of the absolute worst way to prepare for Christ’s coming, which is to say, to do nothing but wait with a very anxious eye for what God will do in our world next.

Jesus is coming. On this Advent Sunday, let’s be sure of this. This somewhat bizarre and frightfully apocalyptic-sounding claim is the driving aim of the Christian story. Christ will come again. But how? On the clouds, or into our lives?

Humans have a need for the spectacular, the dramatic, the cataclysmic. I would argue that God never works in such a way. That God never has.[2] But because our need of our insatiable need for the sensational, history is replete with examples of fear-filled sky-watchers, reading every anxious “sign of the times,” and cowering in timid anticipation – God is going to do something, dramatic. Or, perhaps worse, are those who swagger arrogantly, looking forward to the coming display of God’s power as vengeance to our enemies and vindication of our own righteousness.

But neither fear nor arrogance is an appropriate attitude of preparation, for the coming of a Prince of Peace. We must listen more closely to John. For he does proclaim good news.

Out of such a fiery prophet, wouldn’t you expect a message that sent the people scurrying into the hills with duct tape and plastic in tow, and all the non-perishable canned goods, bottled water, and batteries they could carry? This is the way that so many prepare for coming wrath: Protect what is mine. Gather what it will take to save me. Withdraw. Hide. Defend. Look to the heavens and hope for help from on high. But John the Baptizer will have none of this. His message is still urgent. “Jesus is coming.” The times are still extreme. “Get ready.” But the extreme measures to which John calls us prepare us for a new day, not the end of all days.[3]

John’s word reminds us that in days of advent our religion will get us nowhere. The best way I know of to end a conversation on an airplane or at a PTA mixer is to tell someone that you’re a preacher. After they tell you that, “you know, my mama was a Baptist, too,” there’s always someone else they’ve got to see. (“Yes… nice to meet you!”) But John didn’t care where your mama was Baptized – or you either – for if all God wanted was people with a religion to claim, God would let the rocks sing praise.

When the crowds cowered, “(Then) what should we do…” John’s tone may have softened a bit. “Give someone your shirt.” Jesus is coming -- share. “Don’t charge more interest than is necessary.” Jesus is coming -- have compassion. “Don’t use your position of power to better yourself at the expense of someone else.” Jesus is coming – remember, they’re all your neighbors. “Be satisfied.”

There is an awful lot that we do around here to get ready for Christmas. How much of it really prepares the way of the Lord?

An advent wish in closing: I wish you the trial of Christ-fire with every material gift you purchase this Christmas, and with every decision you make. I wish our community of faith the cleansing of advent wrath. I wish our nation the purifying preparation that will allow us a new day.

[1] A phrase borrowed from Sting, in his song, “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.”

[2] This was essentially the theme of our entire Advent 2002 series, “God, the Good ‘Ol Days, and the STORY of Christmas” – God “works” in the same way today that God has always worked. (The “old, old story” is still our story.) So, either the “miracles” of old, never were, or those kinds of miracles are still being done among us. Do we have eyes to see?

[3] I am told that the poet, Wendell Berry, once remarked that we should never be convinced that “extreme times call for extreme measures.” (Such thinking only gets us into more extreme times!) Extreme times, instead, call for steady, consistent, faithful measures.