November 17, 2019: It's The End Of The World (As We Know It)
November 17, 2019 Rev. Rhonda Blevins, DMIN
It’s the End of the World (As We Know It)
Luke 21:5-19
When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them. “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. 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.
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Did you hear about the cannibal who switched to Spam? He said it’s the greatest thing since sliced Fred. (Sorry, Fred.)
Until this week, the last time I bought a can of spam was in December 1999. I was prepping for the end of the world. Whoever can name the end of the world paranoia from 1999 wins their very own can of spam! (Yum.)
Y2K!
Many of you remember Y2K, the turn of the millennium scare: a major computer glitch would bring about the complete collapse of the banking system, utilities and other infrastructure—one terrifying idea was that the computer glitch might even set off an inadvertent nuclear missile launch—nuclear World War III would begin and the human race would decimated. Some famous preachers—even Jonathan Edwards from the 1700’s— thought the year 2000 would launch the apocalypse. Some took this so far that on New Year’s Eve, 1999, they hid out in bunkers. Others, like me, stocked up on Spam and played a rousing game of Monopoly, nervously awaiting the clock to strike midnight. Tick. Tock. BOOM!
In reality, it was Tick. Tock. Yawn. Y2K proved to be a big nothing-burger. The best part about nothing happening on Y2K? I didn’t have to eat that nasty Spam!
It seems that every generation has its own end-of-the-world scenario. For that matter, just in the past decade or so we’ve had dozens of apocalyptic predictions:
· A famous televangelist (I won’t tell you his name, but let’s just say it rhymes with Rat Pobertson) predicted the earth would be destroyed on April 29, 2007.
· Remember when the end of the Mayan Calendar approached? It surely meant the end of the world on December 21, 2012.
· There was one conspiracy theorist (David Meade) who predicted that the end of the world would be by October 15, 2017, and when that didn’t happen, he said it would be on April 23, 2018.
· Another religious soothsayer predicted the world would end this year on June 9.
I could go on. Wikipedia has a list of dozens . . . hundreds of predictions of the end of the world.[1]
All of these predictions about the end of the world, but let me ask a question: has the world ended? I would suggest yes.
You see every moment brings with it “The End of the World (As We Know It).” This is the title of a 1987 by R.E.M. from Athens, Georgia (how could I live in Athens for eight years without knowing R.E.M?) “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” is a song title, but it’s also the truth. Think about it. When you walk back outside when you leave church this morning, the clouds will be different. The traffic, not exactly the same as when you came in. 15,000 babies will have been born; 6,300 individuals will have died. Each moment is the end of the world AS WE KNOW IT.
So when Jesus predicts wars, earthquakes, famines, plagues and persecution, he’s not being particularly psychic. It’s possible that Jesus named the suffering each generation faces, because truly, it’s always The End of the World (As We Know It). Everything changes. This is a disturbing fact of life.
So when Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple, that “not one stone would be left on another,” he was naming the inevitable.
The Temple in Jesus’ day was a sight to behold. King Herod began construction in 19 BC. Jesus was born, most scholars suggest, around 4 AD. He was crucified and raised in the early 30’s. The outer courts of the Temple were completed in the early 60’s. Then the Romans completely destroyed the Temple in AD 70.
The Temple, you may recall, was the center of religious life, but also civic life, and economic life. In the same way that the 9/11 terrorists targeted our economic center in the World Trade Center, our military center at the Pentagon, and the fourth plane was thought to be headed toward a government center. . . the U.S. Capitol Building. Think of how 9/11 rocked our world. We were mortified, stunned, terrified. The Temple was all of that—it was the cultural center, the economic center, the judicial center as well as the religious center of Jewish life—housed in one massive and glorious complex. The destruction of the Temple was the End of the World for the Jews at that time.
The Temple fell in 70 AD; most scholars believe the Gospel of Luke to be written between 85-90 AD—15-20 years after the Temple fell. Luke is looking back on what Jesus said about the Temple in light of the Temple having now been destroyed. Luke is trying to make sense of it all—to synthesize the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus—along with the destruction of the Temple—the symbol of the Jewish way of life. Luke tells his first century readers how Jesus wanted them to live. “Remember, Jesus didn’t promise us that life would be smooth and easy. In fact he promised the opposite—he told us it was going to be hard, that we would suffer. That we would experience the end of the world as we know it.” But Jesus didn’t leave them there, in hardship and suffering. In this passage from Luke, Jesus gives them three instructions for how to face difficult times, these three instructions apply to us as well:
1. Don’t bite. “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.” In other words, don’t drink the kool-aid. Don’t get snookered by false prophets. There will be plenty who use the name of Jesus and pretend to know when the end of the world is nigh. Don’t listen to them. Don’t go after them. Don’t like them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. And woe to you if you send them money!
2. Don’t prep. “Make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance,” Jesus tells them. Don’t be a prepper. Don’t waste your money on a bunch of spam. Don’t build a bunker or divest from the stock market in order to buy 41-pound-pails of pinto beans (that’s a thing).
3. And perhaps the most important of Jesus’ three commands in this passage: Don’t fear. “Do not be terrified.” The end of the world will happen just as it has happened every day of your life. I’m not going to lie—there’s plenty to fear. Don’t give yourself over to fear. Do not let fear win.
That last instruction, “Do not fear,” is a common refrain in the Bible. It’s repeated over and over again. Why? Because apparently we can’t get this through our thick homo sapien skulls. We’re still terrified 2,000 years later.
I want to suggest there are two basic approaches to faith (as well as to most of life): fear and love. So much of religion is fear-based. “Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior or you’ll spend eternity in hell.” Fear-based. I did that kind of religion for a lot of years. I actually have a master’s degree in that kind of religion—literally. You can read the Bible in such a way to believe terrible things about God—that God would damn people to eternal flames for infinity for something they did or didn’t believe with their finite minds—if that’s who God is, I don’t want anything to do with God.
But there’s another approach to faith—another way to read the Bible. When we look at God through the lens of love instead of through the lens of fear, a beautiful new world opens up. We begin to take hold of life-giving passages of scripture, like 1 John 4:18: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”
Jesus’ oft-repeated command, “Do not fear,” isn’t so hard to do when we let love win—when our view of God is love not fear—when we read the Bible with love not fear—when we look at the state of the world through love not fear.
And when we hear of wars and rumors of war—when the next apocalyptic scare creates a national frenzy—the next Y2K or Mayan Calendar or Rat Pobertson—heed these three instructions from Jesus: don’t bite, don’t prep, don’t fear. And whatever you do: don’t buy Spam. That stuff is nasty.
That 1987 song by R.E.M. has another line that I quite appreciate: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” I feel fine. My hope and my prayer is that you feel fine as well.
[1] Wikipedia has a great list of these predictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events