Day 280: 10/8/13- Apocalyptic Birthday
New Thing: Birthday! Gathering of Leaders Day Two, Christophany
Inspiration: Birthday & Jesus
Time: Several Hours
Bottom Line: Awe.
Reflection: Jesus gave be a birthday gift today and here is the sermon it prompted:
Apocalyptic Birthday
October 27, 2013
Year C Proper 25
Joel 2:23-32
Luke 18:9-14
Since it is Stewardship season, I bet you are looking at that Gospel reading
and thinking, “ok- I know where the sermon is going to go today.” You see the self-righteous Pharisee who gives his money and his prayers ONLY to serve his own pride and self image on one side of Jesus’ parable. And on the other is the humble tax collector who admits his sins and goes home justified coupled with Jesus’ pronouncement that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” So, I bet your are thinking the sermon is going to be, “God desires us to give our time, talent and treasure not so that we look good or because there is some kind of divine checklist of all the things we have to give to God in order to be justified. He wants us to give because we are grateful for his love to us even though we don’t deserve it. In loving God like that, we are motivated to give thanks and give of what he has already given us.”And that would be
a very good stewardship sermon!
But that’s not the one I’m going to preach.
Instead, we’re going to talk about the apocalyptic.
Now I bet you are thinking, “is it to late to go back to the first sermon?!”
Sorry—apocalyptic stewardship sermon it is!
Our first reading from Joel which belongs to the genre of apocalyptic writing is just to good to pass up. In this beautiful passage we hear about
the way God pours his grace out upon his people. “Then afterward, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”
That is powerful and beautiful. It is a reality that we would like to see for if everyone was prophesying—speaking the truth of God to the world—
if everyone was dreaming dreams and seeing visions of His peace
and love—just think about the way this world would change?!
And since it is a reality that we would love to see, that first line—“Then afterward, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh”—that line makes us stop and wonder, “Then after what?” What comes before that kind of beautiful reality? Well according to Joel, and many other writers in the Bible, before that beautiful reality comes the apocalypse. The previous chapter in
Joel
talks of a plague, a swam of locusts he talks about destruction and devastation and he talks about darkness. He says, “Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains.” It is God’s revelation that Joel is describing. The end of time as we know it.
This passage and the one we have read today actually shows us the true point of the apocalypse. It is not, as Hollywood would have us imagine,
the meaningless destruction of all humanity. It is rather a revelation that points to God’s grace—both now and in the time to come. In fact, the original Greek meaning of the word was 'un-covering', a disclosure of knowledge, like a lifting of the veil or revelation.
Yet, we worry about this Day of the Lord, this apocalypse. We worry
that if God’s day of judgment were to descend upon us today, we would be caught like kids with our hands in the cookie jar wondering what we are going to be punished or destroyed for having done. But don’t forget, Joel’s vision has already reveled to us that God chooses to save us, to feed us, to let us be put to shame no more and lift our visions and dreams heaven-ward.
As theologian Donna Schaper writes, “We tend to predict trouble [when it comes to God’s revelation]. Joel is trying to convert us to predicting possibility…Apocalypse uncovers the action of God in the action of the world. In the apocalypse or end time, God destroys the ruling power of evil…We are to be fed, not destroyed in God’s coming time.”
Now, I said in the beginning that this was going to be a stewardship sermon.
The theme that the stewardship committee has chosen this year, “being good swards of God’s Grace” matches Joel’s call to us to predict possibility and not disaster from God. Stewardship is about joining with God in believing that there will be hope and love and life in the time to come. It is a sign
that you trust the future to God’s hands, that he has reveled to you and to me
that his coming will be one that pours out Spirit! That brings visions and dreams! When we give to the future, God’s future in a spirit of gratitude
we are trusting in the apoplectic vision that God loves us and will not let us parish, but wants us to know everlasting life.
A few weeks ago, I had my own apocalypse--my own lifting of the veil to see God’s hand on my life. It happened on the morning of my birthday. That’s right—my birthday was an apocalypse for me. I am sure that I am not alone in feeling that birthdays are a time to take stock and to look forward. And this was the spirit I had when I stepped out of my door at 5am for a birthday 10k. I was in Chicago for a clergy conference and staying at a Catholic seminary called St. Mary’s of the lake. We had arrived later in the afternoon the day before so I had yet to make my way around the stretch of road that circled the beautiful lake, thus I had no idea what to expect. I had assumed that there would be lights to mark the wooded road, but you know what happens when you assume. It was pitch dark, it was unfamiliar, it had the foreboding sense of being completely remote and removed from all safety—it had all the markings of an apocalyptic.
And so, I started to run into the darkness.
As I ran, I started to think about my life—after all that’s what you do on birthdays, right? Maybe it was my surroundings, but I started to think about all the darkness I had been through. I started thinking about disappointments, people who had hurt me, and worse, people who I had hurt. I started thinking about dangers I had been in and pains that still left some residue. As I began to feel a fear that only comes while running through the dark path of our broken pasts, I rounded a bend and as if from no where, there was a bridge. It was light up with several dozen lamps that looked like they were designed off the Narnia one with crosses at the base of each one. They shown in stark contrast to the pitch darkness that the bridge cut through. This bridge seem to float over the black lake which had mist rolling off of it. It was hauntingly beautiful. It stopped me in my tacks.
I had not expected all this light, all this stability. I had not expected to cross the lake in such safety and beauty. But the same could be said about my life
I realized in that moment. Here I was thinking only of the darkness, the plagues, the terrors, when God’s hope and goodness had been with me to illumine my path and guide me to revelation out of the apocalypse into his future. With that knowledge, I ran on until at the end, I arrived at this large dock structure that had these towering gazebos and mornings and lights—
someone had told me that they had built such a structure in case the pope ever visited on his barge. I took a seated meditation posture on the highest one overlooking the lake where the sun was ever so slightly rising. Having run out of the darkness, out of the apocalypse I suddenly felt something that I can only describe as Jesus sitting down right next to me. I felt it as sure
as anything. And it took my breath away and I wept for the goodness of it all. It made me ache with love. For God was revealing to me what I should have know—that there is no end to God’s love, only the pains and apocalypses of this world.
And so we are back to where Joel would have us start. Changing our fears
and our expectations and predictions of destruction into visions and dreams of God’s love for us, his desire to fed us in this time and the next when we see these apocalypse that we live through as signs of his revelation, we are free to live in knowledge of his grace. We are free to be ones who prophecy God’s word, to dream dreams of a world of love, to be stewards of the grace to others in His name. We are free to see the apocalypse of this life as they really are—revelations of grace.
