Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, (28B), November 18th, 2018; The Rev. Susan Ackley

What is your first political memory?

Someone asked that question at a breakfast I was with with a group of strangers. My first memory was the McCarthy hearings. I remember my mother doing housework and at the same time watching the hearings on our fuzzy black-and-white television. It was odd to me, because we didn’t usually have the tv on during the day. Strangely enough I remember McCarthy’s face, bland, self-possessed. The whole thing was disturbing to me; I knew something was bad but my mother didn’t explain anything to me. I couldn’t articulate it, but in some child way I was wondering, what will the future hold?

The person sitting next to me was an elderly German man.He remembered being quite small and his father walking him down a street at night.  People were yelling and sounds of smashing glass and rough laughter. He could see only flickers of figures with axes illuminated by the streetlights.  It was Kristalnacht. The man remembered fear, and his father’s shock, and nothing being explained. What would the future hold?

I suspect that many people’s first political memories are tinged with confusion or fear. Something is wrong and the fear is that it, that confusing and frightening “it” that no one seems able to explain, is going to get worse. Is going to change things for the worse. I wonder about my grandchildren—Will little Iris remember her parents’ shock the morning after presidential election. In her three year old mind was there an inchoate sense of threat: what would the future hold?

During the past three months we’ve followed Jesus and his friends and disciples on their walk south from the imperial city of Caesarea Philippi in the very north of Israel to the sacred city of Jerusalem. They’ve come to celebrate Passover here. But Passover in Jerusalem during that period meant danger. Roman troops were called in from all over the country and beyond to keep crowds of native and visiting Jews, sparked by the Passover narrative of liberation from Egypt, from.any thought of revolution. One technique for reminding the people at Passover about supreme Roman power was mass public crucifixion.

The Gospel today is a section of a “sermon” Jesus gave to his disciples in those days of foreboding in Jerusalem. It’s often referred to as the “Little Apocalypse.” It is actually quite a bit longer than what we’re reading today, but what we have gives us the flavor of the whole. The word ‘apocalypse’ is from the Greek and means “uncovering.” Apocalyptic literature tends to be written in times of great social change and upheaval. It is intended to “uncover” where the world is heading and to symbolically describe the end times.

As you are aware, some Christians, like Jehovah’s Witness and some evangelicals, live in a symbolic universe that is heavily apocalyptic. They look at events as “signs”and use them to try and predict the end of the world. Their way of Christian practice is to prepare themselves for the end. Episcopalians and other mainline denominations don’t tend to privilege this apocalyptic sensibility. But, I wonder, might there not be something in it for us?

Let’s look at apocalypse first from a personal point of view. You and I are of course, each one of us, living in our own end times. Our personal time on earth will come to an end sooner or later.  And even before our deaths, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly, many of the structures we’ve built to make ourselves secure will weaken and eventually fall, like the Jerusalem temple. The people of Paradise, California are going through an experience looks and feels like apocalypse. How can the survivors bear it? How can they live through and beyond it?

Change is the only real constant in our lives.  It is all, as the Buddhists teach, impermanence. The temptation is to fight uncertainty by searching for certainties— dogmas, bank accounts, degrees— whatever we can hold onto that won’t shift shape in our hands.  But curiously, the opposite of uncertainty is not certainty. It’s courage. It’s the courage to face into the revealing of our own end times, the eventual collapse of everything we’re holding on to so tightly and the hard fact that yes, really, each of is is going to die. Courage to make the best of our lives whatever they bring us.

This morning’s cantata will take us deep into the awareness of personal transience and death.

“Ah, how fleeting, ah how insignificant is the life of mankind!,
As a mist suddenly appears and then quickly disappears again,
Behold! So is our life.”

Fittingly, the last verse of the cantata points beyond our personal lives and deaths to a cosmic apocalypse. The penultimate line is–

“Everything, everything that we see must fall and pass away.”

What would it mean to feel our way into a cosmic apocalyptic sensibility? What would it mean for us, for our spirituality, to live in the expectation of the end of time? It would mean, I think, facing into the full reality of what’s going on beyond our little lives and holding all transient human lives as precious and fragile, and the transient existences of all the creatures of earth,  and even earth itself.

Jesus said, “…Nation will rise up against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines.”

It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? “Nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom.” Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, even the tensions between the United States and Europe. Earthquakes and other natural disasters— What could be more apocalyptic than the horror of the fires in California or the famine in Yemen—the brutal photos of  starving children? They feel Biblical in its scale.

I believe that these words of Mark’s Little Apocalypse can be heard not so much as predicting an end of time in the future as describing what is happening around us, and what happens in every generation.  W. B.Yeats’ words name what has been true and continues to be true about this world—“The center does not hold.”

But look! Behold! Remember the Gospel’s last line:

“This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

These words echo what St. Paul says in his Letter to the Romans: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in birth pangs until now.”  What is this cosmic labor in process for? What is to be born?  I believe it is the Kingdom, the Reign of God, the healing, the salvation of all things. The final victory of Good over chaos and evil.

It’s a big vision. I don’t know about you, but it’s very hard to get my head around it. But I can use the metaphor of birth pangs to draw from it a role for us. The rhetoric of apocalypse calls us to be midwives—“mid-husbands”?—for the kingdom of God. Confronted with the sufferings of the world around us,, whether of natural or human origins, our call is to be as clear-eyed, as fully open as we can be to what’s going on in the world around us and then to ease the pain as we can, to stay present and accompany those who suffer, and work to change the conditions that create suffering.

To make, as the Biblical scholar Ched Meyers puts it, “a revolutionary commitment to the transformation of history….”

This is a high calling, this attending at the birth of Justice and Goodness and Beauty in the Reign of God. Some of us are in a position where we can do great things. Yet for the rest of us it proceeds most usually in small, everyday acts, like a midwife gently massaging the feet of a woman in labor.

Rabbi Berman, speaking at the CRT’S Shabbat service on Friday night, spoke of his gratitude for the people who supported the him and the congregation after the shootings in Pittsburgh. He read two cards which had been sent to him from students at a Catholic school offering their concern and prayers. These elementary school kids were midwives of the kingdom.  Maybe this will be their first political memory. Maybe it will be tinged more with hope than fear as they look to the future, hope in their high calling to cooperate in the birthing of the Reign of God.

A question to ponder:

Where are you called to midwife/midhusband the transformation of history, the bringing in of the Kingdom of God in big ways or small?

Pray for the courage to persevere and deepen your commitment.

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