Homily for Pentecost 2
May 25, 2008
Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal
The Very Revd Michael J. Pitts
Isaiah 49:8-16
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
Matthew 6:25-34
James Lovelock is a British scientist, now in his eighties, who, unlike most scientists today, works not for government, industry or academia, but independently in his own laboratory in Cornwall. In 1965, when we youngsters were talking about a bright, technological, work-free future, he predicted that at the beginning of the third millennium we would be facing the irreversible degradation of the environment. Later he came up with the gaia hypothesis, the idea that our planet could be understood as a self regulating super-organism. In a recent book The Revenge of Gaia, he predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will cause world-wide devastation; by 2040 much of Europe will be like the Sahara desert and London will be under water; by 2100, 80% of the human population will be wiped out. [i]
Its not a very bright looking future. In a poetic way Thomas Stearns Eliot had already said something similar in 1925:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. [ii]
Very different is the view of the future espoused by the later writes of Hebrew Scripture and the writers of the Christian Scriptures. Already in the time of the prophets Amos and Joel, it is clear that people were looking forward to the Day of the Lord, and it is also clear that they saw this as a bright future, when everything would be wonderful. Both Amos and Joel warn that because of social injustice and cultic impurity, the Day of the Lord would, in fact, be a day of punishment. But some generations later, second Isaiah prophesying among the exiles in Babylon, after the fall of Jerusalem, returns to the idea of a bright future:
They shall feed along the ways, on all the bare heights shall be their pasture; they shall not hunger or thirst, neither scorching wind nor sun shall strike them down, for he who has pity on them will lead them, and by springs of water will guide them. And I will turn all my mountains into a road, and my highways shall be raised up. Lo, these shall come from far away, and lo, these from the north and from the west, and these from the land of Syene. Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the LORD has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones. [iii]
This hope of a bright future continued through the less than perfect period after the return from the Exile, through the disastrous period of Macedonian and Seleucid occupation and into the period of Roman occupation, in which the Christian faith and scriptures were born. From it sprang the Messianic hope, that God would send his anointed one to bring this hoped for future into reality. Both the general idea of a bright future and the specific idea of the coming Messiah took on board mythical elements as they developed, and especially the idea that this time in the future would involve either the end of the created world or its total physical recreation. Both Mark and Paul shared this kind of understanding of the future and in particular they shared a belief that that the end of the present world would happen in their own life times. This is the background to what Paul is saying in our second scripture reading this morning
Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive commendation from God. [iv]
It has been much debated in the last decade, among the scholars of the historical Jesus school, whether the Jesus of history shared in this understanding of living in the end time, seeing himself as a prophet of the immanent end of all things. The major scholars are divided among themselves. Some think this is so; others see Jesus more in the light of a traveling philosopher, a teacher of wisdom.
The canonical gospels too are ambivalent. Mark is, as we have seen, like Paul, firmly convinced that the end is nigh. Matthew and Luke have a longer term view, and Luke specifically has Jesus correct any false impressions that the end would be immediate. In John, the whole idea is almost completely absent. The synoptic Gospels contain sayings of Jesus in which an immanent end is central. But they also contain passages like that we read for our Gospel this morning which come more from the lips of a teacher of wisdom than a prophet of the end:
Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. [v]
When the immediate end of the world did not happen, as the Christian tradition developed, the idea became transmuted into a concern about our personal future after death, a concern almost totally absent from our Christian Scriptures. The end of all things remained, tacked almost as an appendix on to the ends of the Jesus sections of the creeds.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead
The last phrase of the creed however returns to speak of our personal future after death:
I believe in ... the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting [vi]
Things might have remained like that had not the idea of the immanent end of the world been dusted off and brought back into play at the end of the nineteenth century. In certain of what were then rather fringe elements of the churches two things happened. One was the putting together of disparate texts from very different contexts in the Scriptures and making one theology out of them. The other was the modernist heresy of taking the Bible texts literally, and in particular of interpreting the mythical language as though it were the language of science. In the last hundred years this end of the world ideology has come from the fringes into the centre of some Christian teaching, especially south of the border, and in fact is a driving force, not only in churches, but in politics, especially that of the right, both there and here.
Included in the amalgam of theories is that the Jerusalem Temple must be rebuilt, that a nuclear war would be a good thing, namely the beginning of the end, and that there will be, before the end, a rapture, in which the true believers will be taken directly to heaven, while the rest us suffer the torments of the end times.
It is not too difficult to realize that there can be disastrous world-political results from this kind of belief being put into practice. Leaving aside questions of wars and peace, perhaps one of the most dangerous results is a total lack of interest in environmental questions. If God is going to end the world so soon, why bother about global warming, air, land and water pollution, global poverty and social instability. If fact, bring them on; for like a nuclear war they are signs that the end is really happening.
Personally, as a description of what the future might hold, I prefer something along the lines of the picture drawn by James Lovelock. He is speaking of course only of the future of the human race. The end of the physical world is still a few billion years away. Our sun may burn out long before the universe ceases to expand and begins its long contraction, but that also is many million tears away. I suppose the earth could end sooner if there were some meteoric catastrophe. But meanwhile the greatest concern is that of the degradation of the biosphere. With Lovelace, I tend to think that it too late to avoid the inevitable collapse of human civilization, but I do believe that we can take measures to palliate the effects of what might happen. Those measures need to be technological, finding new ways both to power our world and to grow our food. They need to be social and political in preparing ourselves to face vast upheavals and the forcing of more and more people into the still habitable areas of the world. And they need to be theological in seeking new ways of understanding the role of faith and scripture in the life of the world, and in seeking to find ways of enabling people of very different faiths and scriptures to live and work close together as we shall have to in the new and dangerous world into which we are moving.
[i] The information of this paragraph is drawn from an article by Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian weekly 28th March 2008
[ii] T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men
[vi] These are quoted from the baptismal (also known as the Apostles') creed. The Eucharistic or Nicene Creed is similar.
