You're Kidding. THAT'S in the Bible?! Apocalypse Now or Never?
January 21, 2007
Ralph DiBiasio-Snyder

Mark 13 and Revelation 16

Introduction to the Readings

If you were here last week you know that I did some messing around with the wording of the Lord's Prayer . . . something they teach you in seminary never to do! I am a considerable ways from seminary, though, and I changed the wording - really, I repeated two of the phrases, for emphasis, but MOST of you didn't notice it at all; one of you said that you were reading it and just skipped over the repeated phrase. Anyway, I should have warned you, and could have avoided the liturgical train wreck we all witnessed last Sunday.

I didn't repeat my sacrilege today. But you all sang some words that I bet you didn't mean, or, perhaps if you are like me, have little idea what you meant as you sang the Gloria Patri a few minutes ago.

Really? Do you really think that this world will never end? Dr. Barbara Rossing of Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago isn't so sure. In her book The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation she says that there are environmental endings coming at us very quickly. Like the end of the world's oil supply probably in the lifetime of many of us here today. Like the end of the glaciers, and of arctic ice shelves - one just broke loose a couple of weeks ago, floating and melting its way southward. Rossing writes, "What may be ending today is our unsustainable way of life, but not the earth itself." [Christian Century, November 14, 2006, p.23] There are great changes afoot ecologically, and many people are rightfully worried about them.

Just this week the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists - the journal that in 1947 created the "Doomsday Clock" to warn the world about nuclear catastrophe - moved the hands of their clock two minutes closer to midnight, to 11:55. They did so citing not just increased activity in nuclear weapons development in the world, but also "threats to global survival" such as global warming. It's not just religious nuts who think we are flirting with disaster, that "the end" is closer than we think, if we think about it at all.

So when you sang "world without end" did you mean to say you believe the world will never end, really? Or was it a wish - a prayer - that the world not end? Or was it just something we sing every week?

There are passages in the Bible that envision an end of the world - at least an end of the world as we know it. The whole book of Revelation is one long vision of how it will happen. Or at least I think that is what Revelation is about! I'm not terribly sure. Not because I've never read it; I even took a course on it in seminary. In my first church there was a man who taught a Bible class every Sunday - every Sunday I - on Revelation. He taught that class for twenty years, so into it was brother Swope! So I am not a stranger to the book. I just don't get much of it.

But Revelation is not the only book in the Bible that uses what scholars have identified as "apocalyptic" literature. In fact there are long sections in Matthew, Mark, and Luke in which Jesus no less sounds like an apocalyptic preacher. You will hear sermons on these passages about as much as you hear them on Revelation, and for the same reason. We don't understand them very well - and that goes for all the preachers who think they DO understand them, and perfectly well.

And so you may not have heard the passages Ann will read today. I will ask her first to read the passage from Mark. But before I do let me tell you just a bit about "apolcalyptic" writing in the Bible - indeed outside of the Bible.

Apocalyptic visions grew and flourished in the time between the Old and the New Testaments, continuing through the first century of the church. It was a time when Israel had been defeated, taken off into captivity, allowed to return to their land but only as a very weak nation, subject to the law and taxes and whims of their conquerors. It was a bad, bad time for the Jewish people, and there appeared to be no hope for ever returning to the glory years of David and Solomon. They were defeated, humiliated, oppressed by foreign armies and governors.

The prophets said, "Come on, now, have hope! Be faithful and God will be faithful to you, and restore your fortunes!" The writers of apocalyptic visions - and there were many of them - said that the only hope was the coming cataclysm, the coming of God that would wreak judgment on their oppressors, and save the truly righteous. The world is so far gone that it must end, a new earth to be born of the wrath and judgement of God. These apocalyptic visions were always full of the destruction and suffering of the evil-doers. And full of fantastic symbols - symbols that the righteous reader could decipher, but the opponents of God could not. You'll hear this especially in the reading from Revelation today. In apocalyptic language there are always signs and portents in the heavens - stars falling and the sun darkening - and angels too doing good things and bad too. In the apocalyptic view of the world there are only two kinds of people - the righteous and the unrighteous - and God is pitted against Satan in a final great battle.

Palestine in Jesus' time was awash in apocalyptic talk and hopes and would-be messiahs. Oppressed by Rome, the Jews longed to be out from under the bondage on the pagans. Jesus would have been aware of all this certainly. Which brings us to the passage from Mark.

As you listen: remember when this was written. The earliest anyone dates this is in the late 60s of the first century. Emperor Nero's violent persecution of Christians began in 64 - followers of Jesus would have been very much afraid of Rome. And there was a great Jewish revolt against Rome beginning in 67 - so threatening a revolt that Rome chose to crush it, leveling the whole city of Jerusalem in the year 70, its inhabitants fleeing to every corner of the middle east, and the great Temple of the Jews utterly destroyed, not a block of it left standing. That's the setting of this reading.

Listen for the apocalyptic images of destruction and signs in the heavens. And listen for when all this is to take place. "This generation," says Jesus, "will not pass away until all these things have taken place." It sure sounds like Jesus thought it would all happen soon, very soon - in the lifetime of those listening to him.

Read Mark 13.

So . . . what does it mean? I don't know. I don't believe anyone knows. I think that Jesus had in mind the end of the Jewish nation, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the year 70. If he was predicting the destruction of the city by the Roman army he was not alone. There were others in these years who said similar things [See NIB, Vol VIII, p. 685]. There had been before him a number of men who claimed to be the messiah, who led rebellions against Rome. And he could well have looked at the religious and political climate of his day and warned that someday the Jews would push too far, and Rome would end it once and for all.

But in these verses Jesus has clearly been influenced by the apocalyptic vision with which he surely was familiar. And perhaps he saw himself playing a part in that - if he is calling himself the "Son of Man" that will come in the clouds in great power and glory.

Some of you know that I grew up in a church that believed very strongly that Jesus was coming back to the earth in the clouds, with great power. We believed in "the second coming" as it is called. And every New Years Eve we had a service at the church - we called it a "Watch Night" service. The adults knew that meant watching for the New Year to come. We children - or maybe it was just me? Hmmm . . I wonder if my brother might have led me astray here - I thought that what we were watching for every year was the Second Coming! I thought Jesus was on his way to arrive at at midnight! It only took a couple such disappointments for me to adjust my thinking, of course.

I came to understand that Jesus wasn't coming "in the clouds with great power and glory" on New Years Eve, and not, perhaps ever. You see it has been now going on 2000 years that some Christians have been expecting that Second Coming. 2000 years. That's a problem, it seems to me. A big problem with the idea of an imminent "second coming" theology. One that makes me think that whatever this passage means it probably does NOT mean that Jesus is coming back.

But let us go on to the next reading, from Revelation. We sometimes call it The Apocalypse because the word apocalypse means a revealing, a drawing back the veil of God's future. That is what Revelation claims to be: a vision of a man named John, a vision of the coming destruction of all evil, the vindication of the righteous, and the ultimate triumph of God over satan, of good over evil.

Do you remember that scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy confronts the Wizard who claims to be all-powerful, but is literally unveiled - the curtain falls down - to reveal not a wizard, but merely a man? Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, says the "wizard." That was an apocalypse - an unveiling, showing the difference between illusion and reality.

Professor Rossing whom I mentioned earlier points out that catastrophic events can be apocalyptic events. Hurricane Katrina was one such event. Some preachers said it revealed God's wrath upon a sinful city. I think it rather revealed just how impotent humankind is when confronted with the raw forces of nature, and too the arrogance of humanity who thought they could manipulate nature. And Katrina exposed poor emergency planning on the part of the city and that federal government, and the racism that still permeates our society. Katrina pulled the curtain back for us, if we were willing to look.

The apocalyptic vision of the book of Revelation likewise seeks to pull back the curtain, in this case to expose the powers of that first century world that were aligned against the Christian community. Written we think at the close of the first century - some 40 years after Mark - Revelation comes out of a world dominated by imperial Rome. Rome, it would seem, would continue its oppression unopposed. Who could stand against it? Who could overcome its armies, escape its persecution? Surely not the church which had no worldly power. And so to bring hope that good someday would triumph, to offer a promise that God would come to the aid of God's people, to assure that community of faith that all is not lost, the last word has not been spoken, the writer holds up his apocalyptic vision. Let us listen to a small section of a very long book.

Read Revelation 16.

So . . . what does THAT mean? I don't know. I don't believe anyone knows. Lest of all the people who say that do, who say that have discovered "the code," who say God has shown them what all this wild, fantastic images mean.

Not long after I figured out that Jesus was NOT coming back at our Watch Night services a book called The Late Great Planet Earth by a man named Hal Lindsay came out, and it became the best-selling work of non-fiction (I question THAT category!) of the decade of the 1970s. It is now in 54 languages, and has sold over 35 million copies worldwide. In the book Lindsay made all sorts of predictions about the soon end of the world - the Soviet Union was to be a key player, the US was not a factor at all, the Anti-Christ was to head the United States of Europe, and other things that didn't come true. But his book sold, and in fact Mr. Lindsay 35 years later is still making a very nice living working the prophecy angle combined now with right-wing politics and Christian Zionism.

In fact, Hal Lindsay recently has been urging that the US attack Iran to disarm its Weapons of Mass Destruction, so as to save Israel from attack but more importantly to bring about the so-called biblical prophecies of the second coming of Christ. He has been joined by John Hagee, pastor of an 18,000 member church in San Antonio, who in his recent book Jerusalem Countdown (sales now of 700,000 copies) says that "a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ." [See http://www.alternet.org/story/39748/ for more information on this.] He has been joined by other highly influential televangelists who are advocating an attack on Iran, in no small part in order that their vision of the end of the world might come true, that the battle of Armageddon referenced in today's reading might come to happen.

It is one thing to fantasize about what these strange and puzzling and bizarre passages of the Bible might mean. It may be harmless to imagine what all these symbols mean, what the "second coming" of Christ so long delayed might bring about. But actively promoting war because you think you know what God is doing in the world - that is quite another thing. A very frightening thing.

So what are we to make of all this, and of the passages in the Bible like those we have heard today? I say simply enough: whatever interpretations we might bring to them, let us first and last admit that they are way too complex and too far removed in time from us to have any certainty about what they mean. We just don't know.

And let us say that's OK. There are far more passages in the Bible that are surely very clear. They tell us to love God and to serve our neighbors. They tell us to love even our enemies. They urge us to trust God for today and for tomorrow, not our bizarre visions of biblical prophecy.. They tell us that it is the poor and the hungry, the merciful and the peacemakers who know God truly. Let us spend our time trying to understand and live out THOSE passages of Scripture. And leave the rest for last - or for not at all.