November 26, 2006, Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, and
Reign of Christ Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 46: Revelation 21:1-7, 22:1-5: Matthew 25:31-40
Some people seem to live charmed lives and do not encounter much
personal suffering or grief until late in life, but sooner or later we all face death. If
death allows us more than an instant of self-awareness, we also face the questions
that death raises, questions that challenge us to our core. Is death the end of
everything, or is it the beginning of something new? What is the meaning of
life—what lasts or matters in a world where we all die?
If we look beyond the personal sphere to human history and the life of
planet Earth, we see that individuals are not the only entities that die. Nations rise
and have their time of glory and then fade away. Whole civilizations lie buried in
rainforest or sand. Entire species die out. There are periods of human and
planetary history that we look back on as end-times—times when so much
changed, when so much died that one epoch ended and another began. These
times raise the same kinds of questions as our personal confrontations with
death—especially when we consider that we may be on the brink of such a time
ourselves.
Anyone who is familiar with NewYorker or Gary Larson cartoons knows
the stock characters who usually wear long white robes and long white beards and
carry signs saying, “The End of the World is at Hand!” To say they may be right
risks ridicule. Yet there seem to be many ways in which our world is threatened
with events on such a scale that they could mean the end of the world as we have
known it—global climate change; a plague or pandemic that wipes out a large
portion of the world’s population; the end of the era of relatively cheap and
abundant fossil fuels.
Even in smaller ways it seems we are at a turning point. Among many
other institutions, the mainline church is going through changes that indicate an
end-time is at hand.
There was an age not long ago when people came to church because they
felt it their duty or obligation. Sundays were set aside by society for Sabbath-
keeping. Church was the only regularly scheduled activity. Now people attend
church not for duty’s sake but for the benefits it offers. There are many competing
Sunday activities with their own attractive benefits—sports being a major one,
though only one among countless others. Church members themselves schedule
conflicting events on Sunday mornings for lack of a better time. We have no
Sabbath. The social norm is not to go to church.
In days gone by, all a church had to do was open its doors and provide a
reasonable program and people would flow in, people who had been coming to
church all their lives and knew what to expect and what not to expect. In a society
where 80% of twenty year olds have never been to church, we are facing an
entirely new challenge. Church needs to change or become extinct.
We are in a tumultuous and threatening period of history. Anxiety and
depression are rampant. Divorce rates are as high as ever. Poverty is worse than
ever and getting still worse. Violence rages. Younger generations see little
promise for their future. Imagine losing the institution of the church in such a
time. But what hope is there that it will survive?
There is much hope. Perhaps the greatest hope comes from the fact that the
church came into existence precisely for this purpose—to help people through
end-times, to help people establish a new beginning, a new realm, to help us live
in a new Jerusalem on earth, even as the old convulsed or crumbled to dust.
We have seen how the church helps us as individuals through our end-
times. Think about those among us who have died. Think of the wonderful visit
Rod Webb had with Pril Hall just before his death, and the comfort Rod found in
prayer, and the sacred time when his family stood at his bedside as he was dying
and said the 23rd and 121st Psalms and read his favorite hymn. Think of all the
comfort we still are able to provide Helen. Or think of the steady flow of people
from this church who streamed through Gladys Boyd’s living room as she lay
dying, and the comfort and gladness it brought her.
We know the church has helped people through all kinds of troubles and
transitions in their families, and through financial difficulties and through illness
and loss. We know that the Bible is full of stories about God helping his people
through cataclysmic floods or slavery or exile. We can hear the assurance of
surviving end-times in the beautiful 46th Psalm: “God is our refuge and strength, a
very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should
change…”
What we may overlook, though, is that the teachings of Jesus and Paul in
the New Testament are largely about making a transition through an end-time
from one form of society to another, one realm to another, symbolized by the city
of Jerusalem. The good news is largely about the fall of the old Jerusalem, ruled
by its Herods and corrupt priests and Roman emperors, and the establishment of
the New Jerusalem ruled by God.
The gospels are full of references to two kingdoms or two realms, urging
people to strive for God’s realm and let the worldly society go. Paul’s letters to
the churches are full of advice about how to live within a decadent, doomed
empire. Two prominent contemporary scholars, John Dominic Crossan and
Jonathan L. Reed, published a book in 2004 entitled, In Search of Paul: How
Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom. In it they say,
“Jesus and Paul are not so much trapped in a negation of global imperialism as
engaged in establishing its positive alternative here below upon this earth.” We
can hear the positive alternative in what Jesus was saying in today’s gospel
passage. It is through taking care of the poor, the sick, the stranger and the
prisoner that we come into God’s realm and establish it on earth.
Stanley Hauerwas, another contemporary Christian theologian, speaks
along these same lines. He has said, “The work of Jesus was not a new set of
ideals or principles for reforming or even revolutionizing society, but the
establishment of a new community, a people that embodied forgiveness, sharing
and self-sacrificing love…In that sense, the visible church is not to be the bearer
of Christ’s message, but to be the message.”
On Reign of Christ Sunday we celebrate our belief that Christ’s higher
power is so great and universal that following his way can lead us into an alternate
realm on earth, a society that embodies his “forgiveness, sharing and self-
sacrificing love,” a society that can establish peace on earth and the healing of the
nations through its practice of justice and mercy.
The question on this Reign of Christ Sunday is how can we as a church not
only bear Christ’s message, but be Christ’s message? One vision that answers that
question has come out of a recent book by Richard Heinberg entitled, Power
Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World. He is writing about one
kind on end-time, the end of the oil and fossil fuel era, but his thinking could apply
to any of the many kinds of end-times we face.
Heinberg describes four possible paths we can take. The first is the path of
competing and grabbing what resources there are to grab so that we are the last to
lose them. A church on that path would focus on amassing as many members and
as much wealth as possible—growth for growth’s sake, security in material goods.
The second path is waiting for a magic solution and indulging in wishful
thinking and denial. Churches that focus all their hope on the Second Coming and
the Rapture follow that path, as do churches that watch themselves dwindle and
become irrelevant hoping that some miracle will come along and revive them,
without being willing to take the risks change requires.
The third path is boldly to live what we believe, responding to the world
around us with Christ-like actions. In the case of an end to oil, it is to “power
down,” practicing conservation and reducing our ecological impact as a
community. It is to do strategic planning as a church, asking the big question of
what God is calling us to do here and now, and who is the neighbor we need to
love and serve.
The fourth path builds on the third. Heinberg calls it “building lifeboats”—
creating sustainable communities designed to survive the various kinds of end-
times that threaten us, communities based on the ideals of Christ in the midst of a
materialistic society whose world is falling apart.
During the Dark Ages Christian monasteries served as lifeboats that
preserved much that was good and beautiful that had come before. They created
little islands of the realm of Christ for all who were going down in the wreck of
society to swim to and be saved. Those lifeboats sailed through a thousand years
of darkness and arrived at the dawn of the society we now live in, the society of
science and technology and modern thought, which is largely based on what those
lifeboats preserved.
We need to be asking what kind of lifeboat we could create in and around
this church for the wrecks we see slowly unfolding. We need to do this for our
children and generations of descendents to come.
Whatever we do, we know it needs to include the kinds of activities Jesus
described in his apocalyptic story today—feeding the hungry, welcoming the
stranger, taking care of the sick—bringing comfort to those around us who are
suffering in the throes of end–times.
But we also know that it will include much comfort for us. We know that
anytime we succeed in creating something like the realm of God on earth it will
have some of the qualities so beautifully described in the book of Revelation. We
know that it will feel like a new heaven and a new earth, as if we are living in a
New Jerusalem. We know that we will feel God’s presence among and within us.
We know that “God will wipe every tear from our eyes…[and] to the thirsty [God]
will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.” We know that our
fruits will be for the healing of the nations. And whatever new dark age comes,
we know that God will be all the light that we need.
Let us pray in silence, asking the Holy Spirit to guide and empower us to
create a community of Christ here in this church that may serve as a lifeboat and a
New Jerusalem for us and our children and children’s children’s children. Let us
pray…
Sermon 11/26/2006