Nov. 18, 2007 By Harry T. Cook Luke 21: 5-19 The last ding-dong of doom will be sounded in sermons all over Christendom today as the church tries to respond to the content of such bible reading as we hear at this season. Whether we take the language of those readings literally or metaphorically, the clear image in them is that the world - to turn T.S. Eliot's phrase on its head - will end not with a whimper but a bang. After all, most physicists have come to think that the universe began with a bang - a very big bang, in fact. Why should it not end with one? In many a fundamentalist church that is precisely what you would hear, not only today but almost any Sunday. The preacher with a painstaking arrangement of bible texts will give you chapter and verse of the day, time and instant when Jesus will come again. But let us not lay it all at the feet of such preachers. Those who every Sunday recite the Nicene Creed in churches and communions like ours are heard to affirm the idea that He will come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead. Thus is Christianity at some level an apocalyptic religion, which is to say that its official teachings contemplate an end to all this we call life. Beyond the historic creedal statement, the Episcopal Church presents what it thinks is a modern catechism in which it freely uses without moderating nuance such phrases as to await the coming of Christ, the coming of Christ in glory [to] make all things new [and] to judge the living and the dead. Those who would charge me with heresy insist that I should be teaching our children such things. Cold day in you-know-where. Certainly apocalyptic, end-time themes are sounded throughout the Bible. Some New Testament scholars work on the hypothesis that Jesus was not so much the ethical teacher as he was an apocalyptic prophet. But we are making this consideration not, say, in 97 A.D. but in 2007 A.D. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein have come and gone in our common life, leaving behind them their epoch-making observations and theories. Yet none of that rules out apocalypse or apocalyptic. Cataclysm may arrive in our lives in other ways. How much do we need to read and hear about the melting of the polar icecaps and the alarming climate changes going on all over the earth before we understand what we're doing? The human race is contributing to global warming at such a rate that a little less than a century from now San Francisco, Miami, Boston, New York and, even more catastrophically, hugely congested settlements in the underdeveloped world could become ghostly cities beneath the sea. Fossil fuels - which are blessing and curse all at the same time - are beginning to run short. So is potable water. Ask anybody in metropolitan Atlanta or parts of the Far West about that. Airborne viruses and waterborne bacteria are outpacing the efforts of medical science. - Is all that apocalypse enough for you? The real end-time we might better be concerned with is accounted for in a line from the 90th Psalm in which the poet wrote: Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. The psalmist confessed aloud what each of us knows at some level, depending, perhaps, upon our age and perception of personal health and well-being. My eyes have but to fall upon the countenances of any one of my four grandchildren, and I am instantly moved to apply my heart to wisdom. I become mindful of the clear probabilities that, statistically, I may not live to know their children, and that unless my generation and I devote more time and energy to such matters as environmental stability, economic and social justice and overall better management of this fragile earth, our island home*, I will have failed them and their generation. I am often asked, as I come within hailing distance of my 69th birthday, why it is I don't take my pension, retire and take it easy. There are two reasons for why I don't. Number One is that I have devoted my adult working life to newspapers and the church - neither of which are known for robust pay scales and pension benefits. The Number Two and far more important reason is that there remains so much to be done and so little time to do it. I'd like for the adult world of my grandchildren to be a peaceful one, therefore I preach peace and practice it by walking the anti-war picket line. I have become a plaintiff in a federal case testing whether or not people who are not ticketed for honking if they love Jesus can be ticketed for honking if they want Bush out and his war ended. I'd like for the adult world of my grandchildren to be one in which they can actually breathe the air without choking and go to New York without having to paddle a canoe at high-tide down what was once Fifth Avenue, so I will take the advice of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and vote for "green" candidates and most definitely against those who contrary to the facts of the matter insist that global warming is a gigantic hoax. If, indeed, You-Know-Who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, I should like to be judged (whether living or dead) as one who tried to make a difference in preventing preventable apocalypses. *Quoted from Great Thanksgiving C, Book of Common Prayer 1979, p.370 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
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