Welcome to the apocalypse

In 1979 I started at Knox College to do my Master of Divinity degree, and that was the start of my path into The Presbyterian Church in Canada as a minister.

Moving to Toronto was quite a change from where I had lived. Hampton was a village when I was a boy: something in the order of three thousand people lived in Hampton, New Brunswick. And I did my undergraduate degree at Mount Allison University, in a town twice the size of Hampton. It had about seven thousand people living there, and there were two thousand in the university, which is actually a small university.

So Toronto was huge. It was almost overwhelming: people everywhere. And for the first time that I could remember, I lived in a place of racial diversity. I remember going to see the Blue Jays, taking the bus from Knox College and paying the princely sum of two dollars to get in to see a doubleheader, sitting in the outfield.

Shortly after arriving at Knox, there was a night of initiation for students in the residence. At that time the residence was only for males. And I skipped the initiation night, because I hated initiations; the idea of being humiliated by others with power just didn’t go with me. So instead of initiation night, I went to the movies and watched Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, at the university theatre, I think, in Technicolor and Dolby sound.

It was a movie set in the time of the Vietnam War, loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Although I didn’t understand it fully at the time, this movie, which was a real attack on the senses, full of interesting cinematography and sound effects, really was an anti-war movie, dealing with the psychological effects of war and how soldiers in war are physically and mentally harmed and traumatized.

The plot is about a soldier looking for a rogue American colonel, Colonel Kurtz, who’s gone insane. His secret mission is to kill the colonel. And as he and his crew navigate up the river towards Kurtz’s camp, they’re descending into the heart of darkness in more ways than one. Coppola’s brilliance, I suppose, is that he uses sound, visual effects, lighting, angles, zooming in and out, film editing, the plot — all trying to convey that war is the heart of darkness; that war is apocalypse now; and that it happened to ordinary people who went from America to fight in Vietnam.

I can remember one scene really vividly in my mind. It is a morning raid on a Vietnamese village, with helicopters. You can hear the loud sound of the blades, and then, blaring from the speakers of the helicopters, one of my favourite classical pieces, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” probably at one hundred decibels plus. And they go into war, and napalm is dropped, and you see huge flames, and it’s both horrifying and fascinating at the same time.

The apocalypse.

Maybe you think that’s what the apocalypse will be like: big balls of flame, destroying and killing; loud sound effects; terrifying violence; and people dying by the score. That’s what a lot of people think the apocalypse is about. There’s a whole genre of literature called post-apocalyptic, with the idea that the apocalypse has already happened. The apocalypse in this literature is some kind of disaster, like a nuclear war, or a biological weapon gone wrong, or a plague, and after the apocalypse there are only a few people left, scrambling and scratching the dirt to eke out a living or survive. And so the apocalypse is always some terrible horror visited on the earth.

But strangely enough, the writings in the Bible called apocalyptic writings are not messages of doom and gloom. They were not really predictions of the end of the world, with end-of-the-world scenarios of violence and destruction — even though the book of Revelation, I confess, has its moments. They were primarily writings of hope, to people going through tough times. They were not writings to scare the bejesus out of children to make sure they’d be good boys and girls, or to scare the bejesus out of adults to make sure they believe in God.

No. Apocalyptic writings in the scriptures had a very important message: that God had not forgotten his children, and that there were more important powers than the dominant powers that were threatening them. Yes, there are beastly empires, and antichrist dictators, and principalities and powers of darkness. But one day they will be gone. And all the while there is another power, and it’s the power of God, and the power of love.

So today, welcome to the apocalypse. Grab a cup of coffee or tea, settle down in your chair — but put your seat belt on. It’s quite a ride.

Many years ago, the people of Israel went through an apocalypse on the scale of the Holocaust. Israel had split into two kingdoms: the northern kingdom, called Israel, and the southern kingdom, called Judah. The northern kingdom consisted of ten tribes, and that kingdom was destroyed and wiped out in 721 BC by the Assyrians. So many Jews were killed, and so many taken into slavery, and they were so scattered and decimated, that the ten tribes are considered in effect to be lost.

Judah was the southern kingdom, and Jerusalem was its capital. Jeremiah the prophet, from whom we read some scripture, was contemporary with the fall of Jerusalem, around 586 BC. Many Jews were killed there as well, and the city was taken into captivity and absolutely destroyed. The Babylonians pulled it down. They say that not even one stone was left on another; it was that thoroughly flattened to rubble, including the palace of Solomon and the temple. Nothing left to speak of.

There are conflicting reports, but it seems that Jerusalem’s elite were taken into captivity — maybe twenty thousand; there are various numbers given by scholars — taken as slaves, and the rest may have been put to the sword or scattered. We’re not exactly sure, but of the fifty thousand or so who were left, a lot of them were killed.

But it’s to this situation that Jeremiah speaks. I read the scripture earlier:

This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

Jeremiah 31:33–34

The new covenant that Jeremiah speaks about is not based in the temple. It’s not based in animal sacrifice. It’s not based on the Ten Commandments. It’s based on a relationship with God so intimate that you won’t even have to teach your neighbour to know the Lord, because everyone will know the Lord. Everyone will know God. That’s quite a promise, in the midst of an apocalypse.

It seems that we might be in the midst of an apocalypse. Maybe not as bad as World War One or World War Two; certainly not as bad as the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide. But we are threatened. Many people have died. There’s been a lot of grief; there’s been a lot of loss. We don’t have Nebuchadnezzar parked outside the city, frightening us with destruction while we all hunker down and starve to the point of consuming one another. No. We have COVID-19 outside the door, but also inside the city.

And we have had restrictions the like of which hardly any of us have ever seen before. It’s hurt the economy. It’s meant huge losses of jobs: people staying home, people laid off, people without income, businesses going under, and a ton of emotional stress. And then there’s the matter of all those who have been sick and died, especially older people. One of the tragedies that has been exposed in this pandemic is the many ways this nation has failed elderly people in nursing homes and care facilities. I can’t even get into the whole host of difficulties that have happened in those facilities.

And the pandemic has been very difficult on church life. We’ve not been able to gather to worship like we have for thousands of years. We haven’t been doing potluck suppers and Bible studies and choir practice and church school, at least not in person. We’ve all gone virtual. So welcome to the apocalypse.

But I also want to set this pandemic in the larger context of what the wider church has experienced over quite a few years. The church has experienced significant decline. So maybe the church is in a bigger apocalypse; you could set this pandemic apocalypse within a larger apocalypse for the church.

Church decline has been hastened in the twenty-first century by a number of factors. One is the number of scandals in churches around sexual misconduct. Another is the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001; there’s been a real identification of violence with religion in the world. Another factor is the wars and conflicts within church denominations over a number of issues, not the least of which is the full acceptance of gays and lesbians into the church. Added to those factors, there’s been the #MeToo movement, which has talked about powerful men abusing women. There’s been the Black Lives Matter movement, which talks about systemic racism. And increasingly, the world’s wealth is being shifted into the hands of the very rich, and life is not getting better for the poor. All of this, I think, has been part of the mix which has caused church attendance to spiral downward. The church could be in its own kind of apocalypse.

But it’s not all bad. We’re in for a bumpy ride, and we don’t know where it’s all going to end. But it’s not all bad, because the meaning of apocalypse is actually this: unveiling. Peel back the layers in the apocalypse, and you see the real thing.

Now, we could argue about how long this unveiling has been going on. I could say maybe fifty years; some might say a hundred years; some might say twenty years. But it has certainly accelerated in the twenty-first century. And what is being unveiled is the misuse of power. Powerful people and institutions subjugated people who are not white. Powerful men, and men in general, subjugated women. Powerful rich people subjugated the poor. Powerful people have made money running care facilities, and the elderly have suffered. Powerful people make millions of dollars off the military-industrial complex; it’s such a huge force in the world. War and violence make money for the rich and powerful. Why would they want to stop — as long as it’s not in their country, in their backyard?

And here’s the other thing that’s being unveiled, which has pertinence for the church: that behind many of the abuses of power is bad theology, or even heresy. I quote from the Reverend Nadia Bolz-Weber:

The heresy is this: with all the trappings of Christianity behind them, those who seek to justify or maintain dominance over another group of people have historically used the Bible to prove that the domination was not actually an abuse of power at the expense of others, but indeed was part of God’s plan. And there you have the appearance of Christianity — Bible verses and God talk — contradicting its essence: love God, and love your neighbour as yourself.

The venom of domination runs deep in us, and it does so because the fangs that delivered it were given not in the devil’s name but in God’s name. When the subordination of women is established as God’s will; when slavery is established as God’s will; when discrimination against queer folks is established as God’s will; when the CEO of the National Rifle Association claims that the right to buy a semi-automatic assault rifle is not bestowed by man but granted by God, it delivers a poison that can infect the deepest parts of us. Because messages that are transmitted to us in God’s name embed far beneath the surface, all the way down to our original place of createdness: our source code.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

I know this as a fact. Because no matter how much I love to think of myself as woke, I grew up in a racist society; in a church and a society that abused gays, that didn’t give equality to women, that excluded people who didn’t fit in; in a country that dominated and decimated Aboriginal people; in a world that abused and dominated women, the poor and people of colour. And I was part of the system, and it was embedded in me. It’s taken me years to change, and I still struggle with all of it: years of embedded prejudice, racism, white dominance and cultural superiority. I literally have cried when I think of some of the things I thought, I believed, I said and I did. They were prejudiced and racist. And I still have a ways to go.

But it’s the apocalypse that unveils this to me. It’s the apocalypse that opens our eyes. It’s the apocalypse that unsettles us. It causes us to question; it challenges our assumptions. The apocalypse threatens to undo us, because we need to be undone.

And yes, even though the Bible has been weaponized at times to prop up the powerful, and to create and empower the dominant, my hope is in the gospel. My hope is that there’s a new time coming in the church, which is based on the Spirit, which is based on a relationship with God, which is based on love.

I believe there’s a time coming for the church when God’s going to have a relationship with you and me so intimate that you won’t need a teacher to teach you how to believe in God. You won’t need a preacher to tell you God’s word. You won’t need a priest to forgive your sins, or to offer sacrifices on your behalf. Because you’ll know God. You’ll know how to love. You’ll know how to love your neighbour. He will be in your heart, because you’ll have a relationship with God that is really deep and intimate.

Today our gospel lesson has some Greeks who want to see Jesus. We’re not sure why. They’re Gentiles; they’re not Jews; they don’t share the same faith as Jesus. But they want to see Jesus. Is it because of Jesus’ miracles? Is it because of his parables and his teaching? Is it because Jesus stands up to the authorities? Is it because Jesus speaks with truth and authority? Is it because Jesus obviously comes from God, is connected to God? Or is it even because they don’t agree with Jesus, and want to argue with Jesus?

What I do know is that in the midst of a pandemic, or an apocalypse, we know the feeling of wanting to see Jesus: of wanting to know Jesus, of wanting to hear from Jesus, of wanting to receive from Jesus. Sometimes we want Jesus to fix things that are wrong. Sometimes we want to be comforted. Sometimes we want Jesus to explain the big plan, because we don’t seem to get it. And sometimes we’d even like to give Jesus a piece of our minds.

And we all have a vision of the Jesus we’d like to see. Maybe some of us want to see Jesus the peacemaker, and some of us want to see Jesus the miracle worker. Some of us want to see Jesus the teacher, or Jesus the friend, or Jesus the healer, or Jesus the shepherd, or Jesus the forgiver.

But it’s interesting, the response of Jesus after the request of the Greeks — these foreigners, these people who have a different faith, or maybe no faith. Jesus launches into a monologue about his death. He talks about himself as a grain of wheat that has to die to bear fruit. He talks about the manner of his death, and he talks of it being glorious. For this reason Jesus came: to die. And it’s glorious.

People want to see Jesus. We want to see Jesus. And while all the other images of Jesus are important — teacher, miracle worker, peacemaker, shepherd, all those beautiful images — I think Jesus wants us to see all these images through the prism of the cross. So that when we meet Jesus, primarily what we see first is Jesus on the cross.

Because you don’t understand Jesus until you understand the cross: that on the cross he proved that you can kill Jesus, but he will still love you. On the cross you have the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world, because Jesus always absorbs sin and evil and violence, but he never gives it back to us.

One of the most significant unveilings we can have in this apocalypse is to have the real Jesus unveiled before our eyes: the Jesus who would go to the cross and die for you, and take upon himself the sin and evil of the world, only to give back love and grace and liberation.

So today I welcome you to the apocalypse. Get ready to have your mind blown as your eyes are opened. Strap in for a bumpy ride. It’s a little unsettling. It’s apocalypse now.

Amen.