You’d think I’d have been better prepared, given our gospel reading this week – ready to get Water Daily out despite having family visiting for the holiday – but I didn’t manage it yesterday. I apologize – and hope you were too busy with your own celebrations or too full of turkey to notice! Here’s one more for this week, a day late and a dollar short.
I must also confess that I haven’t been eager to reflect on this Advent reading. It's both somewhat frightening, with its references of suffering, and too cosmic in scope to grasp. It is an apocalyptic vision of the end of all that we know:
“But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.”
I saw Interstellar yesterday. It’s actually quite a good backdrop for considering Jesus’ words about the end of the world. In Christopher Nolan’s sweeping narrative, the end of this world is coming quickly, due not to cosmic forces but from the natural consequences of humanity’s damage to our environment. The sun is often darkened by fierce dust storms in a world with not enough water, and dirt piles up everywhere, including in children’s lungs. Humanity’s extinction is considered inevitable; the only question is whether we will suffocate, or starve due to food shortages brought on by blighted crops in the nitrate-rich atmosphere.
A small group of scientists is seeking other habitable planets to colonize in order to preserve humankind, and much of the film takes place in outer space, vast, limitless, mysterious.
“Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.”
In Nolan’s vision, salvation comes from humankind cracking the cosmic secrets of space-time-gravity to access a new habitat. Our Christian vision of salvation has a similar theme – but its movement is from the cosmic to earthly. In our sweeping story it is God, the author of the mysteries of the universe, who transcended them to come into our dying world, to plant a seed of healing among us. Christ’s redemption includes the restoration of the universe – and what we might call a re-colonization, as the “elect” are gathered from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. The point of these apocalyptic passages is to remind us where our Christ-story ultimately ends – not in the manger, not on the cross, not even with the empty tomb, but with the New Heavens and a New Earth.
When we pray, “Thy Kingdom come,” that is what we are inviting into being. Today you might pray very slowly through the Lord’s Prayer, and pause to reflect on that phrase when you come to it. How does that petition open up the rest of the others in the prayer Jesus taught his followers to pray? What does it open up in you?
“The world is about to turn,” goes the chorus to Canticle of the Turning, a hymn setting of the Song of Mary. That is worth staying awake for.
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