11-7-16 - EOTWAWKI?

Right in time for our cataclysmic election, here comes our Gospel text for Sunday – and it's the end of the world. (You know you’re going to get an REM link at some point this week…) Each fall, as if to match the gathering gloom of shortening days, our lectionary begins to drag scary stories out of our ancestral closet. It echoes an earlier a time, when Advent was much more focused on prophetic doom and gloom than it is now.

This conversation starts casually, as some of Jesus’ followers are admiring the temple and its adornments. Jesus is blunt: "As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down." 

Now, we the readers know that in 70 CE the Romans did in fact destroy the temple. But this would have been a shocking pronouncement to Jesus’ companions. And as with most of us, when we hear that something horrible is likely to happen, they want to know when will it be, and how will they know.

Jesus’ answer is cryptic: "Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, `I am he!' and, `The time is near!' Do not go after them.” He suggests that some will try to gain a following by issuing dire predictions about the end of the world. We’ve seen that in the recent past – remember when the world was going to end on May 21 a few years ago?

Why do people fall for this? Maybe because it is fairly natural to fear what we cannot control, and it’s hard to get bigger in the “you cannot control this” department than the end of the world as we know it. The end of THE world becomes a stand-in for our anxiety about the ends of our worlds – which actually come with some frequency, with wars and famines and pandemics; infidelities and job losses; diagnoses and mega-storms and losses of all sorts. And for the most part, we survive.

What are you most afraid of losing today? Can you name that fear, sit with it, invite Jesus to join you in your imagination? What might he do with it? How might you invite his perfect love to transform that fear into something you can use?

It is true that in some ways our worlds are always ending. But that’s not the whole story - new life is always being born as well, sometimes in the ashes of the old world. God is in the business of making all things new – can’t help himself. Our job is to be open to new life wherever we find it.

(I’m going to wait on REM, but here’s a link to a fun song by a duo I like, Goodnight Moonshine. The song is “End of the World Blues,” and you can find it about 15.55 minutes into this concert on YouTube