DANIEL 12:1-4a

PSALM 16:5-11

HEBREWS 10:31-39

MARK 10:14-23

Sermon – 11/16/03

I suspect that there are at least one or two people in the pews today who are wondering right now, “What in God’s Name are today’s Bible readings about? It sounds like they’re talking about The End of the World.”

Well, yes, actually. That’s exactly what today’s readings are about.

Some Christians spend a lot of time reflecting on biblical passages like this, and some avoid them at all costs. Years ago when I was a seminarian I was co-teaching Junior High Sunday School and we got to these passages, and the other teachers hastily assured the students that only “way-out holy rollers” believed these things. I asked the other teachers after class, “In that case, what are we saying every week when we recite the Creed – “Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and dead, and his Kingdom will have no end.”

Today’s Scriptures form part of the biblical basis for that sentence from the Nicene Creed; indeed, today and next Sunday’s and the Sunday after’s Scriptures all reflect on the same reality: “This fragile earth, our island home” is mortal, just as we are. The world will come to an end – perhaps in five billion years, perhaps this afternoon. The world was created by God at a specific point in time, and at some point will be uncreated, also by God.

This article of our Christian faith is also in an even more familiar place – the Lord’s Prayer. We pray “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” In this part of the prayer, we celebrate the fact that God’s will is done perfectly and all the time in heaven, acknowledge the fact that God’s will is not done perfectly and all the time on earth (as you may have noticed) – and celebrate the reality that when the Kingdom of God comes God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The idea of The End of the World is not, actually, a foreign one to us, ever since Western science adopted the biblical view that history is linear, neither unchanging nor circular, that the universe had a beginning (as did the earth) and that life on earth will come to an end “x” billion years in the future when the aging sun will swell to become a Red Giant Star and the earth’s oceans will boil dry and the planet will be swallowed by the sun – all of which will make global warming seem like a very tame thing indeed. Unless, of course, some other cataclysm happens long before – like the earth getting hit by a giant asteroid or whatever.

That sort of possibility has spanned space age disaster movies, like the one in which Bruce Willis takes a band of fearless misfits up in space to blow up such an asteroid. Or you could watch the movie “Independence Day”, in which Will Smith helps save the day when earth is attacked by malevolent aliens.

A few years ago, the more common speculation was that we human beings would manage to blow ourselves up without outside help. I had air raid drills in elementary school. I remember my father building a fall-out shelter and I can still remember the map on Page One of our local paper during the Cuban Missile Crisis which detailed the damage if the Soviets dropped an H-bomb on Washington.

It was not a carefree time to be a kid.

And the reality was, in fact, worse than my fears: anyone who lived as close to downtown Boston as we did would not have had to worry about fall-out in a full-fledge nuclear war. We would have been fall-out.

Nowadays, of course, we don’t think about this so much...unless we wonder if the Russian government still has kept track of all the nuclear warheads the Soviet military used to have under lock and key.

The Christian faith says: yes, the world will completely come to an end – and when it does, God will then be completely in charge. Who else would we rather have be in charge?

So, when you pray, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done,” play “The Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s “Messiah” in your mind:

“The Kingdom of this world has become the Kingdom of our God and of his Christ and he shall reign for ever and ever, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”

If the world is going to end eventually anyway, which we can accept scientifically, let us embrace the hope and joy the Christian faith gives us: namely, God is in charge of the ultimate destiny of all people and of what comes next after history. God will end history – and does not want any help from humans in ending it!

All sin will be destroyed by God: all greed, cruelty, violence, bigotry, idolatry for starters and all the consequences of sin, like war and starvation.

This is good news.

So, point one: The world will end. God will end it and be in charge of what comes next.

Point two: There will be great suffering, and tribulation before the return of Christ. The Bible is clear about this.

Point three: There will be frauds, fake messiahs trying to con people. Already have been. Will be more. Don’t be taken in. No one knows when the End will be except God the Father Almighty, and he’s not telling.

Point four: The mission of Christians living under the shadow of The End is to repent, have faith and endure – and call others to do likewise. There is still time to be among those who God will save. Spread the Good News of God’s mercy and love and be seriously and joyously committed.

Point five: The new world a’coming will be more wonderful than we can imagine. Imagine life with the bad parts left out, and then multiply that joy by itself a few times. That’s a start.

So if the Scriptures today and for the next two weeks seem a little grim – well, part of the future will be grim, but the grimness of the warnings is mainly to keep us from worshipping the world as it is. Some people get too hung up on what they own and what they can and want to buy, forgetting how transient this life is. Well, the world is transient, too. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the world’s needs – quite the contrary. For it is the love we lavish on others which will endure; the things we buy for ourselves will not.

In the words of the classic hymn,

“For the Lord our God shall come,

and shall take his harvest home;

from his field shall in that day

all offenses purge away;

give his angels charge at last

in the fire the taves to cast,

but the fruitful ears to store

in his garner ever more.

“Even so, Lord, quickly come

to thy final harvest home;

gather thou thy people in,

free from sorrow, free from sin,

there, forever purified, in thy presence to abide;

come, with all thine angels come,

raise the glorious harvest home.”

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church