Advent 1 | The Bible & Judgement | Luke 4:14-22

According to one ancient witness, on the very last day of the year 999, a mass of weeping and terrified people thronged to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, counting down the minutes to the end of the world. That night was the eve of the millennium, the Day of Wrath when the earth would dissolve into ashes. Many folks had given away all that they owned to the poor, all their lands, their homes, their prized possessions, hoping to assure for themselves some measure of forgiveness in the face of the wrath to come. Some of the worshippers actually wore sackcloth and doused themselves with ashes. Some had spent weeks and even months mortifying their flesh and doing other severe acts of penance.

Scholars were certain that the Second Coming of Christ would occur at the stroke of midnight, and that the last Judgement would happen at Jerusalem. An immense, devastating army of pilgrims swarmed Jerusalem hoping that that sacred place would afford them some mercy before the judgement seat.

Adding to people's paranoia, a number of portents and signs appeared. French nuns saw "fiery armies fighting in the sky." So they started a procession and said prayers to ward off the ruin at hand. In Aquitaine, the sky rained blood, spattering people's clothes with crimson spots that could not be washed out.

It was a terrifying time, and I'm sure that though many people were relieved that the apocalypse had not, in fact occurred, I'm sure there were some who felt the first dawn of the year 1000 to be somewhat anticlimactic. And if you were one of those who had sold all you had, I'm sure you were very angry indeed.

This was not the only time people were certain that the end of the world was upon us. In 1844, a Baptist preacher named William Miller was sure that Christ would return and the world as we know it come to an end. Well, when 1844 came and went, Miller's followers had a meeting and decided that although Christ had not actually returned, he had entered the Holy of Holies in the celestial Temple. That seemed to satisfy these followers, who organized themselves into the 7th Day Adventist church.

About seventy years later, another apocalyptic sect, the , Jehovah's Witnesses, declared that Christ would return in 1914. Thousands of devotees sold their possessions, quit their jobs and took to the streets to proclaim the world's immanent demise. When the appointed date came and went, the main office of the Jehovah's Witnesses told its loyal followers that yes, Jesus had in fact returned, but because of their lack of faith, no one had actually seen him.

Evangelicals in the 1970s jumped on the bandwagon as well, producing a string of grade "B" horror movies about the Rapture that literally scared the hell out of a generation of teenagers, or perhaps as they would say, it scared the teenagers out of hell. But many evangelical scholars are realizing that all of those end-times expectations, the "In case of rapture this vehicle will be unmanned" bumper stickers, and the hype so many churches poured on was perhaps ill-advised. They are re-thinking their conclusions, and there is an exciting amount of debate in evangelical circles about the subject today.

These stories are instructive for us, especially as it is very nearly the turn of the next millennium. We have survivalists heading for the hills and doomsday prophets of our own warning that Y2K will bring about the downfall of Western Civilization. But I suspect that we will awaken on Jan 1st to find that our Televisions still work, our power is still on, and few airplanes will actually be falling from the sky.

None of these end-times scenarios came true the way that their prophets predicted they would, and I expect the Y2K soothsayers will be similarly mistaken. But the Bible is a powerful book, precisely because it is filled with dramatic images, and because people have such fervent faith in its literal truth. The fact that so much of it is poetry into which one can read almost anything is lost on people who have a strong agenda and an apocalyptic bent.

Eschatology is a theological term that means "the study of the end of days." The doomsayers and prophets we are so familiar with embrace what scholars call a "future-based" eschatology, meaning they expect these events depicted in scripture to occur at some time yet to come, a time that they look forward to with expectation.

The people in Jesus' day were similarly looking foward to a time when heaven's armies would ride out of the sky and vanquish their foes, in this case, the Roman Empire. The old order would be destroyed and God would reign through his Messiah in Jerusalem. But the Messiah didn't come like that, and Jesus never bought into this kind of future-based eschatology, where bloodshed and terror are the order of the day. Instead, take a look at what he says in our Gospel reading today "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me and sent me to announce glad tidings to the poor; to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." This is the sort of apocalypse Jesus promises, the sort of eschatological vision he intends: an end to a world that promotes bondage and blindness and oppression, and the dawning of sight and release and liberty.

Now in Greek, the word "world" is "kosmos," and it is more properly translated in our current day vernacular as "the system." The system, which tells us that it's every man for himself. The system, which says that welfare mothers are acceptable losses so long as economic growth can be sustained. The system says that people who pay their taxes and obey the rules get to go to heaven, while prostitutes, junkies, and criminals go to the other place. Most people, like sheep, buy into these lies, and they tell them to their children, and the system is perpetuated.

But let us not fool ourselves. The system is not Jesus' way. Jesus taught, fought, and died trying to wake people up to the reality of God's Kingdom. For the Kingdom of God that Jesus taught is the mirror opposite of "the system." In God's Kingdom, the man who thinks only of himself is damned. In God's Kingdom, the widow and orphan are not forgotten. In God's Kingdom streetpeople and hookers have a place at the table to feast with everybody else.

Look at what happens next in the text. Jesus says, to the horror of all that are listening, that "Today, in your very hearing, this text has come true." This is the true genius of Jesus. The end of the world, for him, is not an event in the future, but something very much present in each and every moment. This is what scholars call "realized eschatology," and it is the great twist that Jesus gives to apocalyptic thought. In Jesus' "realized eschatology," the Kingdom is not far away in the future, but is here, available now to anyone who will receive it. "The Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst" Jesus said to his disciples so long ago. And Jesus' words are as true for us today as they were for his listeners in the first century. The Greek verb tense used to describe the "coming of Christ" in the New Testament is not a one-time-only event; it denotes a continual action. The second coming of Christ is not something that we are waiting for to happen in the future, but is a reality that is present to us at all times. Christ is coming, and Christ is coming again. Christ is perpetually coming to our aid as age stretches into age, for as long as men and women of faith look to the risen one for their hope. The Kingdom is not coming, it is here to anyone with the vision to grasp it, and the guts to live in it.

For Jesus, the end of the world is not a cataclysmic, cosmic battle, but a personal battle, fought on the field of the heart. As the Muslims say, true Jihad is fought within. This Holy War is with us in every waking moment. It is the fight between the current system of values and its control over us, and our complicity with it.

The only apocalypse we might experience on the eve of December 31st will be a personal one. The end of days will not happen with a war in the sky and the host of heaven descending upon the Holy City, but within the hearts of each and every person who is open to the experience. Bono of the rock group U2, once said "I can't change the world, but I can change the world in me." This simple phrase, I think, is the key to making sense of the apocalypse, both in scripture and in our everyday lives.

Living in the world, complicitous with "the system," most of us have forgotten our "true face" as Buddhism terms it. Our authentic self is covered over by many layers of "false selves," the personas that society deems so much more appropriate than the "real you." Yet the word "Apocalypse" means "revealing what is hidden," even in one's own heart. This new millennium may be an invitation to you to live life more authentically, to show forth the "real you" instead of the face society has deemed acceptable to show to world. The Gospel of Thomas promises us "That which you have inside you that you bring forth will save you, yet that which you do not bring forth will condemn you." What are the hidden things in your heart that prevent you from living authentically, with power and grace? What fear keeps us cowering before the world, not daring to rock the boat or question the system? What secrets keep you from living the abundant life Jesus promises in the gospel?

On January first, I will not be expecting an army to ride out of the sky, or for the battle of Armageddon to commence. Instead, I plan to nurse a quiet cup of coffee, and sing "Now the Green Blade Riseth" to the world from my porch. I plan to hail the return of the Sun god after months of cold and increasing dark. I plan to celebrate the resurrection of humanity, reborn in a new era. I plan to sing the hope of a renewed and restored planet, of God's Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven, and I will of course include a prayer that I also may be restored, renewed, and that the hidden things in me will be revealed to the world. I invite you to do the same. Let us pray.

God of beginnings, and God of endings, you promise in your word that the mighty will fall and the small will be raised up, and though we long to see such promises come to fruition in the world around us, perhaps we are looking in the wrong place. Let us not pay heed to those who say "The end is near," but to realize that the end is already upon us, and that resurrection is already springing forth unbidden. For we ask this in the name of the one who proclaimed glad tidings to the poor; release for prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, whose Kingdom is already built and waiting for us to simply move in, even Jesus Christ. Amen.

For the first three paragraphs I am indebted to Richard Erdoes' AD 1000: Living on the Brink of Apocalypse (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988).