Читать книгу Apocalypse When? - Jerry L. Sumney - Страница 9

Leah D. Schade

For clergy, preaching apocalyptic texts is anticipated with nearly as much enthusiasm as a dental check-up. “The end of the world . . . again,” quipped one pastor at a text study I once attended as we tackled the images of the end times that proliferate the Revised Common Lectionary passages in the last Sundays of Pentecost and the first Sundays of Advent. The pastor’s sarcasm perhaps masks a deeper unease about the real fears alluded to in passages such as Revelation 21:15, whose warnings of impending cosmic upheaval ricochet sharply off contemporary headlines about war, natural disasters, and threats to the fabric of civilization. Add to this the disconcerting news about the effects of climate disruption, a global pandemic, and environmental stress, and the task of preaching good news in the face of seemingly imminent doom can feel overwhelming to pastor and congregation alike.

Catherine Keller describes the problem this way:

[W]arnings of social, economic, ecological, or nuclear disaster have become so numbingly normal that they do not have the desired effect on most of us who retreat all the more frantically into private pursuits . . . How can we sustain resistance to destruction without expecting to triumph? That is, how can we acknowledge the apocalyptic dimensions of the late-modern situation in which we find ourselves entrenched without either clinging to some millennial hope of steady progress or then, flipping, disappointed, back to pessimism?9

Preachers may experience this “flipping” when faced with the temptations of either cheerleading the faithful with end-time fantasies or encouraging magical thinking by waiting passively for a messianic solution to the world’s problems. Both options, says Keller, can lead to an “apocalyptic either/or logic—if we can’t save the world, then to hell with it. Either salvation or damnation.”10

This either-or dichotomy is not the only option to approaching end-time texts, however. New Testament scholar Barbara Rossing notes that apocalyptic texts provide unique opportunities for preachers and are, in fact, essential because they “empower radical witness. They give us a sacramental imagination, taking us on a journey into the heart of God’s vision for the world.”11 The word apokalypsis in Greek literally means, “pulling back the curtain.” Biblical texts (and the sermons that utilize them) can pull back the veils that obscure the presence of systemic and oppressive evil in the world and allow us to see a deeper reality that is not immediately visible. We are able to see with a kind of double vision that reveals “both the beauty of creation and also the pathologies of empire,” whether these empires originate in Assyria, Babylonia, Rome, or the United States of America.12

Equipped with this double vision, the preacher is able to name the underlying oppressive assumptions of empire and critique these assumptions and how they manifest in society, the natural world, and the lived experiences of the hearers. But a third move is needed—proclaiming the divine eschatological vision that has the power to transform our imaginations, renew hope, and empower collective action for living into this vision of the eschaton. Eschatology comes from the Greek word eschaton, meaning end times. The visionary world of biblical apocalyptic literature “can help us see both the perils we face and the urgency of God’s promised future,” says Rossing, “turning the world for justice and healing, ‘on Earth as in heaven.’ The preacher cultivates an apocalyptic imagination by helping people recognize God’s future breaking into the present, even in times of despair.”13

Our approach to preaching apocalyptic texts in this book will be to offer an eschatological perspective that is forthright about the existential realities of our present time while avoiding either extreme of doom and gloom or “pie in the sky by and by.” We’ll explore a “third way” for understanding the concepts of beginnings and endings in Scripture that looks to the hope revealed in Christ’s redemption for all Creation.14 The goal is for this lens to yield insights and heuristic possibilities for eschatologically oriented proclamation that engenders hope and invites deep and joyful engagement with God’s new creation.

Reflections on Christian Concepts of Time and Preaching

The way in which the church has understood time throughout its history, how it orients itself in time today, and how its worship rituals, Bible readings, prayers, and even music are shaped by the liturgical year are all factors to consider in preaching, especially when addressing apocalyptic texts. Genesis 1 describes the creation of time where days and nights are marked by the movement of the sun and moon and stars, the means by which Earth-dwellers measure and track time. By the end of that chapter, we reach the culmination of the seven-day period resolving into a time of rest. Thus, we see patterns: the movement of light and darkness within a single day, the seven-day week within the month, and all of this encompassed within the cycle of the year. Thus, our very existence contains the DNA of time built right into the cosmos, our planet, our bodies and psyches, and our communities.

Yet humans also have a sense of the eternal, the timelessness of the Divine. Psalm 90 gives us a glimpse into the mystery of how mortals and God experience time differently:

1Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.

2Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

3You turn us back to dust, and say, “Turn back, you mortals.”

4For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.

In other words, what can seem like a long span of time for humans is but a tick of the clock for God. Perceptions of time differ according to our perspective; time stretches, contracts, speeds up, slows down, and even seems to stop on occasion. More importantly, as Jews and Christians believe, God chooses mortal time as the means by which to reveal God’s self. Humans are not expected to train themselves to transcend time and space in order to attain enlightenment, as is the case in some religions. Instead, God enters into human time and space in very concrete ways, through specific historical events and people, in order to develop a relationship with humankind. Relationships are key for human beings, and we both mark time and build continuity in relationships by remembering certain days such as birthdays and anniversaries throughout the years. The same is true for Jews and Christians who believe in a relational God who makes Godself known through concrete acts that happen in history and are remembered yearly, weekly, and even daily.

In this way, time—past, present, and future—is a gift that is given to humanity. The fact that God is interested in being part of time with us and for us creates sacred time for believers. Mircea Eliade theorized that Archaic Man lived in the space between two planes of existence—the sacred and the profane. Human belief in the supernatural means that their actions, rituals, buildings, and how they orient themselves in time are all reflected by the desire to exist in the sacred realm even while slogging through the everydayness of life. Profane time is experienced as linear. It’s just one thing happening after another in sequence. Time flows in one direction, from present to future. But human memory also allows for time past to be remembered in the present, thus seeming to flow both backward and forward. We have the capacity to remember not only as individuals, but also as a species, as a culture. This past is remembered through story, myth, and recorded history. We also have the capacity to think about the future, to conceive of a different reality than what we see at the present. This future-thinking accounts for the tension in apocalyptic—will the future be an improvement on the past, or will we see things deteriorate? And what is God’s role in this future? What is the church’s role? What is the role of individual Christians?

In addition to the linear conceptions of time, humans are also able to experience time in a cyclical way, which is how we are able to imagine and exist in sacred time. We do this through ritual in which we attempt to re-create and thus re-experience the events of the past through sacred time. This cyclical nature of time enables us to re-actualize what happened previously, even going back to the dawn of human civilization. For example, seasons of planting, growth, harvest, and death are marked in nearly every ancient culture, including the Jewish calendar (which is, of course, where the Christian calendar draws its origins). But these seasons are also given sacred significance, connected with the realm of God as well as the stories of God’s saving history with the people.

Human culture celebrates all manner of festivals around the change of seasons and years, and this is no different in the church. The liturgical year marks both the internal cycles of time (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost), and the progression of time over weeks, months, years, centuries, and millennia. Eliade explained that through myths and rituals that give access to this sacred time, humans can protect themselves against what he called the “terror of history,” the fear that human existence is a pointless exercise ending in oblivion.15 In other words, sacred time always involves a return to a paradigmatic mythic period in the past in order to give meaning to the present and to bolster courage for the future.

For Christians, the liturgy within our worship services gives us access to that sacred time. Both the cyclical and linear timelines converge because God is active in history, is active in the here and now, and will be active in the future—what the Greeks called eschaton, the end times. Every worship service in a sense proclaims the in-breaking of God’s kingdom into this world, bringing the fullness of time upon us. This means that the liturgy (and thus preaching) situates us in that liminal, in-between time which transcends past, present, and future, but is also very much a part of real time as well.

How does God’s future manifest itself in our present time? There is another interesting Greek word called prolepsis, which means “anticipated.” When we participate in and lead the liturgy, we are in the midst of a paradox: Christ’s coming has already happened, but it has not yet come upon us in the fullness of the present moment. We can catch glimpses of it, but we only experience his return (called the Parousia) in an “already but not yet” way. Thus, we exist in a state of anticipation and expectation. Prolepsis allows the liturgy (including the sermon) to create hope because it anticipates the return of the resurrected Christ within this very time and place.

Think of it this way. Ephesians 1:9–10, states: “[God] has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” In other words, time is moving forward to an inexorable point of Christ’s coming, the fulfillment of the kingdom of God at the eschaton. And because we believe that promise, it has an effect on the here and now, so that in our proclamation, in our worship, in our service, in our work for justice and peace, we are actually participating in the coming of God’s realm. We are part of Christ’s work of bringing the realm of God into the world—even when it seems the world is falling apart around us.

Thus, it is through Jesus the Christ that past, present, and future come together. And we experience that mysterious convergence through the rituals of the liturgy where we read from ancient Scriptures, preach, and partake in ancient rituals (such as baptism and communion) that have been with us for thousands of years. As Hebrews 1:12 states: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.” The question for preachers and their listeners, however, is how to live in these “last days” when suffering seems to be increasing on scales of magnitude that are overwhelming.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel _______”(fill in the blank)16

“We are moving fast—nose-diving—toward ecological catastrophe and/or nuclear Armageddon. If we cannot pull out of this nose-dive the short term future can evaporate at any moment.”17 So warned feminist psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein in 1989. She continued: “And to pull out of it—to avert the death of living earthly reality—means mustering a huge, miraculous spurt of human growth and change: fast change; change within persons and within intimate groups, and change in the nature of the larger societal units (cultural, economic, political and regional) on whose level the developments we call historic take place.”18

Voices within the secular realm have joined in the clarion call for action in the face of impending apocalyptic doom. Thomas Friedman’s book, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How it can Renew America, attempted to tap into the can-do spirit of American ingenuity to avert the disastrous trifecta of global warming, the demands of the global economy, and human overpopulation.19 Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit called for a “global Marshall Plan” to respond to the global environmental crisis and even evoked religious language. “We have had a warning of the fate that awaits if we ‘bow before the accomplished fact.’ God and history will remember our judgment,” he solemnly intoned.20 Nearly thirty years later at the time of this writing, climate scientists have estimated that the time remaining is terrifyingly short for humans to radically curtail carbon emissions before a cascade of catastrophic events threatens all life on this planet.

In many ways Creation itself is already in the eschaton. This is especially true for the strip-mined mountains, decimated forests, and other devastated areas of Earth for whom “the end” has already happened. The preacher working from an eco-hermeneutical reading of Revelation might consider Earth and Earth’s other-than-human creatures as “hearers” of the sermon even if they are not present per se in the human congregation. Because, in fact, the “end of the world” has already come to pass for countless extinct species whose history has come to an end at the hands of human beings. Doomsday has come and gone for the North American Passenger Pigeon, Australian Toolache Wallaby, Indian Arunchal Hopea Tree, and St. Helena Olive, not to mention untold numbers of plant and animal species whose final dying members passed into oblivion unnoticed and unmourned by human eyes.

And what of the impending apocalypse for the hundreds of plant and animal species currently facing threatened or imminent extinction? Countless species languish in prisons of shrinking habitat, poisoned waters, and diminishing food supplies. We have ghettoized Creation, delineating by way of concrete and metal boundaries where greenery, fur, and feathers can and cannot live, blocking them into increasingly smaller areas of living that isolate and cramp them in what had once been vast and free-ranging bioscapes. Meanwhile, human suffering from the effects of climate disruption manifests in catastrophic storms, rising sea levels engulfing homes, droughts and blighted crops, wildfires raging through entire communities, and wars over diminishing resources.

This means that when we read John of Patmos’s vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Revelation, we can see that this is not some otherworldly portent of impending doom. They represent real human riders subjugating animals, ecosystems, and humans (especially those of color and those in poverty) in the service of conquest, war, famine, and death. Humans may delight in (and profit from) the publishing success of apocalyptic fiction such as the Left Behind series. But Earth watches the drama unfold in real time, its future uncertain, save for the knowledge that suffering is happening right now and will continue to happen for generations to come. Thus, the preacher’s proclamation about the certainty of God’s presence, care, and desire for justice is all the more necessary.

Not Our First Apocalyptic Rodeo

While the writers of apocalyptic texts did not face the global scale of environmental, socioeconomic, cultural, military, and institutional pressures that, for us, seem to have reached their breaking point, they did face their own version of a cataclysmic collision of these forces. Sumney’s descriptions of the circumstances faced by the oppressed people to whom these apocalyptic texts were written will be found throughout this book. As we will see, whether at the mercy of ancient rulers or our current neoliberal-industrial-capitalistic-military complex, those caught in the totality of empire find themselves desperate for release. We can understand, then, the need to turn to apocalyptic texts and the feelings that these texts want to address—hopelessness, panic, foreboding, frustration, helplessness, and perhaps even suicidal despair. These are the feelings that the preacher will need to be aware of when crafting sermons that address biblical passages about end times and the coming of divine judgment.

Yet the preacher will also recognize that not all people experience these feelings. Some try to numb them through artificial, chemical, or technological escapes. Others just appear to be happily oblivious—especially if their positions of privilege within the empire are comfortably (if temporarily) maintained. Thus, the preacher will likely face a congregation whose folks are not in agreement about the state of the world. Some will resist sermons that courageously and prophetically name what is happening. Others may have already given up hope. But there will also be those who are looking to the Word of God for something, anything, that helps them make sense of the chaos and disintegration that they see happening around them. The sermon can help create meaning by pointing to the ancient wisdom of these apocalyptic texts and drawing out implications for what we face today.

Even those who are comfortable—or comfortably numb—with the state of the world cannot deny that the culture itself is littered with “texts” that depict apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic futures. There is a plethora of books, movies, television shows, graphic novels, and video games that traffic in the images and story lines of end-of-the-world scenarios. The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, Divergent by Veronica Roth, and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood; movies such as Blade Runner, Mad Max, The Matrix, and the animated WALL-E; video games like Call of Duty, Half Life, and Fall Out; television shows such as The Last Man on Earth; comics like The Walking Dead (also a television series)—all of them present a vision of the future that eerily echoes biblical themes and scenes from apocalyptic texts.

For preachers, these cultural texts cut both ways. On the one hand, one need only refer to a popular scene from one of these movies or books for contemporary hearers to tune in with recognition. Threatening skies, zombies roaming the streets, anarchy, mayhem, violence, desolation, and shortages of food and water in contemporary literature and movies seem to be lifted right from Daniel 9 or the book of Revelation (minus the zombies). But the preponderance of these modern dystopias presents two serious barriers for Christians to hear the biblical texts. First, in nearly all of these dystopias, evil wins. In fact, it appears that the genres themselves inadvertently create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The character Nix in the movie Tomorrowland explains why the messages of doom can backfire:

[I believed] the only way to stop [the annihilation] was to show it. To scare people straight. Because what reasonable human being wouldn’t be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they’ve ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up like a chocolate eclair! They didn’t fear their demise, they re-packaged it. It could be enjoyed as video games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon. 21

This is exactly what we want to avoid in preaching apocalyptic texts from the Bible. When visions of fantastical beasts, death, destruction, and doom show up in Scripture, they are not intended to be repackaged as products for consumption, as has been done with the lucrative Left Behind series. Rather, their function is to tell a different story, which is that even if this is where we are now—heading toward the worst case scenario—God does not abandon the world or us. What we see, and what the proclamations of doom envision, are not the last word.

To this, modern listeners may respond, “Of course! That’s where the hero comes in!” Within nearly every one of the secular stories of the apocalyptic genre there is the singular hero, perhaps with a small band of friends, who finds a way to survive, beat back the zombies, find a cure, or unlock the secret to a better future. They battle sadistic rulers, savage creatures, double-crossing fellow survivors, and the destitution of Earth, to emerge with a glimmer of hope for humanity. These stories have strong appeal, but they are based on a dangerous premise, which is that the salvation of humanity and the world is up to the individual. The theological premise of these genres is that we are alone, abandoned by God (if there ever was one), and the fate of the world rests in our hands. The best we can hope for are a few loyal and ingenious friends to accompany us as we make our way in this grave new world.

This premise of the apocalyptic hero throws up the second barrier to preachers trying to proclaim—and listeners trying to hear—the gospel in end-times texts. The hero trope is antithetical to the intention of apocalyptic texts in the Bible for two reasons. First, Scripture promises that we are not alone, and that even if we fail, God does not. Second, apocalyptic texts in Scripture are not about singular individuals; they are about the community of the faithful who are strengthened and upheld by a divine and benevolent force bigger than themselves. In contrast, the modern day concept of the hero and a band of fellow stalwart survivors battling for survival is like a flame drawing moths. We are seduced by something that distracts us and draws away our energy that is needed for something far more important—building faith and building community. Thus, sermons based on apocalyptic texts will need to reveal the problematic nature of secular doomsday dramas while clearly pointing the way to the true light of the gospel.

Yet even while the preacher is countering the distracting messages of the apocalypse in popular culture, there is an even more daunting task—refuting the dangerous “Rapture theology” of Christian millennialism.

Leaving Behind Left Behind

When I was nine years old in the late ’70s, a friend of mine and her family took me to their church to see a movie. I was very excited because I loved going to movies, and I thought it was cool that a church was going to show a real movie with popcorn and candy! But when we got to the church and descended the steps to the basement, I realized I was going to be disappointed. There was no popcorn, no candy. Only rows of hard metal chairs facing a screen.

My disappointment turned to fear as I watched the film. It was a movie about the end of days and what was going to happen when Jesus came back to Earth. It was terrifying! It showed images of the moon turning the color of blood, the sun going dark, and stars falling from the sky. It painted a picture of mass confusion on Earth, with people running around in sheer terror as Jesus comes down in a great cloud of doom. The movie followed the story of one family’s trials and tribulations, including watching their young son being tortured by agents of the Antichrist.

After it was over, my friend’s parents asked me what I thought of the movie. I said that I thought it was really scary and that I was worried that maybe the end of the world would happen while I was alive. They told me that everything I saw in the movie was in the Bible and is exactly the way things are going to happen when Jesus comes back. “You should be worried,” they said. “Everyone should be worried about Jesus coming again.”

This was the same message I received from the books given to me by members of my extended family who attended churches where authors like Frank Peretti, Tim LaHaye, and Jerry Jenkins were read with as much fervor as the Bible. Books like Peretti’s This Present Darkness and LaHaye and Jenkins’s Left Behind series put the fear of God and angels into my nightmares and daydreams. When I think back on the way these books and movies created such dread of Jesus in my impressionable young mind, it’s a wonder I didn’t run screaming from the church and the Bible. Instead, by the grace of God, it led me into a lifelong pursuit of theological and biblical study that eventually resulted in my becoming a pastor and seminary professor of preaching and worship. Something in my head and heart told me that what they were showing me in that cold, dark church basement and in those terrifying books was not the Jesus and God of the Bible. I had to find different answers and wrestle with these biblical passages in other contexts in order to get a fuller understanding of what they mean for our lives.

But for millions of people, Christian apocalyptic fiction is not a genre to be critically examined; it is akin to the Bible itself. An entire multimillion-dollar industry has been created around graphic Christian horror that grips the faithful in fear and fantasy. Worse, it peddles a narrative that supports a political agenda of war-making in the Middle East, environmental degradation, patriarchal control over women and their bodies, and anti-Semitic and Islamophobic white nationalism. Eighty million copies of the Left Behind books, along with numerous Rapture websites, movies, and spin-offs threaten to drown out the gospel of hope, renewal, and love. Meanwhile, the preacher on a Sunday morning has about fifteen to twenty minutes to proclaim that Jesus’ return is about justice, transformation, and healing. So it’s important to make these sermons count for deconstructing harmful theology and reconstructing a theology of nonviolence and an ethic of care for those most vulnerable.

These distorted fundamentalist end-time narratives pose the opposite problem of secular doomsday products. They insist that the state of the world is God’s will. The suffering endured by people and the planet is the result of God’s wrath against the heathens, and, worse, it is inevitable. Those ascribing to this theology assent to the suffering of others (and even their own suffering) because they see no possibility for a better future until they are whisked away by a vengeful God smiting the Earth and all his (sic) enemies. In both secular and Christian apocalyptic fiction, however, the result is the same. People resign themselves to having no agency in God’s work of restoration. Or, worse, they believe that polluting the Earth or stirring up war in the Middle East is going to speed up Christ’s return.

Preachers, then, have a profound challenge—to reintroduce their listeners to the apocalyptic texts in a way that takes them on a journey that is different from either the secular or fundamentalist Christian paths. It is not a journey that leads to war or ecological collapse or oppressive dystopias, but rather “a journey into the heart of God, a journey into the heart of our world,” says Rossing. Apocalyptic texts give us a way of seeing that “teaches us how to look at the stories of our lives and the structures of violence and power in light of God’s shepherding Lamb. It teaches us to challenge oppression and to look for signs of hope, even when evil seems overpowering. It gives us an urgent vision for our future in which God dwells with us, on earth.”22 And it invites us to actively participate in that future in a life-giving way.

Homiletical Orientation

The sermons in this book will be grounded in a theology of preaching wherein “the Word of God spoken is itself the Word of God in preaching or God’s own speech to us. Thus preaching has a dual aspect: divine activity and human activity, God’s Word and human speech.”23 This dual function of preaching emphasizes both the human activity of the preacher who takes the suffering of humanity and Earth into consideration when proclaiming God’s Word, as well as God’s action of calling people to awareness, repentance, and hope in the midst of despair. Such proclamation is enhanced by engaging with other dialogue partners, as Richard Lischer states: “Beyond the preacher’s pastoral experiences lies theology’s perennial dialogue with psychotherapy, anthropology, philosophy, ideology, politics, the arts, science, medicine, cybernetics, and ethics. This dialogue not only informs preaching; it makes it possible—and intelligible.”24

As a Lutheran homiletician, my commitment to preaching both Law and Gospel will likely be evident in many of the sermons. Martin Luther taught that God’s Law drives us to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Gospel without the Law leads to pablum and what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.”25 But Law without Gospel leads to despair, fear, and hopelessness. Therefore, the Law-Gospel dialectic will be helpful for preaching about apocalyptic texts so that we are forthright about both individual and systemic sin but also the necessity and sureness of God’s response of justice, grace, mercy, reconciliation, and a “new creation.”

My homiletic is also strongly influenced by what John McClure identifies as a liberation theology approach to preaching, which develops “a profound awareness of Christ incarnate in the pain and suffering of the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, the shamed, the shunned, the outcast, the abused, or the disenfranchised.”26 I extend this liberation theology to include an ecotheological orientation for preaching that moves to expand our awareness beyond the human community to embrace the other-than-human community of Earth-kin and Earth itself. Including these voices at the homiletical “round table” (to use McClure’s and Lucy Atkinson Rose’s phrase) arises out of, and is a natural extension of, the gospel’s concern with “the least of these” and the good news about the coming of God’s new creation. In the preacher’s proclamation of grace within a sermon about apocalyptic texts, “God’s will and power are identified not with what socially is but with what will be.”27

Consider, for example, passages such as Isaiah 65:17–19, 2 Corinthians 5:17, and Revelation 21:15, each of which contain either the phrase “new heaven and new earth” or “new creation.” A sermon about this theme will proclaim hope as “an absolutely fundamental theological category [because] anticipation of a new future grounded in faith in God conditions and motivates life,” says McClure. “The Christian life is one of hope, consciousness-raising, learning from and suffering with the oppressed (in order to come close to Christ), hope for and involvement in the work of social transformation, and joy in the present, rooted in faith’s hope for and vision of the future.”28 We’ll explore this theme of hope and new creation more fully throughout the book.

Having traced the contours of the complexities that accompany preaching about apocalyptic texts, we can establish some parameters for apocalyptic preaching. A sermon that preaches both “law” about our crisis as well as “gospel” proclaiming God’s grace in the midst of our failures finds a way to do three things. First, the sermon will honor the intrinsic value of God’s Creation, inclusive of humanity. Second, the sermon will realistically state the dilemmas in which we find ourselves today and offer prophetic critique in order to participate in God’s transformative justice. Third, the sermon will look to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ for clues as to how we as the church might creatively live into the proleptic vision of Christ’s return that leads to hope, restoration, and community.

Fundamentally, we hope that this book will bolster the confidence of the preacher to undertake apocalyptic preaching in the first place. As Philip Quanbeck notes, when it comes to preaching about apocalyptic passages in the Bible:

The temptation is to avoid those texts altogether. The infrequent appearance of Revelation in the Revised Common Lectionary aids in that conspiracy of silence. If, however, there is something central to Christian theology in those apocalyptic texts, those texts need to be proclaimed. If the lectionary is not going to help, the preacher needs to do something intentional, such as a sermon series on apocalyptic texts. These texts cannot be left to the Christian fringe.29

We agree with Quanbeck’s assertion that preachers must address apocalyptic texts in their sermons. Apocalyptic preaching attempts to answer the question, how shall we live in this space in between the already and the not yet?30 How shall we sojourn in this “becoming” time and space that is so precariously perched upon the abyss? The fact is that chaos does bring pain and destruction with it. The “birth pangs” described by Paul in Romans 8 may be heralding a new creation, but the woman in travail must learn how to push through the pain and violent upheaval. Ideally, she will have midwives to coach her along, remind her to breathe, and guide the emergence of the new creation. Perhaps that is one role for the preacher—to serve as a midwife for God’s people and Earth longing for the birth of the new creation.

This means that when we are preaching apocalyptic texts, we are on a kind of frontier, a liminal place between the Divine and the people. Thus we have a very important job, which is to help people keep God’s horizon in sight. There is a tension between the immediate time and the eschatological time always coming to us from the horizon. As people are so caught up in the hurriedness and scatteredness of everyday profane living, the worship service and preaching help to bring the horizon of holiness back into our focus. The liturgy and sermon help to reorient us in time and to step back into that journey towards the eternal. God’s horizon of holiness keeps calling to us.

As worship leaders and preachers, we hold these two edges together—the past and the present time—while also looking toward that horizon of the eschatological future. The poet David Whyte speaks of the “generous surprise” that comes to us in good literature and art, and, I would add, in worship services and preaching.31 This generous surprise brings us into a new world, but also a world that is familiar to us. It is the paradox of the crucified body resurrected—bearing the scars yet transformed by God’s power and grace into new life. This is what apocalyptic preaching can do. It can guide us into a world where we are changed when we come into this generous surprise. Apocalyptic preaching invites transformation, and transformation happens primarily to those who are paying attention. The more deeply we attend to what is being revealed to us, the more our hearts are broken and our minds are resolved to act. You as a worship leader and preacher are the one who can help to communicate this to your congregation and to a world that is desperately in need of vision.

The challenge, Catherine Keller says, is “how to begin. Again. Amidst every kind of loss.”32 Preaching apocalyptic texts proclaims that it is God’s love that hovers and dances, breathes and laughs as the ruach-spirit upon the abyss. It is love that submerges and reemerges from the depths. It is love that creates. It is love that becomes one of us in this powerful, fragile humanity. “[T]o love is to bear with the chaos.”33 Love attends the crucifixion and does not look away. Love brings balm and burial spices to the tomb of a crucified Earth. And love stands in the garden, gasping in wide-eyed recognition of the stranger, our teacher the Rabbi—the beloved new creation calling our name.

9. Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then, 14.

10. Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then, 14.

11. Rossing, “The World is About to Turn,” 141.

12. Rossing, “The World is About to Turn,” 141.

13. Rossing, “The World is About to Turn,” 141.

14. I make the decision to capitalize the word Creation so as to denote the level of respect I am affording the other-than-human world as a subject rather than object. I do the same with the term Earth when addressing it as an entity (as opposed to lowercase earth, which is a synonym of soil). Capitalizing the term indicates that this is an entity with a name, and that the entity is worthy of such.

15. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, ch. 4.

16. The song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” is a song by the band R.E.M. released on their 1987 album Document.

17. Dinnerstein, “Survival on Earth,” 192.

18. Dinnerstein, “Survival on Earth,” 192.

19. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

20. Gore, Earth in the Balance, 294.

21. Bird, Tomorrowland.

22. Rossing, The Rapture Exposed, xviii.

23. Ngien, “Theology of Preaching in Martin Luther.”

24. Lischer, A Theology of Preaching, 9.

25. Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship.

26. McClure, Other-Wise Preaching, 136.

27. McClure, Other-Wise Preaching, 137.

28. McClure, Other-Wise Preaching, 137.

29. Quanbeck, “Preaching Apocalyptic Texts,” 318.

30. Margaret Swedish’s book Living Beyond the “End of the World” offers a practical and cogent guide to this question.

31. Whyte, What to Remember When Waking.

32. Keller, Face of the Deep, 158.

33. Keller, Face of the Deep, 29.