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First Sunday in Advent

Matthew 24:36–44

Romans 13:8–14

For most of us on the more progressive end of the religious spectrum, any talk of apocalypse becomes problematic quite quickly. First, for those of us who grew up or spent time in more fundamentalist, evangelical circles, we have all too vivid memories of sermons talking about the end times and how, somehow always, we were living in them. We had signs and wonders pointed out to us, showing how they matched up with Daniel or Revelation, making it clear that the end of the world was just around the corner. We watched awful movies in the 1980s that portrayed what would happen when Jesus returned (usually involving children coming into houses to find no one there, an image that might have leeched into our own lives), and, of course, there was the Left Behind book series. I’ve even heard some people describe “rapture practice,” where they would do deep knee-bends, then rise up, lifting their hands to the heavens, as they imagined they might be carried away one day. We might have even bought and read Hal Lindsey’s book showing exactly how everything matched up with passages from the apocalyptic sections of the Bible, so we were quite clear on how the end of the world would occur. Not surprisingly, those predictions never came true, which often led us to question our faith, given that our faith was built on the Bible’s being an accurate forecaster of future events, as if it is our Christian Nostradamus.

There’s a larger problem, though, in that, for many of us, we don’t think about the afterlife in the same way as evangelicals. We might not believe in any kind of literal second coming (or even a metaphorical one), and we might even go so far as to question the existence of any kind of heaven. Instead, we argue that heaven happens here on Earth when we act out the teachings of Jesus, and that hell is simply an invention of the medieval church designed to control the masses. I might be going a bit far, of course, but it’s not a stretch to say that most progressive Christians struggle when it comes to talking about anything related to Jesus’s (or the rest of the Bible’s) apocalyptic passages, as they usually ascribe them simply to the culture the Bible comes from when people quite clearly believed in a coming apocalypse of some sort.

Thus, we’re left with what to do with these passages. I’m never comfortable simply dismissing passages as presenting archaic beliefs that have nothing to teach us, as there are almost always truths lying beneath the surface of those passages, and I definitely believe that to be the case here. One of the reasons our society is so focused on apocalyptic scenes (note the number of zombie shows and movies that have replaced the focus on nuclear annihilation prevalent in the 1980s) is that we all will ultimately suffer from our personal apocalypse: we will all die. The world will come to an end for us, so, whether we want to admit this truth about ourselves, we believe the world will, for all purposes, end. We are unable to truly imagine a world without us in it, as our viewpoint is the only one we know and can imagine.

Thus, if we want a different way of thinking about the afterlife, we can think about the world that will exist after us. Samuel Scheffler, author of Death & the Afterlife, takes an interesting approach to this subject. He doesn’t believe in the afterlife in the traditional sense, but he does talk about a literal world that exists after our deaths, as the earth will continue after we die. He then proceeds to argue that, if we were to ignore that world, it would change almost everything about our lives. He uses the example of a cancer researcher to ask whether that would be a good use of time and resources if everyone on the planet was simply going to die out in seventy or eighty years; why would anyone do research that will not see real results in their lifetime? He even references a scene from Annie Hall, where Alvy Singer, a nine-year-old, says that he won’t do his homework because the universe will end. The doctor assures him that that end will not happen for billions of years, but Scheffler asks whether or not Alvy would be right if all lives would end in ten or twenty years. Essentially, he’s taking the idea of what we would do if we only had six months (or two decades) to live, but complicating it by removing any future generations.

It is these future generations that might help us better understand what Jesus and Paul are getting at here, as opposed to the more traditional view of the afterlife. Rather than wanting us to live a certain way to get into heaven, Jesus wants us to live a certain way to affect those around us and those who will come after us, those who will live on in what we can call our personal afterlife. Even if we don’t have children, we have an impact on the world that exists after we cease to, whether that impact is large or small. We should “keep awake,” as Jesus says, because we never know when our world will end and our impact will cease.

This unexpectedness, combined with that impact, leads to Paul’s passage on loving one another. He, too, wants us to wake up, to move from darkness into light, but he is more explicit about what he means by that. He wants us to love our neighbor, as that is “the fulfilling of the law.” Loving those around us will have ripple effects, changing the world that we leave behind, not in any sense of cheesy funeral scenes from movies, but by truly changing people around us, causing them to live different lives, as well. If we believe that we will one day die and cease to exist and that we don’t know when that will occur, we should live in the light Paul talks about, loving our neighbors. We might or might not exist in some sort of heaven above, but we can help those who come after us to live in a world that is closer to heaven, giving our lives more meaning than we can now imagine.

Questions for Reflection or Discussion:

How do you think about apocalyptic passages in the Bible today?

What are ways we can live out loving others that will live on after us?