1 Cor 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20
"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near..." "The appointed time has grown short... The present form of this world is passing away."
Well, if I were Paul, I suppose I would tell you to take all those New Year's Resolutions you may have made just a few weeks ago and throw them in the trash. Also, whatever classes you're registered for this semester, really, don't bother with scheduling the final projects and exams. "The appointed time has grown short," and "the present form of this world is passing away."
Jesus, too, would probably have given you the same advice. Drop what you're doing and follow Jesus, leave your books at your desk, and follow.
Neither Paul nor Jesus seem to have been long-term thinkers. And it's easy to chuckle, with two thousand years between us and their words. We can't possibly take them seriously, and so we read them somewhat metaphorically - with Paul we spiritualize and contextualize his words, finding ways so that they don't literally apply to our circumstances, and say that they really mean we just shouldn't become spiritually attached to the physical things and situations of this world. With Jesus's words, we turn to liberation theology, which has taught us to see the "now" of the coming of God's reign, where we can act to resist and even overthrow the economic and capitalist powers of oppression, but continue to live in this physical world.
The challenge with these interpretations is that it seems highly likely that Paul and Jesus as he is written in Mark both literally mean that the world is ending. According to Lester Grabbe, a Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism scholar, Jesus and Paul both believed in a Jewish eschatology that understood that "the age of the world is finite and [that] history was being played out according to a pre-determined divine plan." (Grabbe, Vol 4, 282) This physical world was only meant to exist for a certain period of time, and then God would literally intervene and literally destroy Rome. The sufferings that they experienced under Roman Imperial rule were part of the divine plan and a sign that God was about to end the world.
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Did you know that the present form of this world is passing away? Literally. Last year's fires in Canada, last year's global temperature extremes that twice crossed the two-degree higher than historical averages marker that we weren't supposed to cross for another fifty, the shocking warming of the top two metres of the oceans, the loss of biodiversity - these are just waypoints on what now appears to be an irreversible trend of environmental change that will have catastrophic changes for humans. Scientists, agriculturalists, sociologists, even economists are tracing the path from environmental collapse to global food collapse to global economic collapse to global security collapse. The radical changes that need to be made now will only minimize the harm that is coming, they won't eliminate it. According to the two most recent Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change, as well as the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, there is "great certainty" that our future - our future, not just our children's future - will see global civilizational collapse. The collapse of food networks, the collapse of governments, of infrastructures, of production and manufacturing systems, of banking systems, of the internet, of institutions like ours, whether you're talking about churches or seminaries. All of it. In our lifetime.
Now the difference between our situation and Paul's is not that he turned out to be wrong, but that he believed God was in control of all things and had planned the suffering under the Roman Empire in order to display the glory of God when it was overthrown. Our situation is that when it comes to this already-begun climate collapse, the suffering that we are and will experience, along with the suffering of the entire world, is not caused by God, but by our own curved-in-on-ourself-ness. It's caused by our own self-centeredness, which has led us to exploit and consume the resources of this world without hesitation and indeed with divine justification. We are the cause of our own destruction, and it cannot be stopped.
Which is what causes me to lose sleep at night, to feel like I want to throw up even as I say all this, to feel as if my heart stops beating when I face the very real possibility of the actual extinction of the human species before the end of this century - because that is one of the outcomes that is predicted if we continue on this path - and what makes me wish I was not actually preaching this sermon right now. Because the question that keeps arising is one that Paul didn't ask, and that is "why didn't God stop us?" followed immediately by, "what if God can't?"
It's not a new question actually - this was the question asked by Jews as the Holocaust unfolded. Elie Wiesel, in his book Night, tells about the tortuous hanging of a boy in a concentration camp: "the [...] rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing... And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me, I heard [a] man asking: "For God's sake, where is God?" And from within me, I heard a voice answer: "Where is He? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..."" For Wiesel and other Jews, this was the ultimate blow - the death of God. They had been taught to believe that God was both good and that God was omnipotent. Rather than give up their belief that God was good and God loved them, they gave up on their belief that God had the power to change things - they gave up on God's omnipotence. It wasn't that God would not stop what was happening, it was that God could not.
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So, when Lutherans are ordained as pastors, we are cautioned to "[give] no occasion for false security or illusory hope." At this moment in time, hoping that God's omnipotence will save us from the coming collapse of the climate and civilization is an illusory hope, just as was the Jews' hope that God could save their children from the fires of Auschwitz.
And so we are driven to our knees in fear, not just for the future but for our faith. Giving up on God's omnipotence is terrifying in and of itself, because this is the space of hopelessness and it greatly troubles us because we have come to believe that hope is the result of faith. That to be faithful is to be hopeful. That's how we demonstrate our faith, right? By hoping, by trusting, that the God who promises to deliver can indeed deliver. So, as faithful people, hopelessness shakes us to our core.
But hope is not faith, and it can betray us when we hope in something, instead of in someone. I'm going to say that again - we run into trouble when we hope in something, instead of in someone. Another way to say this might be that we run into trouble when we place all of our hope in an outcome, instead of in the One who is with us.
Paul dos not proclaim that God is going to save this world, or this species, or any species from extinction. Paul is very clear that resurrection is not a kind of spiritual new life while maintaining our old life. Paul is explicit that the new life that God will bring is something completely different from what we know: "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." (1 Cor 15:50) This is not some kind of double speak that we are meant to understand metaphorically. Paul is literal - the present form of this world is passing away and God is not going to save it. Paul told the early Christians to give up both mourning and rejoicing, and he might as well also have told them to give up hope.
But here's the thing - giving up hope is not the same thing as giving up faith. To be hopeless is not to be faithless. Miguel De La Torre, a professor at Iliff School of Theology, says in his book, Embracing Hopelessness, "hopelessness engenders desperation and doubt, two needed emotions that serve as the basis for faith." "Hopelessness does not mean faithlessness." Hopelessness is to give up hope in a particular action, in a specific outcome. Faithlessness is to give up believing that there is One who is and remains in relationship with us. Indeed, hopelessness can drive us to faithfulness, where we give up hoping in an outcome and turn instead to God who is with us even unto the cross. To be hopeless is to be freed from illusory hope or false security, to be hopeless is a step to being faithful. Hopelessness is what happens when our belief that God can change the outcome is stripped away, and yet we still reach out our arms in the moment of death and cry out in despair and doubt, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus felt hopelessness. But he was not faithless. A faithless person does not believe there is anyone there to hear him, and so does not even cry out. Faith is what compels us to cry out because we know that there is someone listening. Jesus cried out in hopelessness because he knew God was with him.
As we take seriously the reality of climate collapse and the very real possibility of civilizational collapse, these feelings of hopelessness will increase. As fishers of people, we are not called to proclaim that God will or even can make everything okay again. This world that we live in is dying. But we are called to proclaim to them, and to ourselves, the good news that God is with them, that Emmanuel is with us, and will remain with us as this world that we have crucified ends. Together we will cry out, and God will be with us. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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